WE, your Memorialists, the Members of the One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Legislature of the State of Maine now assembled in the First Regular Session, most respectfully present and petition the President of the United States and the members of the Congress of the United States, as follows:

WHEREAS,  the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution reads as follows: "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"; and

WHEREAS,  the Tenth Amendment defines the total scope of federal power as being that specifically granted by the United States Constitution and no more; and

WHEREAS,  the scope of power defined by the Tenth Amendment means that the Federal Government was created by the states specifically to be an agent of the states; and

WHEREAS,  today, in 2011, it is as if the states are treated as agents of the Federal Government; and

WHEREAS,  many federal laws seem to be in violation of the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution; and

WHEREAS,  the Tenth Amendment assures that we, the people of the United States of America and each sovereign state in the Union of States, now have, and have always had, rights the Federal Government may not usurp; and

WHEREAS,  Article IV, Section 4 says, "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government," and the Ninth Amendment states, "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people"; and

WHEREAS,  the United States Supreme Court has ruled in New York v. United States, 112 S. Ct. 2408 (1992), that Congress may not simply commandeer the legislative and regulatory processes of the states; and

WHEREAS,  a number of proposals from previous administrations and some now pending from the present administration and from Congress may further violate the United States Constitution; now, therefore, be it