The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
To borrow money on the credit of the United States;
To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;
When you look at it this way, it becomes apparent that the first clause is actually composed of two subclauses, first, the prefatory clause that applies to all of the granted powers - the clause "The Congress shall have power" - and second, the first enumerated power the Constitution grants to Congress.
That means that the phrase:
to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
must be read as one, distinct enumerated power, and not part of the initial, prefatory, clause that starts the list of enumerated powers. Read that way, Art. I, sec. 8, cl. 1, merely states that Congress may impose taxes in order to pay for the debts of the federal government and to pay for the common defense and those matters that fall under the rubric of the "general welfare" of the U.S.
In other words, the only thing the federal government can do, with respect to something that is considered part of the "general welfare" but which is not provided for in any of the other enumerated powers, is to spend monies to "provide for" those matters, and impose taxes for the purpose of obtaining those monies.
What the liberals have done is to take the phrase "provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States" completely out of context and to treat it as a wholly separate, distinct grant of power, on a par with the enumerated powers contained in clauses 2 through 18 of Art. I, sec. 8.
In other words, what liberals are doing - and they're doing it in bad faith because they are too smart, and there are too many lawyers amongst them, for them to pretend otherwise - is to treat the first clause of Art. I, sec. 8, as providing for two separate, distinct powers - (1) the power to tax, and (2) the power to provide for the general welfare. In order to accomplish that, they have necessarily had to secretly rewrite the first clause of Art. I, sec. 8 as if it read like this:
The Congress shall have power:
(a) to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, and
(b) to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but
(c) all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
If Art. I, sec. 8, cl. 1 were all we had, that might be a plausible reading of it - although it would not be the best reading of it - however, when read within the context of the whole of Art. I, sec. 8, it becomes very difficult to maintain that as a plausible reading of cl. 1. First off, it necessarily entails that the phrase "all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States" also be given weight as a separate, distinct grant of an enumerated power, on a par with the other 17 clauses of sec. 8, but that is simply nonsense because the phrase "all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States" standing by itself is not a grant of power, it is a dependent limitation upon some other grant of power. As such, reading cl. 1 the way liberals would like to pretend it should be read violates one of the basic, fundamental canons of statutory construction that one must always avoid any interpretation of statutory language that requires one to treat the language given in a less logical manner than is available under other interpretations (to very, very broadly paraphrase the canon of construction I am thinking of). Furthermore, it renders cl. 1 inconsistent with cl. 12 which also contains a "but" subclause that qualifies the language of cl. 12 itself that precedes the word "but."
Basically, given that the "general welfare" clause appears as a second dependent subclause in cl. 1, the better interpretation is that it is qualified by the subject-matter of the rest of cl. 1, and that therefore it merely empowers Congress to spend monies to "provide for the general welfare" and it does not constitute a free-standing grant of power to Congress to "provide for the general welfare" in whatever manner Congress sees fit, in particular through compulsory regulations and edicts.
