America today would terrify the Founding Fathers. Armed troops roam the streets of major cities, masked government agents arrest people without probable cause and disrupt the public speech that the president hates and fears, and the president kills foreigners on the high seas whom he says might commit crimes should their small speedboats miraculously make it 1,500 miles to the United States.

Here is the backstory. 

Shortly after the Constitution was ratified and while the Bill of Rights was being crafted, the Federalists in Congress proposed the creation of a federal bank. James Madison, who had been the scrivener at the Constitutional Convention just four years earlier and who was chair of the House of Representatives committee drafting the Bill of Rights, argued forcefully against it.

In Madison's famous Bank Speech, he articulated the views he offered when he wrote his portion of the Federalist Papers — namely, that the powers of the new federal government are few and limited and precisely written down, and a establishing a bank is not among them. 

Madison lost the debate, as Congress approved the First National Bank of the United States. His argument, though, generally carried the day for the following 120 years, except for the Civil War era. That argument — known today as the Madisonian model — offers that the federal government may only govern in the 16 unique discrete areas of governance articulated in Article I of the Constitution.

The subtext of the Madisonian model was that the feds need the permission of the states or the people to do nearly anything. Safety was left to the states, and there'd be no troops in the streets as the colonists from Boston to Charleston had endured with British soldiers. And the Fourth Amendment — guaranteeing the right to be left alone — would apply to all persons and keep the government away from the peoples' "persons, houses, papers, and effects" without search or arrest warrants.

By 120 years later, the Madisonian model had been discarded. The states lost their powers as checks on the federal government they had created, and the Wilsonian model — named after Woodrow Wilson — took effect. This model holds that the feds may govern in any area for which there is a national political will, except that which is expressly prohibited to them in the Constitution.

The subtext of the Wilsonian model is that the states and the people need the permission of the feds to do nearly everything. And those prohibitions — like "Congress shall make no law abridging … the freedom of speech" — well, they only apply to Congress, not to the president. Wilson actually made this legally erroneous and law-school-flunking argument when defending his arrests for speech he hated and feared.