Speaking of Smaller Government:

Today as been declared Tenth Amendment Day:

Thomas Jefferson described the Tenth Amendment as “the foundation of the Constitution” and added, “to take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn … is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.”

The text of the Tenth Amendment, is:

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.

I am not a Constitutional scholar, and I didn't stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, so I have to settle for Wikipedia's article. It appears that for about 150 years, this amendment was taken more or less literally, but with United States v. Sprague in 1931 (wasn't something going on with the economy at that time?), it became acceptable to treat the Tenth Amendment as a truism that added little to no value to the Constitution. I somehow think that the federalists who fought for the Tenth Amendment to ensure the federal government did not usurp the principles of subsidiarity with respect to state and local governments would be surprised to hear that the amendment was pretty much worthless.

Since the precedent set in the 30's, the Supreme Court has only declared a handful of laws unconstitutional for violating the Tenth Amendment, often getting around the Tenth Amendment by resting on the Commerce Clause Powers of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution:

The Congress shall have power . . . To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;

Which apparently, includes a woman growing weed in her own house for her personal medical problems, in a state where such activity was legal. According to Wikipedia:

Most recently, the Commerce Clause was cited in the 2005 decision Gonzales v. Raich. In this case, a California woman sued the Drug Enforcement Administration after her medical marijuana crop was seized and destroyed by Federal agents. Medical marijuana was explicitly made legal under California state law by Proposition 215; however, marijuana is prohibited at the federal level by the Controlled Substances Act. Even though the woman grew the marijuana strictly for her own consumption and never sold any, the Supreme Court stated that growing one's own marijuana affects the interstate market of marijuana, citing the Wickard v. Filburn decision. The theory was that the marijuana could enter the stream of interstate commerce, even if it clearly wasn't grown for that purpose and it was unlikely ever to happen. It therefore ruled that this practice may be regulated by the federal government under the authority of the Commerce Clause.

The Supreme Court, in its decision, stated:

The Commerce Clause emerged as the Framers' response to the central problem giving rise to the Constitution itself: the absence of any federal commerce power under the Articles of Confederation. For the first century of our history, the primary use of the Clause was to preclude the kind of discriminatory state legislation that had once been permissible. Then, in response to rapid industrial development and an increasingly interdependent national economy, Congress “ushered in a new era of federal regulation under the commerce power,” beginning with the enactment of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887 and the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890.

I put great importance in the Tenth Amendment, and if the quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson is true, I agree with him on this matter. I am interested to know what my attorney friends might think.

(Hat tip to The Humble Libertarian.)