With half of our Federal Budget destined for Socialist Programs like Welfare, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid growing to over 75% by 2040, we will soon no longer be able to fund things like your referenced Federal Highway system, our own military defense because we will be so mired down in providing your “general welfare” there will be money left for nothing else. Whether it’s Constitutional or not (and it’s not) is that the right future for us? How can you support the expansion, or even continued levels of our Socialist Programs with our future so clearly laid out in front of us? How can defending your interpretation of the Preamble be so important that you’d sacrafice everything else to defend it?

It’s sad we are so unable to learn from history’s lessons, and the mistakes so clearly ratified by our predecessors. Socialism fails. It’s not even a discussion point. It’s a law of history.

Concerning the preamble, my point is that one cannot use the preamble for a basis of law and thus cannot use the “promote the general welfare” to cover whatever one wants. I don’t think it is window dressing either BTW. My point in this post was, in one way, to point out that there is no “right” to health coverage. Many people feel that they are entitled to it or that it is a “right” which it is not and, IMHO, never should be.

In a technical sense, you’re right. The constitution only forbids denying the right to vote to people based on gender, age, poll-taxes, and race. Legislatures are still free to deny the right to vote to homosexuals, people born in the year 1973, those who like their eggs sunny side up, and people whose names start with an M, a J, or a P. At least they would be free to do it for the 2 days or so before a constitutional amendment which struck the legislation down was ratified. The general assumption in America is that all adult citizens can vote. It isn’t necessary to provide a universal voting amendment because no one in modern times is so foolish as to try to restrict voting.

Those amendments do not give a universal right to vote. You cannot deny the vote based on race or gender but it does not give a universal right to vote. Note that in Texas, persons declared mentally incompetent and felons currently in prison or on probation are denied the right to vote.

Those amendments do give a right to vote. In fact, those are the exact words they use, “…the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied…”

In regards to the 15th and 19th -true, they do forbid discrimination in voting on the basis of race or sex however these prohibitions don’t give us a universal right to vote.

Universal healthcare does not need to be authorized by the constitution to be a legitimate undertaking of government. The constitution doesn’t authorize building the interstate system either, but no serious person would argue that it shouldn’t have been built. Some services (like the interstate system or the military), are best provided by government. The debate over universal healthcare is not a debate over its constitutionality. It’s a debate over whether it’s an enterprise best done collectively (i.e. by the federal government).

The 15th and 19th amendments to the US constitution guarantee the right to vote.