Posted on 11/14/2016 9:51:10 AM PST by Olog-hai
A masterpiece of vaguery. It has played small role in constitutional law. As I have said elsewhere the reason the federal power has grown to the current state, is not because it stole that power but because the states threw it in the lap of the feds. Or they were incompetent or unwilling to guarantee citizens rights. See Jim Crow.
In such situations the constitution allows the feds to develop programs to correct the unconstitutional behavior.
State power should be easier to understand and control but I live in Illinois so that appears to be false.
If you were citing the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments, you might have been making a point. But you did not.
And nothing you say refutes my claim that the Tenth Amendment’s design was to maintain the explicit provisions of Articles 1 through 3 regarding the powers given to the three branches of federal government.
As for Jim Crow, a war was fought to reverse that. Nothing to do with expanding the federal government’s aegis, and certainly not anything to do with expanding the role of the executive beyond that stipulated in Article 2.
Apologies; got Dred Scott mixed up with Jim Crow. But neither of those decisions were a Constitutional excuse for expanding the power of the federal executive.
It was due to the excesses in the Jim Crow south that demands to protect the civil rights of black citizen became a major issue and Brown vs Board was clearly an expansion of constitutional law. It even involved US military forces in enforcing the ruling.
Federal judges today make decisions on the shape of congressional districts which ensures minority victories. This is an attack on the fundamental aspect of democratic representation. Federal judges make scores of rulings every election with the Civil Rights laws in mind.
Plessy vs Ferguson was the ruling which made Jim Crow laws constitutional.
And one of the results of the Civil War was a great increase in federal power in many areas. It is true that the government shrank rapidly and substantially but never returned to the size before the CW. The tiny federal army had to be built from scratch allowing the Rebellion to grow in strength.
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