RESOURCES & RESEARCH (Legal FAQ's)
KENTUCKY GOT IT RIGHT, EARLY ON
One of the best ways to see how our Constitution is supposed to work is to read Thomas Jefferson's Kentucky Resolution of 1798, which starts out with this paragraph (underlining added for emphasis):
1. Resolved, That the several States composing, the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes — delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force: that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral part, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party: that the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.
The rest of it is quite descriptive as well, see Constitution Org
What was the remedy? The states. They were to consider such power-grabs "void, and of no force."
And note that these resolutions, passed within years of the ratification of our Constitution, and drafted by some of the same authors as wrote our Constitution, show that the power-hungry forces in the Federal government had already started, aggressively and audaciously. They 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 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?