The Whole Point of the Constitution Was to Weaken the States
As millions of Americans see it, the Constitution was written to protect and extend the powers and prerogatives of the states. It established a “limited” national government and preserved, for state governments, any number of rights and responsibilities.
The whole point of the Constitution, in this view, is to restrain the federal government as much as possible. If there is one reason, beyond partisanship, that anyone is attracted to a plainly deficient idea like the independent state legislature doctrine (which I wrote about last week), it is that it’s in line with the widespread belief that state governments have pride of place within the American constitutional order.
But this is a misunderstanding. Even in the age when state governments were more independent and autonomous than they are today — the nearly 80 years between ratification and Appomattox — it was still understood that states were subordinate to the federal government. In turn, the federal government had considerable power to act on and influence the states. Why else would the statesmen of antebellum South Carolina develop a theory of nullification, if not to challenge the prevailing view that states were bound to submit to the will of the national government?
Go back a little further, to the first years of the American republic, and you will see that one of the key goals of the Constitution was to curb the power of the states and leash them to the broader authority of a new national government led by a powerful legislature and an unusually strong elected executive.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/15/opinion/madison-constitution-states-rights.html
I seem to recall from my high school government classes that the Constitution was written to cure the "defects" of the Articles of Confederation, which gave the states authorities that conflicted with federal powers intended to establish a common framework of legal, judicial, and administrative controls applicable to all states of the union. Republican state politicians in particular seem to want to Balkanize the USA these days by their relentless attacks against the federal government.
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