The theory and jurisprudence of American federalism remains a muddle. The Supreme Court has never managed to settle three intertwined jurisprudential questions of federalism: (1) Can an effectual national government with implied powers be meaningfully limited to a set of enumerated powers? (2) Can the Tenth Amendment\u2019s concept of reserved state powers be presumptive, or meaningfully specified under a system of implied national powers? (3) Can the state governments meaningfully be called \u201csovereign\u201d in either of the two distinct senses usually meant? The ideology of \u201cenumerationism\u201d\u2014that the Constitution creates a national government of limited enumerated powers\u2014answers these questions \u201cyes.\u201d<\/p>\n
But McCulloch v. Maryland answered these questions \u201cno\u201d and is therefore at odds with enumerationism. A limiting enumeration is incompatible with McCulloch\u2019s conception of a grant of implied powers necessary for an effective national government that can address national problems without reliance on the states. McCulloch clearly rejected the various versions of implied powers that were aimed at preserving a limiting enumeration. Moreover, as McCulloch makes clear, a system of implied national powers cannot be reconciled with \u201creserved\u201d state powers having any definable content. Implied powers can grow and change with new circumstances and new legislative ideas, and therefore cannot be specified in advance, making it impossible to specify a \u201creserve\u201d of state powers that excludes federal regulation. Finally, McCulloch recognized that federal supremacy necessarily makes the states \u201csubordinate governments\u201d that lack the power to block prima facie federal powers, whether express or implied. McCulloch thereby rejected the idea that state sovereignty is either a power to resist federal implied powers or a mirror image of a limiting enumeration of federal power.<\/p>\n