10th amendment why is it important

Sign in. Log into your account. Password recovery. Recover your password. Forgot your password? Get help. Constitution of United States of America Home Constitutional Amendments Understanding the 10th Amendment. Understanding the 12th Amendment. Understanding the 13th Amendment. Understanding the 14th Amendment. In fact, they viewed federalism as an important counter-majoritarian feature in the administration of this vast and diverse republic.

This dynamic ensures that neither government can become too powerful, because citizens who feel oppressed by one sovereign can expect protection from the other.

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Join The Recorder now! Already have an account? Sign In. United States United States International. Law Firms. All Sections. Content Type Articles Cases. Limit Search to Slideshows. Interestingly, the Tenth Amendment has not been invoked by the Court to protect individual citizens against the exercise of federal power.

Whether the Tenth Amendment actually is, or ought to be, serving as an independent source of constitutional principles of federalism is a matter of great controversy, both on and off the Court. When initially added to the United States Constitution, the Tenth Amendment stood as a reminder of the continuing importance of states and of the foundational role of the people. The Amendment was significant not for the text it supplied, but for the structure it emphasized.

That structure has evolved over time. Recently, the United States Supreme Court has sought to revive the Amendment, with unfortunate results. The Court has found in the Amendment a license to create new barriers to the exercise of national authority, barriers that lack foundation in the text or structure of the Constitution or in sound policies of federalism. In the early part of the Twentieth Century, the Supreme Court relied on the Tenth Amendment in resisting expanded assertions of national power.

However, during the New Deal, Congress enacted a range of federal regulatory programs, such as Social Security, designed to stabilize the economy, protect workers, and promote the general welfare. Constitutional law. After a brief reemergence, the Tenth Amendment went back underground in , before returning, apparently to stay, in Good reasons existed for the disappearance of the Tenth Amendment.

The Tenth Amendment suffered from the assertion that the powers reserved to the states included the power to enforce racial inequality. Politically, socially, and morally, the Tenth Amendment seemed to speak to the past, not the present or the future. Along similar lines, the Court invoked the Eleventh Amendment to limit the ability of Congress to subject states to suit in federal court, even for claims that the states were violating federal law.

Even while reinvigorating the Tenth Amendment in New York v. In its current incarnation, however, the function of the Tenth Amendment is to impose a non-textual limit on the use of federal power. The Court has held that even when the federal government is regulating interstate commerce, as authorized by Article I, section 8 of the Constitution, the federal government still may not invade certain protected enclaves of state sovereignty.

For example, in New York v. United States , the Court held that the Tenth Amendment prohibited Congress from enacting a comprehensive plan for the disposal of radioactive waste that required states to assume responsibility for the disposal of waste within their borders.

That reading runs counter to the text of the Tenth Amendment. By way of policy justification, the Court has suggested that it must draw clear lines between domains of state and federal authority. The blurring of federal and state functions, the Court asserts, would undermine the accountability of government officials. The citizens would not know to which government entity they should address policy concerns.

Scholars have questioned the empirical underpinnings of this line of argument. Are people really so easily confused? Moreover, given the extensive overlap of state and federal power in so many areas, how important is it that some area of state exclusivity be maintained? Citizens would need a fairly sharp sense of discernment to know which would be the few areas in which the federal government was immune from responsibility.