Thursday, August 26, 2010

Ignorance And The 10th Amendment


I saw this image on a conservative blog and thought it was interesting because it was so simplistic and it spoke volumes in regards to the right's understanding of the Constitution.  It shows their willingness to oversimplify a complex situation so that they can digest it easily, but in doing so they wind up losing the full meaning.

Here is the full text of the 10th Amendment:
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.
The above flag of the "tenthers" leaves out a lot - it implies that the federal government has zero authority and that all powers are reserved to the people.  What the flag leaves out is that anything not delegated to the federal government is delegated to the States or the people.  What the flag forgets to mention are all the powers granted to the federal government.

Supporters of the 10th Amendment (and critics of everything Obama) like to reference this amendment in things like their opposition to the health care and immigration reform because they state that the Constitution does not specifically enumerate those responsibilities to the federal government, but the document they love to hate does specifically lay out those powers, but vaguely to allow for flexibility, for if the government was founded with a strict set of dos and don'ts, it would have been unable to deal with the many challenges that were ahead and would have surely ceased in a few years like the Confederacy.

Here is a more appropriate flag for the right:


In case you were wondering, the above flag was for the Master/slave fetishists - the right's desires to be the master while keeping everyone else in a subservient position.  Maybe if conservatives were open to compromise we wouldn't be in our current situation - with a centrist approach everyone gets a little of what they want and you avoid running the risk of going all in on what amounts to a junk bond (like the deregulation of Wall Street and the subsequent economic meltdown)...

1 comment:

  1. Federal law superceeds State law, especially when it comes to individual rights as the Civil War proved.
    Least we forget these conservatives would like to go back to the original Constitution, which did not yet have protections for blacks, women, and other minorities.

    ReplyDelete

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