Bryan Fischer: Madison would veto health care forthwith
Bryan Fischer is the host of Focal Point, part of the American Family Association.]
My good friend Adam Graham points out that James Madison, one of the framers of the Constitution and the father of the Bill of Rights, once vetoed a bill that would have provided federal funding for canals and roads on the grounds that building canals and roads is not one of the “enumerated powers” given to the federal government in the Constitution.
Said Madison in his veto message,
The legislative powers vested in Congress are specified and enumerated in the eighth section of the first article of the Constitution, and it does not appear that the power proposed to be exercised by the bill is among the enumerated powers, or that it falls by any just interpretation with the power to make laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution those or other powers vested by the Constitution in the Government of the United States...
To refer the power in question to the clause “to provide for common defense and general welfare” would be contrary to the established and consistent rules of interpretation, as rendering the special and careful enumeration of powers which follow the clause nugatory and improper. Such a view of the Constitution would have the effect of giving to Congress a general power of legislation instead of the defined and limited one hitherto understood to belong to them...
In the Federalist Papers, he was even more explicit...
Read entire article at Rightly Concerned (Blog)
My good friend Adam Graham points out that James Madison, one of the framers of the Constitution and the father of the Bill of Rights, once vetoed a bill that would have provided federal funding for canals and roads on the grounds that building canals and roads is not one of the “enumerated powers” given to the federal government in the Constitution.
Said Madison in his veto message,
The legislative powers vested in Congress are specified and enumerated in the eighth section of the first article of the Constitution, and it does not appear that the power proposed to be exercised by the bill is among the enumerated powers, or that it falls by any just interpretation with the power to make laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution those or other powers vested by the Constitution in the Government of the United States...
To refer the power in question to the clause “to provide for common defense and general welfare” would be contrary to the established and consistent rules of interpretation, as rendering the special and careful enumeration of powers which follow the clause nugatory and improper. Such a view of the Constitution would have the effect of giving to Congress a general power of legislation instead of the defined and limited one hitherto understood to belong to them...
In the Federalist Papers, he was even more explicit...