According to me, those 2 amendments barely tolerate the creation of the federal government and the Constitution. They allow them to exist but they give back to state and local governments the autonomy they had before the adoption of the Constitution.
What I am claiming here is not recognized by our specialists.
I am not the only one to say so. To his book on the Ninth Amendment that speaks of rights “retained by the people,” Daniel A. Farber gives the following title and subtitle,
Retained by the People
The “silent” Ninth Amendment and the Constitutional Rights
Americans don’t Know they Have
On page 4 he writes this about the Ninth Amendment,
Since many conservatives do not want to hear its message, they pretend that the Ninth does not exist. They claim that, with its murky language, it is a meaningless fragment, not at all amenable to intelligible interpretation. Robert Bork compared the Ninth to an “ink blot” during his confirmation hearings. He said, “I do not think the court can make up what might be under the ink blot if you cannot read it.” In other words, unenumerated rights simply do not exist.
We have here a real problem. Robert Bork was right. The Ninth Amendment is enigmatic. It cannot be interpreted with the traditional ways that rely on the content of the text. The content is elusive. The same thing is true of the Tenth Amendments. If we cannot interpret the Ninth, we cannot interpret the Tenth.
Farber has a point, however. The Ninth Amendment must have a meaning. If we cannot find its meaning in the text of the amendment, we should look for a meaning in the way the Founding Fathers thought. This is a solution of last resort. It is risky, because it is speculative.
My interpretation is by far superior. It is based on a special method of interpreting enigmatic texts. I have elaborated that method for the study of enigmatic texts in the Gospel of Mark. My investigation was guided by what Michel de Certeau says about documents that are particularly difficult to interpret. He writes,
The document silences what it knows; it hides what organizes it; it reveals only through its form what it effaces from its contents.
Michel de Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, (4 – écritures freudiennes)
Gallimard, 1975. 398.
In other words, when we rely on the content of an enigmatic text, we cannot interpret it. This is what Bork did and this is why he could not make any sense of the Ninth Amendment.
If this difficult question interests you, you can read what I wrote about it under Theory/Long texts.
Jurists like Borg who say that the Ninth Amendment does not amend anything have a problem. An Amendment must amend something, otherwise it cannot be called amendment.
According to Michel de Certeau, there are ways of interpreting enigmatic texts, because even though they hide what they know, they always give clues that can guide the interpreter, otherwise the very notion of interpretation collapses.
Rethinking America 
Is it possible that the 9th and 10th amendments were included to limit the power of the Constitution to only the specific powers described in the Constitution? That way, all the other things not mentioned or even thought of yet, could still be decided by the States?
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The Ninth and Tenth Amendments go back to the way things were before the Constitution was adopted. The pre-Constitution document is the “Articles of Confederation.” In those days the federal government did not exist and the 13 states were in control of Congress. The Constitution created the federal government and gave it most of the powers of the states. The losers were the states. They became subordinated to the federal government. With the Civil War, the states became as good as colonies of the federal government. This was particularly true of the confederate states. They lost the war and they became colonized by the Feds. Eventually all the states joined the southern states (14th Amendment). After that, the powers of the federal government kept increasing. the Sixteenth Amendment introduced the federal income tax. The powers of the Presidents kept increasing. Now they have imperial powers. This makes every change in the White House highly traumatic for about one half of the Americans. this is what has become intolerable for the losers.
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