Thomas Jefferson Quotes

The powers of the federal government ... result from the compact to which the states are parties, [and are] limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting that compact.

[In the case of] dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the states, who are parties thereto, have the right, and are duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil.

If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare... they may appoint teachers in every state... The powers of Congress would subvert the very foundation, the very nature of the limited government established by the people of America.

I think the federal government should be doing only what the Constitution says it should be. We don't have authority under the federal Constitution to have a big federal criminal justice system.

Nullification is the Jeffersonian idea that the states of the American Union must judge the constitutionality of the acts of their agent, the federal government, since no impartial arbiter between them exists.

This right to secede is deduced from the nature of the Constitution, which they say is a compact between sovereign States who have preserved their whole sovereignty, and therefore are subject to no superior; that because they made the compact, they can break it when in their opinion it has been departed from by the other States. Fallacious as this course of reasoning is, it enlists State pride, and finds advocates in the honest prejudices of those who have not studied the nature of our government sufficiently to see the radical error on which it rests.

In this relation, then, the proposed government cannot be deemed a national one; since its jurisdiction extends to certain enumerated objects only, and leaves to the several states, a residuary and inviolable sovereignty over all other objects.

If the Tenth Amendment were still taken seriously, most of the federal government's present activities would not exist. That's why no one in Washington ever mentions it.

The poor Constitution itself is hardly paid any attention to. It's necessary to ignore it because most of what government does these days is clearly unconstitutional. The original idea, as expressed by James Madison, was that states would do 95 percent of the governing. Today, they are little more than administrative subdivisions of the central empire.

That the several states who formed that instrument, being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of its infraction; and that a nullification, by those sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts done under colour of that instrument, is the rightful remedy.

To hold that Congress has general police power would be to hold that it may accomplish objects not intrusted to the general government, and to defeat the operation of the 10th Amendment, declaring 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.

If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything-and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.

The several states composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government

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.

I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that 'all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people.' To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power not longer susceptible of any definition.

The basis, the corner-stone of this Government, was the perfect equality of the free, sovereign, and independent States which made it.

Nullification means insurrection and war; and the other states have a right to put it down.

No one supposes that the government of the United States is supreme, beyond the sphere plainly defined by the constitution: Neither does any one deny that the State is supreme within its proper sphere of action.

Some of them, in accepting the proposed plan of government, coupled their acceptance with a recommendation of various additions to the Constitution, which they deemed essential to the preservation of the rights of the States, or of the People.

I consider ... the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one state, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.

[The new Federal Government] would either triumph over the state governments and reduce them to entire subordination or in the course of a few years … the contests about the boundaries of power between the particular [State] governments and the general government … will produce a dissolution of the union.

the several states who formed that instrument, being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of its infraction; and that a nullification, by those sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts done under colour of that instrument, is the rightful remedy:

The Constitution preserves the autonomy and independence of the States; “federal supervision of their action” is in no case permissible except as to matters specifically delegated to the United States. Any interference ... except as thus permitted is an invasion of the authority of the States

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. –

Government of limited power need not be anemic government.