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To: Vicomte13
Pick a topic, any topic, and there's overlapping jurisdiction. Usually the Feds can assert supremacy if they need to.

Yes, if the states allow it and if the people of the states allow the states to allow it.

That's a lot of allow's, I know, but that's the way it was intended to work.

15 posted on 11/02/2004 12:03:58 PM PST by eskimo
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To: eskimo

Me: Pick a topic, any topic, and there's overlapping jurisdiction. Usually the Feds can assert supremacy if they need to.

You: Yes, if the states allow it and if the people of the states allow the states to allow it. That's a lot of allow's, I know, but that's the way it was intended to work.

Well, I think you've got to pare back the "allows" a bit. Under the Constitution, the States do NOT have a veto over acts of the Federal government that the Federal government takes within its sphere of delegated powers. An example: the power to impose tarriffs, or to establish a navy. These are not powers of the States at all. The People delegated these powers to the Federal government in the Constitution, they delegated them exclusively to the Federal government in the Constitution, and the States do not have any power at any level or override that, or to challenge it. Certainly they don't have the power to disobey it. That is called "rebellion", and the Constitution gives the Federal government the power to suppress rebellion.

Also, take a good look at the Constitution and its history. It is not, on its own terms, a creation of the States, but of the People. Nor was the Constitutional Convention exactly convened by the States. It was convened by the leading men of the country because the Confederation was not working. The Constitution needed to be ratified by a certain number of States to come into effect, but that ratification process took place through democratically elected legislatures. My point is that the US Constitution was not created by the State governments getting together and signing a deal using the existing structures of government at the time, under which each State got a veto. Rather, it was formulated by an independent convention formed by the leaders of the People, to break the logjam that the Confederative form of government had created.

The intent was to create a powerful, but limited national government that would have full powers to do certain things that needed to be done at the national level and could not be done on the state level, such as national defense, or the survey, parcelling, sale, and admission of Western Territories into the US as future States. The original 13 states were self-governing, but 46 of the other 47 were first organized by the Federal Government and later elevated to status of State by the People of that state, once they had met certain Federal guidelines. Certainly the entity which is today Massachussetts was not a creation of the Federal government of the United States. But just as certainly, the entity that is today the State of Ohio, or Illinois, or Montana, was first created as a territorial subdivision of the Federal government, and was only elevated to the status of State by meeting federal criteria, not by some sua sponte assertion of sovereignty.


29 posted on 11/02/2004 1:09:57 PM PST by Vicomte13 (Auta i Lome!)
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