People who think the "common defense and general Welfare" clause is "hazy" evidently have been taught to understand Article I Section 8 in a manner completely out of the context given by the DoI and the Preamble.
Boiling it all down, the DoI tells us who the We the People are. The Preamble tells us that We the People are the ultimate source and authority of our constitutional system of government; that the purpose of the People's ordaining and establishing the Constitution is finally "to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." They were not surrendering their native, sovereign liberties to the federal government (were this so, the 9th Amendment would be pointless). Rather, they were delegating certain enumerated and limited powers to Congress to discharge on behalf of the People.
In short, Congressional power is NOT in any way "unlimited." If it were, the entire Bill of Rights would be senseless. For the BoR is nothing but a statement of the constraints on Congressional power agreed to and imposed by We the People as the principal of the Constitutional charter; the Congress is in the position of agent. In the principal/agent relation, the former is the "sovereign" party, the latter the executor, or "servant" of the principal in the exercise of the enumerated powers granted — and only those granted powers. Last time I tried to count the granted, "enumerated" powers of the Constitution, I came up with the number: 28. [I invite anybody to get their hands on the document, and try to make their own count. I'd love to see what you'd come up with!]
If so, this would mean there are only 28 ways in which the federal government in its several branches can legitimately act under the Constitution. Anything else or beyond the granted powers would be understood by the Framers as an illegitimate usurpation of the just powers/unalienable rights of the People — the People's retained rights, which are made explicit in the DoI, the Preamble, and the BoR. Even with respect to the delegated powers, the People are the "answerable authority" that Congress, as the People's delegated agent, MUST respect.
Note also that the Constitution has zero authority to regard the People in terms of group affiliation of any kind. The entire philosophical complex of our Founding Documents deals only with the individual human person, and this mainly in Judeo-Christian terms (as the DoI makes explicit). In short, Justice inheres in persons only, not in groups....
However, when legal positivists and nominalists read the texts, they do so as if the texts were unconnected with any larger system of ideas that would shed light on their meaning. In a sense, they "deconstruct" the Constitution, by saying, in effect, "the words speak for themselves," the texts are whatever they might happen to mean to the reader, without regard to the intent of the author of the texts, which are de facto held to be perfectly irrelevant to constitutional jurisprudence. That's where the "living Constitution" B.S. comes into the picture.
Don't get me wrong: I also believe the Constitution is a "living" document. But not in the Darwinian manner of the legal positivist/nominalist persuasion, which basically seems to hold that the "life form" of the Constitution has to be created anew by changing it.... It is "living" because it is capable of being "changed" — by them.
As pointed out already, the larger system of ideas that motivated the intent and purposes of the Framers is captured in the DoI, the Preamble, and the BoR. THAT is the context in which the Constitution is supposed to operate, "for the benefit of ourselves and our Posterity."
Anyhoot, just some thoughts, Jacquerie, FWIW. Thank you so very much for your excellent essay/post, and for pointing out what should be obvious: that the Framers were, indeed, the most punctilious of grammarians! Now all we need is people who understand English grammar.... But they seem to be getting as rare as people who understand what the Framers were up to, in designing the Constitution the way they did....
Surely this state of affairs demonstrates the utterly abject failure of so-called public education nowadays....
So all I can say is: "GO, Home-schoolers!" The future of our culture seems to be in your hands....
I thoroughly agree yet again.
Thanks.
(1) These magnificently punctilious grammarians "also" crafted one of the greatest (and most concise) literary masterpieces in the history of the English language.
(2) What is increasingly less appreciated in our own time is that the Framers' design was fundamentally premised on a system of SELF-government. Something that had never, ever been seen in the world before, a world in which priests and monarchs, et al., had been accepted as the necessary "intercessors" between God and Man, just to get quite normal things done in daily existence, since most people — living in what Eric Vöegelin has described as the Ecumenic Age, in which "primitive" and "tribal" forms of existence were increasingly displaced by "organizational principles" to be contrived by an expert (priestly–political–bureaucratic) class; and then from there, imposed direct pressure on the "subject" people "from on-high," whether the pressured people liked it or not. Historically speaking, they usually didn't.
[N.B.: The events we revere and remember at Christmas took place in precisely such a milieu, or "crucible" of forces.... ]
Yet the Framers, being of Christian temperament, believed in (or as some might have termed it, recognized the "self-evident truth" of) human free will. Thus, to me it seems that, bottom line, what the Framers proposed was that Man should live in openness to God, exercise/enjoy the gifts that God gave him, and live in the virtue of God's love and justice....
Such a view clearly has Judeo-Christian roots, and roots in classical Greece, as well. Maybe this latter aspect could be a topic for another time.
On closer reading of your posts, I still greatly and thoroughly agree.
Not sure I can add much more.
Personally, I would like to see . . . The Constitution, The Declaration of I and the Bill of Rights . . . printed on very unpalatable cardboard . . . then Pelousey and Finestein sp? both required to memorize all those docs . . . and then have to eat every particle of all those docs. Then be tried and sentenced and . . . fittingly punished . . . for horrific treason.
But then they are but stooges of the worse evil doers behind the scenes.
. . . who have been shredding those documents for decades.
All points are spot on as near as I can tell through these droopy eyelids. Our Founders no doubt wrote the Constitution so that We The People could understand it. Like Jacquerie pointed out, the only people looking to parse the language and discover subtle nuances are our would-be masters.
That is a topic worthy of a long essay. Our Constitution was a bulwark against the worst aspect of human political nature, the tendency to accumulate power. It worked this way until we let the courts run wild.
You bring up so many other great points . . . among the saddest is denial of the Judeo-Christian foundation of our governing philosophy.