To Take a Single Step Beyond the Boundaries Thus Especially Drawn Around the Powers of Congress Is to Take Possession of a Boundless Field of Power, No Longer Susceptible of Any Definition

Attorney General Randolph had already expressed his firm conviction that the National Bank bill was unconstitutional when Jefferson wrote his reply to Washington. Thus the Secretary of State, along with Madison and Randolph, became part of a trio of Virginians making an orchestrated attack on the bank.

In his reply to the President, Jefferson methodically listed the three things that the bill was designed to do. It would form a corporation with functions crossing state lines and challenging state authority. In effect, it would grant a monopoly. It would authorize directors of this new corporate monopoly to make regulations superseding in some instances the laws of the states. He then examined these provisions in the light of an amendment to the Constitution of the United States which had not yet been formally adopted but was assured of passage. He anticipated that it would be the Twelfth Amendment, and so designated it, but it became the Tenth Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to  the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." "To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus especially drawn around the powers of Congress," Jefferson argued, "is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition."

--Alf J. Mapp Jr., Thomas Jefferson: America's Paradoxical Patriot (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2008), 294.