Unless you were paying very close attention, you would have missed it. Here it is:

What kind of country would this be if this chamber had voted down Social Security or Medicare just because it violated some rigid idea about what government could or could not do?

That was, in particular, a reference to the Constitution’s Commerce Clause as it existed before 1937, the year in which Franklin Roosevelt threatened to pack the Supreme Court with five extra justices, thereby forcing it to abdicate its role as guardian of the Constitution’s constraints on federal power. Before 1937, the federal commerce power was limited to regulating commerce “with foreign Nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian Tribes.” (The Constitution, Art. I, Sec. 8.) Today, of course, it doesn’t matter what the Constitution says, because it’s just a “rigid idea” about what government can and cannot do, an antiquated document that should never stand in the way of what the national majority wants–even if what the national majority wants is to destroy self-government at every other level of society down to state and local government. Yesterday the Huffington Post put me in the growing ranks of “support for a radical rethinking of the relationship between the states and the federal government.” Because, you see, insisting that the Constitution really means what it says is a “radical rethinking” of political arrangement. Well, I’m sorry for radical thinking, but if the Framers had known the federal government would one day be regulating health care and education, the Constitution would absolutely never have been ratified. Patrick Henry turned out to be right and the Federalists wrong: the Constitution would eventually lead to a vast accumulation of central power, and it has.

Just because a policy–say Medicaid or Social Security–is desirable, doesn’t mean that the federal government must be the one to impose it. The federal structure of our Constitution: was meant to protect self-government and individual liberty against the tyranny of the majority. Or, to use 20th century terms, it was meant to guard against collectivism. In The Good Society (1937), Walter Lippmann argued that there are two kinds of political system, the collectivist, and the individualist. Among the collectivist systems he grouped Communism, Nazism, and what he termed “gradual collectivism” or “democratic collectivism”:

The gradual collectivist believes in the absolutism of the majority, having by a fiction identified the mandates of transient majorities with the enduring and diverse purposes of the members of a community. He thinks it absurd that a few oligarchs in the Kremlin or demagogic dictators in Berlin or Rome should pretend that their personal decisions are the comprehensive purposes of great nations. Yet the gradual collectivist, under the banner of popular sovereignty, believes in the dictatorship of random aggregations of voters. In this theory the individual has no rights as against the majority, for constitutional checks and bills of rights exist only by consent of the majority.

This was all a reference to Franklin Roosevelt, of whom Walter Lippmann had been an early supporter. But it is also an exact description of Obama and his “constitutional values.”

Mario Loyola is director of the Center for Tenth Amendment Studies at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.