WhatFinger


Trashing the Tenth Amendment.

Most disturbing impact of SCOTUS rulings: They've made the federal government the 51st state



Let's refresh our memories about exactly what the Tenth Amendment says:
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.

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That is not ambiguous. If the Constitution doesn't expressly grant the federal government a power or expressly prohibit the states from exercising that same power, then the states and not the federal government have that power. But in both the ObamaCare ruling and the gay marriage ruling last week, the Supreme Court ruled as if the Tenth Amendment did not exist. In essence, by ruling as it did in both cases, it essentially established the federal government as the 51st state - and let there be no doubt, as a more-equal-than-all-others 51st state. First let's consider the ObamaCare ruling. Even though the statute says subsidies are only available to those who bought their policies on exchanges "established by the State," the majority ruled that the federal government can still subsidize those who bought on the federal exchange - because ObamaCare doesn't work if they can't. (In other words, the Democrats wrote a law that doesn't work so the Supremes once again rewrote it in an attempt to make it work.) What they decided, in essence, is that the federal government is a state. That is the only way to square the statutory language with the Court's ruling. Now consider the gay marriage ruling. The Constitution says nothing about anyone's power to define what marriage is. An obvious reading of the Tenth Amendment makes it clear, therefore, that this power belongs to the states. In his majority opinion, Justice Kennedy wrote that it's right at this point in history to change the definition of marriage because of how the culture has evolved. Now you can agree or disagree with that, but if it is the right thing to do, then it's up to the individual state legislatures to do it. The Constitution grants no authority to the federal government to overrule a culture-based judgement call made by states on the basis of the Justices' personal opinions about the rightness or wrongness of cultural trends. But that's exactly what the Justices did. What are the legal implications of that? In practice, the Court has decided that powers not granted to the federal government may be reserved for the states, but whenever the federal government feels like it, it will function as a state and decide what the states must do. Among other things, this takes away from the power of your vote. When you elect state legislators and governors, they may be empowered to make the decisions that govern your state - or they may be overruled by the supreme 51st state, which presumes to exercise powers not granted to it in the Constitution, unless it is in fact the 51st state. Liberals have never liked the idea that the federal government's power is limited and that the states can make their own choices. But until now the Supreme Court has served as an effective check against their desire to turn the federal government into the de facto state that really rules the other 50. With these rulings, that legal firewall appears to have collapsed. And that portends more trouble than most of us can possibly imagine.


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