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To: detsaoT
To that, I must ask: Whom is the sovereign? Whom is the subject?

The Constitution allows the states to exercise a great deal of sovereignty over matters within their borders. Outside those borders, however, the Constitution makes it clear that there are limits on what they can do. Rather than asking which is soverign, one might ask which is supreme. And the Constitution makes it clear that it is.

260 posted on 02/06/2006 6:46:05 PM PST by Non-Sequitur
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To: Non-Sequitur
The Constitution allows the states to exercise a great deal of sovereignty over matters within their borders. Outside those borders, however, the Constitution makes it clear that there are limits on what they can do. Rather than asking which is sovereign, one might ask which is supreme. And the Constitution makes it clear that it is.

I'm terribly sorry, Sir, but under the original design of our government, the Constitution is supreme only in areas under which it has jurisdiction. The Congress was not intended to legislate in areas to which it had not been granted power to do so by the States, who were the sovereigns. I worded my questions specifically the way I did for a reason: Under our present condition, the federal government is our Sovereign, to which we all owe Allegiance. This is in diametric opposition to the way in which this nation was designed to operate, and in which this nation operated up until the Civil War.

To deny the sovereignty of the States is to deny that the American form of government exists at all! Is that seriously what you are proposing?

See Federalist no 33, specifically:

But it is said that the laws of the Union are to be the SUPREME LAW of the land. But what inference can be drawn from this, or what would they amount to, if they were not to be supreme? It is evident they would amount to nothing. A LAW, by the very meaning of the term, includes supremacy. It is a rule which those to whom it is prescribed are bound to observe. This results from every political association. If individuals enter into a state of society, the laws of that society must be the supreme regulator of their conduct. If a number of political societies enter into a larger political society, the laws which the latter may enact, pursuant to the powers intrusted to it by its constitution, must necessarily be supreme over those societies, and the individuals of whom they are composed. It would otherwise be a mere treaty, dependent on the good faith of the parties, and not a goverment, which is only another word for POLITICAL POWER AND SUPREMACY. But it will not follow from this doctrine that acts of the large society which are NOT PURSUANT to its constitutional powers, but which are invasions of the residuary authorities of the smaller societies, will become the supreme law of the land. These will be merely acts of usurpation, and will deserve to be treated as such. Hence we perceive that the clause which declares the supremacy of the laws of the Union, like the one we have just before considered, only declares a truth, which flows immediately and necessarily from the institution of a federal government. It will not, I presume, have escaped observation, that it EXPRESSLY confines this supremacy to laws made PURSUANT TO THE CONSTITUTION; which I mention merely as an instance of caution in the convention; since that limitation would have been to be understood, though it had not been expressed.

262 posted on 02/06/2006 6:59:33 PM PST by detsaoT (Proudly not "dumb as a journalist.")
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