Wow! It's almost surreal reading this:
I'll say the last refuge of cowards in the Tenth Amendment.
The Tenth has been invoked a lot lately. The Tenth has been mentioned as the reason health-care reform is unconstitutional. It's the way the Speaker of the Tennessee State House says his state can circumvent federal gun laws. It's the states' rights argument carried to the extreme.
The amendment reads: "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."
What that says, in other words, is that if a power is unclaimed by the federal government -- or if that power is not denied to the states -- then the states have it. The intent is to clarify the basic point that if the feds aren't in charge, the states are.
It's a truism, not a grant of power.
Soon after the framers wrote the original document, it was obvious states couldn't act independently. When the Constitution was written, there wasn't much interstate commerce at all. Going from one end of the country to the other end didn't take five hours -- it took five months. So the federal government claimed some powers to tie up loose ends.
If states acted on their own when it came to matters of interstate commerce, it would be to easy for states to grant monopolies to business, and too easy for large businesses to fix prices and destroy smaller competition.
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Everyone learns at some point in life that there are three remedies to a negative situation: avoid, alter or accept it. Those against health-care legislation or gun-control laws don't need to accept what they see as bad policy. They should try alter the policy in all the accepted ways.
But reverting to the Tenth Amendment is avoidance. It's the equivalent of taking your ball and going home. And these issues are too important to do that.
After invoking the Tenth Amendment he goes on (there is more than just that above) to justify the Interstate Commerce clause without even mentioning it as if it were the Tenth Amendment.
And did you notice all the errors in the passages above?
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The first line says "...in the Tenth..." instead of "...is the Tenth..." but I figure that is just a typo and I give him a pass on that.
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"It's a truism, not a grant of power. "? It explicitly states that the Feds are not granted most powers and he turns it around to claim the states are not granted powers.
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It took five months to travel from one end of the 13 colonies to the other? It's only about 1500 miles so he is saying the average speed of travel was 10 miles per day. Even with a backpack on and walking on mountain trails I can do better than that.
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The Tenth Amendment is part of the U.S. Constitution and it's pretty clear the original intent is being violated. Many other Federal laws have been struck down by the courts as violating various parts of the constitution, including the Tenth Amendment, so it's entirely reasonable to quest whether this law is in violation.
So it's the author that is the coward avoiding the issue. He gets it exactly backward and calls people invoking the Tenth Amendment cowards. It's called "projection" and it just goes to show he either has mental problems or has crap for brains.