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.
Again the issue is not 'nationalism' vs 'localism', the issue is the individual vs the state, all states, local, state and federal.
The Federal gov't is trying to overthrow a gun ban in DC as being an infringment of individual rights.
In the Alaska debate, the question was asked, would the Senate candidates support such action. The GOP candidate did, but the Democrat (who stated he supported the 2nd Amendment) then made an appeal to the right of 'local control'.
The point is that each level of gov't must defend individual rights and each is a threat to the same because each has power it can use against the individual.
The cry of 'states rights' is a misleading one since 'states' can be just as abusive of individual freedoms as the federal gov't.
In fact Madison's appeal for a federal gov't was that a larger gov't was less likely to be corrupted then a small one.