Founders Meant a Stronger Federal Government

A recent scholarly claim (in Richard Primus’s new book, as discussed in this review) argues that the Constitution’s enumerated list of powers was intended to justify expanding federal authority rather than to cabin it. The book coins 'enumerationism' as an ideological habit that has long misled Americans into treating enumeration as limitation. — If adopted, this reinterpretation would shift constitutional argument, affecting Supreme Court doctrines, federal regulatory scope, and political rhetoric about the proper size of national government.