[tpaine]

The raygun/wiki position:

Providing for the general safety of the public (through regulation of commerce of potentially societally harmful substances is entirely Constitutional).

Nothing in the Constitution supports this theory. -- The opposite is supported, -- an individual person is not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
-- Fiat prohibitions on supposedly 'unsafe' items of commerce infringe on those rights both in the enactment of such 'laws', -- and in their enforcement.

I guess what's being argued is just what is the purpose of the enumerated powers of the Constitution.

You "guess" because you can't refute the clear words of the 9th & 14th Amendments.

If the General Welfare clause and the Commerce clause are blank checks,

Obviously, they are not. Both clause's are restrained by due process of law considerations.

why all the gibberish of the various enumerated powers?

You term the concept of delegated powers "gibberish"?

--- the Preamble to the Constitution sets the stage for the purpose of the implicitely enumerated powers that follow; they being delegated to Congress by the People for the People. It would be inconceivable in my mind to interprete any sort of Constitutional mandate for the regulation of the purity of anything if Congress has no authority to regulate the consumption of useless, deleterious or otherwise noxious substances, especially those that cause addiction, the burden it causes upon the individuals, their associates and society as an aggregate.

So? To your mind its "inconceivable"; -- your mind conflicts with our Constitution, as written.
Your recourse is to amend the Constitution, as per the 18th, not to ignore it in order to prohibit "noxious" items by fiat 'law'.

As I've indicated previously, if the General Welfare to society as a whole intent of the Constitution is invisible we can just go back to pre-1906 (Upton Sinclair) days, and forget about meat inspection, food inspection, and prohibition of sale of patent medicines.

You're repeating the 'snake oil' bit; -- it's hype.
We have pure booze for sale everywhere in the USA, -- there is no reason we can't have pure recreational drugs for sale on the same 'reasonable regulations' basis.

Guarenteed sanitary and sterile items and objects? Reckless endangerment? Clean water? Electrical (building/equipment) codes, fire codes? Building codes? Restaurant hygiene/cleanliness codes? Motor vehicle standards and regulations? Motor carrier safetyAnti-pollution laws? Clean-air standards? OSHA? Boating safety regulations? Office of pipeline safety? Why, the heck with it, we might as well scrap each and every one of these regulations as un-Constitutional (well, at least at a Federal level they are). In fact a whole butt-load of the U.S. Code in general could be just plain scrapped.

More baby/bath oil hype. State & local legislation can 'reasonably regulate' all of those items without infringing on our rights to life, liberty or property.

I think all of you guys that are arguing for the legalization of drugs haven't seen or experienced first hand the tradgedy caused by them. Haven't experienced first hand abusive alcoholic parents, haven't been personally affected by somebody close to you O.D'g or absolutely wrecking their life (and everybody around them). You haven't seen first hand the what crank/crack does to people. You personally haven't had to care for crack/crank/smack/fill-in-the-blank babies. Or havn't seen the permanent physical impairments that can be caused by drug abuse (Parkinsons, dementia, paralysis, memory loss, suicide, etc.). You people are so myopically focused on your seemingly innocuous drug (Mary Jane - hey its in all the books), that you're blinded to reality around you. You people are akin to those that are resistant to immunizations for their children (prefering instead to rely on the protection of herd immunity). I once challenged somebody about that, and was given a reply that there's risk of adverse affect. Adverse affect? Adverse affect? You haven't actually seen one of your own children (OR ANYBODY YOU MAY CARE ABOUT) actually die from whooping cough HAVE you? Because if you DID, you'd be singing a different tune.

Good grief. - Your emotional 'save the children' rant is duly noted. Spare us oh Hillary.

Frankly, I'm remiss in understanding this obsession with this obsession for intoxication anyways.

Frankly, I'm remiss in understanding this obsession with prohibiting human behavior -- this obsession against intoxication. Why this compulsion to control your peers?

Why this compulsion for alter states of perception? What in the world is wrong with reality, and feeling the way one does. Is feeling sad on occasion bad? Is feeling happy not good enough, that one has to artificially coerce the emotion? Gee, I guess it is a Brave New World isn't it? Everybody pop their Soma now, y'hear?

Funny how it's you prohibitionists that would lead us into the "brave new world" of controlled reality. All we have to do is give up our liberty.

[raygun]

James Madison stated that the general welfare clause was not intended to give Congress an open hand "to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defense or general welfare." If by the "general welfare," the Founding Fathers had meant any and all social, economic, or educational programs Congress wanted to create, there would have been no reason to list specific powers of Congress such as establishing courts and maintaining the armed forces. Those powers would simply have been included in one all-encompassing phrase, to "promote the general welfare." To whit, my tongue-in-cheek commentary about the gibberish following the preamble. Writing about the general welfare clause in 1791, Thomas Jefferson saw the danger of misinterpreting the Constitution. The danger in the hands of Senators and Congressmen was "that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and, as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please."

I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That ‘all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people.’ To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition. - Thomas Jefferson

Thanks in great deal to the efforts of Justice Marshal (and his protege Justice Story), the tiller of the ship of state was already turned a scant 50 years after the war for independence was fought. Within 20 years of Justice Story's COMMENTARIES, a bloody war would be fought concerning the very issue of state's rights (and the states lost).

Madison has some intersting things to say on the topic in Federalist 41:

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. ...

But what color can the objection have, when a specification of the objects alluded to by these general terms immediately follows, and is not even separated by a longer pause than a semicolon? If the different parts of the same instrument ought to be so expounded, as to give meaning to every part which will bear it, shall one part of the same sentence be excluded altogether from a share in the meaning; and shall the more doubtful and indefinite terms be retained in their full extent, and the clear and precise expressions be denied any signification whatsoever? For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted, if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power? Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars. But the idea of an enumeration of particulars which neither explain nor qualify the general meaning, and can have no other effect than to confound and mislead, is an absurdity, which, as we are reduced to the dilemma of charging either on the authors of the objection or on the authors of the Constitution, we must take the liberty of supposing, had not its origin with the latter. it is for error to escape its own condemnation!

However, it is clear that there's a perceived Madisonian contradiction. To whit:

From the CATO Institute Volume 16 Article 1:

Leonard R. Sorenson, a professor of politics at Assumption College in Massachusetts, has undertaken to rescue us from our rescuer. According to Crosskey, Madison was duplicitous: Publicly, Madison proclaimed that the General Welfare Clause is merely a synonym for the enumerated powers considered collectively, not an independent source of power. But privately, Madison believed that the General Welfare Clause delegates to the Congress plenary legislative power; that the enumeration of specific powers served simply to allocate and assign governmental functions, establish certain procedural limitations, and illustrate some of the powers deemed to be necessary and proper. This alleged difference between Madison’s public and private persona is at the root of the so-called Madisonian contradiction.

Sorenson’s thesis, based primarily on Federalist No. 41, is that Madison regarded the enumeration as defining the objects entailed within the general welfare and the other general clauses that make up the Preamble (i.e., justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, and liberty). But those objects are the broad ends or purposes of the Constitution, not just means or powers. Therefore, states Sorenson, Madison understood the general terms of the Preamble to enlarge the dominion of government beyond the enumeration itself, although not to confer plenary power. Madison’s public position, ascribed to him by Crosskey, was that substantive powers are defined by specifying their number, kind, and application. On the contrary, Sorenson’s explanation is that (1) Madison perceived the Preamble of the Constitution as prescribing a limited number of limited ends; (2) the enumeration defines those ends more precisely; (3) the general welfare and other clauses that make up the Preamble vest particular powers beyond the enumeration, but only to accomplish the limited ends; and (4) the particular powers thus vested can be identified only through an examination of the enumerated powers themselves, in their relation to the authorized ends. - the foregoing sourced from post#93 of the following thread:

http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3aa699b23882.htm

ThJ1800's post#111 in the above thread expounds upon the foregoing quite eloquently. I intuitively perceived the general welfare clause in accordance to the second defninition of the word "welfare" as presented below from the 1828 edition of Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language:

It is clear that Article 1, Section 8 refers to general welfare of the United States as a whole, and not individuals in particular. Moreover, Article 4, Section 4, is clearly refering to the States, and so it only seems natural for the application being to society as a whole. Sadly I see now that this interpretation belies the intent of the Founders. It is clear to me now that the present liberal carte blanche check view of the welfare clause was being elucidated by Justice Joseph Story (in the first sentance cited). In that the enumerated powers don't actually delegate anything, but "expound the nature and extent and application of the powers actually conferred by the Constitution". Nevertheless, there's still a vast difference between either Madison's public or private opinions and Story's interpretation. My view lay with Madison's private opinion concerning the matter. Blood of Tyrant's post #25 (from the above referenced thread) nails the origin of the status quo exquisitely:

Franklin Roosevelt's Supreme Court, eager to expand federal power, declared (in United States vs. Darby,1941) that the 10th "states but a truism that all is retained which has not been surrendered." In other words, the states and the people were entitled only to powers the federal government hadn't claimed. The court substituted the telling word "surrendered" for the Constitution's word, "delegated." You "delegate" power to an inferior; you "surrender" power to a superior. This ruling, by draining the 10th of any force, inverted the whole federal structure, reducing the states to vassals of the federal government.

The fact of the matter remains, that if but for the welfare state as we know it today, unfettered recreational drug usage would be scourge on this country (far more devastating than what is being experienced at present). And as BVW has previously mentioned, the impetus to pass Prohibition Ammendment was directly related to the horrors caused by alcohol abuse. And that's my argument against legalized recreational drug use in this day, at this time. The reality of the matter is that no politician would stand a snow-ball's chance in hell standing on a platform of rolling back Social Security (let alone eliminate it), rolling back Senior Citizen drug program (let alone eliminate it), rolling back public education (let alone eliminate it), curtailing building of infrastructure (roads, etc), let alone eliminate it. Cut welfare/medicare/medicaide? Will never happen. The ship of state has turned so much since 1833, the people having discovered how to vote themselves largess out of the public treasure it would be political suicide for any politician to attempt to place their hand upon the tiller to move the ship of state back upon its original course.

While my argument does constain an emotional element, its not exclusively an appeal from emotion as such, in that I see the victims as being people, and I regard the value and dignity of human life to be something more than merely trash to throw into the dumpster. I wish that things could be different, that people would be responsible enough for their own destiny, however after over 100 years of liberal indoctrination/conditioning, that's absolutely not the case anymore. The whole status quo really is truly an utter travesty.