Landor v. Louisiana Dept of Corrections and Public Safety · ¶17

In the end, the founding generation rejected Morris’s reading of the Clause just as it had his semicolon. See Me dina, 606 U. S., at 370–371. While the Clause may allow Congress to raise and spend money in support of the “general Welfare,” early authorities concluded, it did not “endow Congress with [any] power to regulate conduct.” Ibid. (internal quotation marks omitted). Were it otherwise, they recognized, “the ‘enumeration of specific powers’ elsewhere in Article I would be rendered largely pointless, and the Nation would trade a limited federal government for ‘an unlimited’ one.” Id., at 371 (quoting 2 J. Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States §§904, 906, pp. 367, 369 (1833)). This Court’s precedents have long respected that founding-era consensus. See Medina, 606 U. S., at 371; accord, Cummings v. Premier Rehab Keller, 596 U. S. 212, 219 (2022).

slip opinion, revised 6/28/26
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