The quest to limit congressional power ~ By Henry Lamb

Commentary from WorldNetDaily

"To separate those candidates who say they will defend the Constitution from those who really will, every candidate should sign a pledge to support only legislation that explicitly cites its constitutional authority. Any candidate, including incumbents, who will not make this pledge – has no business in Washington. It is the people's business to see that they stay home."

By Henry Lamb Posted: January 16, 2010 ~ 1:00 am Eastern © 2010 Power corrupts. Power in Congress corrupts Congress. In hopes of preventing or at least minimizing congressional corruption, the nation's framers carefully limited the power of Congress to those specific powers set forth in Article I, Section 8. The 10th Amendment makes it impossible to misinterpret the limitation of congressional power by expressly stating that all power not granted to the United States by the Constitution is retained by the states or by the people. (Emphasis my own) The House of Representatives once recognized this limitation and included this language in their rules of procedure:

Each report of a committee on a public bill or public joint resolution shall contain the following: A statement citing the specific powers granted to Congress in the Constitution to enact the law proposed by the bill or joint resolution.

Congress lived within its limitation – generally speaking – until Roosevelt's Democratic tsunami. Roosevelt's "New Deal" trashed the Constitution nearly as badly as Obama's current "Raw Deal." The Supreme Court ruled a dozen of Roosevelt's new laws unconstitutional. Furious, Roosevelt set out to pack the court, proposing legislation that would let him appoint six new justices. His legislation failed, but it frightened the Supreme Court so badly that not another piece of legislation was ruled unconstitutional for 60 years. The Supreme Court voted 5-4 to uphold the Social Security Act [Steward Machine Company v. Davis] which, in effect, extended the "general welfare" clause beyond the enumerated powers. Since that 1937 decision, both parties have ignored the concept of limited government, and mangled the Constitution in the process. Interestingly, Obama's pledge to "fundamentally transform the United States of America" includes the transformation of the Supreme Court. There has not been a lot of publicity yet, but a lot of important Obama-backers are weighing in to transform the Court into another tool for their use. The debate over the limitation of congressional power goes all the way back to Alexander Hamilton, who believed that the "general welfare clause" did extend congressional power beyond those enumerated. James Madison, on the other hand, told his friend Henry Lee that if there were no limits on Congress, the Constitution might as well be thrown into the fire. Honest people who care about the Constitution will pray to understand and apply its great principles accurately. Power-hungry politicians corrupt the Constitution when they twist and stretch its meaning to apply the power of government to achieve their personal goals. READ FULL STORY >