The Tenth Amendment... States Have Rights Too

We close out the Bill of Rights series with one of the most important, yet arguably least understood amendments.

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.

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Not unlike the Ninth Amendment, the Tenth Amendment is somewhat of a catch all. The Founding Fathers closed out the Bill of Rights with what I believe to be among the most important amendments up to this point.

Anything not explicitly written into the Constitution as a right of the federal government falls under the purview of individual states, if not to individual citizens themselves. This is one of the greatest limitations on federal powers in all of our founding documents.

In law enforcement, the Tenth Amendment has been nicknamed the “Police Powers” amendment. Under the Tenth Amendment, each state has the right to establish their own police agencies and organize them as they see fit.

Sovereign Citizens might take issue with that last part.

To that end, each state has its own licensing standards. For example, Texas has the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement (TCOLE) while states like California use the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST). It’s up to each state how they want to train and license their police officers.

This wasn’t a power specifically enumerated in the Constitution, so it was deferred to the states. They had the authority to create their own law enforcement agencies.

There are federal standards set by Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC) and others, but those mostly amount to best practices or “gold standards”, not necessarily rules, though that can be the case at times.

Without the Tenth Amendment, we might have been stuck with national police or military police, which is something you see in a lot of foreign countries with varying degrees of success or tyranny.

In smaller countries with largely homogenized cultures, that might be fine. But the United States is rather unique. We inhabit a massive landmass with dozens of distinct cultures. Hundreds if you count the small subsets between cultures. Just look at the argument over which southern state has the best barbecue if you don’t believe me.

The answer is Texas, by the way. Try the brisket next time you’re there.

I’d even argue Texans share more in common with Mexicans along the border than they do a state like Maine. Can you imagine a bureaucratically standardized police force managing to serve such disparate communities?

The Tenth Amendment creates flexibility. It’s why Louisiana can run their entire legal system through the Napoleonic Code while the rest of us use English Common Law. It’s their call, not the feds.

There are other ramifications beyond law enforcement. I don’t want to get into a political discussion on healthcare (though I will in a few paragraphs), so for now I’ll just say one of the more valid criticisms of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was the fact that there is no right to universal healthcare enumerated in the Constitution.

One could argue the Ninth Amendment opens the door for that. However, critics of the ACA can point to the Tenth Amendment and say each state has the right to create their own version of the ACA that applies to the citizens of their state, rather than have the federal government administrate from their detached position.

Testing the Limits

As you can see, universal healthcare questions run into the same questions a national police force would run into. Would a one-size-fits-all system work for such a large and incredibly diverse country? Rural Iowans don’t have the same healthcare concerns as New Yorkers in the Bronx, for example.

Proponents of universal healthcare in the United States often point to European countries that have universal healthcare systems as proofs of concept for an American version.

They tend to neglect the fact that individual nations have their own healthcare systems, not the European Union as a whole. The United States has about 350 million people, and the European Union has about 450 million people. So rather than compare individual nations within Europe to the United States, let’s compare the European Union to the United States.

When we shift the parameters to a more accurate comparison, we see that individual nations having their own healthcare systems would be about par with individual states having their own healthcare systems.

Well that’s great news for universal healthcare advocates in a way. Rather than demand the federal government provide a service the Constitution prohibits it from providing, they could advocate individual states do the same thing.

The Tenth Amendment provides for that. And for the nerds in my audience (which includes me), that makes the comparison make sense. Individual nations within the European Union are largely comparable to individual states within the United States when it comes to population size and cultural similarities.

I know we took a left turn into a healthcare discussion on a law enforcement focused platform. However, the same arguments can, and have been, applied to law enforcement.

The Tenth Amendment stands as a bulwark against federal government overreach. Ignore its authority at your own peril.