Why The 10th Amendment?

[Kevin_Kennedy]

The recent rejuvenation of interest in State’s rights, nullification, and secession has been a welcome result of the explosion of federal power since the housing and credit bubbles burst last fall. The 10th Amendment movements and "tea parties" are, at least on one level, a pure form of "republicanism." Unfortunately, there are those who call themselves Republicans who have little understanding about the history of the republic, namely how the Founding generation conceptualized the "united States" as Jefferson called it in the Declaration of Independence. "Country club" Republican "protesters" have jumped on the bandwagon, and as folks on the LRC have documented, these individuals are purely pawns for the demagogues in the GOP, a party that has never truly been either for State’s rights or limited government. Simply rallying against unconstitutional taxes, expansive federal programs, or shallow assaults on the Democrats and Barack Obama is not enough. You can chant about the 10th Amendment till you go hoarse, but without understanding the principles behind State sovereignty, your voice will be useless.

It becomes clear, then, that those who push for reasserting State power must know how the Founders defined a republic in both size and scope and what they meant by republicanism. Returning to the founding principles of the United States is an obvious way to end the insanity in Washington D.C., but it won’t happen if State’s rights are consistently viewed as a knee-jerk reactionary response to unconstitutional federal legislation. Yes, the 10th Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights, but why did the Founders insist on state sovereignty? Rather than a theoretical fabrication at the 1787 Philadelphia Convention or the State ratification conventions, State’s rights were explicitly linked to the stability of the United States from the Revolutionary War forward. That is the key to the State sovereignty movement.

Why the 10th Amendment? by Brion McClanahan

 

[Garinold]

As you can probably tell Kevin if you have read the few posts I've made on these forums and I am right of center & do consider myself a conservative. However, even as a conservative I have found myself laughing at some of these tea parties and guys like Sean Hannity that promote them. For no other reason than they have no idea where the country is at in its history. Asserting state's right isn't going to keep the power of the Federal Gov't in check with regard to it's intervention into the economy in the form of the ascension of the regulatory & administrative state. There must be a doctrine of economic substantive due process that forces legislation to meet the three prong due process test & scrutiny. That is the way you get rid of damaging & wasteful Gov't intervention.

If you read the Federalist papers, and I have cover to cover, you can get a pretty good depiction as to what some of he framers (Hamilton, Madison, and Jay) had in mind for the country when they were arguing for the articles of the Constitution. At the time these arguments were in all honesty the tip of the spear, the absolute cutting edge, for supporting the expansion of Gov't. Hamilton especially was an advocate of "energetic" Gov't, the strong centralized Gov't that the vast majority of the people at the time were afraid of. Now if you look at this arguments you have to laugh. His vision (one of the extremes in favor of strong central Gov't) could be easily view today as extremely limiting the scope of power. The power of the Federal Gov't has expanded so far in every conceivable aspect of life compared to what the founders intended its insane. The states were once viewed, under the construction of the new Constitution, as being able to more readily able to obstruct the activities of the Federal Gov't, than the other way around (this was mentioned in the Federalist papers). Laughable now....

And I agree with the article. The ideals of the conservative movement in this country need to be a permanent fixture in political life, not just reactionary. If the republican party wants to represent these ideals in policy-making, than a permanent manifesto must be created (advocating limited Gov't in all forms in accordance with the original ideal of Federalism), and the party can never again make the same mistakes that it made in the last 8 years.