Matt R. Erickson
Mark’s greatest insights came from his great-grandfather’s monetary papers which relayed one conversation with Floyd Johnson. Floyd had brought up that the federal government seemed to be growing immensely powerful, not by amendment as was the express means provided by Article V of the Constitution for changing federal power, but merely somehow. Mark Adamson noted that the Tenth Amendment very clearly established the ‘rule’ of American government, that with ratification of the Constitution, government power became divided into federal and State jurisdictions. Mark Adamson likened this 10th Amendment principle to a pie, with the small sliver of federal authority delegated to the federal government as outlined by the Constitution, with the States retaining the remainder of the government power pie as reserved powers. Floyd stated he agreed only in principle. He stated that in practice the federal government now all but consumed the mostly insignificant State government authorities, with States being now forced to tow the federal line. Floyd therefore argued for a pie in which the small sliver went to the State governments, where the bulk of the pie was now federal. Mark Adamson conceded that the government model in principle did not seem to correspond with the government model in practice, and therefore argued that they were both missing some critical interim step which somehow allowed the transition. Mark understood that although the United States began and operated under the ‘small slice of federal authority’ type of government model for the first 70-odd years until 1862, that something then happened which seemed to allow that sliver of authority to expand exponentially. This seemed to occur even though no new amendment had been ratified since 1804. The State governments, as acknowledged in Article VII of the Constitution, voluntarily withdrew some of their own sovereign government powers and delegated those powers enumerated within the Constitution over to their ne
Read this work at the World Public Library (library card needed).