The most vivid (and totally researchable) day-to-day indications of a functioning Tenth Amendment, across a labyrinthine and vast network of tens of thousands of agencies & jurisdictions all over the USA(also known as federalism, and well worth an intensive refresher-course, fellow Americans) are the operabilities of interagency command, coordination, cooperation & communication.
Whatever you want to label what went on to happen in LA (and we vigorously disagree on this), how it started was with a large-scale paramilitary operation which was all but unidentifiable from the street, within a municipality called Paramount in Los Angeles County, one of dozens of cities outside LA proper where both the LAPD and Sheriff's office share various duties on a routine basis. When these local agencies had been called by locals to respond to such a large-scale incursion by multiple federal agencies in full battle gear (and hardly an insignia among them saying who and what they were), neither of them, nor the Mayor's office, nor the Los Angeles DA's office, nor anyone else not on Kristi Noem's speed-dial, had been given any notice whatsoever from the feds, from the same agencies local law enforcement must coordinate activities with on a regular basis, on anything from managing wildfires to conducting manhunts to carrying out REAL task-forced law-enforcement ops such as drug raids, etc
For all this talk about the First Amendment being both the stakes and the grounds for the CA-vs-DC standoff which ensued, this is not the overall most crucial constitutional dispute in play.
The Tenth is, because without interagency cooperation in every jurisdiction from Key West to Nome, San Diego to Bangor, all possibility of the mechanism we have known all our lives across the entire country, (interagency relations actually working absent political disputes between agencies preventing any jointness of action among them), which we are pleased to call Law and Order, can no longer function on a 24/7 basis as it has been doing since before living memory.
In its place, can come all manner of countermeasures against what amounts to coerced jurisdictional autonomy, meaning every town, every county, every State is left not knowing whether it can count on the feds, or the police department just over a line where The Other Side has the power and gives the orders; and watch the paranoia, siege mindsets, and increasingly zero-tolerance approaches at the local level to anything police do; then comes the concertina wire, the checkpoints, the sealed radio codes and altered dispatch policies, and anything else a community or region feeling left to its own devices by DC can come up with, to secure their own perimeter, and concern themselves further with absolutely nothing outside of it.
Times tens of thousands of such locales....
If this administration wants to fracture the most successful union of political sovereignties in known history (why we call them 'United" States in the first place), all it has to do is keeping carrying out local raids and task-force ops without giving the police a heads-up first, keep recruiting riot actors nearby to stage brief & uncontagious incidents of entirely apolitical mayhem for the cameras (and the Reichstag-fire crackdown-fever these foment in some circles), keep hurling slurs such as 'tarred and feathered' at local executive authority trying to exercise its lawful powers IN SPITE of the feds instead of alongside them, and the USA becomes a medieval patchwork of gang/warlord districts, separatist enclaves, lawless and trackless expanses full of every kind of banditry imaginable (ever look out the window cruising at 20,000 over Flyover Country?), rural and even more isolated land-baronates run by vigilante fronts wearing police uniforms, etc, etc.
As meanwhile the very topic of what is or is not 'legal immigration' becomes altogether moot, because the only law there is across the fence-line alongside the nearest federal highway, is the law the locals had been left to make up as they go along.
This will not be, history instructs us, any pretty sight.
Even though few remain still living who recall times in America's not-too-distant past, urban and rural alike, when everything I have described here was the routine order of business across much of the land, this does not mean that the USA cannot RETURN to such a condition of general lawlessness nationwide, in the face of this kind of purely political and factional wagering and provocation against the TENTH Amendment. The First is doing just fine.
The most vivid (and totally researchable) day-to-day indications of a functioning Tenth Amendment, across a labyrinthine and vast network of tens of thousands of agencies & jurisdictions all over the USA(also known as federalism, and well worth an intensive refresher-course, fellow Americans) are the operabilities of interagency command, coordination, cooperation & communication.
Whatever you want to label what went on to happen in LA (and we vigorously disagree on this), how it started was with a large-scale paramilitary operation which was all but unidentifiable from the street, within a municipality called Paramount in Los Angeles County, one of dozens of cities outside LA proper where both the LAPD and Sheriff's office share various duties on a routine basis. When these local agencies had been called by locals to respond to such a large-scale incursion by multiple federal agencies in full battle gear (and hardly an insignia among them saying who and what they were), neither of them, nor the Mayor's office, nor the Los Angeles DA's office, nor anyone else not on Kristi Noem's speed-dial, had been given any notice whatsoever from the feds, from the same agencies local law enforcement must coordinate activities with on a regular basis, on anything from managing wildfires to conducting manhunts to carrying out REAL task-forced law-enforcement ops such as drug raids, etc
For all this talk about the First Amendment being both the stakes and the grounds for the CA-vs-DC standoff which ensued, this is not the overall most crucial constitutional dispute in play.
The Tenth is, because without interagency cooperation in every jurisdiction from Key West to Nome, San Diego to Bangor, all possibility of the mechanism we have known all our lives across the entire country, (interagency relations actually working absent political disputes between agencies preventing any jointness of action among them), which we are pleased to call Law and Order, can no longer function on a 24/7 basis as it has been doing since before living memory.
In its place, can come all manner of countermeasures against what amounts to coerced jurisdictional autonomy, meaning every town, every county, every State is left not knowing whether it can count on the feds, or the police department just over a line where The Other Side has the power and gives the orders; and watch the paranoia, siege mindsets, and increasingly zero-tolerance approaches at the local level to anything police do; then comes the concertina wire, the checkpoints, the sealed radio codes and altered dispatch policies, and anything else a community or region feeling left to its own devices by DC can come up with, to secure their own perimeter, and concern themselves further with absolutely nothing outside of it.
Times tens of thousands of such locales....
If this administration wants to fracture the most successful union of political sovereignties in known history (why we call them 'United" States in the first place), all it has to do is keeping carrying out local raids and task-force ops without giving the police a heads-up first, keep recruiting riot actors nearby to stage brief & uncontagious incidents of entirely apolitical mayhem for the cameras (and the Reichstag-fire crackdown-fever these foment in some circles), keep hurling slurs such as 'tarred and feathered' at local executive authority trying to exercise its lawful powers IN SPITE of the feds instead of alongside them, and the USA becomes a medieval patchwork of gang/warlord districts, separatist enclaves, lawless and trackless expanses full of every kind of banditry imaginable (ever look out the window cruising at 20,000 over Flyover Country?), rural and even more isolated land-baronates run by vigilante fronts wearing police uniforms, etc, etc.
As meanwhile the very topic of what is or is not 'legal immigration' becomes altogether moot, because the only law there is across the fence-line alongside the nearest federal highway, is the law the locals had been left to make up as they go along.
This will not be, history instructs us, any pretty sight.
Even though few remain still living who recall times in America's not-too-distant past, urban and rural alike, when everything I have described here was the routine order of business across much of the land, this does not mean that the USA cannot RETURN to such a condition of general lawlessness nationwide, in the face of this kind of purely political and factional wagering and provocation against the TENTH Amendment. The First is doing just fine.