The debate arose over the fundamental question of the source of federal sovereignty. Did the Union derive its authority from the states, or the people acting through the states, or the people acting directly, or from its predecessor (the Confederation or the British Crown)? … Historians have drawn the connection between the Republican and Federalist sides of this debate to the older Country and Court parties of eighteenth-century English politics, but it is Powell who, with characteristic legal insight, links this debate with the choice of constitutional interpretive modes. Republican partisans campaigned for a stringently textual approach to constitutional interpretation, construing grants of congressional authority narrowly vis-Avis the states and more broadly against the Executive.

DEFINE: Clarifies the interpretive-mode distinction: stringently textualist reading construed congressional grants narrowly against states, broadly against the Executive.

Philip Chase Bobbitt, Philip Chase Bobbitt - Refl…, loc. 192