What Biden and his handlers intend to do with federal power.
Inside every Progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.
According to the Progressives, more government is the answer, always.
For them, the constitutional limits on the power of government the founders had so carefully crafted are actually defects which must be eliminated.
Their aim is total government; their strategy is to achieve total government step-by-step, progressively.
The Biden administration intends to accomplish nothing less than completing the project of centralizing power in the federal government.
The point of the all-important 10th Amendment is that the Founders created a federal government of strictly limited powers. Here it is in full:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The 10th says the powers of the federal government (here referred to as "the United States") are limited to the enumerated powers, the limited powers assigned it in the Constitution; the individual states (here referred to as "the States") retain all their powers not delegated to the federal government.
In the Constitution and in the original American republic, senators were selected by the state legislatures. The wisdom of the Framers is nowhere more evident than in this feature of their constitutional design. This was the central pillar of that design. It secured the 10th Amendment by the power of the Senate.
When in 1913 America approved the 17th Amendment, the amendment that provided for the direct election of senators, the 10th Amendment was doomed.
Before the 17th Amendment, the state legislatures controlled the upper chamber of Congress. There was no way the federal government was going to usurp the power of the states. The 17th Amendment dis-empowered the states, and the 10th Amendment promptly began eroding away.
The Framers' purpose was a regime of liberty that would endure.
Their challenge was to find a way to prevent the federal government from becoming what it has become, to prevent the federal government from doing what it has done during the last century: take on more and more power and increasingly rule for the benefit of those who rule. The Framers’ brilliant solution was federalism.
The federal government was originally designed to be limited government.
Madison wrote in The Federalist, "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined."
The federal government was to take responsibility for America's relations with foreign states — in Madison's words, "war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce."
The federal government was also to take responsibility for commerce among the American states to provide a nationwide free market that would make possible America's world-changing economic success.
All other governmental powers were to be retained by the individual states that were joining to form the new nation, the United States of America. The idea is right there in the name.
According to the bargain the Founders proposed, the states gave up their power to make war and to negotiate treaties with other countries.
The Founders' argument was that America would be safer and better represented in the world by a federal government than by many individual states operating independently and perhaps at cross purposes. Besides, the state governments would not be giving up control of those powers. They would retain control of them by means of the Senate. According to the founding bargain, senators would be chosen by the state legislatures — and the Senate would control the powers delegated to the federal government by the Constitution. That is why the Constitution assigns to the Senate power over treaties, over the declaration of war, even over the people the president selects for the Cabinet offices.
In 1913, the American people, not realizing what they were doing, threw away the crowning jewel of the American Constitution.
The 10th Amendment is no longer rooted in the power of the Senate, and you and I have lost an essential safeguard of American liberty the Founders intended for us to have.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/what-happened-10th-amendment-frontpage-magazine/
