I love quotes too. Particularly ones from the Founders concerning the Constitutional compact:
"If every infraction of a compact of so many parties is to be resisted at once as a dissolution, none can ever be formed which would last one year. We must have patience and longer endurance then with our brethren while under delusion; give them time for reflection and experience of consequences; keep ourselves in a situation to profit by the chapter of accidents; and separate from our companions only when the sole alternatives left are the dissolution of our Union with them or submission to a government without limitation of powers. Between these two evils, when we must make a choice, there can be no hesitation. But in the meanwhile, the States should be watchful to note every material usurpation on their rights; to denounce them as they occur in the most peremptory terms; to protest against them as wrongs to which our present submission shall be considered, not as acknowledgments or precedents of right, but as a temporary yielding to the lesser evil, until their accumulation shall overweigh that of separation."
Thomas Jefferson to William Branch Giles, 1825.
Badeye:
Great quote, to be sure. Its easy to forget that Jeffersons own hand set up the primary reasons the Civil War took place 80 years later when you read his thoughts as in this passage.
Badeye, - As Mama Tex says:
"Government cannot make a law contrary to the law that made the government".
If the States had - from the outset - protected their powers from federal encroachments in the Courts - the civil war need never have been fought.
Instead, the States played the same game as the Feds [and still do].
They both still claim undelegated powers; - 'Governments can make laws contrary to the supreme Law of the Land. - The bill of rights only selectively applies to Congress or to the States'
That was the beauty of Original Intent, the federal court had no jurisdiction over the States unless it was an issue of already-delegated powers.
___
In January 1800, the entire House went to the state legislature of Virginia. Both Virginia and Kentucky had petitioned the new federal government that the recent Alien and Sedition Act was unconstitutional. Madison wrote the report James Madison, Report on the Virginia Resolutions
However true, therefore, it may be, that the judicial department is, in all questions submitted to it by the forms of the Constitution, to decide in the last resort, this resort must necessarily be deemed the last in relation to the authorities of the other departments of the government; not in relation to the rights of the parties to the constitutional compact, from which the judicial, as well as the other departments, hold their delegated trusts. On any other hypothesis, the delegation of judicial power would annul the authority delegating it; and the concurrence of this department with the others in usurped powers, might subvert forever, and beyond the possible reach of any rightful remedy, the very Constitution which all were instituted to preserve.