cocacola1

Fair point.

It’s 2006. The President has embroiled us in an unpopular war in the Middle East and has lied about it.

It’s 2026. The President has embroiled us in an unpopular war in the Middle East and has lied about it.

This is the 3rd Republican president in a row to start in a war in the Middle East. It’s like we’re still paying for Desert Storm.

Great movie. Amusingly, Verhoeven hated the book.

A city is a state actor for Fourteenth Amendment purposes. The Supreme Court has applied the Fourteenth Amendment to municipal action since at least Yick Wo, and municipalities can be sued under §1983 for constitutional violations caused by official policy.

And "you can vote them out or sue in tort" doesn't answer the constitutional question. The availability of other remedies does not make an otherwise unconstitutional government action constitutional.

Also, the Fourteenth Amendment does considerably more than prohibit abridging privileges or immunities. It expressly prohibits states from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process and from denying equal protection.

If a city chooses to operate a water system, that’s still subject to the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Fourteenth Amendment constrains state and local government action. And the Preamble's "general Welfare" is relevant interpretive context. At the Founding, that meant the safety, prosperity, happiness, and well being of the political community.

So the question isn't whether the Constitution requires cities to provide water, but whether a city that allegedly poisons people through the water system it operates can violate constitutionally protected interests in life, liberty, or bodily integrity.

You're conflating purpose with power. "Promote the general Welfare" doesn't create unlimited power. The power comes from the Constitution. The point is that once you are interpreting those powers, the Constitution's stated purposes are relevant to what they mean and how broadly they should be understood.

Nor was "general Welfare" some contentless phrase at the Founding. Protection, safety, prosperity, happiness, and the well being of the political community were all part of the contemporary vocabulary surrounding the public good. As Madison wrote in Federalist 45, “the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people is the supreme object to be pursued”.

All government powers carry some risk of abuse. But, as Joseph Story put it, “Neither rulers, nor any other functionaries, much less any private persons, have a right to cripple it, because it is according to their own views inconvenient, or dangerous, unwise or impolitic, of narrow limits, or of wide influence.”

The Fourteenth Amendment explicitly constrains states, and those constitutional restrictions apply to state and local government action.

The Preamble isn't vague about what it's doing, though. It's quite clear. It tells us who is establishing the Constitution and expressly states the purposes for which they are establishing it.

Saying that those stated purposes should inform constitutional interpretation isn't a particularly novel idea. Pretending the ratified language at the beginning of the Constitution doesn't matter because taking it seriously might be inconvenient isn't a serious position either.

The possibility that judges can abuse constitutional interpretation is an argument for doing it carefully, not selectively. Or, as Joseph Story put it: "The circumstance, that so construed the power may be abused, is no answer. All powers may be abused."