Our modern regulatory and redistributive state--the state the Framers sought explicitly to prohibit--has arisen largely since 1937, and primarily through just two clauses in the Constitution, the Commerce Clause and the General Welfare Clause respectively. It is striking that this is so, for if the Framers had meant for Congress to be able to do virtually anything it wanted through those two simple clauses, why would they have bothered to enumerate Congress' other powers, much less defend the doctrine of enumerated powers throughout the Federalist Papers?The corruption of the meaning of the Constitution and the supremacy of a national government which has usurped powers not granted to it by consent of the governed has resulted in less liberty for all Americans. Those who feel they can improve upon the Constitution as intended by the Founders are invariably mistaken.The explanation, of course, is that the Framers intended no such thing. The modern state arose through judicial legerdemain, following Franklin Roosevelt's notorious 1937 Court-packing scheme.
With the Court's evisceration of the doctrine of enumerated powers, the modern regulatory and redistributive state poured through the opening. One result of the subsequent explosion of federal power, of course, was the contraction of state power where the two conflicted--and the attendant federalism dilemmas.
At the same time, individual liberty contracted as well--the preservation of which was supposed to be the very purpose of government.
Some become so enamoured of having the federal government enlist in their pet cause they will corrupt the meaning of "consent of the governed" so as to deny that there has been an usurpation.
Exactly right.
The problem has been in seeing the Constitution as a 'living'document rather then a 'legal'document.
Thus, the liberals have been able to 'stretch'the meanings of the General Welfare Clause and Commerce Clause to push an activist agenda against individual liberty, not against states rights.