At its core, the most important job of the federal government is to protect us against external enemies. That begins at our border. There have now been a total of 4.9 million known border incursions since Biden took office, nearly the population of Ireland. These comprise roughly 3.9 million apprehensions and close to a million gotaways (which is probably lowballing it). Our government has not only abrogated its most important responsibility to the states – protecting against invasion – but it has been complicit in the smuggling and criminal conspiracy that has brought over sex trafficking, drugs, and dangerous criminals.
Our founders didn’t fear this degree of federal government not only because it was not supposed to have all these federal police agencies, statutes, and executive authority over every aspect of our lives (including breathing without masks!), but because it was supposed to be busy working on external affairs. In one of the most important descriptions of the federalist arrangement, Madison laid out the design in Federalist #45 as follows:
