The following is excerpted from Over Ruled by Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze. Copyright 2024 by Neil Gorsuch. Published with permission from Harper Books and HarperCollins Publishers.

When the founders set about drafting the Constitution, they faced the question of where to allocate power. Few wanted to concentrate all authority at the national level; they feared a single, centralized power would pose too much of a risk to individual liberty and invite the sort of tyranny they experienced at the hands of the English Crown. Yet the colonists’ first attempt at a governing structure, the Articles of Confederation, left the federal government too weak to competently discharge even basic national duties like raising an army or conducting foreign affairs. How to strike the right balance between central and local control became one of the principal tasks of the Constitutional Convention.