915
The taxing power 916
The commerce power 917
Police power 918
State activities and instrumentalities 919

RESERVED STATE POWERS

Amendment 10

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.

Scope and Purpose

"The Tenth Amendment was intended to confirm the understanding of the
people at the time the Constitution was adopted, that powers not granted
to the United States were reserved to the States or to the people. It
added nothing to the instrument as originally ratified * * *."[1] That
this provision was not conceived to be a yardstick for measuring the
powers granted to the Federal Government or reserved to the States was
clearly indicated by its sponsor, James Madison, in the course of the
debate which took place while the amendment was pending concerning
Hamilton's proposal to establish a national bank. He declared that:
"Interference with the power of the States was no constitutional
criterion of the power of Congress. If the power was not given, Congress
could not exercise it; if given, they might exercise it, although it
should interfere with the laws, or even the Constitutions of the
States."[2] Nevertheless, for approximately a century, from the death of
Marshall until 1937, the Tenth Amendment was frequently invoked to
curtail powers expressly granted to Congress, notably the powers to
regulate interstate commerce, to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment and to
lay and collect taxes.

The first, and logically the strongest, effort to set up the Tenth
Amendment as a limitation on federal power was directed to the expansion
of that power by virtue of the necessary and proper clause. In McCulloch
_v._ Maryland,[3] the Attorney-General of Maryland cited the charges
made by the enemies of the Constitution that it contained "* * * a vast
variety of powers, lurking under the generality of its phraseology,
which would prove highly dangerous to the liberties of the people, and
the rights of the states, * * *" and he cited the adoption of the Tenth
Amendment to allay these apprehensions, in support of his contention
that the power to create corporations was reserved by that amendment to
the Stat