Vested Powers

The Vested Powers - Not a List of Suggestions!

The very first sentence of the U.S. Constitution - the one every
Congressman and Senator swears an oath to defend - sums up the entirety of the power of Congress with,"All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives."

The rest of the Constitution precisely defines "all" the legislative powers in great detail, with a total lack of ambiguity - limiting the authority of Congress to only those powers. The powers vested to Congress were not intended to be a list of suggestions, but were to be the entirety of the authorized powers. How far we have veered off the path.

Try to match up the following list of vested powers, found in Article I, Section 8, with the expenditures in the 2009 U.S. budget. You will find that nearly 90% of the money our federal government spends is being diverted to fund unconstitutional, and therefore illegal, programs. There can be little argument that those we have elected to Congress have run roughshod over the powers we entrusted them with.

Congress Has the Vested Power to:

- Provide for the common defense
- Raise, fund and regulate the Army and the Navy
- Borrow money on the credit of the United States
- Declare war and grant letters of marque and reprisal
- Approve treaties, Cabinet and Supreme Court appointments
- Regulate the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court
- Impeach (House only) and try (Senate only) federal officers
- Introduce Constitutional amendments, call a convention
- Override presidential vetoes
- Regulate commerce with foreign countries and between the states
- Establish rules for citizenship
- Coin money and regulate the value thereof, determine punishment for counterfeiting
- Define and punish crimes committed at sea
- Establish federal courts
- Create all bills for raising revenue (House only)
- Levy and collect taxes, duties
- Pay all debts
- Organize and arm the state militias
- Exercise exclusive jurisdiction over the District of Columbia
- Establish post offices and postal roads
- Create bankruptcy laws
- Regulate patents and copyrights
- Assemble at least once in every year on the first Monday in December
- Establish times for elections
- Discipline it's own members
- Oversee all federal property and possessions (what few there should be)
- Fill a vacancy in the Presidency in cases of death or inability
- Receive electoral votes for the Presidency
- Keep and publish a journal of its proceedings
- Conduct a census every ten years

These are the only powers vested to Congress by the Constitution. Outside of these, Congress has no other powers. Just to make the limited scope of these powers very clear, the Constitution even specifies that Congress may only pass the laws "necessary and proper" for executing these vested powers. Go to the U. S. Constitution Online and see for yourself the very defined limitation of powers our founders placed on the federal government.

Conspicuously missing from these authorized powers is any authority over education, health care, food distribution, housing, foreign aid, farming, transportation, spotted owls, retirement, job creation, energy production, gun regulation, space exploration, “family planning”, day care, the "arts", etc. Congress needs to be restricted to the powers expressly granted to it in the Constitution.

Either our leaders have no idea the Constitution has outlined such specific powers, which would be hard to believe, or they know about these limitations but have no intention of abiding by the oath they took for office.

My commitment is to refer to this list of vested powers often, and only vote to approve legislation that falls within these very clear limitations. And I will NEVER vote to start a war or fund an occupation unless we are under an actual attack by a defined enemy - not some shadowy group of desert bediouns who couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag!

Every Senator and Congressman swears an oath to defend our Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. We have proved our foreign enemies are nothing but an illusion...

It is the domestic enemies we need to start worrying about!