OK, ‘Praetorian’, a little history lesson. “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Sound familiar? That would be the 10th Amendment. Now, let’s try to think clearly (difficult for a leftist, I know, but…): if the ‘general welfare’ wording meant that Congress could do any durnfool thing they thought was good for the citizens of the US, then what does this amendment mean? Nothing.
We have to read the Constitution as it was meant to be read by the Framers, not bringing our own modern prejudices to it. At the time of its writing, the United States was a new, separate entity, a union of theoretically independent nation-states. The general welfare wording meant that if there was something Congress saw fit to do that benefitted that union qua union, they could do it, not to interfere with the personal lives of the people, or the proper functioning of the states.
And, give us a couple more Scalias, Roberts, or Thomases on the SCOTUS, and who knows? Maybe we’ll see a substantial dismantling of the monstrous bureaucracy of federal gov’t we have now, built substantially by gross misreading of the Constitution, like yours.
