States’ rights, the call to arms of secessionists during the Civil War, is making a comeback in state legislatures around the country as the Tea Party movement gains ground.

In Olympia, Rep. Ed Orcutt, R-Kalama, has joined with other House Republicans in sponsoring several states’ rights bills invoking the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states, “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.”

The bills’ sponsors, led by Rep. Matt Shea, R-Spokane Valley, argue that the states must resist federal law on a broad range of issues, from reducing greenhouse gas emissions to regulating firearms sales to implementing national health care reform.

Shea won national prominence within the 10th Amendment movement last year when he sponsored a House joint resolution declaring Washington a sovereign state and calling on the federal government to ”cease and desist, effective immediately, any and all mandates that are beyond the scope of its constitutionally delegated power.”

The resolution failed in Olympia, but the Idaho Legislature later adopted a version of it, Shea’s office said.