1/ In my Constitutional Interpretation course at Princeton, the first thing I do is explain the difference between the authority of the national government as a government of delegated and enumerated powers, and the authority of the states as governments of general jurisdiction.
2/ States possess police powers to protect public health, safety, and morals and advance the common good. The national government possesses no such plenary authority. Nor are the powers of the states delegated to them by, or derivative of the powers of, the national government.
3/ The Constitution's 10th Amendment is (simply) a reminder that "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." The second thing I do in the course is to explain
4/ the differences between executive and legislative authority. I note that the distinction sometimes becomes fuzzy at the edges, but that should not be permitted to obscure the fact that it is usually clear enough. Congresses and state legislatures ought not to try to execute
5/ the laws they make, nor should they purport to remove by legislation authority constitutionally conferred upon the executive; presidents and governors ought not to legislate--that's not their job, and when they do it they violate their oath of office and become usurpers.
6/ I point out that usurpations of legislative authority by presidents, for example, are usually crystal clear to those who do not belong to the president's party or who have strong ideological differences with him. But those of his own party and point of view seem blind to them.
7/ Such usurpations by a Democratic president become a precedent for those by the next Republican president. Then his usurpations become a precedent for the next Democrat to hold the office. And the beat goes on. Those who had been complaining about the last president's actions
8/ become apologists for the next president's actions. That beat goes on, too. The odor of hyposcrisy so fills the public nostrils that we end up in a state of olfactory adaptation: no one even notices the stench anymore.
9/ Alexandra Wolf's reporting in 2017 of my (then) thirty years or so of warning about all this: wsj.com/articles/rober…
10/ The online (EdX) version of my Constitutional Interpretation course. (It's free of charge, by the way.)
edx.org/course/constit…
edx.org/course/constit…
