Pleading the Tenth

THE 28 words of 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”—seem to set forth a simple principle: The Federal Government may exercise the specific powers that are listed in the Constitution, and the states and the people may exercise all remaining powers.

But the Tenth Amendment has been so twisted and manipulated by the United States Supreme Court as to render its words meaningless. It has been disparaged, ignored, and eviscerated by a federal judiciary going out of its way not to apply it. Various court decisions have called it “but a truism,” “essentially a tautology,” and something that doesn’t require the Supreme Court to fashion any “discrete limitations on the objects of federal authority.” By systematically bleeding from the Tenth Amendment any real meaning within the boundaries of constitutional law, the Supreme Court has virtually rationalized it out of existence.

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Pete Du Pont

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THE 28 words of 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”—seem to set forth a simple principle: The Federal Government may exercise the specific powers that are listed in the Constitution, and the states and the people may exercise all remaining powers.

But the Tenth Amendment has been so twisted and manipulated by the United States Supreme Court as to render its words meaningless. It has been disparaged, ignored, and eviscerated by a federal judiciary going out of its way not to apply it. Various court decisions have called it “but a truism,” “essentially a tautology,” and something that doesn’t require the Supreme Court to fashion any “discrete limitations on the objects of federal authority.” By systematically bleeding from the Tenth Amendment any real meaning within the boundaries of constitutional law, the Supreme Court has virtually rationalized it out of existence.