STATES' RIGHTS CAN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT BE FIRED? by Dr. D.J. Stevens-Allen

This article appears here courtesy of The Barnes Review, PO Box 15877, Washington, DC, 20003.

Any discussion of states' rights must commence with the definition of sovereignty. This is particularly true of these United States today, because, in the community of nations, we are unique.

Here, as in the later German Federal Empire, the states were sovereign nations to begin with. We created the Continental Congress of the First Republic and the federal government of the Second Republic. And we established the conditions for the operation of the "general government"; in the first instance the Articles of Confederation and, in the second, the Constitution. This latter document leaves no reasonable doubt that, in America, the states hold ultimate sovereignty, not the federal government. The federal government's sovereignty is granted by delegation, not by inherent right.

If you're independent, you are, by definition, sovereign. This was the status of the individual states of the United States when they drafted and ratified the Constitution in 1787-1789.

In terms of international relations, a compact is a treaty or agreement setting forth a stated objective and the means whereby the concurring nations propose to accomplish it. Thus, a "compact may (or may not) be a constitution, and a constitution may (or may not) be a compact."

At the end of the Revolutionary War, each of the American states was an independent and sovereign republic, recognized as such by other states, and therefore fully empowered to conduct it own foreign policy, regulate its own commerce and exercise all the other functions inherent in the condition of nationhood. They were, indeed. sovereign states.

The Constitution is a "compact" or treaty among sovereign nations, whereby the various countries subscribing to it gave up, on a temporary basis, certain, specific aspects of their sovereignty. The quarrel arises, increasingly, over how much sovereignty was contributed to the common pool, embodied in the federal government. And the argument dates back to the Washington administration.