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Read My Plan →WASHINGTON IIIFOR PRESIDENT 2028
David Green
@davidgreen-6d1ee3
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John Washington III — The People’s Concert: Berlin 2028
▣ 10/10/2026
◷ 3:00 PM
⌖ Konzerthaus Berlin Gendarmenmarkt 2, Berlin, Germany
The Tenth Amendment Says “Or to the People” — What Does That Really Mean?
The Tenth Amendment doesn’t just say that powers are reserved to the states. It also says, “or to the people.” That language matters. My view is that every word in the Constitution deserves attention, including those three words: “to the people.” What exactly does that mean when we talk about power, government, and the rights of the people themselves? Have we spent so much time discussing federal power versus state power that we overlook the role the Constitution specifically reserves for the people? I’m not presenting this as a declaration of law or claiming that my interpretation settles the constitutional question. I’m asking a question that I believe deserves a much bigger public conversation. The Constitution belongs to the people too, and we should be willing to read it, study it, question it, and discuss what every word means. So I want to hear from you: When the Tenth Amendment says powers are reserved “to the States respectively, or to the people,” what do you believe “to the people” means? — John Washington III
Read Update“Or to the People”: Has the Tenth Amendment’s Final Phrase Been Given Its Full Constitutional Meaning?
There are certain words in the Constitution that Americans hear so often that we can begin to stop hearing them at all. We repeat them. We quote them. We teach them in classrooms. Lawyers cite them. Judges interpret them. Politicians invoke them. Yet sometimes the most familiar language can contain questions that remain worth asking. For me, one of those questions is found in the final four words of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: “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 entire amendment is only one sentence: “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.” Every word in that sentence deserves attention. The amendment does not say that every power not given to the federal government belongs automatically to state governments. It says those powers are reserved “to the States respectively, or to the people.” That distinction is what I want Americans to examine. I am not arguing that modern courts have accepted a legal theory under which citizens may simply override state governments whenever they believe a particular power belongs directly to the people. They have not. The prevailing constitutional framework gives state governments extremely broad authority over matters not assigned to the federal government, subject to the limitations imposed by the Constitution. Nor am I suggesting that four words can be removed from the rest of the Constitution, isolated from more than two centuries of judicial interpretation, and turned into whatever rule someone happens to prefer. My argument is more fundamental. I am asking whether American constitutional thought has given enough independent meaning to the phrase “or to the people.” And if it has not, I believe the time has come for scholars, judges, lawmakers, attorneys, students, candidates, and ordinary citizens to start discussing what those words were intended to preserve. The Constitution Begins With the People Before we even reach the Tenth Amendment, we should remember how the Constitution begins: “We the People.” It does not begin, “We the federal government.” It does not begin, “We the States.” It does not begin, “We the legislatures.” It begins with the people. That was not accidental. The American system rests on a principle that was revolutionary in the eighteenth century and remains revolutionary today: government does not create the people’s authority. The people create the government’s authority. Government possesses delegated power. The people possess original political sovereignty. That concept also runs through the Declaration of Independence, which states: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Those words establish an important sequence. First come the governed. Then comes their consent. Then comes government. The government does not exist first and graciously distribute freedom downward. The political community exists first, and legitimate governmental authority flows upward from it. That is one of the central philosophical claims on which the American experiment was built. If that principle still means what we say it means, then we should be careful not to collapse “the people” into “the government.” They are related. They are connected. One derives legitimacy from the other. But they are not constitutionally identical. Government Is an Entity; the People Are the Source of Its Authority A state government is an institution. It has agencies. It has officials. It has courts. It has a legislature. It has an executive branch. It has administrative departments. It has a treasury. It can sue and be sued. It can own property. It can enter contracts. It can enact statutes. It can prosecute crimes. It can regulate conduct. It survives individual officeholders. Governors leave office, but the state government continues. Legislators retire, but the legislature remains. Judges die or resign, but the judicial institution survives them. In that sense, government has an institutional existence separate from any particular citizen. But where does its rightful authority come from? From the people. That is the constitutional relationship that interests me. The people and their government cannot be treated as completely interchangeable concepts because one is supposed to be the source of the other’s authority. When we say that government exists by the consent of the governed, we necessarily recognize a distinction between the governing institution and the human beings from whom its legitimacy is derived. That distinction matters when reading the Tenth Amendment. If the framers had intended every undelegated power to belong to the governments of the states, they could have ended the amendment after the phrase “reserved to the States respectively.” They did not. They added: “or to the people.” Why? That is not a rhetorical trick. It is a constitutional question. Words in a Constitution Should Not Be Treated as Surplus One of the oldest principles of legal interpretation is that words in an important legal text generally should not be treated as meaningless if a reasonable interpretation gives them effect. That does not mean every word creates an independent lawsuit. It does not mean every phrase creates an unlimited substantive right. But it does mean we should hesitate before treating constitutional language as decorative. The Tenth Amendment identifies three locations in the constitutional distribution of power: the United States, the States, and the people. The federal government receives delegated powers. Certain powers are denied to the states. The remainder is reserved either to the states or to the people. That structure appears to recognize something beyond a simple two-part division between federal power and state power. Yet much modern discussion of the Tenth Amendment reduces it to precisely that binary: If the federal government does not have a power, the states do. That may often be the correct practical conclusion. But the text itself says something slightly more complicated. It says: the States respectively, or the people. Those last words force us to ask whether there are dimensions of constitutional authority that do not belong to either governmental sovereign in the ordinary institutional sense. What Could “Reserved to the People” Mean? This is where humility is important. There are several possible interpretations. The phrase could be understood primarily as a statement of popular sovereignty—a reminder that government authority ultimately originates with the people. It could recognize that certain retained liberties remain outside ordinary governmental power. It could refer indirectly to political powers exercised by the people themselves through constitutional conventions, elections, amendments, petitions, referenda where available, and other democratic mechanisms. It could reinforce the broader philosophy reflected in the Ninth Amendment, which warns that enumerating particular rights should not be interpreted to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people. Or the phrase could carry several of these meanings at once. I am not claiming that I can resolve that debate in a single essay. I am saying the debate deserves to exist. Because if “the people” in the Tenth Amendment merely means “the state governments,” then we should explain why the Constitution uses two different expressions. And if they are not identical, then the American constitutional conversation should take that difference seriously. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments Sit Beside Each Other for a Reason Consider the Ninth Amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Then immediately comes the Tenth Amendment: “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 Ninth Amendment speaks of rights “retained by the people.” The Tenth Amendment speaks of powers reserved “to the States respectively, or to the people.” I do not believe we should casually erase the recurring constitutional presence of the people themselves. The Bill of Rights was not written merely as an organizational chart for competing governments. It was also written because Americans feared concentrated political authority. The founding generation had experienced a government that claimed powers they believed had not been legitimately granted. Their response was not merely to create a different government. It was to create a system in which governmental authority would be divided, constrained, enumerated, checked, balanced, and ultimately grounded in popular sovereignty. That history does not automatically prove any particular modern legal claim. But it should affect how seriously we take constitutional language describing powers and rights retained by the people. A State Is Not the Same Thing as Its People This distinction becomes especially important when Americans use the word “state.” Sometimes we mean the geographic community. Sometimes we mean the population. Sometimes we mean the governmental apparatus. Those are not always the same thing. When someone says, “Texas decided,” what do they mean? Did approximately thirty million Texans personally decide? Did the Legislature decide? Did the governo
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