Tenth Amendment and Enumerated Powers

Now one of my good friends posted this on his Facebook thing, and I must admit it is funny. There's isn't a bit of truth to it, but if it did, it would even be funnier. Nobody is arguing that the Federal Constitution is not the Law of the land. Nobody is arguing that the Federal Government may not "levy taxes" and "regulate commerce". So whatever humor could have been was given over to straw-men.

So the cartoon misses the point or did it? The cartoon was clearly intended to give the impression that Constitutionalists and or conservatives/libertarians or whoever believe the Federal government can't do anything, especially whatever the political Left wants. Therefore I believe the cartoonist knows full well that he is purposely trying to deceive and marginalize his political opponents.

However, if you wish to believe the best about this cartoonist, and that he is just misled, then lets go with that assumption. The truth is that Conservatives and Libertarians want to follow the Constitution. The Constitution writers assumed that only the enumerated powers within the document is what the Federal Government could be authorized to do. Since most Americans knew that it was just nonsense to believe the Government would restrict itself to just its enumerated powers, the States demanded what turned out to be the Bill of Rights.

For the moment, I want to cite the Tenth Amendment and a quote from the authors as to its meaning if there is some doubt.

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.

Now if you doubt about the Conservative understanding of this text, please read this quote:

“The most numerous objects of legislation belong to the States. Those of the National Legislature [are] but few.”
–Rufus King, at the Federal Constitutional Convention

As Robert Natelson, Nevada Law Journal, has written,

The drafters of the Constitution chose to enumerate the powers of the federal government but not, with a few procedural exceptions, the exclusive powers of states. However, that decision should not be understood as implying that exclusive state powers were narrow, but rather that they were vast. As the drafters explained, they had decided not to enumerate the states’ reserved powers for the same reasons they had decided not to include a bill of rights: first, the reserved powers were too extensive to enumerate; second, a discrete list would encourage the pretense that the federal government could act everywhere else.

So for those of you who choose to misrepresent the Conservative/Libertarian/Tea Partier, the meaning of the Constitution may be debated, but it must debated within the Framework of the document's original intent, something sorely lacking among today's Media/Left wing politics.