Posted on 12/01/2024 4:43:30 PM PST by Jonty30
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,[note 1] promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
However, I'm being told that the Preamble has no legal authority.
It’s an intro to the Constitution with no legal status.
I think without it, your Constitution is doomed as the anarco-communists use the Constitution to destroy itself.
The Founding Fathers certainly gave it weight by their words.
While the Preamble may have had particular relevance to a number of isolated questions before the Congress in the Nation’s early years, Presidents and congressional leaders have more generally relied on the Preamble’s laudatory phrases in exploring the broader import of the Constitution and the general purposes of American government. For instance, President James Monroe referred to the Preamble as the “Key of the Constitution,” 17 and in his inaugural address, President John Quincy Adams described the “first words” of the Constitution as declaring the purposes for which the government “should be invariably and sacredly devoted.” 18 Echoing these themes in his own first inaugural address, President Abraham Lincoln invoked the Preamble’s “perfect union” language to note the importance of national unity as the country faced the brink of civil war.19 In the midst of another constitutional crisis—that which arose in 1937 amid clashes over the constitutionality of the New Deal—President Franklin Roosevelt stated the need to “read and reread the preamble of the Constitution,” as its words suggested that the document could be “used as an instrument of progress, and not as a device for prevention of action.” 20 Decades later, Representative Barbara Jordan, the first African-American woman elected to the House of Representatives from the South, quoted the Preamble in a statement before the House Judiciary Committee as it considered the Articles of Impeachment for President Richard Nixon.21 In that statement, she noted that “through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision” she had been included in “We, the people” and was now serving as an “inquisitor” aiming to preserve the goals of the Constitution.22
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/preamble/legal-effect-of-the-preamble
The whole constitution was written, signed and voted on. No parts were excluded. Modern activist judges would say it is just fluff. But it is an integral part of a whole that was accepted.
But it was more of what people today would call a vision statement. I suppose it would be executable if some future government decided to simply dump all national defense, and said so. But in reality, it’s hard to see anyone enforcing it.
it sets the framework of the purpose of the Constitution so it does not specifically have legal ramifications other than to set the goals and guide us to what a reasonable course of action and processes to facilitate the desired result. Freedom and the pursuit of happiness. The individual(s) and not the overpowering state should rule.
It says to promote the general welfare, not provide it. There is no justification for Federal Welfare programs anywhere in it. Liberals hate that.
At the time, we the people meant “white males”
NO, but some in congress think it does
Not explicitly. There just wasn’t the means to include everybody at the time and hold it all together. The Founding Fathers were not intending to keep it that way forever, but they couldn’t include everybody and form a country.
Article I Section 8 is where "provide" comes in.
"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States;..."
Unfortunately, this seems to be interpreted as cradle to grave spoon feeding.
I believe this is an example of hortatory law. It has no enforceable provision.
You asked a question, I answered.
And that (obviously) caused its own problems, suggesting to some that the Constitution was somehow established by the people of the nation, acting as a single sovereign body, rather than by the people of each State, acting independently within their own, distinct and separate States, not bound by the decisions of either a majority of the States, or a majority of the people in the United States...
Anything that doesn’t do the “ in Order to” things is unconstitutional.
Better than a penumbra or an emanation.
I don’t have any idea - all I remember is we had to learn the Preamble probably in 4th-5th grade in the 1940’s....
“we had to learn the Preamble probably in 4th-5th grade in the 1940’s”
Same here but in the mid-50’s.
At least to me, it should have legal weight to define the terms as to the application of the Amendments. My link to quotes of the Founding Fathers seem to suggest that they thought the same way, that the Preamble was the defining conditions to the Constitution and its Amendments.
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