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To: TheFrog
So all homicide cases should be held Federal Courts?

Ofcourse not.

We are talking about checks and balances.

On a practical level, local crimes are dealt with locally.

However, a murder must be considered a crime in every state, no state can pick and choose to ignore a murder and redefine the term to mean what it wants to e.g. it is not 'murder' to kill deformed infants.

105 posted on 10/29/2004 12:45:52 PM PDT by fortheDeclaration
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To: fortheDeclaration
We are talking about checks and balances.

from the article:

At bottom, then, the Tenth Amendment is not about federal vs. state, much less about federal-state "partnerships," block grants, "swapping," "turnbacks," or any of the other modern concepts of intergovernmental governance. It is about legitimacy.

As the final member of the Bill of Rights, and the culmination of the founding period, the Tenth Amendment recapitulates the philosophy of government first set forth in the Declaration of Independence, that governments are instituted to secure our rights, "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Without that consent, as manifest in the Constitution, power is simply not there.

It is the doctrine of enumerated powers, then, that gives content to the Tenth Amendment, informs its theory of legitimacy, and limits the federal government. Power is granted or delegated by the people, enumerated in the Constitution, and thus limited by virtue of that delegation and enumeration.

The Framers could hardly have enumerated all of our rights--a problem the Ninth Amendment was meant to address. They could enumerate the federal government's powers, which they did to restrain that government. The doctrine of enumerated powers was meant to be the principal line of defense against overweening government. The Bill of Rights, added two years after the Constitution was ratified, was meant as a secondary defense.

Today we need that secondary defense because enumerated powers has been abandoned in the face of rampant nationalism.

107 posted on 10/29/2004 12:53:51 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
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