This is probably taken out of context. Yes, we all know the 10th amendment. If you don't, it's the quote on the left in the image. However, there's a LOT of nuance in there and they have historically frequently overlapped resulting in about 240 years of case law meant to sort out precisely when a power is federal or state. Let me give you two obvious and relevant examples:
Can a woman kill her own fetus in utero? For most of my life, the SCOTUS's answer was: yes, this is within the domain of the feds and so we can have one nationwide rule. While there's nothing in the Constitution that says a woman can murder her own offspring up to the moment it passes the birth canal, the SCOTUS held for 50 years that this matter would not be regulated by the individual states.
Can a man marry a man? While there's nothing in the Constitution that specifically states it's the federal government's job to issue marriage licenses, the Obergefell decision legalizing Alphabet marriages asserts a nationwide rule over the rights of individual states to regulate the issue.
Yes, they're both wrongly decided. Both murder and marriage licenses are the states' purview, but they also illustrate that we deal with this question all the time when some clever lawyer figures out a way to claim something is implied by the Constitution to be one way or another. There are plenty of reasons Sotomayor could have said that statement in a perfectly valid way. She makes enough objectionable choices for which she can be criticized. We don't need to take cheap shots, IMO. It's beneath us and opens us up to equally cheap counter-accusations of being waycist.
This is probably taken out of context. Yes, we all know the 10th amendment. If you don't, it's the quote on the left in the image. However, there's a LOT of nuance in there and they have historically frequently overlapped resulting in about 240 years of case law meant to sort out precisely when a power is federal or state. Let me give you two obvious and relevant examples:
Can a woman kill her own fetus in utero? For most of my life, the SCOTUS's answer was: yes, this is within the domain of the feds and so we can have one nationwide rule. While there's nothing in the Constitution that says a woman can murder her own offspring up to the moment it passes the birth canal, the SCOTUS held for 50 years that this matter would not be regulated by the individual states.
Can a man marry a man? While there's nothing in the Constitution that specifically states it's the federal government's job to issue marriage licenses, the Obergefell decision legalizing Alphabet marriages asserts a nationwide rule over the rights of individual states to regulate the issue.
Yes, they're both wrongly decided. Both murder and marriage licenses are the states' purview, but they also illustrate that we deal with this question all the time when some clever lawyer figures out a way to claim something is implied by the Constitution to be one way or another. There are plenty of reasons Sotomayor could have said that statement in a perfectly valid way. She makes enough objectionable choices for which she can be criticized. We don't need to take cheap shots, IMO. It's beneath us and opens us up to equally cheap counter-accusations of being waycist.