Raveen wrote:QUOTE (Raveen @ Feb 25 2017, 08:24 AM) Aren't the first ten amendments to your Constitution entirely about the rights of citizens being set at a Federal level?
Not really.
The Bill of Rights was drafted in order to allay concerns of anti-Federalists who were opposed to ratification of the Constitution for fear that the newly-formed Federal government might someday overstep its boundaries and interfere in matters reserved for the States at the time. E.g., the 1st Amendment says that Congress could not establish a national religion, but it didn't stop individual states from having their own state churches, which many of them had when entering the union.
It wasn't until long after the Civil War and the 14th amendment was ratified that an argument could be made that the Constitution recognized individual rights that states were obligated to respect.
Anyways the Constitution has precious little to say on the concept of gender-neutral bathrooms. I'm sure a legal argument could be made that these bans are infringing some Constitutionally-protected liberty, or right to equal protection, but far as I know no court has even begun to take up such a case.
In general the Constitution doesn't guarantee freedom from discrimination -- only government discrimination by law, but private discrimination is legal unless there is some law passed against it (like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- but even then, the Federal government could only prevent discrimination so far as it impacted interstate commerce).
The president fundamentally can't tell the states what to do. That's not how it works. He only has a few limited powers, absent Congressional action (and don't hold your breath on that one, either). Federalism is complex, yo.
Obama did what he could: he issued an order preventing the federal government from working with contractors that discriminated against LGBT persons, and his Department of Education circulated an advisory letter indicating that the administration would interpret Title IX, which prevents federal money going to schools that discriminate on the basis of sex, to also cover discrimination on the basis of sexual identity as well. (Those are the same executive actions Trump overturned last week).
On the subject of murder, murder is usually prosecuted under state jurisdiction, unless there is some element that makes it a federal crime (state lines being crossed, interstate commerce being affected, the victim being a federal officer, etc).
On the subject of marijuana, that goes back to everybody's favorite case, Wickard v. Filburn (1942), which essentially ruled there is no such thing as intrastate commerce, because intrastate commerce indirectly affects interstate commerce, so the Federal government gets to regulate intrastate commerce too. And that was specifically upheld in the case of Gonzales v. Raich (2005), where five liberal justices and Scalia (!) affirmed that the same argument worked in the case of medical marijuana as well.
tl;dr: the US's wonderfully schizophrenic system of government frequently gives us hope that one group of idiots in government will save us from another group of idiots in government. But it doesn't always work very well. We haven't quite figured out how to stop electing idiots into government in the first place, either.
