4. Article 1: Congress (Part One)
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Texas Supreme Court in Grigsby v. Reid, 1913
Marriage was not originated by human law. When God created Eve, she was a wife to Adam; they then and there occupied the status of husband to wife and wife to husband. The truth is that civil government has grown out of marriage, which created homes and population and society, from which government became necessary
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CONSTITUTION ALIVE! Class Workbook
Marriages will produce a home and family that will contribute to good society, to free and just government, and the support of Christianity.
It would be sacrilegious to apply the designation “a civil contract” to such a marriage. It is that and more – it is a status ordained by God.
“If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress. … Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America.”
– James Madison
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SECTION FOUR: Article I – Congress (part one)
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CONSTITUTION ALIVE! Class Workbook
“Consider for a moment the immeasurable difference between the Constitution limited in its powers to the enumerated objects, and expounded as it would be by the import claimed for the phraseology in question.
“The difference is equivalent to two Constitutions, of characters essentially contrasted with each other–the one possessing powers confined to certain specified cases, the other extended to all cases whatsoever;…
“Can less be said…than that it is impossible that such a Constitution as the latter would have been recommended to the States by all the members of that body whose names were subscribed to the instrument? … Is it credible that such a power would have been unnoticed and unopposed in the Federal Convention? In the State Conventions, which contended for, and and proposed restrictive and explanatory amendments? And in the Congress of 1789, which recommended so many of these amendments? A power to impose unlimited taxes for unlimited purposes could never have escaped…those public bodies.
SECTION FOUR: Article I – Congress (part one)
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“Constitution is a limited one, possessing no power not actually given, and carrying on the face of it a distrust of power beyond the distrust indicated by the ordinary forms of free Government.”xxiv
– James Madison
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CONSTITUTION ALIVE! Class Workbook
“Nothing is more certain, than that the forms of liberty may be retained, when the substance is gone. In government, as well as in religion, ‘The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.’”