Does the Constitution Limit or Enshrine Federal Power?

It is often said by Conservatives and Libertarians and Paul supporters that the Constitution was written to limit the federal government's power. This is only part of the story because the founder's of the country no more agreed on the scope or limit of federal power than today's liberals, conservatives or libertarians.

The original intent of the writing of the Constitution was to increase the power of the Federal government to do CERTAIN things. Madison said that the dilemma was to at once create a government that was strong yet also limited in its powers. In other words, strong and capable in depth but limited in scope.

The purpose of the Constitution then was BOTH to increase the power of federal government while DIVIDING its mechanisms of power while always guaranteeing that its source was the People in their political capacity as manifested in the conventions of the People in each state that ratified the document. This extends to the present day through Article 5 of the Constitution that stipulates that the ultimate way to amend the Constitution is through conventions of the People at the state level. (this is probably eventually going to have to happen on a grand scale. I have a distrust of such a process, but ultimately we must be able to trust each other and ourselves as Americans to forge new amendments and protect each others rights as Americans no matter Conservative or Liberal or any label. we must learn to trust one another again, but that can only be earned over time through honesty and truth which depends upon freedom of speech and justice)

By dividing the mechanisms of federal power I mean instead of just a Continental Congress, as was the mechanism of power under the Articles of Confederation, Congress would itself be split into two houses and would be joined by two equal partners in power, the executive and the judiciary. These two functions had been weak in the former and left to the states in the latter under the Articles from 1781 to 1787.

The genius of the Founders was not some mystical mythical unity in which they all magically and prophetically agreed on a Constitution, like Saints on some mountain. Their genius was in their recognition that the Nation as a whole needed the kinds of mechanisms and divisions of power that the States already had written into THEIR constitutions beginning in 1776. The real geniuses of the early American Republic were those obscure brilliant souls who toiled away from 1776 to 1780 writing the State constitutions and figuring out ways of dividing power that both guaranteed good and strong governance AND Liberty at the same time. If you read the debate on the Constitution of 1787 it is largely an argument about ways of governing that had Already been implemented in many of the State Constitutions, many of which, at least in the North, led to the abolition of Slavery by the way.

The danger today is not really whether the Federal government has too much or too little power. The danger is UNACCOUNTABLE power. That is unaccountable to the People in their political capacity as the sovereigns of the Nation. Congress today largely abrogates authority to the Executive Branch in the form of bowing to the agencies and beauracratic divisions of the executive branch and relying on the Supreme Court for declarations on the unconstitutionality of laws that they pass.The American People are the source of ALL political power in the country PRECISELY because it was we who, through the Constitutional Conventions at the state level ratified the hallowed document in 1788, 89 and 90.

Madison wrote, in 1787, that the great danger to the Constitution at the time was the power of the States to violate it and assume power back to themselves that the constitution did not permit. This was certainly true up until at least 1865. I think a very good case today can be made that a greater danger to the Constitution is the Federal government exercising powers that the constitution does not permit it to. This is not a theoretical danger to Liberty. It is a direct one. It is direct not necessarily because it poses a PRESENT danger to Liberty but because the PRECEDENT it sets of pushing the limits and pushing down the limits of the Constitution can only, over the long run, leave the People stripped of their sovereign capacity to make their own laws and to be tossed onto the not so tender mercies of the whim of any two bit future tyrant. We will no longer be governed by our laws but by the fancies of our fallible men and women.

We must never forget that we are called the United States, not the the United State. It is not only the responsibility of each state to stay within the Union. It is the responsibility of the federal government, as the Union's power, to adhere to the Constitution and the limits that it places on it. Any violation, in that sense, is as much a violation of the principle of the Union as is the violation by a state. It is NOT legal, as many Conservatives now nonsensically argue, for a state to secede from the Union. But it is also not legal for the Federal government to so intervene into the avenues of power that are reserved for the states as to in effect and in principle secede from the very Union it was created to uphold.

This is sublime and superb.