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Joined: Mon 28 Feb , 2005 9:28 pm
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The Supreme Court - whose opinion is the only one that carries the force of law - seems to not share your interpretation of those sections of the Constitution. Your opinion does not carry the force of law. Its fine that you have one. Its a free country. But it means nothing in terms of what Congress and the President can enact into law.
The same objection you have was heard on a host of other issues when Congress enacted and the President signed programs into law. The list would include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, regulation of the airwaves through the FCC, many Great Society programs and countless others. If you were correct in your interpretation of the Tenth Amendment and Article I, Section 8, we would not have any of those programs in the nation. And clearly we do have them despite right wing challenges over the many years.
This should clear it up.
http://www.answers.com/topic/general-welfare-clause
Article I, section 8 of the U. S. Constitution grants Congress the power to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common defense and general Welfare of the United States." Since the late eighteenth century this language has prompted debate over the extent to which it grants powers to Congress that exceed those powers specifically enumerated in the Constitution. The precise meaning of the clause has never been clear, in large part due to its peculiar wording and placement in the Constitution.
The confusion about its placement arises because it makes up a part of the clause related to Congress's spending power, but does not specify if or how it affects that power. For example, through use of conditional appropriations, Congress could in theory use its power to spend as a tool to regulate areas otherwise reserved to the states. This raises the issue of the extent to which Congress may achieve indirectly, through its power to "spend for the general welfare," that which it cannot legislate directly under the Congress's powers enumerated in Article I, section 8.
At the time the Constitution was adopted, some interpreted the clause as granting Congress a broad power to pass any legislation it pleased, so long as its asserted purpose was promotion of the general welfare. One of the Constitution's drafters, James Madison, objected to this reading of the clause, arguing that it was inconsistent with the concept of a government of limited powers and that it rendered the list of enumerated powers redundant. He argued that the General Welfare clause granted Congress no additional powers other than those enumerated. Thus, in their view the words themselves served no practical purpose.
In his famous Report on Manufactures (1791), Alexander Hamilton argued that the clause enlarged Congress's power to tax and spend by allowing it to tax and spend for the general welfare as well as for purposes falling within its enumerated powers. Thus, he argued, the General Welfare clause granted a distinct power to Congress to use its taxing and spending powers in ways not falling within its other enumerated powers.
The U. S. Supreme Court first interpreted the clause in United States v. Butler (1936). There, Justice Owen Roberts, in his majority opinion, agreed with Hamilton's view and held that the general welfare language in the taxing-and-spending clause constituted a separate grant of power to Congress to spend in areas over which it was not granted direct regulatory control. Nevertheless, the Court stated that this power to tax and spend was limited to spending for matters affecting the national, as opposed to the local, welfare. He also wrote that the Supreme Court should be the final arbiter of what was in fact in the national welfare. In the Butler decision, however, the Court shed no light on what it considered to be in the national—as opposed to local—interest, because it struck down the statute at issue on Tenth Amendment grounds.
The Court soon modified its holding in the Butler decision in Helvering v. Davis (1937). There, the Court sustained the old-age benefits provisions of the Social Security Act of 1935 and adopted an expansive view of the power of the federal government to tax and spend for the general welfare. In Helvering, the Court maintained that although Congress's power to tax and spend under the General Welfare clause was limited to general or national concerns, Congress itself could determine when spending constituted spending for the general welfare. To date, no legislation passed by Congress has ever been struck down because it did not serve the general welfare. Moreover, since congressional power to legislate under the Commerce clause has expanded the areas falling within Congress's enumerated powers, the General Welfare clause has decreased in importance
this too will help clarify the position of the Court on the Tenth Amendment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenth_Amen ... nstitution
Forced participation or commandeering
The Supreme Court rarely declares laws unconstitutional for violating the Tenth Amendment. In the modern era, the Court has only done so where the federal government compels the states to enforce federal statutes. In 1992, in New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144 (1992), for only the second time in 55 years, the Supreme Court invalidated a portion of a federal law for violating the Tenth Amendment. The case challenged a portion of the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Amendments Act of 1985. The act provided three incentives for states to comply with statutory obligations to provide for the disposal of low-level radioactive waste. The first two incentives were monetary. The third, which was challenged in the case, obliged states to take title to any waste within their borders that was not disposed of prior to January 1, 1996, and made each state liable for all damages directly related to the waste. The Court, in a 6–3 decision, ruled that the imposition of that obligation on the states violated the Tenth Amendment. Justice O’Connor wrote that the federal government can encourage the states to adopt certain regulations through the spending power (i.e., by attaching conditions to the receipt of federal funds, see South Dakota v. Dole), or through the commerce power (by directly pre-empting state law). However, Congress cannot directly compel states to enforce federal regulations. In 1997, the Court again ruled that the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act violated the Tenth Amendment (Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898 (1997)). The act required state and local law enforcement officials to conduct background checks on persons attempting to purchase handguns. Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, applied New York v. United States to show that the law violated the Tenth Amendment. Since the act “forced participation of the State’s executive in the actual administration of a federal program,†it was unconstitutional.
[edit]Commerce clause
According to the Tenth Amendment, the government of the United States has the power to regulate only matters delegated to it by the Constitution. Other powers are reserved to the states, or to the people (and even the states cannot alienate some of these). The Commerce Clause is one of the Article 1 Section 8 powers specifically delegated to Congress and thus its interpretation is very important in determining the scope of federal legislative power.
In the twentieth century, complex economic challenges of the Great Depression triggered a reevaluation in both Congress and the Supreme Court of the use of Commerce Clause powers to maintain a strong national economy.
In Wickard v. Filburn (1942), in the context of the Second World War, the Court ruled that federal regulations of wheat production could constitutionally be applied to wheat grown for "home consumption" on a farm--that is, wheat grown to be fed to farm animals or otherwise consumed on the farm. The rationale was that a farmer's growing "his own wheat" can have a substantial cumulative effect on interstate commerce, because if all farmers were to exceed their production quotas, a significant amount of wheat would either not be sold on the market or would be bought from other producers. Hence, in the aggregate, if farmers were allowed to consume their own wheat, it would affect the interstate market in wheat.
In Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority (1985), the Court changed the analytic framework to be applied in Tenth Amendment cases. Prior to the Garcia decision, the determination of whether there was state immunity from federal regulation turned on whether the state activity was "traditional" for or "integral" to the state government. The Court noted that this analysis was "unsound in principle and unworkable in practice," and rejected it without providing a replacement. The Court's holding declined to set any formula to provide guidance in future cases. Instead, it simply held "...we need go no further than to state that we perceive nothing in the overtime and minimum-wage requirements of the FLSA ... that is destructive of state sovereignty or violative of any constitutional provision." It left to future courts how best to determine when a particular federal regulation may be "destructive of state sovereignty or violative of any constitutional provision."
In United States v. Lopez 514 U.S. 549 (1995), a federal law mandating a "gun-free zone" on and around public school campuses was struck down because, the Supreme Court ruled, there was no clause in the Constitution authorizing it. This was the first modern Supreme Court opinion to limit the government's power under the Commerce Clause. The opinion did not mention the Tenth Amendment, and the Court's 1985 Garcia opinion remains the controlling authority on that subject.
Most recently, the Commerce Clause was cited in the 2005 decision Gonzales v. Raich. In this case, a California woman sued the Drug Enforcement Administration after her medical marijuana crop was seized and destroyed by Federal agents. Medical marijuana was explicitly made legal under California state law by Proposition 215; however, marijuana is prohibited at the federal level by the Controlled Substances Act. Even though the woman grew the marijuana strictly for her own consumption and never sold any, the Supreme Court stated that growing one's own marijuana affects the interstate market of marijuana. The theory was that the marijuana could enter the stream of interstate commerce, even if it clearly wasn't grown for that purpose and it was unlikely ever to happen (the same reasoning as in the Wickard v. Filburn decision). It therefore ruled that this practice may be regulated by the federal government under the authority of the Commerce Clause.
[edit]
from CG
I know syllogisms aren't your strong suit,
Are those found in Article III or VI? Or maybe one of the Amendments? My copy of the Constitution does not cover them but it is at least ten years old. _________________ There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. - John Rogers
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- that the very people shrieking in terror over SOCIALIST medicine often benefit from state-provided medical care: the military and all your congressmen and senators.
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