This is because the Constitution is supposed to be an enumeration of what the government is allowed to do.
This is simply not true. The Founders lived through the Articles of Confederation, in which the founding document explicitly enumerated the only powers the government would have. The Constitution was an explicit rejection of that philosophy, and was intended to create a government with broad powers. The point of the Bill of Rights was to place limits on those broad powers.
Unfortunately, Commerce Clause abuse and the effective neutralization of the 10th Amendment has created the opposite situation where the government can do anything it wants as long as it isn't specifically prohibited, and citizens are only guaranteed rights if they are specified.
This is also not true. A great many of the Founders considered the 10th Amendment to be meaningless fluff added only to mollify the slave-owners who wanted restrictions on the Federal government's ability to curtail their ownership of slaves.
That's only true if you use the definition of "broad powers" that was used back when the Constitution was written - which is very different from what it is today.
And all of those broad powers they wanted the government to have, were explicitly written into the text of the Constitution. Sometimes it was deliberately vague, like the Commerce Clause (although if you showed our modern jurisprudence on that to people who wrote it, they would be horrified). And in the Federalist Papers, there are several instances where some bit in the Constitution is explained as, "yes, this is rather broad, but the government needs it for real world reasons". But it is always enumerated.
The First Congress passed the Sedition Act, which was an extremely broad set of laws that would have essentially nullified the First Amendment. The first several Congresses passed extremely broad laws regulating commerce that were ultimately narrowed by the courts. This all despite having numerous members of the Constitutional Convention among their ranks.
It's pretty clear from the laws the First and Second Congress passed that they had an even broader definition of "broad powers" than we do today. (And by the way, the Federal Papers have no legal authority in US law. They're interesting from a historical perspective because they documents an attempt by one politician to sway the opinion of the general public, but they don't form any part of the corpus of American jurisprudence.)
Alien and Sedition Acts were widely panned when they were passed, specifically because many people saw them as unconstitutional. What they proved is that people aren't particularly respectful of the same constitution they wrote, but little else.
I'm well aware that the Federalist Papers aren't law. The reason why I mentioned them is that they come from the party that was anti-Articles, pro-Constitution and pro-strong federal government. So reading them gives you an idea of what they meant by "strong federal government", and what they considered to be out of bounds.
The Sedition Act, passed by the First Congress (consisting of many members of the Constitutional Convention), for starters, which was a huge restriction on free speech.
The multiple attempts by former CC members to pass anti-slavery legislation in Congress in the many decades leading up to the Civil War.
There are a number of other examples, well covered by a number of primary and secondary sources.
This is simply not true. The Founders lived through the Articles of Confederation, in which the founding document explicitly enumerated the only powers the government would have. The Constitution was an explicit rejection of that philosophy, and was intended to create a government with broad powers. The point of the Bill of Rights was to place limits on those broad powers.
Unfortunately, Commerce Clause abuse and the effective neutralization of the 10th Amendment has created the opposite situation where the government can do anything it wants as long as it isn't specifically prohibited, and citizens are only guaranteed rights if they are specified.
This is also not true. A great many of the Founders considered the 10th Amendment to be meaningless fluff added only to mollify the slave-owners who wanted restrictions on the Federal government's ability to curtail their ownership of slaves.