[WhiskeyPapa]

Only where the states have delegated sovereignty to the federal government.

The people of the whole United States are the sovereigns; the states are not.

--Just as Jefferson Davis indicated.

Walt

[4CJ]

The people of the whole United States are the sovereigns; the states are not.

Ask Chief Justice John Marshall, from Sturges v Crowninshield, 4 Wheat. 122, (1819):

When the American people created a national legislature, with certain enumerated powers, it was neither necessary nor proper to define the powers retained by the States. These powers proceed, not from the people of America, but from the people of the several States; and remain, after the adoption of the constitution, what they were before, except so far as they may be abridged by that instrument.

What was that Court case? McCullough v Maryland? From Marshall again:

No political dreamer [except Walt] was ever wild enough to think of breaking down the lines which separate the States, and of compounding the American people into one common mass. Of consequence, when they act, they act in their States. But the measures they adopt do not, on that account, cease to be the measures of the people themselves, or become the measures of the State governments.

See, I didn't even leave your line out. Something later perhaps? How about Justice Thomas, In US Term Limits v Thornton, 514 US 779, (1995):

To be sure, when the Tenth Amendment uses the phrase "the people," it does not specify whether it is referring to the people of each State or the people of the Nation as a whole. But the latter interpretation would make the Amendment pointless: there would have been no reason to provide that where the Constitution is silent about whether a particular power resides at the state level, it might or might not do so. In addition, it would make no sense to speak of powers as being reserved to the undifferentiated people of the Nation as a whole, because the Constitution does not contemplate that those people will either exercise power or delegate it. The Constitution simply does not recognize any mechanism for action by the undifferentiated people of the Nation.

The people of the differentiated states are the sovereigns - not the people of the whole United States en masse.