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The Vermont Papers: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale, by Frank Bryan and John McClaughry (Chelsea Green, 308 pp., $18.95)

State and local government has been vestigial ever since 1940, when an FDR hack (a Supreme Court Justice, as it happened) obliged his patron by opining that the Tenth Amendment was a mere “truism,” no more than “declaratory” of the obvious fact that the states and the people get to keep whatever the Federal Government doesn’t take away from them. (Not many have discerned that whenever the Supreme Court announces a constitutional right, it is likely to be thereby expanding federal power.)

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Joseph Sobran

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The Vermont Papers: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale, by Frank Bryan and John McClaughry (Chelsea Green, 308 pp., $18.95)

State and local government has been vestigial ever since 1940, when an FDR hack (a Supreme Court Justice, as it happened) obliged his patron by opining that the Tenth Amendment was a mere “truism,” no more than “declaratory” of the obvious fact that the states and the people get to keep whatever the Federal Government doesn’t take away from them. (Not many have discerned that whenever the Supreme Court announces a constitutional right, it is likely to be thereby expanding federal power.)