The Republicans and America won huge today!!

ckm8 wrote: We already know that you are a toady of the plutocrats Printsmith. .

Do you have a study to support that claim? :rofl

ckm8 wrote: Everyone within 300 miles knows that you hate the idea of promoting the "General Welfare" and would prefer a more feral nation. Too bad you weren't around to recraft that. You could have told the founders a thing or two.

Oh, there were plenty of people around at the time that attempted to warn people what would happen and to not ratify the Constitution. The anti-federalists warned that this very thing would happen. Madison, the father of the Constitution, rebutted that argument with this excerpt from Federalist 41:

Some, who have not denied the necessity of the power of taxation, have grounded a very fierce attack against the Constitution, on the language in which it is defined. It has been urged and echoed, that the power "to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts, and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States," amounts to an unlimited commission to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defense or general welfare. No stronger proof could be given of the distress under which these writers labor for objections, than their stooping to such a misconstruction.

There is also this from Federalist 83, attributed to Hamilton, widely recognized at the time as a monarchist (what we would today call a progressive):

Having now seen that the maxims relied upon will not bear the use made of them, let us endeavor to ascertain their proper use and true meaning. This will be best done by examples. The plan of the convention declares that the power of Congress, or, in other words, of the NATIONAL LEGISLATURE, shall extend to certain enumerated cases. This specification of particulars evidently excludes all pretension to a general legislative authority, because an affirmative grant of special powers would be absurd, as well as useless, if a general authority was intended.

It isn't that I could have told the founders, or those that followed them, anything new. They already knew that they weren't giving Congress an unlimited ability to legislate anything under the twisting of the taxing authority that the Constitution contained. Why, even FDR knew that the federal government didn't have any such authority when he was Governor of New York in 1930:

As a matter of fact and law, the governing rights of the states are all of those which have not been surrendered to the national government by the Constitution or its amendments. This is not the case in the matter of a great number of other vital problems of government, such as the conduct of public utilities, of banks, of insurance, of business, of agriculture, of education, of social welfare, and of a dozen other important features. In these Washington must not be encouraged to interfere.

The recent twisted meaning of the "general welfare" clause is entirely a creation done in the early part of the last century, more specifically in the time that has elapsed after the 1932 elections.

It's a good thing that the rest of us get to live under the EXISTING Constitution--and the interpretations thereof--rather than the one the Federalists, (and you, by your own admission), would have given us.

I like the one we got better than the one you would have us live under.

LadyJazzer wrote: It's a good thing that the rest of us get to live under the EXISTING Constitution--and the interpretations thereof--rather than the one the Federalists, (and you, by your own admission), would have given us.

I like the one we got better than the one you would have us live under.

I'm terribly sorry my friend, but it is the modern day progressive that is comparable to the founding era federalists. Hamilton, a High Federalist, wanted an executive and Senate that enjoyed a lifetime appointment. Now, FDR is the closest thing we have ever come to having such a dictatorship in this nation and the 17th Amendment, ratified under the administration of Wilson, a progressive by any definition of the term, is what has resulted in a de facto lifetime appointment of Senators ala Teddy Kennedy, Strom Thurmond among others.

No, I am no federalist, at least not a Hamilton federalist. I am of the small 'r' republican mind set, as was Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. I used Hamilton as an example to show that even the monarchists of the day, that were the modern day equivalent of FDR, Pelosi, Reid and our President, and you, my dear friend; understood, acknowledged and affirmed that the power to lay and collect taxes granted to the national legislature was limited to the specifically listed items that were to be found in Article I Section 8 and was not, as today practiced, "an unlimited commission to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defense or general welfare."

And I'm glad you are happy under the invented meanings that have been twisted out of the language, but are you as happy with the $14 Trillion dollar public debt that is the result of the bastardization of the original intent?

Nope... Not happy about it at all... It's too bad that after being handed a surplus, Bush and his cronies left us with that $10.6 TRILLION debt the day Obama took office...

Printsmith, you are a wordsmith. I appreciate your thoughtful, well-informed and educated posts. And you're nice.

Too bad the America you live in is such a hated place. Personally I think it's the best country on the planet.

prove it. You lib's are making us the laughing stock in the world..

What makes us the laughing stock is our inability to provide healthcare to all our citizens, being involved in two unwinable wars, and paying out the big bucks to our millionaires. Those are hardly liberal ideas. Oh...add not putting emphasis on education.

Define winable vs unwinable. I think we could pull out, drop some neutron bombs and it would be over rather quickly. But the US isn't about genocide, so conventional warfare is what we've got. The other nations you hold so high for their healthcare are in a worse economic state than us. Give it a few years and see how well their healthcare is when their nation is going under.