Gateway to Liberty: The Constitutional Power of the 10th Amendment

No amendment in our Bill of Rights is more deeply rooted in American history, politics, and government than our Tenth Amendment. Its roots are deep in the colonies' histories, in the framing and ratification of our first constitution, our Articles of Confederation, and in the framing and ratification of our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. They might be traced back to English history and the authority of self-governing entities in medieval law, and even to the form of civil government which God gave His people when they entered the Promised Land after their exodus from Egypt, though that is beyond the scope of this work.  It should be enough for us to know that the Tenth Amendments protection of federalism— of each state's right to govern its own internal affairs except for those few areas of authority which the states delegated to our central government in the Constitution and those few powers which the states forbade to themselves in our fundamental law— was not an afterthought b