Talk:United States Government/Federalism and State Authority

In American Federalism the States are the higher political authority, or more correctly the State and their People, who are the Sovereign and their own Subject, who have freely submitted themselves to laws they have enacted through their elected Representatives. No, this has nothing to do with the nonsense of those espousing they are a Sovereign Citizen.

Alexander Hamilton had this to say about American Federalism and the States' assent to the U.S. Constitution in Federalist Paper No. 32, second paragraph: "An entire consolidation of the States into one complete national sovereignty would imply an entire subordination of the parts; and whatever powers might remain in them, would be altogether dependent on the national will. But the plan of the convention aims only at a partial union or consolidation, the State governments would clearly retain all rights of sovereignty which they before had, and which were not, by that act, exclusively delegated to the United States."

The Agent-at-Large created by the States with their assent was United States, or United States of America, and is in the caption of parties in every lawsuit by and against the federal government. When the States sent delegates to Philadelphia in 1787 to revise the Articles of Confederation they were in fact Diplomats from free, sovereign, and independent countries, or Nation-States. The Articles of Confederation provided for their mutual defense much like the European Union, in part, does today, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that provides for mutual defense under article 5 of that Treaty.

Assent is given to an agreement as in contract, while Consent is permission in the form of yielding. The States could never Consent because ultimately there is no higher authority than theirs in American Federalism. Consider the power the States have over the federal government when a Constitutional Convention is held under Article 5. They can alter, diminish, or create the powers of the federal government through Amendments at the Convention.

As far as the American Civil War, the outcome did not make the federal government supreme over the States. Even Lincoln said in his 1st Inaugural Address, 13th paragraph, "If the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade, by less than all the parties who made it? One party to a contract may violate it -break it, so to speak; but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?" Here He refers to the Constitution as a contract, or as James Madison and others called it, a "compact", and the ultimate power of the States and their People through the construct of the Constitution and Article 5, as well as Amendment 9 and 10.