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Regarding Congress and the General Welfare clause in the Constitution.
Tenth Amendment Rights.
"They are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare.... [G]iving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and, as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please and this can never be permitted."
-- Thomas Jefferson on powers of Congress
Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated."
--Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Albert Gallatin, 1817
"With respect to the two words 'general welfare,' I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.
--James Madison, in a letter to James Robertson:
"If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one and this can not ever be permitted...."
-- James Madison, in a letter to Edmund Pendleton, January 21, 1792
Posted: 01/04/2010
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