Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
1791 amendment enumerating states' rights
The Tenth Amendment (Amendment X) to the United States Constitution, a part of the Bill of Rights, was ratified on December 15, 1791. It expresses the principle of federalism, whereby the federal government and the individual states share power, by mutual agreement. The Tenth Amendment prescribes that the federal government has only those powers delegated to it by the Constitution, and that all other powers not forbidden to the states by the Constitution are reserved to each state, or to the people.
The amendment, with origins before the American Revolution, was proposed by the 1st United States Congress in 1789 during its first term following the adoption of the Constitution. It was considered by many members as a prerequisite before they would ratify the Constitution, and particularly to satisfy demands of Anti-Federalists, who opposed the creation of a stronger federal government.
The purpose of this amendment is to reaffirm the principles of federalism and reinforce the notion of the federal government maintaining only limited, enumerated powers. Some legal scholars (including textualists and originalists) have effectively classified the amendment as a tautology, a statement affirming that the federal government does not have any rights that it does not have.
Text
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.
Drafting and adoption
The Tenth Amendment is similar to Article II of the Articles of Confederation:Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled. Thomas Burke, a vehement supporter of states' rights in the Continental Congress, originally proposed the text of what would later become the Tenth Amendment as an amendment to the Articles of Confederation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.