Quote of the Day, Constitution Edition

“If the end be clearly comprehended within any of the specified powers, and if the measure have an obvious relation to that end, and is not forbidden by any particular provision of the Constitution, it may safely be deemed to come within the compass of the national authority.”
— Alexander Hamilton, 1791

FILED UNDER: Law and the Courts, US Politics, ,
Alex Knapp
About Alex Knapp
Alex Knapp is Associate Editor at Forbes for science and games. He was a longtime blogger elsewhere before joining the OTB team in June 2005 and contributed some 700 posts through January 2013. Follow him on Twitter @TheAlexKnapp.

Comments

  1. mantis says:

    Hamilton was obviously a marxist/communist/fascist/Kenyan anti-colonialist.

  2. michael reynolds says:

    mantis:

    No, he was a marxist/communist/fascist/Nevisian anti-colonialist.

    He was actually born on the Caribbean island of Nevis, in what is now St. Kitts and Nevis.

  3. James Joyner says:

    It’s fair to say that, while one of the Framers–and Federalist Papers author–Hamilton was expounding one extreme view of the Constitution, with Jefferson and others holding the other extreme view, that the Federal government was limited only to powers expressly granted in the document. Most came somewhere in between and we’ve been fighting it out ever since.