Exactly. He's grokking Hamilton and channeling Marshall.
Who were both channeling Hobbes.
Nonsense follows the Constitutional perversions of Lincoln.
In his Cooper Institute speech, Lincoln perverted the Constitution by posing the question as follows:
What is the question which, according to the text, those fathers understood "just as well, and even better than we do now?"It is this: Does the proper division of local from federal authority, or anything in the Constitution, forbid our Federal Government to control as to slavery in our Federal Territories?
And Lincoln makes this Constitutionally perverted pronouncement:
This shows that, in their understanding, no line dividing local from federal authority, nor anything in the Constitution, properly forbade Congress to prohibit slavery in the federal territory; else both their fidelity to correct principle, and their oath to support the Constitution, would have constrained them to oppose the prohibition.
Again, the proper Constitutional question is whether anything in the Constitution affirmatively empowered Congress. Lincoln, and Nonsense, choose to pervert and reverse the question, and assert that silence in the Constitution on a subject gives Congress power to control it.
Nothing at all in the Constitution or any of the first 12 amendments to it prevents Congress from defining marriage. According to the Lincoln/Nonsense theory, this empowers Congress to define marriage as existing only between a man and a man, or between a woman and a woman.
On any matter upon with the Constitution is silent, Congress is omnipotent, according to the Lincoln/Nonsense theory of Constitutional interpretation.