Exercise 3: Stripping Away a Power in the US vs. the UK — Possible Solution
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This exercise asks for a direct procedural comparison, and the
chapter's own closing table gives exactly the material needed to
build it.

THE US CASE: STRIPPING A POWER FROM A STATE
Because a state's reserved powers rest on the Tenth Amendment - a
constitutional guarantee, not an ordinary statute - Congress cannot
simply pass a regular law taking one of those powers away. An
ordinary act of Congress that tried to directly seize a power reserved
to the states would itself be challengeable as unconstitutional under
judicial review (Chapter 4). The only real, formal way to actually
strip a constitutionally reserved state power would be to amend the
Constitution itself - meaning Congress would need to clear Article V's
own full supermajority process from Chapter 1: two-thirds of both the
House and Senate to propose the amendment, then three-fourths of all
fifty state legislatures to ratify it. In practice, that's an
enormously high bar, and it also means the very states whose power is
being reduced get a direct vote on whether to allow it, since state
legislatures are part of the ratification process itself.

THE UK CASE: STRIPPING A POWER FROM THE SCOTTISH PARLIAMENT
Because Scotland's devolved powers exist only through an ordinary Act
of Parliament (the Scotland Act) rather than through any entrenched
constitutional guarantee, Westminster retains full legal sovereignty
over them. UK Politics Fundamentals Chapter 9 establishes that
Parliament could, in principle, alter or revoke devolved powers by
passing another ordinary Act - the same simple-majority, single-session
process that could change any other UK law. The Sewel Convention says
Westminster normally won't legislate on devolved matters without the
Scottish Parliament's own consent, but Chapter 7 of that same course
already showed this convention being ignored 20 real, recorded times
by February 2022 with no legal consequence at all, since it is a
political norm, not an enforceable legal rule.

WHY THE TWO PROCESSES ARE SO DIFFERENT
The difference comes down to where each power actually sits. A US
state's reserved power sits inside the Constitution itself, protected
by the same Article V supermajority machinery that protects everything
else in that document - genuinely hard to reach. Scotland's devolved
power sits inside an ordinary Act of Parliament, which - under
parliamentary sovereignty - Parliament can amend or repeal the same
way it could pass any other law, restrained in practice mainly by
political convention rather than a legal barrier.

ANSWER: To strip a reserved power from a US state, Congress would need
to pass a full Article V constitutional amendment - two-thirds of both
chambers of Congress, then ratification by three-fourths of all state
legislatures - a deliberately difficult, multi-stage process that
gives the states themselves a direct vote on the outcome. To strip a
devolved power from the Scottish Parliament, Westminster could in
principle pass an ordinary Act of Parliament by a simple majority in a
single session, restrained mainly by the Sewel Convention - a real but
legally unenforceable political norm already shown to have been
ignored 20 times without consequence. The processes differ because a
US state's power is constitutionally entrenched, while Scotland's
devolved power exists only as an ordinary, revocable grant from a
sovereign Parliament.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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It walks through the real, specific procedural steps required in each
country separately before comparing them, and explicitly names the
underlying reason for the difference (constitutional entrenchment vs.
an ordinary, revocable statutory grant) rather than just asserting the
UK process is "easier."