Historian Thomas Woods lectures on States' Rights
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.
—U.S. CONSTITUTION, AMENDMENT X
Delegation from the people gives power its legitimacy. Enumeration limits that power. Roger Pilon, the Senior Fellow at the Cato Center for Constitutional Studies, judiciously explains: “What the Tenth Amendment says, in a nutshell, is this: if a power has not been delegated to the federal government, that government simply does not have it. In that case it becomes a question of state law whether the power is held by a state or, failing that, by the people, having never been granted to either government.” Though, the fundamental purpose of delegation and circumscribing the limits of power under the auspices of a written constitution was to effectively restrain the exercise of government power within knowable limits prescribed by law. “The two fundamental correlative elements of constitutionalism,” observes Charles McIlwain, “for which all lovers of liberty must yet fight are the legal limits to arbitrary power and a complete political responsibility of government to the governed.”
To the State governments are reserved all legislation and administration in affairs which concern their own citizens only, and to the federal government is given whatever concerns foreigners or the citizens of other States; these functions alone being made federal. The one is domestic, the other the foreign branch of the same government; neither having control over the other, but within its own department. There are one or two exceptions to this partition of power.
—Thomas Jefferson
The state governments not only retain every power, jurisdiction, and right not delegated to the United States, by the constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, but they are constituent and necessary parts of the federal government; and without their agency in their political character, there could be neither a senate, nor president of the United States, the choice of the latter depending immediately, and on the former, immediately, upon the legislatures of the several states in the union.
—St. George Tucker
