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Is the United States truly a federal country?
If the federal government can use the supremacy clause to outlaw a harmless plant for national security reasons, does the 10th Amendment do anything other than allow states to make laws the federal government isn't interested in making? Are we not then a unitary government, just a lazy one?
I've aced three political classes so far, I'm on my fourth. I know exactly what federalism is. But if the states don't have the power to decide on issues that are clearly not in the enumerated powers, what good is the 10th Amendment? So we can freely choose where to put our stop signs? The federal government's power has been growing significantly ever since the Civil War. I'm simply asking if anyone else believes the federal government has become so powerful that it shares characteristics with unitary governments.
2 Answers
- davidjohnston29Lv 78 years agoFavorite Answer
To quote the American Supreme Court in UNITED STATES v. SPRAGUE, "The Tenth Amendment was intended to confirm the understanding of the people at the time the Constitution was adopted, that powers not granted to the United States were reserved to the states or to the people. It added nothing to the instrument as originally ratified and has [282 U.S. 716, 734] no limited and special operation"
So, no. The Tenth Amendment doesn't do anything. It's interesting to note the contrast with Canada, where constitutionally, provinces have specifically set forth powers and everything not specifically provincial is Federal. Canadian provinces are much more politically powerful than American states. Now to be sure, it would be too much to derive causation from correlation. One reason why Canadian provinces are more powerful is because there are so many fewer of them giving each one of them more political leverage and never having tried to secede in the past when they threaten to secede in the present, that threat has a lot more teeth.
So, yes, American federalism is one in which history has trended away from the states having as much autonomy as they originally had, and more toward a unitary state. But then this was a natural outgrowth of a failed secession attempt.