Since you asked for more founder's quotes, give your friend this quote from James Madison:
The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce …The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberty, and property of the people; and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the State. - James Madison, Federalist 45
It should be obvious that the above explanation of the scope of federal power is radically different than the modern "reading" of the Constitution, via the necessary and proper and commerce clauses (or any other clause), to create a general police power in the national government to make any law it damn well pleases regarding the health, safety and welfare of the people. Since the Federalist Papers were what the Federalists used to sell the Constitution to the American people of that time, we should hold them to their own explanation of what they were selling.
Also, what matters most of all is what the people of that time understood they were agreeing to. And on that, the history of the debates on ratification, the debates over a Bill of Rights, and the actual text of the Bill of Rights, are very instructive.
Despite the assurances of Madison, above, that the powers of the new government would be very limited, the Constitution would never have been ratified without the promise of a Bill of Rights, which the ratifying conventions of several States insisted on because they
still feared misconstruction and usurpation of powers never granted.
The Federalists (Madison included) argued that no Bill of Rights was needed since the federal government lacked the power to ever infringe on any of the people’s rights and they also argued that listing certain rights and protections could dangerously lead to the inference that the government otherwise had powers not granted, and also would lead to the inference that the people’s rights were somehow limited to those listed.
Fortunately, the people did not buy those arguments (imagine where we’d be now, without a Bill of Rights!) but they did address those “concerns” in their proposed amendments, to be doubly-damn sure the Constitution would not be misinterpreted as the Federalists warned. Thus the Bill of Rights itself tells us how we must interpret the Constitution.
First, the Preamble to the Bill of Rights clearly states that its purpose was to prevent misconstruction:
THE Conventions of a number of the States having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added ….
(emphasis added).
Some of those “declaratory and restrictive clauses” are written protections for certain preexisting rights of the people (such as the right to bear arms) and guarantees of ancient procedural protections, such as jury trial. But two others give commands on interpretation “to prevent misconstruction”:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. – Ninth Amendment.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. – Tenth Amendment.
(emphasis added)
These are no mere suggestions. The Ninth Amendment uses the command language “shall not” and is as much a command as “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” It also speaks of the enumeration (the listing) in the Constitution of certain rights, not the “creation by the Constitution of certain rights.” This is no accident. The Bill of Rights does not create rights, but merely provides protection for rights that already exist.
And no, the Tenth Amendment is not merely a “truism.” It is a vital command on interpretation, just like the Ninth. The People meant it to have teeth.
There you go. The Constitution’s built-in manual for constitutional interpretation:
1. You shall not interpret the Constitution as creating rights, and you shall not interpret it as meaning that the people have only those rights listed. We the people have natural rights, and those rights go far beyond those explicitly protected by the Bill of Rights.
2. The national government does not have a general police power to legislate on anything it wants (despite the modern lies of the Supreme Court regarding the Commerce Clause to the contrary). It is a government of particular, enumerated powers, and you shall construe its powers narrowly, as the people intended. There are other powers, which we the people have not granted, and we reserve all of those other powers to our sovereign State governments, or to ourselves.
From all of this, St. George Tucker, in his 1803 commentaries on the Constitution, derived the principle that all of the Constitution’s rights protecting provisions should be read very broadly, while the power granting provisions should be read very narrowly. Tucker was correct, but you don’t need to be a legal scholar to figure it out.
The people who ratified the Constitution did not leave the vital question of its interpretation open to be manipulated by some smart-alecky modern law professor out for tenure and a book deal, or by some future federal judge playing God – they gave us their commands for how it shall and “shall not be construed.”
And it is
their understanding and intent that matters, not the preferences of the Nine Nazgul on the Court. Any “interpretive methods” that are contrary to those commands are not only inaccurate, but are themselves violations of the Constitution.
As others above have noted, you cannot simply read one part of the the text outside of the context of how it relates to other parts, such as the above noted Bill of Rights text, nor can you read the text alone outside of the context of the history and the clear understanding of the Founding generation. They had just won a war of rebellion against a government that claimed the power to regulate them "in all cases whatsoever," as the Declaratory Act stated, and were not about to place another such usurping, omnipotent leviathan over themselves.
All modern revisionist attempts to make that Constitution read like some socialist/fascist wet dream of unlimited power are patent nonsense, and that goes for most of the Supreme Court cases that have wildly "expanded" federal power, with
Gonzales v. Raich being but the latest such nonsense.
And don't even get me started on the absurd notions of the "Unitary Executive" which claims the president, once elected, is an omnipotent dictator with all of the powers of a Persian Emperor. Total nonsense, and once again easy to refute if people will "just open up the Constitution and READ it" as Ron Paul so famously said.
Stewart Rhodes (aka "James Otis")
I need ammo here. Does article 1, section 8 - by the very nature of its wording - infringe upon personal liberties by its giving of such a broad power to congress? Of course, that would be a slightly different argument than what I first posed, and I'd have to amend my position.
). I could imagine nationalized health care would have its cons as well. The only real positive effect of grants is that you get money back; you just don't have nearly as much control over how to use it as when that money first left the local level. 
