The powers of Congress and the government are defined in Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution. The Constitution granted a wider range of powers and prohibited certain actions. The controversy over the extent of congressional authority has been ongoing, with conservatives arguing for strict constructionism and liberals citing McCullough v. Maryland. The trade clause and the Preamble have been used to justify congressional actions.
The powers listed are the powers listed in Article 1, Section 8 and elsewhere in the United States Constitution that define the powers of Congress and the government generally. These include a wide range of powers such as raising revenues, minting money, regulating trade with other nations and between states, setting immigration rules, setting bankruptcy rules, establishing post offices and post roads, establishing and maintaining forces armies, declare war, and many more.
At the time of the Constitution’s creation and ratification, the United States was concluding its failed experiment with the Articles of Confederation, which explicitly limited the authority of the central government to only those enumerated powers specifically granted in the articles, leading to an ineffective central government that she didn’t even have the authority to raise the funds she needed to operate on her own. It had no power to tax and had to ask the states for money. The new Constitution granted a much wider range of enumerated powers and also prohibited Congress from taking certain other actions, such as granting peerages and passing retroactive laws. It also gave Congress the right to pass any legislation necessary to implement any of the powers listed, or any of the other powers granted by the Constitution to any other part of government, in what was called the “necessary and proper” clause. For example, while conducting the decennial census is not one of the powers enumerated in Section 1, Section 8, it is in Section 1, Section 2. Subject to the necessary and appropriate clause, Congress has the authority to issue legislation necessary for carrying out the census.
The controversy over the extent of congressional authority has been ongoing since before the Constitution was ratified. Arguments presented to the New York Ratifying Convention underscored the strong nationalism that would result from a broad and “liberal” interpretation of the Constitution, but those presented to the Virginia Convention suggested that central government would be limited in scope only to those powers listed in Article 1, Section 8. Once the Constitution was ratified and then President George Washington presided over his first cabinet meeting in 1789, he found Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson disagreeing on this same problem. For example, nowhere in the Constitution was the government given the authority to establish or operate a bank, but it was specifically granted the power to mint money. Hamilton advocated a broad interpretation of the Constitution, stating that it was impossible for the Constitution to list every possible action the government could legitimately take, while Jefferson advocated a very strict interpretation.
The concept of the enumerated powers of the Constitution is at the heart of the ongoing controversy between conservatives and liberals in the United States. Under the doctrine of “strict constructionism,” conservatives argue that Congress should limit itself to considering only the issues specifically listed in the Constitution. Liberals cite McCullough v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316 (1819), in which the Supreme Court held that Congress had the right to enact laws not specifically provided for in the Constitution, so long as those laws conform to such express powers. Since then, two parts of the Constitution have been used as justification for a wide range of congressional actions deemed by conservatives to be outside the purview of congressional authority as defined by the Constitution. These two parts are the “trade clause,” which gives Congress the right to regulate commerce between states, and the Preamble, which calls for the promotion of the “general welfare.”
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