Does the Constitution give congress the power to pass all manner of "welfare" programs?

Leftists claim the Constitution specifically authorizes the federal government to enact every policy the left demands, because of the phrase ”promote the general welfare," which appears twice in that document.

For this to be true, one must show that the Founders actually intended this result--and here Leftists go quiet--because clearly that's not what the Founders envisioned--as will be shown.

As always, the Left deliberately ignores all historical data and context to get whatever it wants.  And here's what they spend your taxes on:  here are just a few of the thousands of "earmarks" that have been hidden in the 4,155-page, $1.7 TRILLION spending bill the corrupt congress is about to pass.  Each of these "earmarks" uses your taxes to pay for the left’s extreme agenda.

(For young Americans, an "earmark" is an order to spend money on a specific project that benefits one special-interest group that donated to the congresswhore who inserted the provision into the bill.)

💸 $1.2 million for “LGBTQIA+ Pride Centers”
💸 $1.2 million for "services for DACA recipients” (aka helping illegal aliens with taxpayer funds) at San Diego Community College.
💸 $477k for the Equity Institute in RI to indoctrinate teachers with “antiracism virtual labs.”

💸 $1 million for Zora’s House in Ohio, a “coworking and community space” for “women and gender-expansive people of color.”
💸 $3 million for the American LGBTQ+ Museum in New York City.
💸 $3.6 million for a Michelle Obama Trail in Georgia.

💸 $750k for the for “LGBT and Gender Non-Conforming housing” in Albany, New York.
💸 $2 million for the “Great Blacks in Wax” museum in Baltimore.
💸 $856k for the “LGBT Center” in New York.

💸 $750k for the “TransLatina Coalition” to provide “workforce development programs and supportive services for Transgender and Gender nonconforming and Intersex immigrant women in Los Angeles.

Now: The Left (Democrats) claim the Constitution gives congress the power to spend your money on any "social welfare program" it wants--because the preamble of the Constitution includes the phrase “promote the general Welfare.”  So let's take a look:

The preamble is a one-sentence explanation telling future readers why the Founders drafted the document and established our system of government.

The preamble lists six reasons the Founders drafted the Constitution, including "to…promote the general Welfare….”  This is the phrase the Left uses to justify ALL federal programs that are clearly not authorized by the rest of the document.

But *by law,* the preamble itself confers no power.  In contract law a preamble isn't held to be legally enforceable.  Legal scholars on the Left know this, so virtually all the arguments that the Constitution actually gives the federal government unlimited power (an inevitable conclusion if one accepts the Left's argument that the Founders intended that their new government have the power to "promote the general Welfare") are made by lesser lights whose reasoning is utter crap.

Are you surprised?

Also, to successfully claim the Constitution actually grants this unlimited power, one must (by long-held contract law) also show that the Founders intended such a result.

As will be shown, they didn't.  The actual powers the Founders intended their new central government to have are *expressly detailed* in the remaining Articles of the Constitution.  So again, let's look:

Article I, Section 8 (A1S8) contains the second mention of the phrase “general Welfare,” in a section that delegates a specific list of powers to Congress.  It begins “Congress shall have Power To … provide for the…general Welfare of the United States.”

This is usually called the “welfare clause.”  And it's the clause the Left uses to claim that the Founders intended that the central government have unlimited power.  Using tax dollars to pay off loans for ___-studies majors?  Using tax dollare to pay for medical care for low-income people?  Free food for low-income people?  The Left claims all such powers were explicitly granted by the Founders.

But does that word "general" before "welfare" have any relevance here?

Leftists: "Whut?  Nah, dat jus' boilerplate.  Don' mean nuttin'."

Are you surprised?

Fortunately, immediately following this "unlimited power" clause is a list of 16 specific powers showing exactly what the Founders intended.  For example, “To establish Post Offices” and “To raise and support Armies.”

Leftists: "Ah, but A1S8 ends by giving congress the power 'To make all Laws' needed to "provide for the general welfare.'  So, SEE?  We told ya!"

No.  The grant is to pass laws needed to carry out “the foregoing Powers...", i.e. the 16 specific functions envisioned by the Founders.

Yes, the last sentence in the clause does add "...and all other Powers vested by this Constitution,” but to use that line to justify unlimited power gets us back to the question of what the Founders intended those "other powers" to be.  The preamble doesn't do it, nor are they included in the list of 16 specific powers.

So the phrase "...and all other Powers vested by this Constitution" clearly wasn't intended as authorizing Congress to fund anything it wanted merely by claiming some program to be "general welfare."

To claim the Founders intended that the "welfare clause" gave congress a power other than the 16 explicitly enumerated requires that we accept that there was no point in the Founders listing the 16 specific powers.  That is, why would they provide specific powers if they intended that congress could do ANYTHING, eh?  Such a list would serve no useful purpose. And the law assumes rational people don't bother putting things in contracts that serve no useful purpose.

That list exists because the authorized powers are limited to the list.  When an enumerated list is used in a contract, the principle is “the designation of one is the exclusion of the other.”  The Founders were well familiar with the law, and viewed the Constitution as a legal contract among the states that ratified it.

Even Alexander Hamilton--a big advocate for a powerful central government--wrote (in Federalist #83) “an affirmative grant of special powers would be absurd as well as useless if a general authority was intended.”

The delegates of the 13 states of the "Confederation" spent five months in Philadelphia in the hot summer of 1787 debating, refining, rewording and finally agreeing on the precise language of the proposed Constitution. On September 17th, they submitted the document to the states for ratification.

Every word in it was carefully chosen.  For the Left to claim the Founders listed “Establish Post Offices” and “declare War” as specifically delegated powers of Congress, yet actually intended Congress to have the unlimited power to do anything that could be considered "welfare," cannot be supported as a matter of law and logic.

But if some later Americans decided to give the central government the power to use tax dollars to (for example) give some people free medical care, or build LGBTQ centers, or Black History museums, the Founders provided a way for future Americans to do that, by "amending" the Constitution.  So when oh-so-virtuous pols in congress proposed laws adding new "welfare programs," they could have proposed an amendment to give them that power.

But of course they never offered such an amendment--because for any amendment to become law it must be ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states.  The Left knew that wouldn't happen.  They knew most Americans would object to giving congress unlimited power.  (Today welfare programs have become so numerous that the historical opposition may no longer be true.)

Does anyone really believe that the men who drafted and ratified the Constitution had never heard of hungry kids and the cost of attending college, so simply forgot to list such functions as envisioned federal powers?

Even back in 1787 they knew about hunger and the cost of a college education.

So: All federally funded social welfare programs are unconstitutional.  Yet the Supreme Court--wanting to be popular above all--has never ruled any new "welfare" program unconstitutional.  They came close when Franklin Roosevelt's Dems passed Social Security, but caved when FDR threatened to pack the court with Democrats to ensure court would approve the new welfare program.

Nothing in the Constitution’s preamble, or the welfare clause of Article I, or in the other articles gave Congress the power to fund any social welfare program for sub-sets of citizens in particular situations.  Such programs are not the “general Welfare of the United States” as defined by the Constitution,

No matter how good these programs make Dem pols feel, they're all unconstitutional.  And if left in place they will complete the destruction of the United States, by bankrupting the country.

The 10th Amendment specifically states that any powers not *specifically* granted to the central government were “reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”  This underscores that the Constitution didn't grant either Congress or any other agency of the federal government any power not expressly delegated to it.  But the courts have ignored this explicit amendment.

By contrast, all states were free to try whatever welfare programs they wanted.  It would have been a great experiment:  Had NY and California passed the current vast array of welfare programs, we would have been able to see the results of their doing so.  Had those states prospered, others would have copied their faaabulous example, and eventually the Left might have finally offered its never-offered amendment.

Obviously too late now.  The unhappy result--the end of the U.S. as we've known it--is now, sadly, unavoidable. 

(Adapted from this article by by Keith Bessette in the Federalist)