So, what IS the limit?

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Radley Balko's a libertarian, yes - writes for Reason, has his blog, etc. He's also done great work on drug policy, and may have single-handedly gotten someone a retrial for a botched murder case.

Anyway, he posted this question on his blog tonight in response to the left wing responses to the health care reform lawsuit result yesterday, and I'm sharing it here because I am curious:

Putting aside what’s codified Bill of Rights, which was ratified after the main body of the Constitution, do you believe the Constitution puts any restrictions on the powers of the federal government?

If your answer is yes, what restrictions would those be? And what test would you use to determine what the federal government can and can’t do? I’ve written this before, but after Wickard, Raich, and now, if you support it, the health insurance mandate, it’s hard to see what’s left that would be off-limits.

...

If your answer is no, that is, that the Constitution puts no real restraints on the federal government at all, why do you suppose they bothered writing and passing one in the first place?

...

I guess to get at the meat of the disagreement, I should ask one more: Do you buy into the idea that the people delegate certain, limited powers to the government through the Constitution, or do you believe that the government can do whatever it wants, save for a few restrictions outlined in the Constitution?

I use my Tenther icon ironically right now, but I think it is a reasonable, rational question. I can get why people view the General Welfare clause expansively, even if they're wrong, for example, but I can't wrap my head around how people cannot see this as overly broad, or why anyone's really willing to dismiss certain Constitutional facts out of hand. I'm actually really curious here - if there's something I've been missing all this time, I'd genuinely love to hear it.

Comments

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

Yet, when drafting the Bill of Rights, it was deemed necessary to explicitly state what should not be assumed by virtue of the fact that they had just listed several rights (that you cannot assume because of it that others do not exist or are not held by the people).

Can you describe why it might have been that one list required such an explanation, yet the other did not merit it? Is there an explanation aside from the notion that they had a concern over how one list was read which was not shared with the other one, because the other list actually was okay to be read as a finite one?

[nevermind6794.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty tired, so forgive me if I misread or fail to address your comment.

I take the Bill of Rights to be a list of rights afforded to people (duh), which also means it's a list of further limits on government power. If the powers of Congress are as wide-ranging as I think (again, subject to all those clauses), then it makes sense that more specific restrictions needed to be listed. It's difficult to imagine our nation without freedom of speech, but before it was listed there would have been a debate about whether the executive could censor people or the press in the name of fighting a war, for example. I can see the Founders wanting to preempt that.