AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

Is it stupid? Are you now suggesting that everybody should be willing to chip in? That everybody should pay his/her own way?

That isn't what you said before. I'm crushed. I thought you said anybody unwilling to help those with less than we have are greedy and selfish if we aren't willing to help.

That's why we pay taxes you said. Well I'm pretty sure that you're earning more than I am. So please send the check for my mortgage. The government I paid all those taxes too doesn't seem to be inclined to do that.

Since the SC has not questioned congress or the president in how they have spent taxpayer money, that in essence shows approval.

I know you earn a whole lot more than I do or you wouldn't be able to afford the expensive apartment that you described. There is no way I could afford your apartment. My mortgage including taxes, insurance, and interest is nowhere near that much. But you aren't at all willing to write out a check to help me out unless you're sure there is going to be reciprocation. And yet you consider yourself less greedy and selfish than I am.

You see, you have no idea what my net worth is or what my circumstances are, but even if I convinced you that you were far better off than me, you would not be willing to pay my mortgage.

(Good lord. Must be something in the water some people drink. He actually thinks I was begging on the internet or would have accepted a check had he sent it. Oh well, so much of trying to provide illustration to prove a point. Just not possible for some people to understand.)

Just responding to what you say Cyclop. Just responding to what you say.

Roberts did, however, settle a long‐standing dispute concerning the taxing power of Congress. Article I, section 8, authorizes Congress to levy taxes “to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States. …” James Madison contended that “general welfare” purposes were limited to authorizations elsewhere in the Constitution, whereas Alexander Hamilton held that this language amounted to an independent power to tax and spend, provided only that the “general welfare” was served. Accepting Hamilton's view, Roberts determined that the processing taxes were justified under the General Welfare Clause.

Congress and the President were to continue exercising illegal powers, and Congress chooses not to impeach AND remove all the perpetrators, THEN these are possible consequences: ... .

http://www.answers.com/topic/united-states-v-butler
297 U.S. 1 (1936), argued 9"10 Dec. 1935, decided 6 Jan. 1936, by vote of 6 to 3; Roberts for the Court, Stone, Brandeis, and Cardozo in dissent. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 represented a major New Deal effort to ameliorate the depression in agriculture and raise farm prices by limiting production. Farmers who agreed to reduce crop acreage received benefit payments, the funds coming from a tax levied on the first processor of the commodities involved. Butler, a processor, refused to pay the tax. The circuit court of appeals upheld Butler, and the government appealed.

By a vote of 6 to 3 in United States v. Butler the Supreme Court declared the tax unconstitutional. Justice Owen J. Roberts's opinion for the majority, characterized by Leonard Levy as “monumentally inept,” undertook a preliminary explanation of the Court's limited role in deciding constitutional questions. The judicial duty was simply “to lay the Article of the Constitution which is invoked beside the statute which is challenged and to decide whether the latter squares with the former” (p. 62). This simplistic explanation of the process of constitutional interpretation has been generally considered unrealistic.

Roberts did, however, settle a long‐standing dispute concerning the taxing power of Congress. Article I, section 8, authorizes Congress to levy taxes “to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States. …” James Madison contended that “general welfare” purposes were limited to authorizations elsewhere in the Constitution, whereas Alexander Hamilton held that this language amounted to an independent power to tax and spend, provided only that the “general welfare” was served. Accepting Hamilton's view, Roberts determined that the processing taxes were justified under the General Welfare Clause.

Roberts's support for the spending power was irrelevant, however, for he immediately transferred the argument to an entirely new issue. Whether the spending was for national rather than local welfare was of no consequence, because the statutory plan to regulate and control agricultural production invaded the reserved powers of the states and so was invalid under the Tenth Amendment.

Justices Harlan F. Stone, Louis D. Brandeis, and Benjamin N. Cardozo dissented. In a scathing rebuttal Stone called Roberts's ruling “a tortured construction of the Constitution” (p. 87). But the most widely noted language in Stone's dissent was his warning against judicial arrogance: “Courts are not the only agency of government that must be assumed to have capacity to govern. … [T]he only check upon our own exercise of power is our own sense of self‐restraint” (p. 79). These words were widely read as a rebuke to the Court's conservatives who had been declaring New Deal statutes unconstitutional.

As a threat to other New Deal programs, the Roberts opinion was soon a dead letter. The tax provisions of the Social Security Act were upheld in Steward Machine Co. v. Davis (1937), and the agricultural program struck down in Butler was reenacted by Congress under the commerce power and upheld in Mulford v. Smith (1939) and Wickard v. Filburn (1942).

In retrospect, the principal positive contribution of the Butler majority is the principle, as restated by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger in Fullilove v. Klutznick (1980), that the power to provide for the general welfare “is an independent grant of legislative authority, distinct from other broad congressional powers” (p. 247). Otherwise, the opinion by Roberts is valueless. Justice Felix Frankfurter in International Association of Machinists v. Street (1961) spoke of “the severely criticized, indeed rather discredited case of United States v. Butler” (p. 807). The most enduring feature of the decision is Stone's dissent; his plea for judicial self‐restraint has been invoked on many subsequent occasions by Court minorities, both liberal and conservative. In Shapiro v. Thompson (1969) Justice John M. Harlan cited the Butler fiasco in warning his colleague that cases come to the Court with “an extreme heavy presumption of validity” (p. 675).

http://www.answers.com/topic/taxing-and-spending-clause
Congress's power to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States” (Art. I, sec. 8) is extraordinarily important and controversial.8

The precise meaning of the clause has never been clear. Its peculiar wording and placement in the Constitution have contributed to the problem. One interpretation was that it granted to Congress the broad power to provide for the general welfare. This interpretation assumes that the clause is the first of Congress's enumerated powers (it does immediately precede the long list of enumerated powers in Article I, section 8) and is consistent with a literal reading (see also Implied Powers). Still, this interpretation was inconsistent with the premise that the federal government is one of limited powers and would have rendered the list of enumerated powers redundant. It was never authoritatively accepted and was rejected officially by the Supreme Court in United States v. Butler (1936).

At the other extreme, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson argued that the Taxing and Spending Clause conferred on Congress no additional power whatsoever"that it was merely a summary or general description of the specific powers. Under this view, the clause simply gives to Congress the power to tax and spend to carry out its enumerated powers, which follow immediately afterward. This interpretation was also rejected by the Court in Butler.

A third view was offered by Alexander Hamilton in his 1792 Report on Manufactures. Hamilton argued that the Taxing and Spending Clause conferred on Congress a separate and distinct power and was therefore in addition to, and not limited by, other grants of power under the Constitution. Such a view gives Congress the substantive power to tax and spend for the general welfare over and above its power to tax and spend to carry out its other enumerated powers.

In the Butler case the Supreme Court accepted Hamilton's position. But Justice Owen Roberts made it clear that “the powers of taxation and appropriation extend only to matters of national, as distinguished from local, welfare” (p. 67), and that, in the final analysis, the Supreme Court has the power to determine what constitutes the national welfare. Whether the federal program at issue in Butler did or did not serve the general welfare, however, was never decided, because the Court struck down the statute on Tenth Amendment grounds.

Less than a year later, however, the Court abandoned Butler. In Helvering v. Davis (1937), it held that although Congress's power to tax and spend was limited by the General Welfare Clause, “discretion belongs to Congress, unless the choice is clearly wrong, a display of arbitrary power” (p. 640). No Taxing and Spending Clause statute has ever been invalidated because it did not serve the general welfare, and none is likely to be.

The spending power has raised other constitutional issues as well. Congress is reasonably free to place “noncoercive” restrictions on its expenditures of funds, including requirements that recipients of federal moneys act or refrain from acting in certain ways. This is true whether the recipient is a state government (as, for example, in South Dakota v. Dole, 1987, which required the states to adopt a minimum drinking age of twenty‐one years or forfeit a small portion of their federal highway funds) or a private individual. Congress's power to spend is also limited, of course, by various provisions of the Bill of Rights.

The taxing aspects of the clause have also produced controversy. Prior to the adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment, Congress was required to “apportion” all direct taxes (head taxes, for example). Excises, however, need only be “uniform,” which, the Supreme Court decided in 1900, required only geographic uniformity (Knowlton v. Moore). Thus there was an advantage to having certain taxes classified as excises, in which case they would not be considered direct taxes. The Sixteenth Amendment, in 1913, ended most of this controversy. It granted Congress the power to levy taxes on incomes “from whatever source derived” and “without apportionment.”

The Taxing Clause, like the Spending Clause, gives Congress a separate power in addition to its other powers. If a tax were for regulatory as opposed to revenue purposes, however, it is possible that it would not be justified under the taxing power and would have to be justified under some other congressional power, such as the commerce power. Since the New Deal, however, the Court has interpreted the taxing power generously, and, in any event, its recent broad view of congressional power under the Commerce Clause makes the distinctions at this point purely academic.