Thread: Help our Founders argue against healthcare

Please send the following quote to all or your elected representatives. Tell them we are fed up with the constant desecration of our constitution. Let them know that the founders had set guidelines in which they were to write bills. Bills to large to read are a breach of their contract with us. Then send the following quote to everyone you know, asking them to do the same. Our constitution never was intended to saddle us with laws that NOBODY, NOT ONE PERSON LIVING OR DEAD comprehends or has read in their entirety. This included everything from our jumbled up tax code to TARP to the Stimulus to health care. What they are doing is NOT what our constitution told them they were allowed to do. Demand that they cease these actions immediately.


"It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow."
------Alexander Hamilton and Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 62, 1788


While you are at it, you might want to remind them of the following:

"Our tenet ever was... that Congress had not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated, and that, as it was never meant that they should provide for that welfare but by the exercise of the enumerated powers, so it could not have been meant they should raise money for purposes which the enumeration did not place under their action; consequently, that the specification of powers is a limitation of the purposes for which they may raise money." --Thomas Jefferson to Albert Gallatin, 1817. ME 15:133w


The list of enumerated power is:


* To borrow money on the credit of the United States;
* To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;
* To establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States;
* To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures;
* To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States;
* To establish post offices and post roads;
* To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
* To constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court;
* To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations;
* To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;
* To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;
* To provide and maintain a navy;
* To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;
* To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;
* To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;
* To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten miles (16 km) square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States, and to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings.



I don't see health care anywhere on the list, DEMAND your elected officials obey the constitution!!!

Thanks Cayla. Love it.

I have a question regarding "enumerated powers":

I support the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Without it individual states would fall into the custom of recognizing marriages---gay marriages for example--that occurred in another state, if there was no federal law in place to prevent them. Please note: I said "fall into the custom" since, even though they would have the right to not recognize them, it seems that the pressure would be incredibly great to recognize something basic like that if another State did it. But I don't see something like that in your list of enumerated powers.

So how would we prevent that sort of thing taking root, first in susceptible states---without some way for the federal law to be established?

I think the point by Hamilton of not having rapidly changing laws is great. But I am not sure that this list of enumerated powers adequately settles the question of what a federal government can or should do. Where does the Centers for Disease Control or FDA fit into this? It certainly helps, though, and should provide an antidote to lawmaking from the Bench.

Originally Posted by Captainron

I have a question regarding "enumerated powers":

I support the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Without it individual states would fall into the custom of recognizing marriages---gay marriages for example--that occurred in another state, if there was no federal law in place to prevent them. Please note: I said "fall into the custom" since, even though they would have the right to not recognize them, it seems that the pressure would be incredibly great to recognize something basic like that if another State did it. But I don't see something like that in your list of enumerated powers.

So how would we prevent that sort of thing taking root, first in susceptible states---without some way for the federal law to be established?

I think the point by Hamilton of not having rapidly changing laws is great. But I am not sure that this list of enumerated powers adequately settles the question of what a federal government can or should do. Where does the Centers for Disease Control or FDA fit into this? It certainly helps, though, and should provide an antidote to lawmaking from the Bench.

The answer to all of these questions can be found in the 10th amendment:


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.

The problem is, when you allow congress to make even one extra constitutional program, you open the door for the mess we are currently in. These matters would, and should, be up to the individual states. Many states would take it to the people of the state as to how these matters would be handled. The federal government was never set up to be in control of anything other than a few necessities. I can imagine a number of Governors would ban together in agreement for these programs, but the bottom line is that these programs were never constitutionally intended to exist on a federal level. As far as gay marriage, abortion and a number of other personal and moral decisions, they would be made on a state by state basis.

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