Article V and the Question of Sovereignty Part III

Article V Blog ^ | March 9th 2017 | Rodney Dodsworth

[Jacquerie]

Subtitle: Sovereignty on the Move.

Sovereignty is absolute. Notwithstanding the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God, a person or body is the legal sovereign when he or it has unlimited law-making power, when there is no person or body superior to him or it. During America’s colonial period, a single body, the King-in-Parliament (or equivalently, Parliament) was the legal sovereign. As legal sovereign, and being unencumbered by a written constitution, nothing limits the earthly, supreme lawmaking power of Parliament. Parliament can amend its unwritten constitution as it sees fit, and no Parliament is bound by a previous Parliament.

By the political sovereign, on the other hand, is meant the man or body that writes statutes. In most countries, and certainly in England, the legal sovereign and the political sovereign are coincident.

The concepts of legal and political sovereignty in state legislatures was generally accepted during the Revolutionary War. As per the Declaration of Independence, just government requires the consent of the people. Since every state held annual elections to its lower house, representatives were very close to the people. Thus, the logic went, the people temporarily delegated their legal and political sovereignty to men removable from office on an annual basis. What could be safer?

Well, property wasn’t very safe in the 1780s. Without going into detail here, the reader can get a feel for the problems of the times from two sources. One is James Madison’s Vices of the Political System of the United States, and from Article I § 10 of the Constitution. Section 10 doesn’t just itemize what states could no longer do, much of it itemizes what the states had done, which, when multiplied thirteen times contributed to the tumult and precariousness of the era.