University of Virginia Library

VETO MESSAGE.

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,"[130] 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 within 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 a 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 the 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exempted to be superseded by laws of Congress, it being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 cannot
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 a 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.