Of Timothy Sandefur, that is. He keeps trying to explain things to us, and we just don’t listen. It’s obvious, he says, that the Constitution was not a compact among states — everyone knows that.
Everyone, apparently, with the exception of the entire Virginia ratifying convention, whose Federalists — that’s right, Tim, whose FEDERALISTS — sold the Constitution as precisely a LEAGUE AMONG STATES.
Moreover, Virginia’s limited understanding of the nature of the Union and its powers would be understood to bind the remainder of the states, and Virginia could be “exonerated” from the whole thing if anything more than what she expressly delegated to the federal government were attempted to be exercised. George Nicholas, a member of the committee that drafted Virginia’s ratification instrument, put it this way:
“If thirteen individuals are about to make a contract, and one agrees to it, but at the same time declares that he understands its meaning, signification and intent, to be, what the words of the contract plainly and obviously denote; that it is not to be construed so as to impose any supplementary condition upon him, and that he is to be exonerated from it, whensoever any such imposition shall be attempted
