Madison also noted:
"The regulation of commerce, it is true, is a new power; but that seems to be an addition which few oppose, and from which no apprehensions are entertained."
Yet, to claim Madison as an opponent of an activist federal government, the Right must ignore both his advocacy for beefing up what had been weak authorities and adding the crucial new one over commerce. The Right also must ignore Federalist Paper No. 14 in which Madison envisioned major construction projects under the powers granted by the Commerce Clause.
"[T]he union will be daily facilitated by new improvements," Madison wrote...
"Roads will everywhere be shortened, and kept in better order; accommodations for travelers will be multiplied and meliorated; an interior navigation on our eastern side will be opened throughout, or nearly throughout the whole extent of the Thirteen States."The communication between the western and Atlantic districts, and between different parts of each, will be rendered more and more easy by those numerous canals with which the beneficence of nature has intersected our country, and which art finds it so little difficult to connect and complete."
The building of canals, as an argument in support of the Commerce Clause and the Constitution, further reflects the pragmatic -- and commercial -- attitudes of key founders. In 1785, two years before the Constitutional Convention, George Washington founded the Potowmack Company, which began the work of digging canals to extend navigable waterways westward where he and other Founders had invested in Ohio and other undeveloped lands.
Thus, the idea of involving the central government in major economic projects -- a government-business partnership to create jobs and profits -- was there from the beginning. Madison, Washington and other early American leaders saw the Constitution as creating a dynamic system so the young country could grow and overcome the daunting challenges of its vast territory.
The Founders did debate the proper limits of federal and state powers, but again Madison and Washington came down on the side of making federal statutes and treaties the supreme law of the land. (Madison had even favored giving Congress veto power over each state law, but settled for granting the federal courts the authority to overturn state laws that violated federal statutes.)
After Ratification
The narrow ratification of the Constitution in 1788 did not end the confrontations over states' rights, especially when the South began to fear that its agriculture-based economy and its lucrative industry of slavery might be threatened as the industrialized North expanded and the anti-slavery movement grew.
In the early 1830s, President Andrew Jackson faced down South Carolina over its claimed right to "nullify" federal law. And three decades later, President Abraham Lincoln fought the Civil War to settle the issue of states having the right to secede from the Union.
Still, as late as the 1950s and 1960s, Southern white supremacists were still citing the principle of states' right in defending segregation. Though the segregationists lost those fights in federal courts and in the battle for public opinion, they never surrendered. They simply regrouped.
In the mid-1970s, as the Vietnam War ended, the American Left began shutting down or selling off much its media, which had proved effective in reaching out to the public to build opposition to the war. At the same time, the Right began investing heavily in its own media infrastructure.
Wealthy right-wing foundations and industrialists, like the Koch Brothers, also poured money into think tanks, which hired clever individuals who began reframing the national narrative. Part of that effort was to support "scholarship" that transformed Madison and other key framers from advocates of a strong central government into proponents for states' rights.
A few of Madison's quotes -- from 1788 as he tried to downplay how radical his new constitutional system actually was -- were plucked out of context, while other parts of his biography as an advocate for a strong central government were simply erased.
By Ronald Reagan's inauguration in 1981, Americans were being told that "government is the problem" and that the nation had deviated from the Founders' original vision of an Ayn Rand-style "free-market" society in which everyone was on their own and the government only worried about fighting wars.
Increasingly, the Right pitched itself as the defender of the nation's founding ideals. Any time the central government sought to address vexing national problems -- from the need to regulate Wall Street to extending health coverage to the tens of millions of uninsured Americans -- these proposals were labeled "unconstitutional."
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