10th Amendment needed because men aren’t angels
By TED CRUZ and SCOTT BRISTER
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
This past year, the federal government has marched further and faster than ever toward control of the economy and our everyday lives. This would dismay our Founding Fathers, whose vision of a carefully limited federal government animated the Constitution.
The most explicit statement of limited government in the U.S. Constitution is the 10th Amendment: “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.” Thus, any power that the Constitution does not affirmatively give the federal government, it does not have.
The 10th Amendment embodied a revolutionary concept. Written just a few years after we had won our independence from Britain, the Constitution fundamentally changed the relationship between people and government.
For millennia, the source of power and authority had always been kings and government, and rights were seen as gifts by grace from the monarch. The Constitution inverted that understanding, with sovereignty beginning in the American people — beginning with We the People — and power given to government only to a limited degree.
cross-posted from the California Tenth Amendment Center
We would not need government if people could respect the rights of people on their own. In some ways, governments that protect the liberty of individuals does it against the wishes of everyone else in society. Its undemocratic in its nature since one person can veto the will of the people simply becuase it is their right to do so. The first amendment has been used to override the democratic process many times in our history for good reason because a person's rights exist an no form of government should be able to take those away.