Tenth Amendment Center

Thomas Jefferson: “the States should be watchful to note every material usurpation on their rights; denounce them as they occur in the most peremptory terms; to protest against them as wrongs to which our present submission shall be considered, not as acknowledgments or precedents of right, but as a temporary.”

While the Framers understood the need for a federal government, what concerned them was the possibility that such a government would become a worse menace than no government at all. Their recent experience with the British government – which of course had been their government and against which they had taken up arms – had reinforced what they had learned through their study of history: that the biggest threat to the freedom and well-being of a people was their own government.

Calling on the feds – whether it’s though elections, or protests, or lawsuits, or rallies – is a failed strategy. So how about trying something new?

If the federal government has the exclusive right to judge the extent of its own powers it will continue to grow – regardless of elections.

In his speech at the Ohio Sovereignty Rally, Andrew Napolitano says, “In the long history of the world, very few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its maximum hour of danger. This is that moment and you are that generation! Now is the time to defend our freedoms.”

The Sovereigns of each State have never ceded to the Federal government any power not granted to it by the US Constitution

Thomas J. DiLorenzo, published author and senior fellow at the Mises Institute, discusses the principle of nullification as a devolution of power away from the central government into the hands of the state or the people, Thomas Jefferson and the Kentucky Resolves as resistance to the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, ways nullification was put into practice all across the Union in the early days of the Republic and more…

Wrote Elbridge Gerry: “the origin of all power is in the people, and that they have an incontestible right to check the creatures of their own creation”

In 1819 U.S. Supreme Court decision “McCullough v. Maryland,” Chief Justice John Marshall wrote, “An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy; because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation.”

The Ninth and Tenth Amendments mean absolutely nothing today as Americans have developed a level of naive trust for Congress, the White House and the U.S. Supreme Court that would have astonished the founders, a trust that will lead to our undoing as a great nation.

It is time to turn back the juggernaut of meddling, irresponsible, and bankrupting unconstitutional government and restore the vision of the framers of our Constitution.