The Tenth Amendment
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ton’s 83rd and 84th essays in The Federalist. Madison introduced it simply
to prevent a perverse application of the ancient legal maxim that a denial
of power over a specified right does not imply an affirmative grant of
power over an unnamed right.
This amendment is much misunderstood today, and it is sometimes
thought to be a source of new rights, such as the ‘‘right of privacy,’’ over
which Federal courts may establish jurisdiction. It should be kept in
mind, however, that the original purpose of this amendment was to limit
the powers of the Federal government, not to expand them.
The Tenth Amendment: Rights Retained by the States
This last amendment in the Bill of Rights was probably the one most eagerly desired by the various State conventions and State legislatures
that had demanded the addition of a bill of rights to the Constitution.
Throughout the country, the basic uneasiness with the new Constitution
was the dread that the Federal government would gradually enlarge its
powers and suppress the States’ governments. The Tenth Amendment
was designed to lay such fears to rest.
This amendment was simply a declaration that ‘‘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.’’ The Federalists maintained that the Framers at Philadelphia had meant from the
first that all powers not specifically assigned to the Federal government
were reserved to the States or the people of the States.
The amendment declares that powers are reserved ‘‘to the States respectively, or to the people,’’ meaning they are to be left in their original
state.
It should be noted that the Tenth Amendment does not say that powers not expressly delegated to the United States are reserved to the States.
The authors of the Bill of Rights considered and specifically rejected such
a statement. They believed that an amendment limiting the national government to its expressed powers would have seriously weakened it.
During much of our history, the Tenth Amendment was interpreted as
a limitation of the delegated powers of Congress. Since 1937, however,