Your word play is defective. There is no claim of Sovereignty in the Constitution. Quote it if you've got it. Article VI isn't it.
The founding fathers as a whole profoundly mistrusted a democracy.
You mean Hamilton and his merchant pals. Well, we've heard their maxim of government before, blurted out by a Philadelphia congressman on an FBI videotape: "Money talks, and bullshit walks!" What a proud motto for a political movement! Proud as Carthage, I'm sure.
As such power that would be vested in the people in a democracy is instead, vested in representatives of the people.
Oh, I see -- the representatives represent themselves, and tell us what to do afterwards. Gee, I wish I'd been born rich.
But even beyond that, no people have the right deny the delegated powers, since the constitution is the supreme law of the land.
You bet. So, chasing the pecking order upstream, we go from me, the lowly louse of a citizen, upstream to the powerful Congressmen and the magistrates, and further upstream to the people who give them money. I can't get further up the stream than them........nobody pays them or tells them what to do, rather the other way around.......so I conclude from your precis that we are a plutocratic oligarchy, and ought by right to be, just like Hamilton wanted.
Guess the Bill of Rights was kinda otiose after all, eh? The Antifederalists could have saved their breath, arguing with driven businessmen working on their bottom lines.
It's implicit in your remarks. Either you work for the State and are its commandable resource, or it works for you, and it is your commandable resource.
So who is the master, you or the State? If it isn't you, it's the State.
Like they say, if you're sitting in a poker game and you can't tell by looking who the sucker is -- it's you.
To illustrate further where your argument takes us, let's watch the Supreme Court at play, screwing with the poor old Antifederalists and their attempts to keep the feds off the People's backs:
Here is an "authoritative" discussion from one of the chief offenders,
The U.S. Senate's discussion of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution
Federal Regulations Affecting State Activities and Instrumentalities.--Since the mid-1970s, the Court has been closely divided over whether the Tenth Amendment or related constitutional doctrine constrains congressional authority to subject state activities and instrumentalities to generally applicable requirements enacted pursuant to the commerce power.\45\ Under Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority,\46\ the Court's most recent ruling directly on point, the Tenth Amendment imposes practically no judicially enforceable limit on generally applicable federal legislation, and states must look to the political process for redress.
In other words, the Supreme Court threw the States to the wolves.
And again,
The Court overruled National League of Cities in Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Auth.\54\ Justice Blackmun's opinion for the Court in Garcia concluded that the National League of Cities test for ``integral operations in areas of traditional governmental functions'' had proven ``both impractical and doctrinally barren,'' and that the Court in 1976 had ``tried to repair what did not need repair.''\55\ With only passing reference to the Tenth Amendment the Court nonetheless clearly reverted to the Madisonian view of the Amendment reflected in Unites States v. Darby.\56\ States retain a significant amount of sovereign authority [[Page 1516]] ``only to the extent that the Constitution has not divested them of their original powers and transferred those powers to the Federal Government.''\57\ The principal restraints on congressional exercise of the Commerce power are to be found not in the Tenth Amendment or in the Commerce Clause itself, but in the structure of the Federal Government and in the political processes.\58\ ``Freestanding conceptions of state sovereignty'' such as the National League of Cities test subvert the federal system by ``invit[ing] an unelected federal judiciary to make decisions about which state policies it favors and which ones it dislikes.''\59\ While continuing to recognize that ``Congress' authority under the Commerce Clause must reflect [the] position . . . that the States occupy a special and specific position in our constitutional system,'' the Court held that application of Fair Labor Standards Act minimum wage and overtime provisions to state employment does not require identification of these ``affirmative limits.''\60\ In sum, the Court in Garcia seems to have said that most but not necessarily all disputes over the effects on state sovereignty of federal commerce power legislation are to be considered political questions. What it would take for legislation to so threaten the ``special and specific position'' that states occupy in the constitutional system as to require judicial rather than political resolution was not delineated.
Yeah, right.
Later indications are that the Court may be looking for ways to back off from Garcia. One device is to apply a ``clear statement'' rule requiring unambiguous statement of congressional intent to displace state authority. After noting the serious constitutional issues that would be raised by interpreting the Age Discrimination in Employment Act to apply to appointed state judges, the Court in Gregory v. Ashcroft\64\ explained that, because Garcia ``constrained'' consideration of ``the limits that the state-federal balance places on Congress' powers,'' a plain statement rule was all the more necessary. ``[I]nasmuch as this Court in Garcia has left primarily to the political process the protection of the States against intrusive exercises of Congress' Commerce Clause powers, we must be absolutely certain that Congress intended such an exercise.''
Oh, so we're going to wear a condom now, and so that'll make it okay.
Under the Lincolnian view of States' rights preferred by you, we've declined to this, that Congress has merely to make a "clear statement" that it intends to invade the Reserved Powers under color of the Commerce Clause -- like knocking loudly at a woman's door before helping yourself.