As we daily observe Washington try to take more and more control over our lives, we thought it appropriate to return to the writings of our Founding Fathers.
"Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated." - Thomas Jefferson, letter to Albert Gallatin, 1817.
"A wise and frugal government ... shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government." - Thomas Jefferson, first inaugural address, March 4, 1801.
"Our tenet ever was that Congress had not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated, and that, as it was never meant that they should provide for that welfare but by the exercise of the enumerated powers, so it could not have been meant they should raise money for purposes which the enumeration did not place under their action; consequently, that the specification of powers is a limitation of the purposes for which they may raise money." - Thomas Jefferson, letter to Albert Gallatin, 1817.
"They are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare.... [G]iving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please." - Thomas Jefferson.
"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what is will be tomorrow." - James Madison, Federalist no. 62, February 27, 1788.
"There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." - James Madison, speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 16, 1788.
"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress." - Mark Twain, 1894.
