Last week Jonathan Chait scoffed at Republicans' decision to read the Constitution aloud and require that proposed laws cite where the constitutional authority to enact a particular law comes from, saying "My favorite part is going to be when they read the word "welfare." It's in the first sentence!"
Chait was referring the Preamble to the Constitution, which refers to "promoting the general welfare." That means it's non-binding, but Article I Section 8 does have a provision authorizing Congress to "provide for the common defence and general welfare." Ian Millheiser writes that Republicans have finally decided what they're going to do about those parts of the Constitution. One Republican Congressman, Rep. Scott Garrett, just wants to pretend both that and the "necessary and proper" and "general welfare" clauses don't exist:
Garrett's House rule resolution would require all bills and amendments to contain a statement appropriately citing a specific power granted to Congress in the Constitution. Invoking the “general welfare clause” or the “necessary and proper clause” would not be adequate constitutional citations.
Liberals have had a lot of fun with the tension between quasi-religious veneration of the Constitution and the conservative desire to cram more Amendments into it that reflect their chosen policy preferences. But this is absurdity on par with the conservative obsession with pretending that the 14th Amendment doesn't grant birthright citizenship to children born to foreign parents on American soil.
The necessary and proper and general welfare clauses are vague and broad, but the Framers put them there for a reason. They put them there so that the federal government would be able to resolve genuinely federal problems that they couldn't have foreseen at the time. We have a federal court system and a duly elected legislature to ensure that powers asserted under those clauses don't go too far.
This incidentally, goes back to the debate last week over whether or not the Constitution is a "libertarian" document. It's not. one that reflects the diverging political agendas of the Framers. This is why it contains so many values that are in tension, ideals that every pole of the political spectrum can glom onto in order to legitimize their own particular worldview. While liberals are fairly honest about those tensions, conservatives tend to mistake their own knee-jerk political impulses for constitutional fidelity. All that's happening here is that Garrett is pretending that the parts of the Constitution that might justify liberal policies simply don't exist.
This is one of the reasons I find it irritating that conservatives pretend that constitutional interpretation is a simple matter, although as Jack Balkin suggested in my health care piece liberals might gain some political advantage from rote repetition of the parts of the Constitution that support liberal policy preferences and declarations that any other interpretation would be inherently illegitimate.
