Monopolies -- United States; Railroads and state -- United States
We agree that much of what was said in the dissenting opinion in that
case, which has become the opinion of a majority of the court as now
constituted, was correctly said. We fully agree in all that was quoted
from Chief Justice Marshall. We had indeed accepted, without reserve,
the definition of implied powers in which that great judge summed up his
argument, of which the language quoted formed a part. But if it was
intended to ascribe to us "the doctrine that when an act of congress is
brought to the test of this clause of the constitution," namely, the
clause granting the power of ancillary legislation, "its necessity must
be absolute, and its adaptation to the conceded purpose unquestionable,"
we must be permitted not only to disclaim it, but to say that there is
nothing in the opinion of the then majority which approaches the
assertion of any such doctrine. We did indeed venture to cite, with
approval, the language of Judge Story in his great work on the
constitution, that the words necessary and proper were intended to have
"a sense at once admonitory and directory," and to require that the
means used in the execution of an express power "should be _bona fide_,
appropriate to the end," and also ventured to say that the tenth
amendment, reserving to the states or the people all powers not
delegated to the United States by the constitution, nor prohibited by it
to the states, "was intended to have a like admonitory and directory
sense," and to restrain the limited government established by the
constitution from the exercise of powers not clearly delegated or
derived by just inference from powers so delegated. In thus quoting
Judge Story, and in this expression of our own opinion, we certainly did
not suppose it possible that we could be understood as asserting that
the clause in question "was designed as a restriction upon the ancillary
power incidental to every grant of power in express terms." It was this
proposition which "was stated and refuted" in _McCulloch_ v. _Maryland_.
That refutation touches nothing said by us. We assert only that the
words of the constitution are such as admonish congress that implied
powers are not to be rashly or lightly assumed, and that they are not to
be exercised at all, unless, in the words of Judge Story, they are
"_bona fide_ appropriate to the end," or, in the words of Chief Justice
Marshall, "appropriate, plainly adapted" to a constitutional and
legitimate end, and "not prohibited, but consistent with the letter and
spirit of the constitution."
There appears, therefore, to have been no real difference of opinion in
the court as to the rule by which the existence of an implied power is
to be tested, when _Hepburn_ v. _Griswold_ was decided, though the then
minority seem to have supposed there was. The difference had reference
to the application of the rule rather than to the rule itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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