Subornation of the Constitution for Dummies.

[I]t would have been difficult [after 1789] to imagine how America’s own elected and appointed officials—without triggering public censure and usually without amending the Constitution—might take systematic actions to erode the explicit constitutional limits on their power that you [Madison] designed.

Yet that is exactly what occurred. The techniques that emerged involved a bevy of government actions sharing one defining characteristic: they increased other people’s costs of resisting government expansion. In each case, government officials made it more difficult or costly for people to perceive, or take action to resist, federal power-expanding measures. . . .

These federal actions have included misrepresenting the nature and consequences of government action, proceeding incrementally, concealing the cost of government actions, tying controversial measures to more popular legislative bills, hiding unpopular provisions in omnibus bills, concentrating the benefits and dispersing the costs of government action, changing the Constitution through the back door of the Supreme Court rather than by constitutional amendment, and myriad analogous strategies. . . .

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During the twentieth century, . . . the U.S. Supreme Court often served to bypass the amendment process. Increasingly, Supreme Court decisions changed the Constitution’s long-established meaning without benefit of constitutional amendment . . . .

* * * *

. . . Your generation allowed the central government but little power, influenced as you were by ideologies of liberty and by awareness of the personal costs of expanded central power. My generation, by contrast, ceded enormous power to the central government, having lost ideologies of liberty through public education and by long-standing exposure to an extensive government presence in their lives.

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Mr. Madison, a constitutional counter-revolution has occurred, without a shot being fired, and with barely a whimper from an increasingly ill-educated populace.

"Constitutional Counterrevolution." Charlotte Twight, The Independent Institute, 10/1/00 (footnote omitted, emphasis added).

Prog. Twight's article needs to be read in conjunction with "Federal Government Growth Before the New Deal." By Randall G. Holcombe, The Independent Institute, 9/1/97.

Prof. Holcombe describes the transformation of the federal government from something designed to protect rights into something that was responsible for the nation's economic well being -- which transformation Americans lapped up big time. Num, num, num.

His conclusion:

The New Deal is often seen as the pivotal event in the growth of America’s twentieth-century Leviathan. But the federal government has grown since its inception. The most important event in the history of federal government growth was undoubtedly the Civil War. Then, supported by the popular demand for more government involvement in the economy, the ideological foundation of the massive growth in federal spending was laid during the Progressive Era at the beginning of the twentieth century. The federal income tax made that growth in spending possible.

That the federal government grew during FDR’s presidency is undeniable. But Wilson and Lincoln had already set precedents for increases in government power in wartime. Thus, the main factors underlying the growth in government were firmly in place well before the New Deal.

Id. Emphasis added.