> The interpretation of "gerneral Welfare" varies of course, but providing SOME sort of standards and funding at the federal level for education is well within accepted US federal authority.
You are correct that it is generally accepted, but you are 100% incorrect that it is in any way a faithful reading of the text of the Constitution.
The power granted to Congress in that clause is that of taxation; its powers concerning the common defence and general welfare of the United States (of the states as a whole, that is, not of the people of the United States), are enumerated elsewhere in the document.
Your interpretation — common though it is — implies that there are no limits to what the Congress may do, and that the Ninth & Tenth Amendments are meaningless.
Dialogues like this make me feel like I'm in some surreal universe where all software evolved around one giant mainframe, and now, centuries later, everyone is still programming in COBOL, and it's illegal to not be backward compatible.
> Dialogues like this make me feel like I'm in some surreal universe where all software evolved around one giant mainframe, and now, centuries later, everyone is still programming in COBOL, and it's illegal to not be backward compatible.
Being backward compatible is a feature in a legal system (e.g. forbidding ex post facto laws). Moreover, it's entirely possible to change the Constitution in any way one wishes, simply by passing an amendment. What you can't do is claim that it says what it doesn't, any more than one could run an amd64 Linux kernel directly on a 68000[1].
The Constitution's not perfect. It wasn't when it passed, which is why the Bill of Rights was required. It still wasn't, which is why further amendments were required (e.g., that banning slavery in most cases). Some of the changes were themselves suboptimal (e.g. the 17th Amendment, which has been a catastrophe, or the 18th, which banned alcohol). It's perfectly fine to amend the Constitution to fix it (e.g. the 21st Amendment, which repealed the fundamentally flawed 18th), but one can't just read whatever one wants into the document (c.f. drug prohibition: if an amendment were required to ban alcohol, then one must be required to ban drugs; and yet here we are).
[1] Yes, I'm sure that someone could in fact come up with a bitstream which is both valid amd64 opcodes and valid 68000 opcodes, and that someone could use that substrate to implement some sort of half-assed, tortured 'Linux' kernel. You know what I meant.
You are correct that it is generally accepted, but you are 100% incorrect that it is in any way a faithful reading of the text of the Constitution.
The power granted to Congress in that clause is that of taxation; its powers concerning the common defence and general welfare of the United States (of the states as a whole, that is, not of the people of the United States), are enumerated elsewhere in the document.
Your interpretation — common though it is — implies that there are no limits to what the Congress may do, and that the Ninth & Tenth Amendments are meaningless.