Does the U.S. Constitution Provide the Federal Government Too Much Flexibility?

In determining whether the courts went too far in allowing the Federal government such flexibility in the cases of Gibbons v. Ogden and McCulloch v. Maryland we have to examine them both against the Federalists intentions in the Constitution. A common theme between these two cases is the fact of who has the ultimate authority of the law, the state or nation and constitutional interpretation.

In the case of McCulloch v. Maryland started in 1791, when Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton presented a proposal to the Congress to charter a Bank of the United States to operate as the standard and central bank for the Union. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson did not concur with this deeming that Constitution did not give express power to Congress to charter a bank. President George Washington understood and sustained Hamilton's constitutional understanding and proved for a twenty-year charter for the bank. After the charter had expired, President Madison pushed for a continuation and banks started appearing in the Union.

There was a problem though with local, state-chartered banks. The operations for these banks were up to the state legislatures but the issue at hand in McCulloch v. Maryland was that Maryland imposed a tax on a federal bank's operations and after James McCulloch, bank cashier of the Baltimore branch, repudiated paying the tax the matter went to court.
In the case of McCulloch v. Maryland, this argument is clearly laid out, "The government of the United States, then, though limited in its powers, is supreme; and its laws, when made in pursuance of the constitution, form the supreme law of the land, 'anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.'" (McCulloch v. Maryland, 1819)