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To: WhiskeyPapa
In other words, a typical Wlat non-response followed by a flood of unrelated cut n' paste quotations that you percieve to lend complete support to your view but in reality barely even posess relevance to that same view. As I noted yesterday, Walt, every move you make on this forum is sadly predictable down to the finest detail.
417 posted on 02/24/2003 11:29:36 AM PST by GOPcapitalist
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To: GOPcapitalist
As I noted yesterday, Walt, every move you make on this forum is sadly predictable down to the finest detail.

You don't like the record; it doesn't much support your nonsense positions.

Funny how Jefferson Davis maintained that the central government had the power to coerce the states.

"The Confederate Constitution, he [Davis] pointed out to [Governor] Brown, gave Congress the power "to raise and support armies" and to "provide for the common defense." It also contained another clause (likewise copied from the U.S. Constitution) empowering Congress to make all laws "necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers." Brown had denied the constitutionality of conscription because the Constitution did not specifically authorize it. This was good Jeffersonian doctrine, sanctified by generations of southern strict constructionists. But in Hamiltonian language, Davis insisted that the "necessary and proper" clause legitimized conscription. No one could doubt the necessity "when our very existance is threatened by armies vastly superior in numbers." Therefore "the true and only test is to enquire whether the law is intended and calculated to carry out the object...if the answer be in the affirmative, the law is constitutional."

--Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson P.433

It's not irrelevant to the discussion to note that Davis sounds --just like-- Chief Justice John Marshall writing 40 years earlier:

"The subject is the execution of those great powers on which the welfare of a nation essentially depends. It must have been the intention of those who gave these powers, to insure, as far as human prudence could insure, their beneficial execution. This could not be done by confining their choice of means to such narrow limits as not to leave it in the power of Congress to adopt any which might be appropriate, and which were conducive to the end...to have prescribed the means by which the government, should, in all future times, execute its powers, would have been to change, entirely, the character of the instrument, and give it the properties of a legal code...To have declared, that the best means shall not be used, but those alone, without which the power given would be nugatory...if we apply this principle of construction to any of the powers of the government, we shall find it so pernicious in its operation that we shall be compelled to discard it..."

From McCullough v. Maryland, quoted in "American Constittutional Law" A.T. Mason, et al. ed. 1983 p. 165

Walt

420 posted on 02/24/2003 11:37:46 AM PST by WhiskeyPapa (Be copy now to men of grosser blood and teach them how to war!)
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