Tenth Amendment Quotes

The Tenth Amendment recognizes the States' jurisdiction in certain areas. States' Rights means that the States have a right to act or not to act, as they see fit, in the areas reserved to them. The States may have duties corresponding to these rights, but the duties are owed to the people of the States, not to the federal government. Therefore, the recourse lies not with the federal government, which is not sovereign, but with the people who are, and who have full power to take disciplinary action. If the people are unhappy with say, their State's disability insurance program, they can bring pressure to bear on their state officials and, if that fails, they can elect a new set of officials. And if, in the unhappy event they should wish to divest themselves of this responsibility, they can amend the Constitution.

He was prodding her. Let him. They were on safe ground. “Well, in trying to satisfy one amendment, it looks like they rubbed out another one. The Tenth. It’s only a small amendment, only one sentence long, but it seemed to be the one that meant the most, somehow.

Lincoln eviscerated the U.S. Constitution. He illegally suspended the writ of habeas corpus; started the war without the consent of Congress; made mass arrests of tens of thousands of political dissenters (not spies) across the North without due process; declared martial law; confiscated private firearms; shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers; imprisoned their editors and owners; censored all telegraph communications; nationalized the railroads; invoked military conscription, yet another form of slavery; orchestrated the secession of West Virginia from Virginia without the consent of the latter, as required by the Constitution; denied the Southern states representative government while they were under federal occupation; ordered federal troops to interfere in elections in the Northern states; deported Democrat Clement L. Vallandigham, a congressional critic from Ohio, to the Confederacy; effectively nullified the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution; and more. All of this was supposedly justified by Lincoln’s novel theory that the Constitution had to be suspended, if not destroyed, in order to save it.

The Commerce Clause, used in 1964 to end the sins of segregation and racial discrimination, has now become a mechanism for expanding the power of the federal government into countless other areas. Under the Commerce Clause, Congress and the federal government have gained unlimited power to regulate both civil and criminal activity even in areas once reserved to the states under the Tenth Amendment.

Many Americans have never once read this short document completely through, and most have erroneous views of what it says. One survey found that 36% of Americans are unable to identify any one of the five rights guaranteed by the First Amendment (freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and petition for redress of grievances).[1] Another survey showed that only 28% could name two of those five freedoms, while just one American in 1,000 (one-tenth of one percent) could name all five.[2]

Doctor Munson to Jared Gilsom: "We fought you because we didn’t want some ruler thinking he could tell us what we could do. We spent years, decades paying our share—the Erie Canal, miles of railroads all over the North. But down here, we barely got any of it. Taxed for three of every five slaves on top of our citizens, living the way we always have while we pay to make the North better. And then—and then, they decide that wasn’t enough. Now the government decides it can tell us how to spend our own money, how to live our own lives. Did you ever read the tenth amendment to your constitution? That used to matter. This idea that a president can decide how people live, how they act, what matters to them, how they can think? We fought the British just to avoid that, and then in less than a century we Americans did it to ourselves.

The Articles began with a version of the future Constitution's Tenth Amendment: "Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled."54 The Articles had no bill of rights, and none was appropriate in that the Congress had authority only over the states and not individuals. The states regulated individual conduct, and hence recognition of the rights of persons was a matter for the states.

The fifth model is the federalism model. It is in some ways the flip side of the residual rights model. Here the Ninth Amendment works with the Tenth Amendment to limit the federal government to a narrow reading of its enumerated powers. Instead of fighting against a conclusion that the federal government has general, unenumerated powers, the federalism model has the Ninth Amendment fighting against a conclusion that the federal government has broad enumerated powers.50 In other words, it fights against pretty much exactly how the post–New Deal Supreme Court has interpreted the Commerce Clause, allowing just about any regulation that has anything to do with commerce of any kind, which is basically any regulation.

Thus it could be argued that the Baby Tenth exempted out of the state’s general powers the broad rights that the Lockean provision protected, such as the right to pursue happiness.

Nothing in the Tenth Amendment says that the powers must be explicitly, expressly, or specifically given to the federal government—given, that is, in so many words. Also note that the amendment doesn’t mention state “sovereignty”; in fact, that idea appears nowhere in the Constitution. Nor does the Tenth Amendment (or the rest of the Constitution) mention “rights” for the states. Finally, there’s nothing in it about state “nullification” of federal law. Does the amendment really, in Da Vinci Code fashion, include those ideas? Compare the language of the Articles of Confederation: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.

Most federal entities and employees are neither necessary nor proper to carry out the legitimate federal functions prescribed by the Constitution. Why does the Federal Government need 2.1 million civilian employees?324 This figure does not include uniformed military members or the U.S. Postal Service. Why is this cloud of locusts four times larger than the U.S. Army, when the Tenth Amendment reserves most government functions to the States? These federal organizations are reminiscent of the American colonists’ complaint, in the Declaration of Independence, that King George III had “erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

It is known that the objection of the patriot Samuel Adams was only overcome by an assurance that such an amendment as the tenth would be adopted. Like opposition was by like assurance elsewhere overcome. That article is in these words: "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.

The Bill of Rights,” he growled, “the entire Bill of Rights, was a complete ‘Fuck You’ to the idea of trust in government. An insurance policy. The people who wrote it had just fought off a tyrannical government—their own. Not just the Second Amendment, every amendment in there from the First to the Tenth enumerated the inherent rights of individuals, above those of government. The Bill of Rights doesn’t grant us rights or privileges, it lists the ones we have as human beings that the government has no right to take away. It flat out states the government has no authority to infringe our rights, and the Second Amendment is just there to guarantee the other nine. It’s not there so you can go duck hunting, or even so you can defend yourself against criminals—that was assumed. It’s there so that people like us don’t get ground under the bootheel of tyrants, or at least have a fighting chance, because there always have been tyrants. Always will be. Most of the Constitution is written in very plain language, but ‘shall not be infringed’ is about as plain as it gets, and only people with evil intentions could even attempt to start arguing it doesn’t mean what it says. Free men own guns, slaves don’t, it’s as simple as that. You’re fighting for a government that is trying to argue we should have no rights except for what they grant us. Besides plain unConstitutional that’s evil, pure and simple. And, if you actually took a look at the conditions that caused the colonists in America to revolt against the British back in the 1700s, those laws and regulations are nothing compared to the outrages citizens were having to endure prior to this war.

But as the Tenth Amendment confirms, “the people” also have “powers.” These powers include suffrage, jury duty, militia service, and other institutions in which the people govern, administer justice, keep order, disapprove of and nullify governmental actions, and otherwise participate in political society. As the Revolution proved, the ultimate power of the people that the Second Amendment helps secure is the ability to take arms to resist oppression and overthrow tyranny. In a constitutional republic, actual exercise of this power of the people would be rendered unnecessary.

the Tenth Amendment clarifies that governmental powers are either “delegated” or “reserved,” in contrast with rights of the people, which may not be “infringed” or “violated.” The people also have powers that are “reserved.

During the 1920s, slightly more than 350 new immigrants—some longtime Americans, some fresh off the boat—would take up residence in the county each day. Intoxicated by their good fortune, they would help Los Angeles grow from a mere thirty-two square miles at the turn of the century to a languid sprawl of more than 390 square miles by 1925. This development would catapult Los Angeles from the tenth largest to the fifth largest city in population in the country, considerably irritating residents of San Francisco, who had long held that theirs was the most important city on the Pacific Coast. In this decade, average life expectancy in America would climb to fifty-five years. One out of every four American families would buy or sell an automobile, and the Ford Motor Company would go to market with a car that sold for as little as $290. Radio would become all the rage. Women would ponder the meaning of the first Miss America Pageant, and would take pride in the first woman senator, the first woman governor, Amelia Earhart’s adventures, and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.