Fade Resistance Performance
The overwhelming majority of early Americans were of European descent, a well educated bunch, from the farmer to the blacksmith to the surveyors and engineers. There were only a very few Statesmen or Politicians and even they were mostly craftsmen. Political motivation in the early years of this country was nearly always induced out of necessity, a very measured response forced by the tyranny of British Rule.
Ratification of the Constitution was an intellectually grueling and physically laborious challenge for everyone. The 13 states were scattered over a thousand miles and there was no mass communication or transportation and everyone had to be a part of the process. Even by today’s measure, there were an astounding number of town meetings, arguments, debates and discussions. Most often resolution prevailed at a rate far exceeding "pomp and circumstance".
To properly forge this new country, everyone knew the Freedom and Rights of the People would have to be locked down, while any possibility of future tyranny would have to be permanently locked out. For the most part, everyone agreed the Constitution would be the vehicle to accomplish that Purpose. Getting through the Ratification Process was likely more trouble than anyone initially perceived.
There was an unsettling concern by many people that this new federal Government could ultimately seize control of the States, extort the Freedom of the People and rob the Rights of the Citizens. The word usurpation occurs numberless times in the ratification debates, reflecting the chief anxiety the champions of the Constitution had to allay. And as a final assurance, the Tenth Amendment stipulated that the powers not "delegated" to the federal government were "reserved" to the separate States and to the People.
This simply wasn't enough to satisfy everyone. Well-grounded fears persisted. And during the first half of the nineteenth century, nearly every president, in his inaugural message, felt it appropriate to renew the promise that the powers of the federal Government would not be exceeded, nor the reserved powers of the States transgressed. The federal Government was to remain truly federal, with only a few specified powers, rather than "consolidated", with unlimited powers.
The Worst Fears Materialize...
The Civil War, or the War Between the States if you like, resulted from the suspicion that the North meant to use the power of the Union to destroy the sovereignty of the Southern states. Whether or not that suspicion was justified, the war itself produced that very result. The South was subjugated and occupied like a conquered country. Its institutions were profoundly remade by the federal Government and the United States of America was taking on the character of an extensive, and highly centralized, empire. Similar processes were under way in Europe, as small states were consolidated into large ones, setting the stage for the tyrannies and gigantic wars of the twentieth century.
Even so, there were three constitutional amendments ratified after the war containing a significant clause: "Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." Why is this significant? Because it shows that even the conquerors still understood that a new power of Congress required a constitutional amendment. It couldn't just be taken by majority vote, as it would be today.
This is significant for a possibly far more sinister cause. The Civil War was unconstitutional and, on a bad day, it should have amounted to a law enforcement activity at the very most. It broke the back of the South and the pocketbooks of the North. It destroyed families, friendships and the national economy. The only true victor in it, was the federal Government which gave the People a "door prize" in the form of three amendments. It was little more than an insult to the People of the Divided States of America and an absolute profane gesture to the Founding Fathers.
If the Congress had wanted a national health care plan then, it would have begun by asking the people for an amendment to the Constitution authorizing it to legislate in the area of health care. And if the People refused, the Government could then just "appropriate the legislation" required and push it through anyway. The slippery slope of bogus precepts is covertly underway at this point in our history.
The immediate concept of the Fourteenth Amendment was to provide a constitutional foundation for a proposed civil rights act, but nearly by design, the Supreme Court soon found other uses for it. By appropriation, the high Court began striking down state laws as unconstitutional. This was an important new twist in American constitutional law. Hamilton, in arguing for judicial review in Federalist No. 78, had envisioned the Court as a check on Congress, resisting the illicit centralization and consolidation of power.
Even today, our civics books still describe the function of checks and balances in terms of the three branches of the federal government mutually controlling each other. But in fact, the Court was now heavily countermanding the state legislatures, where the principle of checks and balances had no meaning, and by this time, those state legislatures had no reciprocal control on the Court. This development eventually set the stage for the convulsive Supreme Court rulings of the late twentieth century, from Brown v. Board of Education to Roe v. Wade.
What should be recognized here, is that the high Court had become the very opposite of the institution Hamilton and others had in mind. Instead of blocking the centralization of power in the federal government, the Court was now assisting in it. The original precept of the federal system was that the federal government would have very little to say about the internal affairs of the States. But the result of the Civil War was that the federal Government had a great deal to say about those affairs - in Northern States as well as Southern States.
Power Stripping...