Gunfighter,

The 10th amendment says this:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

One of the powers delegated to the US in Article I is this:

"The Congress shall have 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; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;"

Notice that Congress can tax to "provide for the ... general welfare." Already in the 1830s, Joseph Story in his commentaries on the Constitution exhaustively analyzed and rejected the argument that this only entails the ability to spend on things that are elsewhere authorized, and even then the arguments were not original. (In brief, if that were true, then the "Necessary and proper" clause would already cover it, so the "general welfare" clause would be completely redundant, and we shouldn't interpret a clause to be redundant if we can help it).

So the tenth amendment doesn't apply, because the power to spend, in most cases, IS delegated to Congress. That includes things like spending on schools.

It might or might not be a good idea, but it's not unconstitutional.

republicans need to get their shit together or they'll lose even worse in 2 years.

I don't doubt they will - they don't call it the GOP for nothing. They'll adapt, get back to fiscal conservatism, and stop pressing the bullshit social issues that are currently burying them.

@Krellin,
"The Federal government ***IS**** bankrupt! ALREADY!!!! They just haven't realized it yet."

You're not bankrupt until you're unable to meet your debt obligations. You may think the government is overextended, you may think it's overleveraged, you may think it's fiscally irresponsible, but clearly it's not bankrupt.

The tenth amendment couldn't be less relevant. The amendment that matters is 16:

"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."

It doesn't get clearer than that.

"The Federal government ***IS**** bankrupt! ALREADY!!!! They just haven't realized it yet."
The Federal government is not bankrupt, far from it. If I was a credit rating agency I would rank them AAA, the interest rates on their bonds are an all time low, and compared to Southern Europe, they have like no debt.

They have no short or medium term expenditure or income problems and their long term structural problem has multiple different ways to address the fix;
Raise the retirement age to 70
Slightly increase social security payroll tax (raise taxes on everyone, not just the rich)
Make medicare state funded (Obamacare really sent this in the wrong direction)
Stop spending social security tax income on discretionary spending
Eliminate social security for anyone under the age of 30
etc.

Compared to the problems of Britain, Italy, Greece or Spain, America has an easy road ahead of them.

The federal income tax *is* constitutional as of the ratification of the 16th Amendment. I'm merely pointing out that we can function as a nation with a small federal government. We did it for the first ~120 years of our history.

The "general welfare" clause is the most abused clause in the Constitution. The clause is not a free pass for Congress to pass whatever laws they want. Any law must be either for defense or for the "general welfare" of the country as a whole. In other words, laws have to be in the best interests of the nation. I would contend that Congress rarely passes laws that *really* provide general welfare for the nation. I know I'm stretching on this one and "general welfare" has no unambiguous definition, but I think that it is important to note the Tenth Amendment. If the authors of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that the general welfare clause was a free pass for congress to pass whatever they wanted, then why did they include the Tenth Amendment in the Bill of Rights?

The Constitution was written as a *limiting* document, with the expressed purpose of enumerating Federal powers and putting specific constraints on those powers and *then* saying all other powers belong to the States.

Thus, the travesty that is the abuse of the "general welfare" clause to give the Feds power over *everything* is in *direct* opposition to the clear intention of a power-limiting document. And it is really only in the last 60 years that the landslide of abuse has occurred.

Whether or not America is actually bankrupt is of no consequence. We have to stop spending and everyone is going to lose a piece of the government that they care about. Social Security, healthcare, education,and welfare must be disbanded at the federal level. A sizable chunk of defense has to go. We can raise taxes a little bit but we risk sinking the economy even further by doing so. Our GDP is damned close to our deficit, so even if we theoretically taxed *everything*, we would still have a deficit. That means spending cuts have to be part of the discussion.

But...you know...history is hard....and it's much easier to just brainwash the youth with promises of an easy life living off the tit of government...

I would contend that the 16th Amendment was the beginning of the end, with Franklin Roosevelt's administration marking the final nail in the coffin of America as a constitutional republic.

Gunfighter,

Certainly one can argue that education is for the general welfare of the US. As for why the tenth amendment was still included -- the General Welfare clause still only relates to spending. It does not (for example) allow Congress to criminalize a single solitary thing, or to regulate a single solitary thing (except as condition to getting money, or as incidental to spending it), etc. It's just a spending clause.

semck - you are 100% wrong. Failure to purchase health insurance is now a criminal act.

Or soon will be, that is, once Obamacare is fully implemented.

How is federalized education for the general welfare of the nation? Student performance has plummeted since the Department of Education began operating in 1980. The Department of Education is just more proof of my theory that, with the exception of defense, everything the federal government touches invariably turns into a bureaucratic clusterfuck.

krellin,

"semck - you are 100% wrong. Failure to purchase health insurance is now a criminal act."

First of all, that is false. If you fail to purchase health insurance, you owe more on your taxes. You can not be prosecuted for any crime -- misdemeanor or felony -- for failing to purchase health insurance. You just owe more in taxes.

Don't believe me? Read the Supreme Court case. It turned on this point. I read the case, all of it. I also read a lot of the arguments going up to it, and carefully studied the issue. There is no criminilization, and the Supreme Court was explicit that it would not have allowed such a thing.

Here is the opinion: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/11-393c3a2.pdf

@Gunfighter,

"How is federalized education for the general welfare of the nation? Student performance has plummeted since the Department of Education began operating in 1980"

Sorry, but this is a terrible argument. *Education* is for the general welfare, therefore it's something that Congress can decide to spend money on. They may do a terrible job of it, and end up doing something that doesn't end up being a good idea, but it doesn't thereby become unconstitutional. That would mean that basically, "bad laws are unconstitutional." That is not true, though people on every side often act as though it were.

Your argument amounts to, "This bill is a bad idea, so it's not in the general welfare, so it's not constitutional." Somebody who thought the bill was a good idea would disagree with the premise, and therefore would come to a different conclusion regarding its constitutionality. That's a *terrible* situation, and not one that ever arises with correct analysis of constitutionality. Constitutionality is a separate question from effectiveness.

Oh, and krellin, I never got to the second point, which was in some sense the main one. The "second of all" is this: if failure to buy insurance WERE a criminal act, then it couldn't be one under the "general welfare" clause -- it would have to be one under the commerce clause or something else. The "general welfare" clause deals ONLY with spending -- read it. I already said that I disagreed with many of the things that people try to do under the commerce clause.

In point of fact, I think the Supreme Court did get this point wrong; the mandate is really a civil penalty, not a tax (contra what they said), so it should have come under the commerce clause and then been invalidated, instead of the tax clause. But you'll note that that IS how they defended it when they were presenting it as a penalty. The government argued that, if it was a penalty, it was a VALID exercise of the COMMERCE clause, not an exercise of the tax clause (or, in particular, the general welfare clause). That, too, is clear in the Supreme Court opinion.

"they defended it" = "the government defended it," in the above.

Here is some logic that amuses me.

If the feds are allowed to have functions explicitly called for, then the Air Force and the Marines are unconstitutional. You could also make an argument that the Army is also unconstitutional (The Navy is the only one explicitly granted as a power).

I think disbanding the national Army, Air Force, and Marines as unconstitutional abuses of power would help balance the budget, yes?

And yes, I'm being absurd only to illustrate how absurd krellin's 'arguments' are.

*Is* education "general welfare"? How are we defining "general welfare"? The constitutionality of federal involvement in education is very debatable.

Also, the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") originated in the Senate. If it is a revenue bill as you claim, then the Constitution says it has to originate in the House of Representatives. The ACA originated in the Senate and the Supreme Court ruled that the penalty is in fact a tax. Uh oh. Maybe Chief Justice Roberts is smarter than we think he is.
_______________

Right next to the general welfare clause is the common defense clause. Good try, Jack_Klein.

Well, GF, I think there's a pretty strong argument to be made that universal education does fall under "general welfare." Even ignoring the fact that everybody gets educated, there is a strong tradition going back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1640s that universal education is important for democracy to work.

I didn't say I was opposed to universal education. I said I was opposed to federal involvement in education. We have this great thing called "states" who have been failing to exercise the full extent of their power lately.

Only problem with having the states handle education is what happens when someone moves from one state to another? Actually had a co-worker who would of had to take an extra year because the requirement in California or much different then here in Illinois. Luckily her mother let her do independent study instead and made up the credits that way.

GF how would you address an issue like that coming up?

That problem is not limited to interstate transfer students. Intrastate transfer students run into credit problems as well.

Regardless, state-based education can't possibly be worse than federal education, so I'd be willing to screw over a handful of transfer students if it comes to that.

"there is a strong tradition going back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1640s that universal education is important for democracy to work."

Indeed there is... but why does it need to be run by the government through a massive, corrupt, inept, and totalitarian top-down system? This country had a very high literacy rate long before the first compulsory government school laws started being written in the 1840's.

Keep towing that hardline on public education, conservatives. Enjoy losing again in 2016.

Here's the thing, most Americans actually WANT a good, well-funded, public education for their kids. Shocking, isn't it?

Wanting the feds out of education and the states to be responsible for it is hardly being against education. It is against the federal governmemt overstepping its boundaries.

Adding on to what Draugnar said, I care about kids enough to save them from a federal government bureaucratic clusterfuck.

Education spending (yes, inflation-adjusted) has been on the steady increase for decades. This has not been matched by an increase in performance. Test scores have either held steady or fallen during that time. Clearly, more federal money/involvement is not the solution.

Also, yellowjacket, your arrogance offends me. Considering the GOP lost this last election by a relatively small margin and had a gaffe-prone shady businessman against a charismatic machine politician with the full weight of the media on his side, it's an indicator of the health of the GOP that we didn't lose bigger than we did.

The GOP needs to change, but it needs to stay out of the center at all costs. Abandon some social issues and drift towards a more libertarian, possibly paleoconservative stance.