Article V and the Question of Sovereignty Part IV

Article V Blog ^ | March 13th 2017 | Rodney Dodsworth

[Jacquerie]

The Framing generation bequeathed a brilliant governing form to posterity. Perhaps its most notable feature is the separation of powers. Far less well-known, yet just as important, is what the Framers did with legal and political sovereignty. To review from previous posts:

• The legal sovereign has unlimited, absolute, and supreme law-making power. The Constitution is the supreme law-making expression of the legal sovereign.
• The political sovereign is the single person or body that writes statutes. As per Article I § 1, Congress is America’s political sovereign; it is responsible for crafting statutes necessary and proper to implement enumerated powers.

Both sovereignties are indivisible, and in most governments, they are coincident. The King in Parliament, aka Parliament, was legally and politically sovereign. The English constitution was whatever Parliament decided it to be. No Parliament could encumber future Parliaments. Since sovereignty is indivisible, Parliament could not share its supreme and statutory lawmaking sovereignty with another person or institution.

Upon independence, each state legislature assumed the qualities of legal and political sovereign. It is why they easily, and with clear consciences, ignored or violated the Articles of Confederation. Since sovereignty is indivisible, it wasn’t shared with the Continental Congress.

When the federal convention of 1787 issued its draft Constitution to Congress, it appeared to Anti-Federalists that the Framers attempted the impossible. Didn’t they split both babies, legal and political sovereignty between two classes of government, the new federal and preexisting state governments? There must be a single supreme authority. If the new government was supreme, it meant the dissolution of state authority.

[sauropod]

Bkmk

[Hostage]

This is a very enriching exposition. Still reading and digesting.

[Edward.Fish]

There's a comment on a blog-post, about the [2nd] travel-ban being blocked by the judiciary, that says Nice. I like watching the libtard judiciary encouraging the coming Article V Convention. Maybe that would make for a good topic for one of your posts.

[Jacquerie]

I wasn't aware of Vox Populi. Thanks for the link and suggestion. As for Trumps EOs, I recently touched on the first travel ban in two posts, The Constitutional Crisis at Hand. I just opened the decision by Judge Watkins and suspect there are some great takeaway social justice quotes for posterity.