If you choose a interpretation of the Elastic Clause, the Supremacy Clause, and the Commerce Clause that is radically different from that of the Supreme Court, you will indeed end up in a situation where much of what the federal government does --- some of it uncongenial to you, like domain seizures, but much of it not, like air traffic control and NOAA --- is "Unconstitutional".
It's therefore a viable rhetorical strategy to attack the pillars of federal Constitutional prerogative head-on; don't like something the FBI is doing? Relitigate the Necessary and Proper clause! All you have to do is win an argument that the Supreme Court got it wrong 150 years ago and you've achieved a legal framework to support almost any argument.
Of course, this only works because in the frictionless vacuum of a message board argument, you can ignore the consequences of a radical new interpretation of the Constitution. And when I say that, I don't just mean "Cargill can sell rotten meat at the supermarket and label it 'Health Meat'", but rather that it does not follow from your argument that we'd have less regulation from the federal government if the Enumerated Powers and Elastic Clause were narrowly construed.
The people obviously want safe food, planes that don't collide no matter how cheap the tickets are, and laws that prevent giant corporations from refusing to offer jobs to people because of their ancestry. So some other mechanism --- a series of Constitutional amendments, most likely --- would have stepped in to fill the vacuum had McCulluch v Maryland gone the other way.
Put simply: if you were right, and the only legitimate powers of Congress were those in the Enumerated Powers, we'd have enumerated more powers since 1810 (starting, I guess, with the power to organize banks, that being where SCOTUS started us down the Necessary And Proper stuff with McCulloch v Maryland).
And you would probably not be better off if we had followed a Constitutional strategy of "run into a problem, call a Constitutional convention and add another enumerated power". The people would likely have enumerated some awfully silly powers.
Except you'd need a 2/3 vote in that scenario to enumerate a new silly power and not the 50% vote required today, so I would think that the government would have fewer silly powers than it does today.
It's therefore a viable rhetorical strategy to attack the pillars of federal Constitutional prerogative head-on; don't like something the FBI is doing? Relitigate the Necessary and Proper clause! All you have to do is win an argument that the Supreme Court got it wrong 150 years ago and you've achieved a legal framework to support almost any argument.
Of course, this only works because in the frictionless vacuum of a message board argument, you can ignore the consequences of a radical new interpretation of the Constitution. And when I say that, I don't just mean "Cargill can sell rotten meat at the supermarket and label it 'Health Meat'", but rather that it does not follow from your argument that we'd have less regulation from the federal government if the Enumerated Powers and Elastic Clause were narrowly construed.
The people obviously want safe food, planes that don't collide no matter how cheap the tickets are, and laws that prevent giant corporations from refusing to offer jobs to people because of their ancestry. So some other mechanism --- a series of Constitutional amendments, most likely --- would have stepped in to fill the vacuum had McCulluch v Maryland gone the other way.
Put simply: if you were right, and the only legitimate powers of Congress were those in the Enumerated Powers, we'd have enumerated more powers since 1810 (starting, I guess, with the power to organize banks, that being where SCOTUS started us down the Necessary And Proper stuff with McCulloch v Maryland).
And you would probably not be better off if we had followed a Constitutional strategy of "run into a problem, call a Constitutional convention and add another enumerated power". The people would likely have enumerated some awfully silly powers.