Suggest you read John Qincy Adams on how the Constitution was ratified. There was much concern that state legislative ratification was not honoring the need for resepcting the locus of sovereignty in the People. So, in addition to state ratification by the legislature, it was also ratified by separate constitutional conventions elected by the People. This act of delegation taking part of the power from the State and giving it to the federal government through a Constitution created a Union indivisable by the state legislatures. http://www.lonang.com/exlibris/misc/1839-jub.htm
“The Convention assembled at Philadelphia had themselves no direct authority from the people. Their authority was all derived from the state legislatures. But they had the articles of confederation before them, and they saw and felt the wretched condition into which they had brought the whole people, and that the Union itself was in the agonies of death. They soon perceived that the indispensably needed powers were such as no state government; no combination of them was by the principles of the Declaration of Independence competent to bestow. They could emanate only from the people. A highly respectable portion of the assembly, still clinging to the confederacy of states, proposed as a substitute for the Constitution, a mere revival of the articles of confederation, with a grant of additional powers to the Congress. Their plan was respectfully and thoroughly discussed, but the want of a government and of the sanction of the people to the delegation of powers, happily prevailed. A Constitution for the people, and the distribution of legislative, executive, and judicial powers, was prepared. It announced itself as the work of the people themselves; and as this was unquestionably a power assumed by the Convention, not delegated to them by the people, they religiously confined it to a simple power to propose, and carefully provided that it should be no more than a proposal until sanctioned by the confederation Congress, by the state Legislatures, and by the people of the several states, in conventions specially assembled, by authority of their Legislatures, for the single purpose of examining and passing upon it”
As a matter of curiousity, what do you see as a viable course of action available to The People to restrain the beast and restore Constitutional principles? Should our States not be the first line of defense against a feral government run amuck?
A side note and just for the sake of argument, convince me why WE should stay within the lines when our would-be masters aren't burdened with the same convictions. Reining in tyrants may not be as tidy as you would have us believe.