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4. The People never, ever, EVER give up sovereignty, in the United States.

Sovereignty is vested in the constitution. Check out Article VI, clause 2.

5. The Southern States therefore had the right, which they did not, anywhere in the Constitution, surrender, to gather together in conventions as populi, as Peoples, to reconsider the Union -- and to withdraw from it, in a series of acts of sovereignty over which the other States and Peoples had no right of supervision, much less approval, any more than they had the right, which Connecticut thought they did, to compel Rhode Island's ratification of the Constitution.

The 9th and 10th amendments indicate basically that all powers and rights not enumerated as belonging to the federal government nor prohibited to the states belong to the states. Article VI, Clause 2 states that the constitution is supreme. IOW, sovereignty rests with the constitution - not with the people. Remember that the founders feared a democracy and set out to create a republic.

As for the sovereignty issue, read the enumerated powers given to the federal government and prohibited to the states.

The only way that each individual state could exercise such prohibited powers was by raising state laws above constitutional laws.

Sovereignty is vested in the constitution. Check out Article VI, clause 2.

I did. It doesn't use the word "sovereignty" anywhere. It says, and let's quote it to cross all the t's, :

"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, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."

It is readily manifest that the clause does not touch on sovereignty, but on matters of Law, which are not matters of Sovereignty.

My point again: when the People act, in their capacity as Sovereign, their enactments are superior to every law, constitution, or other arrangement. Vox populi, vox Dei.

You obviously believe that Government is, and ought to be, supreme over the People. That is understandable, given the outcome of the Civil War which you're wedded to defending, and it puts you in some very good company -- socialists, Statists, Marxist-Leninists, National Socialists and other Phalangists, and strongmen of every stripe who use the State Power to make their will binding upon the people they batten on.

The 9th and 10th amendments indicate basically that all powers and rights not enumerated as belonging to the federal government nor prohibited to the states belong to the states.

And that includes the Sovereign power -- which is not delegated to the United States, but instead little pieces are dribbled around piecemeal. There is no block grant of Sovereignty anywhere in the Constitution from the People to USG or to any other entity, including the Constitution, or any redefinition of the People, the populus of America, that would cause Sovereignty to be subsumed under the rubric of Union as Lincoln insisted.

Article VI, Clause 2 states that the constitution is supreme. IOW, sovereignty rests with the constitution - not with the people. Remember that the founders feared a democracy and set out to create a republic.

Yes to the first sentence, if you quote the clause verbatim -- but the word "sovereignty" is not used, and that greatest of all powers is not delegated or surrendered. You may construe that the Supremacy Clause confers Sovereignty, but you can't back it up with a quote because it isn't there.

I'd have trouble, by the way, believing that anyone would transfer Sovereignty to an inanimate object such as a contract -- you'd do better arguing that it was transferred to the People of the United States. But then, you'd play hell showing the scholars that the constitutional ratification conventions construed such a thing themselves as a People of the United States, and that they intended there should spring from the new Constitution a new, super-Hamiltonian unitary populus with a unitary government subsuming all the Peoples who had ratified that Constitution. I don't think even Hamilton, in all his enthusiasm for unitary government, ever argued that.