No, not all the unspecified means. You are under the spell of Marshall and Hamilton, who had a mania for implied powers. Do you honestly think something so big as a central bank could be hiding between the lines of the Constitution, and that it just slipped the Framers’ minds? No.
Unspecified means of implementing expressed powers must pass the necessary and proper test. Marshall fixed the game for the Bank of the US by pretending “necessary” means not that it couldn’t live without it, but more along the lines of “helpful” or “convenient.” In this he had a modicum of justification, since at some point the Constitution contains the phrase “absolutely necessary.” If it was necessary to add the word “absolutely” in that passage, then “necessary” on its own can’t very mean without it whatever’s at issue will die.
Okay, but isn’t there ground between merely helpful and absolutely necessary that “necessary” falls? Is a central bank necessary enough to handle public debt for it to pass the bar of not being in the Constitution? Hell no. There’s a reason we conservatives abide the principle of “strict construction.” Because when you must construe constitutional language, and no matter how clear it is often you must, the endless temptation is to keep adding. Oh, are there implied powers? Well, what about the powers implied by the implied powers? And the powers implied by them? You see the point.
This works the other way, too. People are prone to construe away legitimate powers. But in the balance, and especially according to SCOTUS, extra unspecified powers have swamped the original plan. There’s no way I’d believe in a million years the Framers’d leave something so big as a central bank to implication. There’s no way a central bank is “necessary” to running the treasury or handling the state debt assumed by the fess (yet another extraconstitutional Hamiltonian move) .
Hamilton was the greatest expert on the Constitution that we ever had. He was the genius of the Revolution and the greatest political thinker since Aristotle.
Obviously sovereignty has the means to protect itself and accomplish its tasks or it is not sovereign. Our government was empowered to become sovereign which it could not do under the Articles. Hence, the powers of the national government (the “General” government) were greatly expanded while those of the state governments severely restricted in affairs affecting the entire nation.
Not even Jefferson and Madison denied there were implicit powers within a sovereign government. The constitution was not a detailed plan but only the outline, the basis of a government.
The Convention rejected the addition of anything which would prevent the discernment of implied powers or rule out their existence.
Congress was given the power “To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.” - Article I, Section 8, paragraph 18.
Thus, a central bank as a means of exercising those powers efficiently is clearly Constitutional. It aids the government in funding operations (civilian and military), collection of taxes, borrowing of money and serves the public welfare by restraining wild fluctuations in the money and credit markets.
The Constitution does NOT contain the word “absolutely” in reference to “necessary”. Hamilton destroys Jefferson’s misuse of the word “necessary” so convincingly that Washington signed the Bank Bill almost instantly after receiving Hamilton’s opinion. After all, H. was the greatest lawyer in the country as well as the primere financial expert and most prolific communicator of the Revolutionary period.
Marshall’s opinion about “necessary” comes straight out of Hamilton’s elegantly reasoned and expressed essay. Marshall himself compared his mind to that of Hamilton as comparing “a taper to the sun” and admitted that in every constitutional question his first consultation was the “Federalist” two-thirds of which Hamilton wrote. The greatest political philosophical work written in the Western hemisphere btw.
Funding of the National Debt is clearly constitutional under Article I, Section 8, paragraph 2. Assumption not only instantly made U.S. credit the equal of ANY in the world (it had been the worst) but created a money supply where there was none and allowed the U.S. economy to take off for the stratosphere. This brilliant achievement alone puts Hamilton in the first rank of statesmen in all of history.
As to the danger of an endless chain of implied powers, this is where judgment and honesty come into play. A constitutional act must not contravene the spirit of the document and at some point in the endless chain this would be violated.