Weaponizing the Constitution: "Welfare"

Not many things draw my ire more than maliciously misleading statements designed to confuse and make us question our basic understanding of an important concept. For example, what comes to mind when you think of the word “welfare?” In contemporary, post-Reagan era discourse, its use has become a pejorative suggesting some demographic within the United States is being supported financially by another demographic in a non-consensual manner. While this may be true inasmuch as taxes are one way the government redistributes wealth, to suggest it is unidirectional from the hard-working wealthy to the indolent poor is wrong-headed and comes loaded with prejudice. How many of you know if the word “welfare” is found in the Constitution?

The word is found in Article I, Section 8 which provides Congress with some of its enumerated powers, one of which is:

“The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.”

As you might expect, there are political pundits that want to fix the meaning of the term “welfare” based on their own experiences and biases. I am not going to bother with dictionary definitions to establish a common basis for interpretation but offer an example of its malicious misuse. Paul Engel, who hosts a website titled www.constitutionstudy.com, has a very interesting take on what it means. He begins with,

“So, general welfare, when applied to the states, means the exemption from unusual evil or calamity and the enjoyment of peace, prosperity, and blessings of society for the community as a whole. The next logical question should be, What community?”

I’ll be frank. When someone begins a sentence with “So,…” I become immediately wary of their discourse. It’s just me. I know many people use it in a sentence as a preparatory word for what follows.

Mr. Engel makes it clear in his sentence that he is defining welfare as applied to the states. Fair enough. But then he follows with,

“Notice the Constitution does not say the general welfare of the people of the United States, nor the general welfare of the States, but of the United States.”

Combining the first sentence of his first claim with the first part of his second claim yields,

“…general welfare, when applied to the states, the Constitution does not say…the general welfare of the States….”

I could stop here with the obvious logic conundrum Mr. Engel has left us—if the Constitution does not say general welfare applies to the states, then why would anyone choose to apply it to the states in support of an argument? What else does he have to offer?

After going through some tortured logic, Mr. Engel ends with this conclusion.

“It means that Congress can collect taxes to pay the debts of the federal government, not those of the states. It means Congress can collect taxes to pay for the defense of the nation as a whole, not the defense of individual states. And most importantly, it means Congress can collect taxes to pay for the general welfare of the United States, not the people or the individual states.”

On one thing we can all agree: Congress has the power to lay and collect taxes. Engel drops the word “lay” from his fusillade of conclusions. I will, however, take the opportunity to point out that Congress does indeed write tax laws (lay) but the collection of them is delegated to the IRS, under the executive branch’s Department of Treasury. The emphasis is mine in the italicized words in the preceding paragraph. I used this is a means to point out how Engel subtly shifts his prepositional phrase objects from federal government, to nation as a whole, to United States. We will never know what the founders meant by United States in the context of the clause in question and Mr. Engel offers little help. Let me explain.

Surely there is agreement that the applicability of the general welfare clause is internal—within the United States—without giving more detail yet on the meaning of that name yet. The federal government is a very clearly defined organization comprised of three branches—legislative, executive, and judicial—as well as all the ancillary agencies that collectively govern the United States. As such, for the remainder of this discussion, I will use it as a surrogate for Congress. The nation as a whole is extremely vague and unreliable so let’s dispense with that term and assume Engel was equating it with United States, which I feel certain he was. Here is where the difficulty first arises.

It is a given that the taxes laid and collected by Congress come from the people of the United States, not from the federal government (as much as some of us would prefer the latter). Without explicitly naming them, people of the United States is implied when the Constitution refers to taxation—those who pay. The obviousness of this conclusion is based upon history as well as the hue and cry of taxpayers every April 15th. Every United States citizen—people of the United States—is a taxpayer to some degree or another. I am afraid Mr. Engel’s attempt to equate the federal government with the United States falls apart at this juncture.

We are left then with the federal government (Congress) and the people of the United States. I chose to retain the name United States to replace nation as a whole because the former is what is written in the Constitution.

To connect all these dots logically, Mr. Engel is concluding either one or the other of:

1. Congress taxes itself to ensure its own welfare, or

2. The people of the United States and Congress are one and the same.

So (see what I did there?), if Mr. Engel wishes to suggest that Congress lays and collects taxes only to benefit themselves, then he is referring to something other than what the Constitution means. If he wishes to argue that the welfare of the federal government is the same as the general welfare of the people of the United States, I feel sorry for any high school civics students that happen across his website.

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