No, but a confederacy provides safeguards that are impossible in a consolidated mega-state such as ours. The Articles of Confederation, for example, provided for "expressly delegated powers" only, which shuts the door on liberal construction. In fact, there was no judicial branch, which also, imo, is a safeguard. There is no direct taxation, yet another safeguard over the current system. etc.
The requisition system should have been fixed, not replaced. You want a real check on national power? Let all the national taxes come not from individuals, but from member states. Let each state determine for itself how to collect that money from its citizens. THAT would be a check on national spending. As it is, the states have to get in line behind the nationals.
(yea, I made a little time to respond after all.)
It is a mega-state of our own doing. Over a period of 224 years. It wasn’t in the original document and only possible through “construction.” You want to shut out “construction”? Think you can shut out avarice and ambition? Good luck.
“Our peculiar security is in possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction.”
. . . . . Thomas Jefferson, letter to Wilson Cary Nicholas, 7 September, 1803
You want “expressly delegated” powers only? Be prepared to write a document that rivals, nay exceeds even, the size of the 0bamacare monstrosity.
“Let all the national taxes come not from individuals, but from member states.”
That’s the reason I mentioned 1913. One of the “points” on your graph. Not a part of Federalist 41 or 44, or Madison’s understanding of implied powers. And, in any context other than this discussion, you would be vigorously protesting the attack on sovereignty represented by a Federal assessment levied on the several states. The reason the national government was conceived to act on individual citizens was because action on the states was considered to be a usurpation of the states’ sovereignty.