What does the Tenth Amendment say?

0:05The tenth amendment was included, I mean, you have to think about the background. Where were we in that moment in time? We just overthrown England. There was concern about an all-powerful monarchy and all-powerful government. We had tried to have a loose what was called a confederation of states, where every state per itself with very loose ties between them and it failed. It was clear that you need something more powerful than what was called the Articles of Confederation in order to be a nation even at that time. Just to think about some of the things that you might worry about, you might worry about commerce. If the states are always at war with each other on trade, it's really hard to get trade going across borders. You might need a national government for that. You might need the national government to make things the same, so you might need a single currency that is used in every state. Those are the things.

0:58You might need a federal government in charge of the military because at that point, security was a real issue for this little country, and having the states handle this on their own wasn't going to work. What they tried to think of is, what were the big things that we needed for a nation to thrive at that time? What were the things that you needed a nation for and then leave the rest to the states? We call those powers that the states possess. It's a weird name police powers.

1:27Even though it doesn't mean police in the way that we think of it. Well, police powers were aware the states were basically in charge of everything else. They were in charge of the health and welfare of the people. They were in charge of a huge number of decisions that took place in terms of everybody's day-to-day life. The federal government was this, break in case of emergency, used for the big things that you need to make a real nation.