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In considering whether this power still belongs to the states, we can dismiss in this case the inquiry into whether it is surrendered to Congress by mere authorization or maintained until Congress exercises the power. We can reject this investigation because it was conducted and the regulations that Congress thought were just are now in full swing. The only question is: Can a state regulate trade with and between nations while Congress regulates it? Certainly, all those who have written constitutions consider them the fundamental and primordial law of the nation, and therefore the theory of such a government must be that an act of the legislature that violates the constitution is null and void. The next issue to which the authority will be applied is trade between different states. The word under means mixed with. A thing that is, among other things, mixed with them. Interstate trade cannot stop at the external border of each state, but can be imported inland. It is not to say that these words cover trade which is entirely internal, which is conducted between a man and a man in one State or between different parts of the same State and which does not extend to other States or influence. Such power would be inconvenient and certainly unnecessary. As broad as the word is, it may well be limited to trade involving more than one state. The term would probably not have been chosen to refer to the entirely internal relations of a State, as it is not an appropriate term for that purpose; and the enumeration of the particular categories of commerce to which power was to be extended would not have been made if it had been designed to extend power to any kind. Enumeration presupposes something that is not enumerated; and that something, if we consider the language or subject of the sentence, must be the exclusively internal trade of a State. As a result, constitutional ratification conventions in nearly every state required one or more amendments that clarified the limited power of the federal government to protect state sovereignty, and some also emphasized certain individual freedoms.

Although many amendments were ultimately rejected, the ninth and tenth amendments addressed fundamental structural concerns. The Tenth Amendment stated that the powers of the federal government were limited to those conferred by the Constitution. Similarly, the Ninth Amendment stated that a list of civil liberties — which the federal government could not do — did not mean that the federal government could do everything else. The individual rights proposed by some of the conventions were converted into the rest of the Bill of Rights by James Madison. Moreover, the Declaration of Independence affirmed that “all men are created equal,” meaning that no one has the inherent authority of right to govern another. For a government to have legitimate authority, it must act with the consent of the people who govern it. While the Declaration`s argument seems open to various forms of government that defend the rights of the people, Americans are increasingly convinced that the principle of “all men are created equal” implies a republican form of government. The ideas of the Declaration of Liberty, Equality, Limited Government and Self-Government then served as important elements of the Constitution. Other documents that shared these ideas and influenced the Constitution included important colonial documents such as the Mayflower Compact and the Connecticut Fundamental Orders, the Virginia Bill of Rights, debates between the authors of the Federalist Papers and their “anti-federalist” critics, and the Iroquois Peace Act (the constitution establishing the Federation of Five Tribes). This tradition of political freedom is why the constitution carefully restricts government, for example.

By dividing power into three branches of government: to ensure that no part of the government can become too powerful.