states-rights

Articles 5, 6, and 7

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During the Constitutional Convention, delegates from around the new United States of America came together to formulate a strong nation to replace the weak confederacy that emerged after the Revolutionary War. Article Five of said Constitution was written to give the country the ability to change as the world around it changed. Article Six was created to hold up the financial reputation of America by transferring debts, as well as sustain the standards set in earlier articles as the supreme law of the United States. Article Seven was created to streamline the process of ratifying the Constitution. 

Article Five spells out the process that the federal government has to go through in order to amend the Constitution. Either Congress can present an amendment by gathering two-thirds of both the House and the Senate to approve the amendment, or if the legislatures of two-thirds of the states come together to propose an amendment, Congress will call a convention and amendments will be proposed. Following this, three-fourths of state legislators must ratify the amendment. Congress could also decide to have the states call a convention purely to ratify an amendment. A final clause was tacked on to the end of this amendment stating that no amendment could be passed inhibiting the slave trade until 1808. Article Six transfers the debt and prior treaties from the national government under the Articles of Confederation to the new Constitution. It also states that the federal government (and therefore the Constitution) is the supreme authority in America. Finally, it specifies that oaths should be made by legislators and executives to the people of the United States instead of a religious test as a barrier to entry. Article Seven of the Constitution states that only nine states are required to ratify the Constitution for it to be the binding federal document, and it lists all 13 states and the order in which they will call a Convention to vote on the validity of the Constitution. 

An example of a complex ratification process is the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), an amendment to codify the equality of the sexes in law, was ratified by 30 states within the first year of its proposal but it met opposition after this 30-state benchmark over concerns that women would no longer be exempt from compulsory military service as well as other issues. There are other cases of discrepancy between federal and state power like some campaign finance laws and the legalization of marijuana in spite of the Controlled Substances Act.

During the initial creation of the country, the goal was as little central regulation as possible, but this turned out to be a weak way to organize the United States as many consequential regulations changed from state to state. The Constitution’s significance comes from the combination of general principles found in state Constitutions and rolled them into one document that set the federal government as the highest rule of law in the United States. Instead of changing the federal supremacy clause, the Constitution should clarify the Elasticity Clause or refine the Tenth Amendment to clarify specifically how elastic the powers of the federal government is or where state jurisdiction starts. 

Bibliography

Congress, The Federal Status of Marijuana and the Expanding Policy Gap with States, H.R. Doc., at 3 (Mar. 6, 2023). Accessed June 2, 2023. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12270.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Equal Rights Amendment.” Britannica. Last modified April 27, 2023. Accessed June 2, 2023. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Equal-Rights-Amendment.

Oyez. “Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee V. Federal Election Commission.” In Oyez. Last modified 2023. Accessed June 2, 2023. https://www.oyez.org/cases/1995/95-489.

Aaron – The Tenth Amendment

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The Tenth Amendment establishes the boundaries for the power relationship between the states and the federal government. It was added to the Constitution as a mechanism for keeping the federal government in check by allotting most of the power to enact laws in the hands of each state, a system known as federalism. Today, federalism allows diverse political, cultural, and ideological views to be expressed differently based on the preference of the voters in each state. This system also has its downsides, even when most Americans agree on certain issues, the federal government has no way of enforcing these ideas onto states with opposing views.

Due to the tensions between the state and the federal government, this amendment has been the focus of numerous court cases that have more clearly defined the relationship between the state and federal government. For instance, Wickard v. Filburn (1942) was a precedent that showed that the federal government has more power than once thought inside states. The case concerned a Kansas farmer who had produced a surplus of wheat. His wheat was ruled to be a subject of the commerce clause. The court’s decision for this was based on the fact that his surplus was able to influence the price of wheat elsewhere and therefore needed to be regulated under the clause. This clause was originally meant for the federal government to be a mediator in inter-state commerce but resulted in the federal government claiming that every transaction of commerce-related issues could be regulated by them. This interpretation of the Tenth Amendment vastly expanded the boundaries in which the federal government had power as they now were able to regulate almost all commerce.

Recently, judges have started to revert to a more limited central government. The overturning of Roe v. Wade (2022) set a precedent that state and local governments decide all public health issues. Additionally, another very important case with modern applications is Printz v. United States (1997). In this case, the supreme court used the Constitution’s “anti-commandeering” clauses to rule in favor of states’ rights to not enforce federal laws. 

The majority of the time the Tenth Amendment protects people from a super-powerful central government. On the flip side, however, it has also allowed many states to continue to promote things such as racial inequality. During this time the federal government sometimes couldn’t implement laws promoting racial equality in states even when the majority of Americans were in favor of racial equality. This is because the power to regulate these types of laws was given to the state by the Tenth Amendment.

To summarize, the interpretation of the Tenth Amendment has varied dramatically, but it has always set the boundaries between the state and federal governments. Although the Tenth Amendment has not always been used to do good things, it continues to protect people from an all-powerful government and it allows for the diverse views of the people in different states to be expressed.