The federal government has no constitutional authority to do the vast majority of the things it does today.
Of course, this truth runs counter to conventional wisdom and everything you learned in your high school government class. Suggest the feds shouldn’t formulate policies on marriage, healthcare, education or infrastructure, and you’ll get blank stares at best. Most will adamantly disagree. And many will simply write you off as some kind of “anti-government” kook.
But most ratifiers of the constitution would find the breadth and scope of federal power today shocking and absurd.
Of course, many who were in the anti-federalist camp would say, “Yeah, I told you so.” Opponents of the Constitution predicted the federal government would eventually swallow up the states – or as anti-federalists put it, that the Constitution would result in “the consolidation of the United States into one government.”
In essence, that’s what we have today – a singular national government centered in Washington D.C. with states functioning as mere political subdivisions doing the bidding of their federal overlords.
This may be the result, but supporters of the Constitution swore this wasn’t the intent.
Tench Coxe was a prominent advocate for ratification and a delegate for Pennsylvania to the Continental Congress in 1788-1789. He later served as Secretary of the Treasury. He wrote three essays published in the Pennsylvania Gazette in early 1788 under the pen-name “A Freeman.” In these essays, Coxe offered some of the most forceful arguments asserting the limited nature of the federal government under the proposed Constitution.
The purpose of these essays was to counter this idea that the Constitution would swallow up state sovereignty. As he put it, he would set out to “exhibit clear and permanent marks and lines of separate sovereignty, which must ever distinguish and circumscribe each of the several states, and prevent their annihilation by the fœderal government, or any of its operations.”
Coxe insisted that while the Constitution would strengthen the existing confederation – or union – it would not diminish the fundamental sovereignty of the states that had existed from the moment they declared their independence from Great Britain.
“The matter will be better understood by proceeding to those points which shew, that, as under the old so under the new fœderal constitution, the thirteen United States were not intended to be, and really are not consolidated, in such manner as to absorb or destroy the sovereignties of the several states.”
Coxe first addressed the expression —“We the People” in the preamble. Calling the phrase a “mere form of words,” he explained that while “the people” were in fact sovereign in the system, they acted not as one uniform mass, but through their existing political societies – the states.
