+11

continuing from the preceding post

I just want to know, according to that opinion of the court, how should the prohibitions in section 9 and 10 have been expressed if prohibitions in general were seen to apply on both the federal and the state governments? Should the section about what congress can do be followed by general prohibitions and confuse the reader of whether they meant to apply generally because they were stated in that form or just on congress because they came after the section speaking about what congress is allowed to do? Or is it that the opinion is suggesting that the entity construction approach that led to the preceding congress-can section would not have been used to begin with? If so, why? If not, then what is left of that "plain and marked line of discrimination between the limitations" on the powers of federal and state governments, is only the prohibitions on states related to things the congress was empowered to do. For the later, like it was mentioned in post +9, some of those actions, like coining money for example, leads to different results based on the actor and because of that the empowerment to congress to do them could be seen to be only about the part related to the federal government (coining federal money versus coining state money). Others maybe seen justified because of special relation to specific states. For example, a state could see that congress power to impose duties on imports and exports is not a replacement but in addition to its capability to do the same on its own border. Or a state can see that it may also have the power to make a treaty with another nation it borders. 

As mentioned in post +9, thanks for the help of the court opinion itself with the treaty and declaration of war (as implied by the issuance of marque and reprisal letters according to the opinion)  examples , we can see that the framers precautionary  measures reached even things where the states are directly involved as parts of the whole country and not just about how assigning a role to the congress could be understood.

We are talking about a constitution for the whole country and therefore, by default, general prohibitions apply whenever they are applicable. But even if we start according to what the opinion of the court says, without sufficient argument, that the constitution was intended to be, one could still ask how for the framers of the amendments seeing all the precautionary measures in the constitution for preventing misunderstanding who can do what, that they would leave amendments written in general prohibition and described from the receiving side, making them having one potential meaning and emphasizing more that it is about the end result and not about who can do those actions, like those amendments without explicitly stating that they do not apply on the states? That question acquires even more importance given that they showed explicit attention to what powers are kept for the states in amendment 10. Also, the thing could have been done by merely adding the word "explicitly" before "prohibited by it to the States".