Congress’s powers are supposed to be few and defined

The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution says what it means in 28 words: “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.”

This is the entire architecture of American federalism, in one sentence. For roughly six decades after the New Deal, courts treated the amendment as a constitutional pleasantry with no operative force. That has changed, partially, over the past thirty years — but not nearly enough. And the structural damage from the Commerce Clause era has not been repaired.

Madison put it plainly in The Federalist No. 45: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.”

The Founders built a government of enumerated powers because they understood what happens when authority is limited only by ambition. The Tenth Amendment made that commitment explicit: Federal authority stops where the Constitution’s actual delegations stop. The New Deal dismantled it, root and branch.

In Wickard v. Filburn (1942), the Supreme Court upheld federal regulation of wheat grown on a private farm for the farmer’s personal consumption. The reasoning was that this non-commercial act’s aggregate economic effect on interstate commerce brought it within Congress’s reach.

Once home-grown wheat for personal use was counted as interstate commerce, Congress’s enumerated powers became a historical curiosity rather than an operative constraint. The Commerce Clause effectively consumed the Tenth Amendment, and nobody in Washington complained.

The court started pushing back 30 years ago. U.S. v. Lopez (1995) imposed the........

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