You need to ask, why would a liberal want it to be a truism? Because then he would not have to treat it like "law", or even worse, the "supreme law of the land".

Liberals do not have intellectual opinions. They merely have tactical notions of advancing Marxist doctrines. It is vital not to be drawn into the trap of taking liberal arguments as intellectual ones.

I think the actual problem lies with the way that the federal government applies the provisions in the fourteenth amendment. And keep in mind that the fifth section of that article grants authority to Congress to enforce its provisions. The same clause is attached to other amendments, transferring authority over their provisions to the feds.

Arizona's immigration law is a good case in point. While immigration is not a delegated, nor prohibited, thus reserved power, the feds get around this by application (or misapplication) of the fourteenth's provisions. There is also the "enrollment at birth program" conducted by the Social Security Administration, which gets around the problem with children born in U.S. hospitals to alien parents subject to a foreign jurisdiction. Enrolled at birth, these children are, thereby, subject to U.S. jurisdiction. Which subjects all State and local laws to federal jurisdiction via the fourteenth amendment.

Ain't U.S. citizenship just wonderful!

Connor states-

"If the denial to the federal government of any undelegated power is indeed a truism, then why has that entity repeatedly exercised authority for powers it was never given by the states?"

The Amendment only applies to powers not granted. The Commerce Clause, Necessary and Proper Clause, etc, are granted powers. Thus, when the Amendment is invoked, standing alone, the feds simply fall back on their perversion of these clauses and nullify the Amendment.

Unless the separation of power between the States and their federal government is inserted into the game before any discussion of the delegated powers or the Tenth Amendment, the Amendment will continue to be trampled.

That being said, it could be argued that the Amendment is a re-statement of the truism that forms the foundation of the Constitution.

In a speech at Independence Hall in October of 1787, James Wilson, a Federalist from Pennsylvania, explained the proposed constitution and answered some of the criticisms being leveled against it. In his speech, Wilson succinctly stated why a bill of rights had been omitted:

"It will be proper…to mark the leading discrimination between the State constitutions and the Constitution of the United States. When the people established the powers of legislation under their separate governments, they invested their representatives with every right and authority which they did not in explicit terms reserve…if the frame of government is silent, the jurisdiction is efficient and complete. But in delegating federal powers, another criterion was necessarily introduced, and the congressional power is to be collected, not from tacit implication, but from the positive grant expressed in the instrument of the union. Hence, it is evident, that in the former case everything that is not reserved is given; but in the latter the reverse of the proposition prevails, and everything that is not given is reserved.

This distinction being recognized, will furnish an answer to those who think the omission of a bill of rights a defect in the proposed constitution; for it would have been superfluous and absurd to have stipulated with a federal body of our own creation, that we should enjoy those privileges of which we are not divested, either by the intention or the act that has brought the body into existence. For instance, the liberty of the press…what control can proceed from the Federal government to shackle or destroy that sacred palladium of national freedom? * * [T]he proposed system possesses no influence whatever upon the press, and it would have been merely nugatory to have introduced a formal declaration upon the subject—nay, that very declaration might have been construed to imply that some degree of power was given, since we undertook to define its extent."

Since the federal government would be granted limited enumerated powers, every power not granted would be denied irrespective of whether the document contained a bill of rights. As explained by Wilson, the omission of a bill of rights was consistent with this system of government.