• Madeline Lewis •
• Originally published December 18, 2008 at 7:37 p.m., updated December 18, 2008 at 7:37 p.m.

Finally, the election is over. Every member of the House of Representatives is ready to get to work. Every Senator is full of anticipation for the great task ahead. President-elect Barack Obama has a massive list of items he wants to accomplish.

But what exactly are they supposed to do?

The first order of business is to take the oath of office. The Constitution only provides for members of Congress to ".be bound by oath or affirmation to support this Constitution." - Article VI, Sec. 3 - unlike the president, who has an oath of office prescribed for him in the Constitution: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" - Article II, Sec. 1.

Members of Congress recite their oath, which dates back to the 1860s: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God."

Both the president and our members of Congress swear (or affirm) to support and defend the Constitution. But do they? I contend that the overwhelming majority of them do not. A thorough reading of the document makes it very clear that our national government is limited in what it can and cannot do. To clear up any confusion on this point, our founding fathers thought it necessary to include the 10th Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people" - Amendment X.

If every American would read the Constitution, they'd see that our national government, which is too big and spends too much, does many things that are, by definition, unconstitutional: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, corporate and personal welfare, farm price supports, the Department of Education and many other Federal programs are not authorized by the Constitution.

This is not to say that some things the national government does aren't worthwhile. If they are worthwhile endeavors, they should be able to survive and pass the amendment process - the only process by which the Constitution can be changed.

Before moving on, let's clear up the biggest misconception in the Constitution about what the government can and cannot do in regard to the "necessary and proper" clause. Many people take the "necessary and proper" clause to mean that the government can do anything it wants as long as it is seen as necessary and proper. That reasoning is fundamentally flawed, for it takes the "necessary and proper" clause out of context.

"The Congress shall have power . to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department of officer thereof" - Article 1, Section 8, Clause 18 (emphasis added).

Our founding fathers did their very best to create a system which severely limited the power of the national government. By creating a government under the Articles of Confederation, our first true national government, their intent was clear: The central government must not be powerful. Because of their fear of a strong national government, they made the Articles of Confederation too weak and a new national government was needed.

For us to believe that our founding fathers meant our national government to be very powerful under the new Constitution, we'd have to suspend logic and reason and believe that they changed their minds sometime between the implementation of the Articles of Confederation and the creation of the Constitution about the need to limit the national government. The Constitution of the United States is a document that clearly illustrates our founding fathers' intent.

Words mean things, and the words of the Constitution mean what they say, not what we want them to say.

The $10 trillion debt question on the table is this: Do our representatives, senators, and president mean what they say when they swear (or affirm) to defend and protect the Constitution? For the sake of freedom, liberty, and fiscal sanity, we need to insist that they do.

Peter Aparicio is a government teacher at Memorial High School senior campus.

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