Regular readers of this site recognize that the 10th amendment is forgotten (or ignored) in US government far more often then it’s invoked.
That’s why the Tenth Amendment Center applauds the Oklahoma State House of Representatives, who recently declared “sovereignty” under the principles of the 10th.
In their resolution, which easily passed by a 92-3 margin, they recognized not only that the Tenth Amendment exists, but that it grants only specific powers to the federal government – the rest being left to the “States or to the People.”
According to the language of the resolution, Oklahoma is “serving notice to the federal government to cease and desist certain mandates.”
Although this is the most strongly-worded commitment from a legislature to the principles of states rights in a long time, it will remain to be seen if Oklahoma will actually begin resisting some of the many, many encroachments that the federal government engages in on a daily basis.
Robert Bright has an interesting perspective on his blog:
The list of things that the Fed Gov is doing but does not have authority to do because of the 10th Amendment is staggering. The reason federal politicians ignore the 10th is that they would have little to do if the 10th were applied as intended by the Founding Fathers …
… it’s a very nice gesture. If several states would do the same thing, we could actually see some real change – as opposed to the “change†to an even larger Federal Government as proposed by Obama, Clinton and McCain.
A resolution is clearly not the same thing as outright resistance, but this seems to have awoken a number of people to the realization that a potentially good way to reduce the power of the federal government is through their local communities.
This will happen much quicker once we realize that federal funding that’s dished out for all kinds of unconstitutional mandates are little more than a way to keep us dependent – bribes.
A commenter at PoliticalInquirer.net sums it up pretty well:
Here, here; the most-ignored amendment of all needs a major revival. However, to do that, the states would have to wean themselves off of federal dollars for state-specific purposes and I don’t expect any state has the political intestinal fortitude to do that.
More importantly, the US Supreme Court needs to start recognizing the existence of that Amendment and start ruling based on it. They’ve been operating like there were only nine original Amendments since Roe v Wade (a clear 10th Amendment issue).
Here, Here.