The members of the 10th Amendment Foundation very strongly believe that if our great nation is to survive as a democratic republic with freedom for all our citizens, we must all make sure that the Constitution , that was written for that very purpose must be faithfully adhered to.
We are deeply concerned that far too m any of our people, including members of all three of the branches of government, do not understand either the Constitution or of the importance of following it and not ignoring it to the extent that we have been doing and are ignoring it today.
The importance of a knowledge of history is that it teaches us the mistakes of the past, and we should have learned in the last century the dangers of allowing any country to become ruled by a "rule of man" where anything anyone thinks might be a good idea or might even be considered to be a great necessity can be done without any reference to the social contract that served as the basis of the government having any power at all. Clear examples of nations operating under the Rule of Man within recent history were Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Communist China, Laos under Pol Pot, and Italy under Mussolini.
Nations that we think of as great democratic republics have operated under the "Rule of Law." We are gradually (but faster and faster) allowing those who are in positions of government to ignore the "Rule of Law" and take the short cuts that lead to the "Rule of Man" and ultimate tyranny. In this section, we hope to offer real education as to the major issues where our executive, Legislative and judicial branches of government are doing exactly that!
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Here's a description of the Bond v US case from Rob Natelson at the 10thAmendmentCenter.com:
In Bond v. United States, the Court held that a person prosecuted under a federal criminal statute may defend himself by showing that the statute exceeds the federal government’s enumerated powers, and therefore violates the Tenth Amendment.
There is no need for a state to intervene to defend its own interests under the Tenth Amendment. A threatened individual can do it alone.
As the opinion points out, federal political power derives from the people, not from the states. At the Founding, the people, acting through state conventions, divided political power among different sets of agents—state officials for most purposes, federal officials for enumerated purposes. State officials certainly benefit from the boundaries on federal power, and accordingly have standing to challenge
federal actions outside those boundaries (as most states are doing in response to Obamacare). But the primary beneficiaries of federalism are the people.
The court also applied several other doctrines that are accurate from a strictly originalist point of view:
(1) A treaty can enable Congress to adopt some legislation that would be outside its scope in the absence of a treaty. This is because authority to make treaties, and to pass necessary and proper laws in execution thereof, are themselves enumerated powers. (I don’t particularly like this result, but it appears to be what the Founders had in mind–see The Original Constitution: What It Actually Said and Meant).
(2) The Treaty Power is given to the President-and-Senate, not to Congress, but Congress can implement treaties under the Necessary and Proper Clause. As the court said “The ultimate issue of
the statute’s validity turns in part on whether the law can be deemed ‘necessary and proper for carrying into Execution’ the President’s Article II, §2 Treaty Power. ” In other words, if the federal criminal statute is valid, it must be so under the Necessary and Proper Clause as applied to the Treaty Power.
(3) The court avoided mentioning any possible reliance on the sadly-overused Commerce Power, and thereby appears to have indirectly reinforced United States v. Lopez, the 1995 decision that finally put some boundaries on congressional use of the Commerce Power to enact criminal laws. 