• Veto of federal public works bill
March 3, 1817
To the House of Representatives of the United
States:
Having considered the bill this day presented to me
entitled "An act to set apart and pledge certain funds for internal
improvements," and which sets apart and pledges funds "for
constructing roads and canals, and improving the navigation of water courses,
in order to facilitate, promote, and give security to internal commerce among
the several States, and to render more easy and less expensive the means and
provisions for the common defense," I am constrained by the insuperable
difficulty I feel in reconciling the bill with the Constitution of the United
States to return it with that objection to the House of Representatives, in
which it originated.
The legislative powers vested in Congress are
specified and enumerated in the eighth section of the first article of the
Constitution, and it does not appear that the power proposed to be exercised by
the bill is among the enumerated powers, or that it falls by any just
interpretation with the power to make laws necessary and proper for carrying
into execution those or other powers vested by the Constitution in the
Government of the United States.
"The power to regulate commerce among the
several States" can not include a power to construct roads and canals, and
to improve the navigation of water courses in order to facilitate, promote, and
secure such commerce without a latitude of construction departing from the
ordinary import of the terms strengthened by the known inconveniences which
doubtless led to the grant of this remedial power to Congress.
To refer the power in question to the clause
"to provide for common defense and general welfare" would be contrary
to the established and consistent rules of interpretation, as rendering the
special and careful enumeration of powers which follow the clause nugatory and
improper. Such a view of the Constitution would have the effect of giving to
Congress a general power of legislation instead of the defined and limited one
hitherto understood to belong to them, the terms "common defense and
general welfare" embracing every object and act within the purview of a
legislative trust. It would have the effect of subjecting both the Constitution
and laws of the several States in all cases not specifically exempted to be
superseded by laws of Congress, it being expressly declared "that the
Constitution of the United States and laws made in pursuance thereof shall be
the supreme law of the land, and the judges of every state shall be bound
thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary
notwithstanding." Such a view of the Constitution, finally, would have the
effect of excluding the judicial authority of the United States from its
participation in guarding the boundary between the legislative powers of the
General and the State Governments, inasmuch as questions relating to the
general welfare, being questions of policy and expediency, are unsusceptible of
judicial cognizance and decision.
A restriction of the power "to provide for the
common defense and general welfare" to cases which are to be provided for
by the expenditure of money would still leave within the legislative power of
Congress all the great and most important measures of Government, money being
the ordinary and necessary means of carrying them into execution.
If a general power to construct roads and canals,
and to improve the navigation of water courses, with the train of powers
incident thereto, be not possessed by Congress, the assent of the States in the
mode provided in the bill can not confer the power. The only cases in which the
consent and cession of particular States can extend the power of Congress are
those specified and provided for in the Constitution.
I am not unaware of the great importance of roads
and canals and the improved navigation of water courses, and that a power in
the National Legislature to provide for them might be exercised with signal
advantage to the general prosperity. But seeing that such a power is not
expressly given by the Constitution, and believing that it can not be deduced
from any part of it without an inadmissible latitude of construction and
reliance on insufficient precedents; believing also that the permanent success
of the Constitution depends on a definite partition of powers between the
General and the State Governments, and that no adequate landmarks would be left
by the constructive extension of the powers of Congress as proposed in the
bill, I have no option but to withhold my signature from it, and to cherishing
the hope that its beneficial objects may be attained by a resort for the
necessary powers to the same wisdom and virtue in the nation which established
the Constitution in its actual form and providently marked out in the instrument
itself a safe and practicable mode of improving it as experience might suggest.
James Madison,
President of the United States
