Where the Supreme Court started going off the rails, this time in 1936

Today about half the public believes "Duh gov'mint is suppose ta take care of duh pipo."

Wait...was that what the Founders actually wrote?  And if they didn't, what makes you think that's what they envisioned?

"Gee, deplorable, it's right dere in duh Constitution!  Article I, Section 8 say Congress haz the power to 'provide for the common Defence [sic] and general Welfare of the United States...'  See?"

Yes, we've read it, thanks.  (Well, a few of us have.)  But what did the Founders mean by "general welfare of the U.S?"

• Did they intend that taxpayers should pay for medical care for able-bodied people? 
• Did they intend that government should take a percentage of your earnings to provide for all citizens' retirement? 
• Did they intend for the federal government to order states what they must teach your children?

These aren't trivial questions.  Quite the opposite: the way voters answer each one tells us how effective Democrat propaganda has been in subverting the principles set out by the Founders--because Dems support each of the above policies.

Democrat leaders: "But each of those is absolutely required if we're to have a gud country, deplorable!  All duh European nations do deez things, so they must be right!"

Yeah, well...the Founders almost certainly wouldn't have agreed with you.  Unfortunately, some of the clauses in the Constitution weren't explicit enough, and thus were vulnerable to being hijacked by later socialst judges--which is exactly what happened in 1936, in "U.S. v. Butler."

The case involved a tax imposed by the Agriculture Department on "food processors" pursuant to the "Agricultural Adjustment Act."  The revenue was to be used to pay farmers who agreed to plant less acreage, thus reducing food production.  The goal was to increase food prices during the Great Depression--at a time when many Americans were too poor to buy food.  (It's one of the few times Democrats have reluctantly admitted that the "Law of Supply and Demand" is real.)

But wow, how many bureaucrats would it take to write checks to every farmer, and based on what calculations, eh?

Didn't matter--cuz congress had written duh law, eh?

The always-political Supreme Court decreed the following:

The ["general welfare"] clause confers a power separate and distinct from those later enumerated....  Congress has a substantive power to tax and to appropriate, limited only by the requirement that it shall be exercised to provide for the general welfare of the United States....
  [Thus] the power of Congress to [spend] public money for public purposes is not limited by the direct grants of legislative power found in the Constitution.

You couldn't ask for a clearer rejection of the entire thrust of the Constitution, which clearly limits spending by the federal gruberment to the specific purposes "enumerated" in that document.

The problem was that the Founders failed to specify the limits of several clauses, such as "provide for the general welfare" (or the commerce clause, or the meaning of "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed), allowing moronic judges (yes, I went there) to completely reject the limits of federal power specified in the Constitution.

Ironically, the court actually rejected the specific tax at issue-- BUT in striking down that tax, instead of stopping there the court opened the door to every other form of gruberment overreach--as long as the supporter could claim it "provided for the general welfare."  And of course some power-drunk congress-whore can always find some distant link to "the general welfare," eh?

You really need to read the court's opinion, which quotes sections of the Orwellian law that are mind-boggling.  And you think, "If congress was this power-mad AND stupid in 1933, they must be immensely better at hiding crap today, since they've had 92 years to perfect the grift, eh?"

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/297/1