[Lurkinanloomin]

The 10th Amendment has been dead for ages.

Fedzilla will never be forced back into its Constitutional cage.

[MeganC]

The result of the US civil war effectively ended the notion that the states were superior or at least co-equal to the Fed.

[mlo]

"Therefore, many executive orders, judicial opinions, and federal regulations not enacted by Congress or made IN PURSUANCE of the Constitution are not legitimate law."

Wrong. Written like someone with no understanding of the law. All of those things are authorized by, or interpretations of, laws. A court decides what the law means. That is its proper role. Its decisions determine the effect those laws have. An executive order is the president exercising his pre-existing authority, granted in either law or the Constitution. He has no ability to make executive orders that are otherwise. Agency regulations are made by explicit grants of authority in the law passed by Congress.

All of these things have the root of their authority in laws.

[IronJack]

This hearkens back to the Marbury decision, one of the first handed down by the Supreme Court, in which it appointed itself the final arbiter of all laws, state or federal.

[bgill]

Now, now, you know you didn’t build anything.

[reg45]

The Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary war in 1783, recognized each of the colonies as an independent sovereign entity. The states subsequently united under the Articles of Confederation and that confederation lasted for less than a decade. Then the states created the constitution of 1787 which we call the constitution of the United States. The individual states, therefore, preexisted the Constitution of the United States.

[Zionist Conspirator]

This is a bit of a stretch.

The Constitution was written by a convention that exceeded its authority (it was supposed to simply amend the Articles of Confederation). Furthermore it was not ratified by the state legislatures but by special ratifying conventions.

I know the federal government has become an un-G-dly monstrosity, but let's not start peddling propaganda.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Furthermore, while one may say that the first thirteen states created the federal government, one could just as easily say that the other 37 were actually created by the federal government.

[x]

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

So the United States had to have been in existence 14 years before 1789 for George Washington (or anybody) to become president.

But the question isn't so much which came first as whether the states or the people of the country created the Constitution.

It's a tricky question, but it's clear that the federal government was intended to be more than a mere league of states or creature of the state governments.