The passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments further strengthened the rights and powers of individuals against the power of the States, vis-a-vis the Ninth and Tenth Amendments: guaranteeing that the protections of the Bill of Rights were extended to include the States (under the Fourteenth Amendment), the end of Involuntary Servitude unless convicted of a crime under Due Process (which, under the Thirteenth Amendment, in theory ended debtor's prisons, since they involved civil, not criminal acts), and extended the right to vote to all male citizens over the age of twenty-one (in theory by the Fifteenth Amendment, although not fully realized for a century).
Since Reconstruction, most of the cases brought before the Supreme Court involving the Tenth Amendment have involved Congress or Federal agencies attempting to apply the interstate commerce clause to regulate business practices (such as child labor laws in the first part of the Twentieth Century), or Congress attempting to apply Federal standards (like the Fair Labor Standards or Minimum Wage Laws) to State, County, or Municipal employees. Since the time of the New Deal, the decisions of the Supreme Court have generally been in favor of the Federal government's position in a wide range of rulings including child labor laws, Social Security, minimum wage, etc.
The passage of the Fourteenth and Seventeenth Amendments were not attacks upon the intentions of the founders--as some reactionaries have stated--but rather the strengthening of the social contract Chief Justice Marshall stated exists directly between We the People, and our Federal Government under the Constitution. These two Amendments strengthened the rights of individual Americans at the expense of the power of the States, the Seventeenth by allowing the people of the States to elect their Senators directly; the Fourteenth by stating that the Federal Government had the power to intervene to ensure that the States were upholding the rights of individual citizens of the states, even if doing so was unpopular, i.e., desegregation.
The application of Due Process clause to the Bill of Rights falls into two categories: Procedural and Substantive Due Process. Together with the Equal Protection clause, they protect the average American from State and local police raiding their houses, their bedrooms, or any other place we might have a reasonable expectation of privacy, but the local power elite wants to know our business. It has led to the legalization of contraceptives, Miranda rights, your right to an attorney in a non-Federal case, the legalization of abortion, the right to be secure in your person and your papers against unreasonable search and seizure by local law enforcement, the need for probable cause in warrants, etc.
Too many people, especially in the Tea Party and other groups on the fringes of the Right, are under the misapprehension that the Tenth Amendment is some sort of cure-all for an overarching Federal Government. Nothing could be further from the truth.
As Chief Justice Marshall stated above in McCullough v. Maryland, "If any one proposition could command the universal assent of mankind, we might expect it would be this-that the government of the Union, though limited in its power, is supreme within its sphere of action." The Federal Government receives its power, authority, and sovereignty directly from the source of those attributes: We the People of the United States. As such, the Federal Government is supreme, and answerable only to the People and their representatives, elected or appointed and confirmed under the provisions of the Constitution. The States have no say in the workings of the Federal Government, other than--as representatives of the State's citizens--proposing a Constitutional Convention, and voting up or down on the ratification of amendments to the Constitution, and whatever additional powers are reserved to them under the Constitution that the People have not kept for themselves.
The Right-wing reactionaries wish to ignore the simple fact that in addition to our Constitution, there are more than two centuries of legislation and case law that makes their overly simplistic, self-serving interpretation of our Constitution not only wrong, but dangerously so.
I would assume that the vast majority of "Tenthers" have no idea of the consequences of making the Tenth Amendment more powerful with regard to the States than it is already is. The reality is that it is not the Federal Government which will be most adversely affected by the strengthening of the power of the States; it will be the individual citizen.
Most of your rights in the workplace are based upon the extension of the Congress's ability to regulate interstate commerce (Article I, Section 8, clause 3), including collective bargaining, and workplace safety. Because of this, there are a group of plutocrats and corporations who would like to see the Tenth Amendment used to reduce Congress's ability to regulate interstate commerce, so that they could pick and choose among the States for the best set of laws to do business under, as Standard Oil did 125 years ago.
We must ask ourselves: do the States deserve more power at the expense of the individual American? Shall we surrender our hard won individual rights in the workplace, in the home, and in the courtroom, so that Exxon-Mobil, Goldman-Sachs, or Bank of America can squeeze an extra two cents per share for their dividend next quarter? Shall we return to the days of the Ludlow Massacre when the President of Colorado Fuel and Iron could call up the Governor of Colorado, and have him send the militia to break the strike, women and children be damned?
I believe that unless you are consumed with greed, or overpowered by a sociopathic lack of human compassion, your answer will be the same as mine: no. If it is, join me in opposing all of these reactionaries trying to pull us back to the miserable days of the 1890's, when the Tenth Amendment could be combined with the Fourteenth to give us the abomination of "separate but equal" in the Supreme Court's decision Plessy v. Ferguson. We the People deserve better.
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