Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, a part of the Bill of Rights, was ratified on December 15, 1791. It expresses the principle of federalism, whereby the federal government and the individual states share power, by mutual agreement. The Tenth Amendment prescribes that the federal government has only those powers delegated to it by the Constitution, and that all other powers not forbidden to the states by the Constitution are reserved to each state, or to the people.
The amendment, with origins before the American Revolution, was proposed by the 1st United States Congress in 1789 during its first term following the adoption of the Constitution. It was considered by many members as a prerequisite before they would ratify the Constitution, and particularly to satisfy demands of Anti-Federalists, who opposed the creation of a stronger federal government.
The purpose of this amendment is to reaffirm the principles of federalism and reinforce the notion of the federal government maintaining only limited, enumerated powers. Some legal scholars have effectively classified the amendment as a tautology, a statement affirming that the federal government does not have any rights that it does not have.
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Drafting and adoption
The Tenth Amendment is similar to Article II of the Articles of Confederation: Thomas Burke, a vehement supporter of states' rights in the Continental Congress, originally proposed the text of what would later become the Tenth Amendment as an amendment to the Articles of Confederation. Thomas Burke wanted to ensure that there was no ambiguity concerning differences in state or federal power. Other Founding Fathers of the United States disagreed with this amendment, including James Wilson, John Dickinson, and Richard Henry Lee. Nevertheless, the amendment was passed by the Continental Congress.After the American Revolution, with the completion of the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, South Carolina Representative Thomas Tudor Tucker and Massachusetts Representative Elbridge Gerry separately proposed similar amendments limiting the federal government to powers "expressly" delegated, which would have denied implied powers. James Madison opposed the amendments, stating that "it was impossible to confine a Government to the exercise of express powers; there must necessarily be admitted powers by implication, unless the Constitution descended to recount every minutia." When a vote on this version of the amendment with "expressly delegated" was defeated, Connecticut Representative Roger Sherman drafted the Tenth Amendment in its ratified form, omitting "expressly". Sherman's language allowed for an expansive reading of the powers implied by the Necessary and Proper Clause.
When James Madison introduced the Tenth Amendment in Congress, he explained that many states were eager to ratify this amendment, despite critics who deemed the amendment superfluous or unnecessary:
The states ratified the Tenth Amendment, declining to signal that there are unenumerated powers in addition to unenumerated rights. The amendment rendered unambiguous what had previously been at most a mere suggestion or an implication.
Judicial interpretation
The Tenth Amendment, which makes explicit the idea that the powers of the federal government are limited to those powers granted in the Constitution, has been declared to be a truism by the Supreme Court. In United States v. Sprague the Supreme Court asserted that the amendment "added nothing to the as originally ratified."States and local governments have occasionally attempted to assert exemption from various federal regulations, especially in the areas of labor and environmental controls, using the Tenth Amendment as a basis for their claim. An often-repeated quote, from United States v. Darby Lumber Co., reads as follows:
In Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, the Court overruled National League of Cities v. Usery. Under National League of Cities, the determination of whether there was state immunity from federal regulation turned on whether the state activity was "traditional" for or "integral" to the state government. In Garcia, the Court noted that this analysis was "unsound in principle and unworkable in practice", and concluded that the Framers believed state sovereignty could be maintained by the political system established by the Constitution. Noting that the same Congress that extended the Fair Labor Standards Act to cover government-run mass transit systems also provided substantial funding for those systems, the Court concluded that the structure created by the Framers had indeed protected the states from overreaching by the federal government.
In South Carolina v. Baker, the Court said in dicta that an exception to Garcia would be when a state lacked "any right to participate" in the federal political process or was left "politically isolated and powerless" by a federal law.
Commandeering
Since 1992, the Supreme Court has ruled that the Tenth Amendment prohibits the federal government from forcing states to pass or not pass certain legislation, or to enforce federal law.In New York v. United States, the Supreme Court invalidated part of the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Amendments Act of 1985. The act provided three incentives for states to comply with statutory obligations to provide for the disposal of low-level radioactive waste. The first two incentives were monetary. The third, which was challenged in this case, obliged states to take title to any waste within their borders that had not been disposed of prior to January 1, 1996, and made each state liable for all damages directly related to such waste. The Court ruled that imposing that obligation on a state violated the Tenth Amendment. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that the federal government can encourage the states to adopt certain regulations through the spending power or through the commerce power. However, Congress cannot directly compel states to enforce federal regulations.
In Printz v. United States, the Court ruled that part of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act violated the Tenth Amendment. The act required state and local law enforcement officials to conduct background checks on people attempting to purchase handguns. Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, applied New York v. United States to conclude that the act violated the Tenth Amendment. Since the act "forced participation of the State's executive in the actual administration of a federal program", it was unconstitutional.
In Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, the Supreme Court ruled that the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, which prohibited states that had banned sports betting when the law was enacted from later legalizing it, violated the anti-commandeering doctrine, and invalidated the entire law. The Court ruled that the anti-commandeering doctrine applied to congressional attempts to prevent the states from taking a certain action as much as it applied in New York and Printz to Congress requiring states to enforce federal law.
Commerce Clause
In the 20th century, the Commerce Clause became one of the most frequently-used sources of Congress's power. Its interpretation is important in determining the allowable scope of federal government. Complex economic challenges arising from the Great Depression triggered a reevaluation in both Congress and the Supreme Court of the use of Commerce Clause powers to maintain a strong national economy.In Wickard v. Filburn, in the context of World War II, the Court ruled that federal regulation of wheat production could constitutionally be applied to wheat grown for "home consumption" on a farm. The rationale was that a farmer's growing "his own" can have a substantial cumulative effect on interstate commerce, because if all farmers were to exceed their production quotas, a significant amount of wheat would either not be sold on the market or would be bought from other producers. Hence, in the aggregate, if farmers were allowed to consume their own wheat, it would affect the interstate market.
In United States v. Lopez, a federal law mandating a "gun-free zone" on and around public school campuses was struck down. The Supreme Court ruled that there was no clause in the Constitution authorizing the federal law. This was the first modern Supreme Court opinion to limit the government's power under the Commerce Clause. The opinion did not mention the Tenth Amendment or the Court's 1985 Garcia decision.
Most recently, in Gonzales v. Raich, a California woman sued the Drug Enforcement Administration after her medical cannabis crop was seized and destroyed by federal agents. Medical cannabis was explicitly made legal under California state law by Proposition 215, despite cannabis being prohibited at the federal level by the Controlled Substances Act. Even though the woman grew cannabis strictly for her own consumption and never sold any, the Supreme Court stated that growing one's own cannabis affects the interstate market of cannabis. In theory the product could enter the stream of interstate commerce, even if it clearly had not been grown for that purpose and was unlikely ever to reach any market. It therefore ruled that this practice may be regulated by the federal government under the Commerce Clause.
Supremacy Clause
In Cooper v. Aaron, the Supreme Court dealt with states' rights and the Tenth Amendment. The case came about when conflicts arose in direct response to the ruling of another landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education. In Brown, the Supreme Court unanimously declared racial segregation of children in public schools unconstitutional. Following Brown, the court ordered district courts and school boards to proceed with desegregation "with all deliberate speed".Among those opposing the decision was the Governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus. A group of black students known as the Little Rock Nine were to attend the previously all-white Central High School under the school board's attempt to follow the order of Brown. The tension became severe when Governor Faubus ordered the National Guard to prevent the nine from entering the school and President Eisenhower responded with federal troops to escort them.
Five months after the integration crisis happened, the school board filed suit in the United States District Court of the Eastern District of Arkansas requesting a two-and-a-half-year delay in implementing desegregation. Although the district court granted the relief, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit reversed the district court's decision on August 18, 1958, and stayed its mandate pending appeal to the Supreme Court. By this time, the incident had evolved into a national issue: it had become a debate not only on racism and segregation but also on states' rights and the Tenth Amendment.
The Court cited the Supremacy Clause of Article VI, which declares the Constitution to be the supreme law of the land, and Marbury v. Madison in holding that the states must abide by the Court's decision in Brown. Expectedly, many states' right advocates and state officials criticized the ruling as an attack on the Tenth Amendment. Moreover, they claimed the Court's decision on Cooper as being inconsistent with the constitutional vision of the Framers.