RESOURCES & RESEARCH (Legal FAQ's)
VIRGINIA'S RESOLUTION
Thomas Jefferson again accurately and elegantly described the People's frustration with their government's power-grabs, and the solution to it, in the Virginia Resolution of 1798, explaining that the States had the duty to stop Federal Government overreaching, which had already begun (underlining added for emphasis):
"That this Assembly doth explicitly and peremptorily declare, that it views the powers of the federal government, as resulting from the compact, to which the states are parties; as limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting the compact; as no further valid that they are authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact; and that in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the states who are parties thereto, have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them." The rest of it is here Constitution Org
These resolutions, such as the one passed by Kentucky, were within years of the ratification of our Constitution, showing the quick aggressiveness of Central Planners, who had already passed a national whiskey tax, a national bank (eventually The Fed), tried to pass a national real estate tax, and passed the Alien & Sedition Act which audaciously made it criminal to oppose these efforts. Basically they were creating one national government to consolidate their power, ignoring the Constitution's plain wording, and rather than amending the Constution accordingly, just made it criminal for you to oppose it. How did they justify such power-grabs?
"by forced constructions of the constitutional charter which defines them; and that implications have appeared of a design to expound certain general phrases (which having been copied from the very limited grant of power, in the former articles of confederation were the less liable to be misconstrued) so as to destroy the meaning and effect, of the particular enumeration which necessarily explains and limits the general phrases; and so as to consolidate the states by degrees, into one sovereignty, the obvious tendency and inevitable consequence of which would be, to transform the present republican system of the United States, into an absolute, or at best a mixed monarchy."
Again, Thomas Jefferson, this time in the Virginia Resolution of 1798.
Does that sound to you like taking the "commerce clause" and reading it to say the Federal Government can do anything, so long as it has to do with commerce? Where are the States today?