No amendment in our Bill of Rights is more deeply rooted in American history, politics, and government than our Tenth Amendment. Its roots are deep in the colonies’ histories, in the framing and ratification of our first constitution, our Articles of Confederation, and in the framing and ratification of our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. . It should be enough for us to know that the Tenth Amendment’s protection of federalism—of each state’s right to govern its own internal affairs except for those few areas of authority which the states delegated to our central government in the Constitution and those few powers which the states forbade to themselves in our fundamental law—was not an afterthought but an explicit reaffirmation of a principle that is absolutely fundamental to our constitutional system of civil government.
No amendment is of more practical importance than our Tenth Amendment for protecting what remains of our liberty and recovering the huge percentage of liberty that previous generations, and we ourselves, have surrendered to the Federal Leviathan. For our federal system was and still is a system of separation of powers with checks and balances between our national/central government and our states’ governments. Our state governments have powers which can be used against central government usurpations. And our state and local government officials, not to mention our states’ citizens, have means of influencing the officials of our national government to obey the oaths of office which all our elected and appointed officials take to uphold our Constitution.
It is encouraging to see that more and more of our elected officials, particularly at the state level, are realizing the importance of our Tenth Amendment to the proper functioning of state government and its function as the gateway to the preservation of our liberty. - Except from American Vision
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