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You have said it well. The States provided an additional check on Federal government growth. Now they are non-participants. If you assume corruption, you still have a check. Corruption is what government is. The founders merely tried to slow it down.

Amen to that.

I wonder how many people realize now that the founders knew then the reality of government and its inevitable bent toward tyranny and that they weren't trying to use government to build a wonderful new society unlike anything the world had ever seen but were trying hobble government by pitting faction against faction so that a wonderful new society could grow up in the liberty from government that the Constitution was to afford, a society that was whatever the people made it through their lives lived in liberty, pursuing their own inclinations and interests, freely entering into business and social arrangements with whomever for their mutual benefits.

I wonder how many people realize now that we are suffering under rules and regulations more pervasive and oppressive, under a government armed with greater technology and firepower than anything that existed anywhere in the founders' world back then. Sure we have more creature comforts now than they did then. We have so much highly nutritious food obtained at such a low cost and with such ease that we develop diseases from over rather than under-nutrition. But the technology is such today that a regime more oppressive than Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, much less King George, is only as far away as the will of someone in the halls of power to decide to do it.

The founders pledged their lives, their property, and their sacred honor to fight against something that is minuscule compared to what folks today don't even blink their eyes at.