EDITORIAL: State Democrats suddenly discover the 10th Amendment

Democrats have come down with a bad case of the Trumpian vapors. The malady has spread to Carson City. Symptoms include the abandonment of long-standing ideological convictions in an effort to feed the “resistance.”

How else to explain a report from the Review-Journal’s Colton Lochhead that progressives in the Nevada Legislature have stumbled upon the 10th Amendment and may try to use it to beat back the president’s agenda?

Apparently it took Donald J. Trump and more than a century of strident denial for Democrats to embark upon a voyage of discovery through the Bill of Rights and exhume a provision they have not only long detested but actively worked to bury alive.

The president’s immigration policy apparently triggered this excavation. Neophyte state Sen. Yvanna Cancela, a Las Vegas Democrat, is searching for some constitutional cover for legislation to protect illegal immigrants from Mr. Trump’s agenda and to shield Nevada police agencies that ignore federal immigration law.

Alas, Sen. Cancela and friends may not like what they find. The 10th Amendment states that, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” In fact, Article 1, Section 8 gives Congress the right to establish a “uniform rule of naturalization,” meaning the states can’t override federal hegemony in this area regardless of the 10th Amendment.

Still, if state Democrats now desire to breathe life into this vital protection against an activist government, we’re all for it. Over the past 100 years, progressives and their sympathetic brethren on the bench have systematically strangled the amendment in pursuit of erecting a constantly expanding federal behemoth that intrudes on virtually every aspect of modern life. Now, with Mr. Trump rolling over them, they’re admitting there might be something to this states’ rights thing, after all.

“I would not want to see our police distracted from doing their work to protect Nevadans because they’re overburdened by federal government mandates,” Sen. Cancela said. Fetch the smelling salts. A liberal Democrat acknowledging the dangers of an overweening regulatory state? More evidence of those Trumpian vapors.

Unfortunately, this newfound fealty to the 10th Amendment and limited government is likely nothing more than a cynical marriage of convenience. Just ask Sen. Cancela if she favors ignoring federal diktats on, say, environmental or education issues. The silence will no doubt be deafening.