The Crucial Part of the Trump-Harris Debate: States’ Rights
“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.”
This is the text of the Tenth Amendment. On December 15, 1791 the required three-fourths of the states had ratified the Constitution thanks to the Bill of Rights. Without the Bill of Rights and, most important, without the Tenth Amendment, the Constitution wouldn’t have been ratified because the states’ leaders didn’t want to relinquish their states’ rights to sovereignty.I’ll get to Trump and Harris in a minute.The history of the United States since the Constitution’s ratification can be seen as a tug of war between the states and the federal government. The federal government’s goal has been the erosion of the individual states’ sovereignty for the sake of centralization.Only centralized power, centralized in Washington, according to Hamilton and his followers, can do great things like taxing American citizens, building up the…