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How to destroy (and restore) the Constitution

Distorting Federalism.

If I wrote a law stating that no one may drive 100 miles per hour through a school zone, the meaning would be evident to virtually everyone: don’t drive dangerously fast where young students are present. If someone barreled through that zone at reckless speed, they couldn’t reasonably argue, “I didn’t interpret ‘100 mph’ literally.” Similarly, if burglary is illegal, it’s understood that thieves cannot break in and steal. No honest judge would let the thief off the hook over his “loose” reading of the law. The law is the law. Case closed.

However, when it comes to the Constitution, politicians have for generations entertained the notion they can get away with this very thing.

“The Constitution was not made to fit us like a straitjacket,” Woodrow Wilson claimed in 1904. “In its elasticity lies its chief greatness.” That’s silver-tongued progressive jargon for: “The great thing about the Constitution is, unlike other laws, I don’t have to follow it very closely.”

Wilson spent much of his public career critiquing the Constitution. Rather than viewing it as the nation’s trusty lodestar, he spurned it as an anchor tethering us to a less evolved past.

Of course, one may disagree with his conclusions, but he was nevertheless at liberty to examine America’s founding principles and question whether they held up. Unfortunately, he didn’t stop there. His lucid rhetoric merely served as a mask for his true intents: a subtle bid for increased federal power and disregard for the law.

“Our ways of life are profoundly changed since [the dawn of the nation],” he boldly asserted in a 1902 article for The Atlantic. For those who understand the Founders’ vision for federalism and subsidiarity, the following line is truly shocking: “The balance of the states against the Federal government,” he wrote, “no longer seems central to our conceptions of governmental structure, no longer seems of the essence of the people’s liberty” [emphasis added].

We should not underestimate the seismic impact of this deliberate attack on the Founding, this casual dismissal of a vital check and balance. The men who created the Constitution, many of whom were wary of an overly powerful federal government, intended for state governments to bridle the national authority. Even Alexander Hamilton, the ambitious architect of “big government,” lauded the states’ ability to curb federal abuses. “Power being almost always the rival of power, the general government will at all times stand ready to check the usurpations of the state governments, and these will have the same disposition towards the general government,” he wrote in Federalist No. 28. “It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system, that the State governments will, in all possible contingencies, afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority.” But here, with an unassuming wave from his hypnotic pen, Wilson slyly passed over that constitutional constraint, simply because it looked to be outdated. Far from viewing it “as an axiom in our political system,” the then-future president scoffed at “balance of the states against the Federal government.”

“We are no longer strenuous about the niceties of constitutional law,” he stated frankly. The country had moved past its old suspicion about placing power in the hands of a distant elite, Wilson, himself an elite, believed. Now, he wanted the federal government — the least representative level of American politics — to be entrusted with greater authority to administer “self-governance” — a puzzling contradiction of terms.

The worst part, of course, is that Wilson never bothered to incorporate his desired changes via democratic processes. He simply “read them into” the Constitution. One may critique a preexisting law (i.e., the law against speeding in school zones is too strict). But to disregard it on the grounds of “elasticity” or a “loose interpretation” is a recipe for anarchy at the state and local levels and tyranny on the federal.

“We are no longer strenuous about the niceties of constitutional law,” may sound evolved and progressive, but how far does that principle go? Should we no longer be strenuous about freedom of speech? Religion, press? If federal troops (or ICE agents!!) began quartering in our homes, it seems this nonsensical hoopla about the Constitution not fitting like a straitjacket would swiftly subside.

Nevertheless, federal officials continue to evidence their apparent disregard for the Constitution as binding. By wrecking the balance between the states and the federal government, Woodrow Wilson emasculated the former to resist the unchecked growth of the latter. Fortunately, with an Article V convention, the states can climb their way back to the top of the food chain and remind Washington, as Ronald Reagan once said, “that the federal government did not create the states; the states created the federal government.”

It’s time to reassert our dominance over the distant elites who seek to control our lives; sign the petition for an Article V convention to help make it happen.

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Created:	2025-07-21 23:47 GMT
Updated:	2025-07-28 07:00 GMT
Published:	2025-07-21 23:00 GMT
Converted:	2025-11-11 12:06 GMT
Change Author:	Jakob Fay
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