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The Tenth Amendment is not all that hard to understand:

"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."

Since even Harvard graduates can easily understand this simple language, the fact that it is so blatantly ignored must mean that the President, and the majority of Congress, rejects this portion of the Constitution they swore to defend.

Nowhere among the enumerated powers is there authority for the federal government to be in the mortgage loan business -- as in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Nowhere is there authority for the federal government to be in the banking, or insurance business -- as in Citibank, and AIG. Nowhere is there authority for the federal government to be in the health care business, or the business, or in the energy business, or in most of the places where the federal government is now flexing its regulatory muscles.

Ron Paul and a few others in Washington have raised their voices in opposition to this trend. Now, there are new rumblings across the land that gives new hope to those who still believe that the U.S. Constitution must not be ignored.

Oklahoma Representative Charles Key introduced a resolution in the state legislature last year calling on the federal government to "cease and desist" issuing federal mandates beyond the scope of the enumerated powers of the Constitution. The House passed the resolution, but it died in the Senate.

This year, State Senator Randy Brogdon joined the effort and the resolution passed in the Oklahoma Senate 25 - 17. The resolution is quite clear" ":

"...the State of Oklahoma hereby claims sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the Constitution of the United States."

This should be clear enough, even for Harvard graduates, especially those who claim to be Constitutional scholars.

Fifteen other states have similar resolutions under consideration. It may be safe to conclude that the several states have had enough of their constitutional rights usurped by the feds. It's about time. Of course, it will take a lot of backbone for the states to make these resolutions meaningful. The feds hold the purse-strings which puts the states at a disadvantage. The feds can simply refuse to send money to the states that refuse to cooperate with their unconstitutional mandates.

The Democrat bail-out bill, for example, mandates that states remove the time limit on welfare checks as a condition of receiving a portion of the bail-out monies. It will be hard for politicians to refuse the funds, unless they know that their constituents want them to refuse the funds. The states that do accept these conditions, and the funds, will have to find new funds to continue the limitless welfare payments when the fed funds run dry.

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