Posted on 05/24/2007 6:03:30 AM PDT by Rebeleye
Utter tripe. The federal law must be PURSUANT to the Constitution. Otherwise, the power not being prohibited remains with the state.
I don't argue that the federal government is sovereign or that states may not be "sovereign" in certain areas, simply that a state that agreed to the Constitution would have a hard time logically asserting an absolute sovereignty of the sort that lentulus claims for the states.
John Marshall stated that a delegated authority may be recalled, the states are the contracting parties, not the federal government, and it's a union of states not a fixed number, nowhere does it state that a party may not leave. New York cannot craft a single law that Georgia must abide by and vice versa. The federal government cannot craft a federal law that Georgia must obey, unless that law is pursuant to a clause in the Constitution, and even then only if Georgia agrees to abide by it. Georgia refused to agree with a Supreme Court decision, and out of that we have the 11th Amendment.
The lunatic John McCain is warning of illegal immigrants revolting if they fail to get their way, what McCain had better worry about is US revolting - it's pathetic that illegals are treated better than my family who have been here for over 300 years (indefinite counting Native ancestors).
I do believe I said as much:
Obviously, if a power that's forbidden to the federal government is involved or if the federal government oversteps its authority, federal law isn't supreme in that area.
You say:
John Marshall stated that a delegated authority may be recalled, the states are the contracting parties, not the federal government, and it's a union of states not a fixed number, nowhere does it state that a party may not leave.
It looks like that's precisely what Marshall did not say in McCullough vs. Maryland (1819). So far as I understand him he allowed that the People could modify the Constitution, but that the federal government was not a mere creature of the states. It's a very subtle point, but that's my understanding.
Means some lady is going to get lipo and put it all in her butt to get a nice badonkadonk.
That's my "faculty story".
Inasmuch as he and others have pointed out elsewhere that the Constitution, and perforce the Union, were created by the People, and that moreover the States are the People in their corporate form, then therefore his point amounts to a distinction without a difference. One suspects that Marshall is playing games here, trying to elevate the Government to sovereignty again -- a favorite preoccupation of all the Hamiltonians from the moment the guns fell silent at Yorktown.
Know whut ah mean, Vern?
The sovereignty of the States isn't "absolute", which implies "absolved" -- obviously, there are contractual obligations which individuals must obey (remember, the federal Constitution operates, as Hamilton and Madison were at pains to point out, on individuals, the chief remedy for the defects of the Articles of Confederation). Likewise, the States have agreed to refrain from certain activities, such as emitting money or drawing treaties either with one another or with foreign states.
So to say, that the States and the individuals composing the People are obliged by the Constitution, is not to say that they have changed their condition or their qualities in any respect, and that they are now no longer what they were, but only departments and subjects, vassals, of a created greater entity now exalted above them all. Rather, the People are still the undoubted Absolute Master of the States both singularly and in Union, and of the Constitution, and of the Union and Government that the Constitution created. The whole shooting match, in other words.
What I do claim for the People is all the powers of an absolute monarch, all of the rights, and all of the prerogatives, perquisites, and precedence. That includes all the powers delegated to the federal government -- just because I move a $20 bill from my right pocket to my left, doesn't mean I don't own it any more and can't spend it as I please. In like manner, the People of a State can resume their powers and go their own way at any time. The advisability of doing so is one thing, and completely political, but the ability of doing so is quite another, and in no doubt cast by the terms of the Constitution, which is the People's creature just as much as their individual States.
I think you've got something there and I believe the best example that we've ever had of such a hustling self-promoting elite group is the slaveowning interest that was behind the formation of the Confederate States of America.
Once again, the words of prominent Confederate Zebulon Vance apply:
"The great popular heart is not now and never has been in this war. It was a revolution of the politicians, not the people."
Bingo. Georgia is sovereign over Georgia, Texas is sovereign over Texas, ditto for New York et al.
No state SURRENDERED anything, they agreed to not exercise certain powers whilst they were members of the federal union.
There was no power granted to the federal government to compel a state, that notion was defeated twice during debates.
The Supreme Court ruled several times that the federal government cannot force a state to comply.
The framers stated that the states could use their militias against the federal army to prevent tyranny!
The motion to consolidate the people into one amalgamated body failed to receive a second.
The motion by Madison to grant federal power to prevent secession was voted down 8-3.
Now the pecksniffs advert that Lincoln was simply using the militia/army to ensure that the laws of the federal government be enforced. Yet none of them ever berates Lincoln (or any other President) for failing to enforce fugitive laws, or for the failure of the President to defend Texas from native American attacks. The President never sent troops to Massachusetts to force Gov. Caleb Strong to send militia unit to support the war. The Federalist party opposed that war, 8 of 10 New England Senators voted against war (nothing has changed), 34 of 36 House Federalists signed 'An Address of Members of the House of Representatives, of the Congress of the United States, to their constituents, on the subject of the War with Great Britain' opposing war. Why didn't the President, if he had the power, send troops to Massachusetts to cause the law to be upheld?
Possibly because the only LEGAL method of intervention was at the request of the governor or state legislature? Buehler ... Buehler ...
The original book was by Upshur. That note was added by the editor, Charles C. Burr.
I thought an "opus" meant you were leaving.
But you don't go.
Ah, well ...
The State governments may be regarded as constituent and essential parts of the federal government; whilst the latter is nowise essential to the operation or organization of the former.
In Federalist 45, Madison is talking about how the Constitution requires state participation in some aspects of the operation of the federal government. In those days, State legislatures chose Senators and Presidential Electors. So literally, yes, you needed state input to make the federal government work.
He's not saying that the national interest isn't real or that federal laws and treaties don't have validity or that only states matter. Indeed, look at what he says in the very same number 45 of the Federalist:
[I]f the Union, as has been shown, be essential to the security of the people of America against foreign danger; if it be essential to their security against contentions and wars among the different States; if it be essential to guard them against those violent and oppressive factions which embitter the blessings of liberty, and against those military establishments which must gradually poison its very fountain; if, in a word, the Union be essential to the happiness of the people of America, is it not preposterous, to urge as an objection to a government, without which the objects of the Union cannot be attained, that such a government may derogate from the importance of the governments of the individual States? Was, then, the American Revolution effected, was the American Confederacy formed, was the precious blood of thousands spilt, and the hard-earned substance of millions lavished, not that the people of America should enjoy peace, liberty, and safety, but that the government of the individual States, that particular municipal establishments, might enjoy a certain extent of power, and be arrayed with certain dignities and attributes of sovereignty? We have heard of the impious doctrine in the Old World, that the people were made for kings, not kings for the people. Is the same doctrine to be revived in the New, in another shape that the solid happiness of the people is to be sacrificed to the views of political institutions of a different form?
Madison was pretty passionate about the states not being the whole end and aim of American government.
Inasmuch as he and others have pointed out elsewhere that the Constitution, and perforce the Union, were created by the People, and that moreover the States are the People in their corporate form, then therefore his point amounts to a distinction without a difference.
No, that's not what John Marshall is saying in McCulloch v. Maryland. I've gotten really impatient with the legalese, but here's how Wikipedia breaks his decision down.
1. The Court argued that the Constitution was a social contract created by the people via the Constitutional Convention. The government proceeds from the people and binds the state sovereignties. Therefore, the federal government is supreme, based on the consent of the people. Marshall declares the federal governments overarching supremacy in his statement:
If any one proposition could command the universal assent of mankind, we might expect it would be this that the government of the Union, though limited in its power, is supreme within its sphere of action.
The people of the United States ratified the Constitution in state conventions. If at some date the people of the United States decide in state conventions that they want to alter or discard the Constitution, that path is open to them. But it doesn't follow that a convention in one state can unilaterally break with the Constitution or rescind that states ratification.
For Marshall, the "People of the United States" most assuredly does exist, not a variety of state peoples. That's what I and others got from the decision, anyway. And it stands to reason, that if colony-peoples could be created by the British Crown, or London companies, or the actions of settlers, that citizens could also form an "American people." Dogmatism aside, what would make that impossible?
And finally, the People of the United States did not give the federal government a threshold or irrevocable grant of power, but a temporally durable, perpetually renewing trust of power that the People have the right and power to revoke at any time, and resume their powers intact. This is what the departing States did in 1861, whereupon they were set upon by Abraham Lincoln and his political machine, wielding the United States Army as their own instrument of revolution.
In the American Civil War, the revolution of secession was overreached by a coup d'etat of the servant against the master, and the whole American People lost both war and coup, not least the men of the Union Army who fought, they thought, to preserve the Union, but actually to end it.
If it's a question of two "revolutions" then it's not much of a choice. I doubt a government can simply pick up its "sovereignty" again after eighty years, all the more so, if like so many states in the union, they'd never had the kind of sovereignty that you attribute to the states. The state of Mississippi or Illinois was in crucial ways a creation of federal authority. The state of Louisiana or Florida or Iowa occupies land acquired for the American people by the US government. Maybe Texas or Hawaii could, but not Tennessee or Arkansas, which never had anything remotely corresponding to independence.
But in any event, I'm not saying that I know for a fact that secession was unconstitutional. That's my interpretation, but interpretations differ. What I am saying is that where interpretations differ, where each side can make a case, one can't simply act on the basis of one's own reading. One has to behave cautiously and submit the matter to the courts for interpretation, rather than to take up arms.
My basic argument has always been that American history has seen the sad playing-out of a destructive tendency which was present at the Philadelphia Convention, at the beginning, and which now threatens American exceptionalism, as unlimited-government, access capitalists and Marxist-collectivist termites labor in tandem to assimilate America to a despotic new world-state.
Then it follows that you would have supported Lincoln over Davis. First, to establish and maintain American independence from European colonial and imperial powers by defending our borders and developing industry. And second, to roll back the collectivist termite slave regime. I salute you, true American.
A freedom of political association that must await the Government's favorable response to a "Mother, may I?" is no freedom of political association at all.He understands 'sovereignty'. Wish we had more like him and Thomas.
... the federal government is supreme, based on the consent of the people. Marshall declares the federal governments overarching supremacy in his statement:And Wikipedia is reliable? Bwhahahahahahaha!If any one proposition could command the universal assent of mankind, we might expect it would be this that the government of the Union, though limited in its power, is supreme within its sphere of action.
The following is from the Supreme Court opinion, meaning that Chief Justice Chase (he of "Free [for Whites] Soil, Free [from black competition] Labor, Free [White] Men" bent) agreed.
It is a familiar rule of construction of the Constitution of the Union, that the sovereign powers vested in the State governments by their respective constitutions, remained unaltered and unimpaired, except so far as they were granted to the government of the United States. That the intention of the framers of the Constitution in this respect might not be misunderstood, this rule of interpretation is expressly declared in the tenth article of the amendments, namely: 'The powers not delegated to the United States are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.' The government of the United States, therefore, can claim no powers which are not granted to it by the Constitution, and the powers actually granted must be such as are expressly given, or given by necessary implication.... The supremacy of the general government, therefore, so much relied on in the argument of the counsel for the plaintiff in error, in respect to the question before us, cannot be maintained. The two governments are upon an equality
Justice Nelson, Collector v. Day, 78 Wall. 113 (1870)
And doomed to loos again
There’s a story you should know from a hundred years ago
And a hundred years we’ve waited now to tell
Now the Yankees come along and they’ll listen to this song
And they’ll quake in fear to hear this Rebel yell
And they’ll quake in fear to hear this Rebel yell
Yeeeeehaw! Oh, the South’s gonna rise again!
Robert E. Lee broke his musket on his knee
And a thousand pieces shattered on the ground
But he looked up then and he gathered up his men
And from his lips there came an awful sound
Oh, the South’s gonna rise again!
Stonewall took a gun and he made the Yankees run
But he took a fatal bullet in the chest
As he fell down dead old Stonewall said,
‘I’m givin’ you a dieing man’s request’
‘I’m givin’ you a dieing man’s request’
Oh, the South’s gonna rise again!
Jeb Stewart spurred his horse and the Yankees run of course
But there wasn’t any powder in his gun
So he said to his boys, ‘Let’s make a lot of noise.’
And we’ll charge again and make them Yankees run
And we’ll charge again and make them Yankees run
Yeeeeehaw! Oh, the South’s gonna rise again!
Do it.
Dude, you’re 6 years late - I guess that’s a southern thing.
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