”Resolved_, That the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their [Federal] Government; but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a [Federal] Government for special purposes, -- delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the [Federal] Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force; that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party: that the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.”
Thomas Jefferson, The Kentucky Resolutions, 1798
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