[Non-Sequitur]

So the States were never States outside of the Union - Is that what you are claiming?

Bingo.

[eyedigress]

Will this thread ever die?

[Idabilly]

IB: So the States were never States outside of the Union - Is that what you are claiming?

NS:Bingo.

"When, by the Declaration of Independence, [the nation of Virginia] chose to abolish their former organs of declaring their will, the acts of will already formally and constitutionally declared, remained untouched. For the nation was not dissolved, was not annihilated; its will, therefore, remained in full vigor; and on the establishing the new organs, first of a convention, and afterwards a more complicated legislature, the old acts of national will continued in force, until the nation should, by its new organs, declare its will changed." --Thomas Jefferson to Edmund Randolph, 1799. ME 10:126