Penguin Guide to the United States Constitution: A Fully Annotated Declaration of Independence (5 page)

1. As previously mentioned, the power to levy taxes—the ability of the government to provide for itself a permanent revenue with which to finance its operations—was the single most important power given to the new federal government. The broad purposes for which that power was granted—to “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States”—have been interpreted in widely different ways over the course of the nation’s history, with the general trend leading toward an expansion of activity financed by the federal taxation power.

2. The “commerce power” has proven to be one of the most important and far-reaching provisions of the federal Constitution. Utilizing an ever-expanding definition of its power to regulate commerce “among the several States,” the federal government has broadened the definition of “commerce” to include not only the shipment of goods across state lines but also many other forms of activity: the building of interstate roads; the power to regulate the business activities of corporations; and the power to pass environmental legislation, consumer-protection laws, and occupational-safety regulations.

3. Establishing post offices and post roads may seem mundane enterprises, but this provision of the Constitution, in conjunction with an expansive view of Congress’s role in promoting the “general Welfare” and regulating commerce, marked the beginnings of the creation of a national infrastructure that would tie the thirteen previously independent and sovereign states into a single nation.

4. The clause relating to the promotion of science and useful arts gives to Congress the power to enact patent and copyright laws.

5. Clauses ten through sixteen of Article I, Section 8, deal with the war powers of Congress. If the “power over the purse” has long been considered to be the most important of a government’s powers, the power over the “sword”—the ability not only to declare war but also to vote on appropriations for the financial support of war—has run a close second. Congress’s power to declare war overlaps with the power of the president, as commander in chief of the nation’s armed forces, to direct the actual conduct of war. In one sense, this overlap is part of the Constitution’s system of separation of powers, but in another it has become a significant source of constitutional controversy in recent years. In numerous cases since the mid-twentieth century—in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the First Gulf War, and most recently, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—the president has proceeded with the prosecution of the war without a formal congressional declaration of war.

6. Congress’s power over the appropriation of money gives it a substantial say over how—or whether—a war should be fought, but it has only rarely denied funds for the support of an army or navy once a war is under way.

7. The seventeenth clause, giving to Congress the power to “exercise exclusive Legislation . . . over such District . . . as may . . . become the Seat of the Government,” is the basis on which Congress created the District of Columbia, which is regarded not as a state but as a federal territory and the nation’s capital.

8. The final provision of Article I, Section 8, has proven to be one of the most important—and controversial—provisions of the Constitution. By giving Congress the power to make all laws “necessary and proper” for carrying into effect the previously enumerated powers, the framers of the Constitution opened the door to a significant expansion of federal power. Within just a few years of the adoption of the Constitution, some of the most important figures of the revolutionary era found themselves in bitter disagreement on the meaning of the phrase “necessary and proper,” with President Washington’s secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, arguing for a broad construction of its meaning (for example, as “needful,” “useful,” or “conducive to”) and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison arguing for a strict construction (for example, as “absolutely necessary”). This line of constitutional difference between “broad constructionists” and “strict constructionists” was a bitter source of contention in the period leading up to the Civil War and continues in somewhat diminished form between the respective proponents of a more limited or more active federal government even today.