"Many would legitimately argue that the checks and balances written into the Constitution give us more rights as US citizens than we would ever have as citizens of a state."
Let them argue it. Let's see the federal bill of rights for federal citizens. You can provide a link. The checks and balances operate between states, state citizens, and the federal government and its branches. Without citizens of states, just mere residents, the balance has been removed. There is no state against which to enact unconstitutional legislation. Anything it enacts against federal citizen residents of states is allowable because that is how it was designed from the beginning.
"There doesn't seem to be much real-life warrant for such an assumption."
Do you have a better explanation for what would otherwise be unconstitutional activity? Let's hear them. Explain the attempts on guns, the paper currency, the odius IRS, the coming forced vaccines, the illegal immigration. All they have to do is keep the pressure on and wear us down until we tire. Their boldness has been inversely proportional to the number of de-jure state citizens. That number has gone to zero so their boldness has gone to infinity. Everything they want will come to be. They are not breaking any law by doing what they are doing. The devil is in the citizenship issue.
The federal government could always act as agent to resolve international problems with state citizens without having the citizen actually have to be a federal citizen. That is what the states created the federal government for, to do things like that.
Thanks again. Appreciated. Regards.
In the early years of the Republic, a state could simply declare that whole classes of residents weren't its legal citizens. Hence they had no rights and were subject to being bought and sold as property. As we saw in the Dred Scot decision, the argument was made that people in such classes weren't eligible for citizenship elsewhere in the country and would have to be treated as property and non-citizens wherever they went in the US.
There are a lot of problems with the 14th Amendment. It's poorly drafted. It was written at a time when the country was underpopulated and didn't distinguish between people whose parents were permanent residents and those who were just passing through. The whole distinction between legal and illegal entrants, so far as I know, wasn't in existence at the time. The Amendment's passage still didn't guarantee citizen rights to Indians and other minority groups. And the Amendment didn't specify just which rights of US citizens the states had to protect, so it became the source for all kinds of impositions on state and local government.
But the 14th Amendment was an improvement over what came before. That much is bedrock, at least for me. It was an improvement that states simply couldn't declare that whole groups of people would have no rights. So I don't see how some sort of "common law citizenship" or whatever you want to call it was an improvement over what you say replaced it. If it seems like it was to you, you have to take into account the fate of those who wouldn't have been recognized as citizens if it were wholly up to state governments.
One big difference between people is whether they regard state government as an expression of their wishes and desires. Some people who have a strong regional identity invest a lot of committment and faith in state government and state officials. For others among us, state government is simply another layer of bureaucrats who aren't any more responsive to our ideas than any other. We're just going to disagree about that. I certainly respect the federal system but don't see my state government as a great beacon of freedom and the federal government as the font of tyranny. The two are more alike than different, and left up to its own devises the state government would be as oppressive as Washington DC can be now.
A lot of what people are angry about is federal control over the pursestrings of government. That goes back to 16th Amendment and the institution of the federal income tax. If the federal government didn't have that power, it would be a lot weaker than it is now. Most of what the federal goverment does now would be done by the states. And we'd either be complaining about how inefficient that was, or else criticizing those states for taking so much of our money and having so much power.