Hardly.
I can show you where the Constitution comments on the matter demonstrating that I am correct. Can you?
Certainly. A preliminary question is: what does it mean to be sovereign?
A sovereign entity has the ultimate legal jurisdiction in its territory - there is no legal appeal above it.
A sovereign entity has the sole power of declaring its territory to be at war with another sovereign entity.
A sovereign entity has the sole power of concluding a treaty with other sovereign entities.
A sovereign entity has the power to determine what shall be used as legal tender it its territory and to regulate the value of that legal tender.
A sovereign entity has the power to regulate imports and exports.
The Constitution clearly gives these sovereign powers to the federal government. Individual states cannot make wars, cannot conclude treaties, cannot decide what will be legal tender, cannot regulate imports and exports, and, most importantly of all, cannot be the ultimate legal authority in disputes.
The most important part of the Constitution - which eliminates any ambiguity on the issue of sovereignty - is this:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.
The laws of the United States, and its lawmaking authority, are the supreme law and preempt the constitution and laws of any individual state. Right there, in black and white.
Look at the 10th Amendment.
Please, let's.
It states:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
It's quite clear. If the states were to be sovereigns under the 10th Amendment, it would mean that there were sovereign powers that the Constitution did not delegate to the United States and that those sovereign powers would then reside in the individual states instead.
The problem, of course, is that the Constitution vests all the powers of sovereignty (warmaking, treatymaking, regulation of external trade, regulation of monetary value, final legal appeal) in the United States.
The powers that the 10th Amendment leaves to the states are not sovereign powers, but subsidiary powers of local, not national, jurisdiction.
because the Anti-Federalist clearly understood the tyrannical nature of a single, federal level of control
A Federalist, not the Anti-Federalists (who were opposed to any Constitution), wrote the 10th Amendment. In fact, the very same Federalist who wrote the supremacy clause I quoted above.
He wrote it because the ratifying states wanted to make clear that their local jurisdiction would not be eliminated - namely that the constitutional sovereignty of the United States was indeed federal and not consolidated.
Not surprised you needed to give yourself a primer on sovereignty, and yet you still get it wrong. While it is technically true that a Federalist wrote the Bill of Rights, you and I both know that James Madison did not agree with nor desire a Bill of Rights. It was Thomas Jefferson who pushed for and got the BOR included. Certainly you are not going to try and argue that Jefferson was a federalist when the Constitution was written. That pig won’t fly.
Think about it. There is no need for the 10th if you were a federalist. Without the BOR the federal government WAS supreme. That’s precisely WHY a BOR was demanded by ANTI-Federalist and why Federalist Hamilton did NOT want the BOR. States that did not want to give up their sovereignty refused to join UNTIL the sovereignty was guaranteed. All the pretzel twisting non-logic in the world won’t change the facts.
The same argument made for the 2nd Amendment applies here. The BOR is a definition of rights for PEOPLE, NOT militias and NOT Federal governments. The PEOPLE (in militias) have the right to bear arms the PEOPLE (in the states) are sovereign, just as it says...”The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution (not right to sovereignty was delegated to the US), nor prohibited by it to the States (sovereignty was NOT prohibited to the states), are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Get that? The PEOPLE!!! Unless you lived in the South after 1865 which is when you had no rights and became slaves to the Union.
The following affirmation of my assertion comes from this web site: Read more: http://www.revolutionary-war-and-beyond.com/10th-amendment.html#ixzz26T2gs4Tr
I suggest you read the documentation after the following. It should be very enlightening.
On June 8, James Madison proposed a list of about twenty amendments, which he had carefully chosen from the list of amendments submitted by the STATES. One of these was, of course, what became the 10th Amendment. The Congress voted to accept twelve of these amendments on September 25. They passed them on to the states and with Virginia’s vote for ratification, ten of these twelve amendments became law on December 15, 1791. These first ten amendments are today known as the Bill of Rights.
It is indeed quite clear. Notice that nowhere does it say anything about sovereignty not being permitted. If what you said was true, it would have been written exactly opposite from what it was.
Allow me to demonstrate.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
My bad. In the second graph my mind wandered I said Hamilton instead of Madison.
Then there’s this:
statement by James Madison from The Federalist, No. 45:
“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on EXTERNAL objects, as war, peace negotiation, and foreign commerce;... The powers reserved to the several states will EXTEND TO ALL the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the LIVES, LIBERTIES AND PROPERTIES OF THE PEOPLE, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the state.”