“No, You Can’t - Check the Constitution!”

As I read through the constitution this time, what struck me was that it is all about restraint – not of individuals, but of government. Thomas Jefferson said, “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” Here’s a small slice of the history which inspired that thought.
A book that I’ve been reading on the framing and ratification of the Constitution talks about the monarchists/nationalists, the federalists, and the republicans. It’s important to have those definitions crystal clear:
Nation: a politically organized body of people under a single government.
State: same as above.
Federation: a form of government in which powers and functions are divided between a central government and a number of political subdivisions that have a significant degree of political autonomy.
Confederation: a permanent union of sovereign states for common action in relation to other states.
Republic: a form of government where ultimate political power is vested in the people but in which popular control is exercised only intermittently and indirectly through the popular election of government officials or delegates to a legislative assembly instead of directly through the people.
Democracy: a system in which the people have no leaders but instead vote on everything themselves (demos = people, -cracy = rule).
So to be precise, we don’t live in a democracy or in a nation. We live in a representative republic of States - a federation. Words are important, and the word democracy is being used more and more, and it shouldn’t be. Democracies have historically had short lives, violent deaths, and have only worked at all in areas which are small in geography and population. We should look into this topic more later.
However, to complicate matters, there is a difference between what the above words mean, and the political parties that use these as names. After the Constitution was written and approved by the Convention, it had to be ratified by all the states (which were indeed small nations). The “Federalists,” who were nationalists in disguise (wanting the central government to overrule the state governments) advocated immediate ratification. The “Republicans,” who were called by their opponents “Anti-Federalists,” thought that the Constitution was flawed because of the lack of a bill of rights. Several of them, including George Mason, who wrote the first constitution adopted by the people’s representatives in the history of the world, the 1776 Virginia Constitution and Bill of Rights, refused to sign the U.S. Constitution because of that, and also feared that the power of the courts had not been sufficiently reigned in.
The argument which prevailed was that since the constitution only gave the central government power to do certain things, everything else was off limits. So we didn’t need to fear that our freedoms would be infringed upon; the federal government had no power to do so. Nevertheless, there was enough support for a bill of rights that one was written and approved quickly. Was this a good thing, since without it our rights of free speech, bearing arms, etc. would have disappeared long ago? Was it bad, since it subtly says that government can take control of things that are not expressly forbidden (think about our rights as parents, etc.)? I don’t know, but I’d love your opinion on that.
But back to the main point. The tenth Amendment, the last one of the original “Bill of Rights” states in clear English, “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 was challenged from the very beginning, with various people citing the “Necessary and Proper” clause at the end of Article 1 Section 8, and also quoting the Preamble’s “promote the general Welfare” statement, which isn’t even law, to excuse themselves for usurping powers they had no right to. Helaman 4:22 states that “they had altered and trampled under their feet the laws of Mosiah, or that which the Lord commanded him to give unto the people; and they saw that their laws had become corrupted, and that they had become a wicked people...”
In the video program that goes along with The 5000 Year Leap, Earl Taylor of the National Center for Constitutional Studies points out that Congress has twenty powers, the President has six, and the Judiciary has twelve. Everything else should be done at the state level (remember - little nations) or lower, or not interfered with at all by government. So, though I don't want to engage in Obama-bashing, (I'm not a fan of Bush or McCain either) I must reply to the Obamaphiles: “No, you can’t! Not legally anyway, unless we replace the Constitution, and I for one will fight you on that.”
So what do you all think of these ideas?