“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government,” wrote James Madison in Federalist Paper 45, “are few and defined.” And so in 1887, President Cleveland vetoed the Texas Seed Bill, which appropriated $10,000 to purchase seed grain for drought-stricken farmers. Cleveland said: “I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution.”

What about the power to provide for the “general welfare”? Madison had said no. He warned that if those words were construed to permit Congress to do whatever it said served the general welfare, that “would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.”