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It's funny because it's absurd. The national government under the Constitution is virtually unchecked. The way the system is set up, they assume whatever power they want, THEN it is tested for constitutionality. And who is the final decider on constitutionality? The federal judiciary! The inmates run the asylum.

And it's not as if it is a new phenomenon. Have you ever read George Washington's state of the union addresses? Every year he promoted the idea that Congress should build a national university. Where is that in the Constitution?

Go back and re-read the history of the First National Bank of the US. Madison and Jefferson opposed it, Hamilton and Washington supported it. This was the first use of the "implied powers" doctrine, which opens up the whole can of worms. The old Articles of Confederation, by contrast, consisted of "expressed powers" only. The change was not by accident.

So you had two founders saying a national bank was constitutional, two saying it wasn't. What does that prove? It proves that the limits on the national government provided by the Constitution were unclear, even to its authors and signers. It became a political question.

Then you have the all-powerful federal judiciary. CJ Marshall was a signer of the Constitution, and pretty much set the tone early for how the Court would serve the interests of national power. We now have over 200 years of SCOTUS precedent, which, under the Constitution, carries the full force of law. A long-standing and accepted SCOTUS decision is just as powerful as an amendment to the Constitution---more so, even, because an amendment doesn't get to decide for itself what it means, but the court gets to decide the meaning of all constitutional text---without appeal!

Interestingly, Madison later supported the creation of the Second Bank of the US. You could say he was against a national bank before he was for it. But hey, war debts will make a politician soften his constitutional zeal.

So Madison, the so-called father of the constitution, couldn't even agree with himself on a constitutional question. What does that tell you? It tells you the meaning is up for grabs.

So when one says the feds should "follow the Constitution", what exactly do they mean? Whose interpretation? Which SCOTUS decisions are you going to toss out, and by what authority? What remedy is provided IN the constitution for bad judicial decisions? It seems to me the only means of correction is by amendment. But what does that mean? It means that under the Constitution, whatever the court decides is by definition constitutional until amended or reversed.

In short, it has from day one been a political question. The Constitution is hopelessly vague and open-ended, and is ultimately unchecked, except by amendment. It's no wonder they made amendments so hard to get.

In the Declaration they said " it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish" their government. But in the Constitution, they said it is the right of the people to alter their government if they can get 2/3rds of both houses to agree, plus 3/4ths of the state legislatures. Power was centralizing as soon as the British surrendered.

So yeah, to me the "if only they'd follow it" canard is funny, because it's meaningless and absurd. Look at the history.