Careful, there: you&#x27;re falling victim to historical revisionism in assuming there was a clear unified &quot;original intent&quot; that we can discern, or that the fight was between &quot;the federal government&quot; and &quot;the states&quot;. The writing of the Constitution, and the fight over its ratification and the initial amendments (which had opponents who worried just as equally about enumeration of rights being used to deny others later -- the Ninth Amendment tried to solve this but people today still argue &quot;well, it&#x27;s not in the Constitution so it&#x27;s not a right&quot;) was complex and full of individuals with all sorts of motivations that can&#x27;t easily be boiled down to such simple terms.<p>And that&#x27;s without getting into the fights over the Elastic Clause, or the Commerce Clause, or the other bits that underlie many of the things the federal government does today.