The Tenth Amendment guarantees state rights in the US, limiting federal power to those listed in the Constitution. The Supreme Court ruled in McCullough v. Maryland that federal laws take precedence over state laws. State rights resurfaced during the Civil War, but the powers of the states declined after the Fourteenth and Seventeenth Amendments and the expansion of the Commerce Clause.
In the United States (USA), state rights are the political rights and powers states have vis-à-vis the federal government. The rights of the state are guaranteed in the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states that “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people, respectively.” The term also refers to the political argument that the constitution limits the federal government’s powers to those specifically listed in the constitution and extends the states’ powers to all other areas.
The US Supreme Court first heard the state’s rights issue in McCullough v. Maryland. This case occurred when the federal government established a federal bank in Maryland, which was exempt from state taxes by law. Maryland attempted to enforce its state laws by taxing the bank. The Supreme Court ruled that federal laws generally take precedence over state laws; thus, Maryland could not use its state laws to tax a bank that was exempt under federal law. Since this decision, legal arguments have focused on the extent of state power, particularly whether states possess powers to the exclusion of the federal government.
State rights resurfaced during the American Civil War, in which several Southern states seceded from the United States in 1861 and formed the Confederate States of America, in part due to conflicting views on state rights. The Confederacy maintained that each of its states possessed the right to prosecute runaway slaves in Northern states where slavery was outlawed to capture and return slaves. Northern states argued that Southern states’ intrusion into their territory in order to recapture runaway slaves violated their state’s rights to outlaw slavery within their borders.
In the years following the Civil War, the powers of the states steadily declined and the federal government assumed an increasing role. The decline began with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which applied procedural due process and most of the provisions of the Bill of Rights to states. Notably, the Seventeenth Amendment required individual voters, not states, to elect members of the United States Senate, eliminating the direct role of states in forming the federal government. The expansion of laws surrounding the Commerce Clause gave the federal government the power to control most areas of the national commerce as well.
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