re: My Crystal Ball

Tom, you are of course right about the “Supremacy Clause” of the  Constitution. Contrary to what some of your dumber critics say, the founders did not totally destroy federalism and states’ rights by making the central government “supreme” in all matters when they wrote the Constitution. (I’ve been lectured to by dozens of similarly uneducated Lincoln cultists on this topic, who seem to think the “supremacy clause” permits the government in Washington to even murder its own citizens by the hundreds of thousands if they resist its dictates).

In 1823 John Taylor wrote an excellent book on the Constitution entitled New Views of the Constitution of the United States (reprinted by The Lawbook Exchange, Union, NJ, in 2002).  Referring to the published notes on the constitutional convention taken by New York Chief Justice Robert Yates, Taylor wrote (p. 78) that:  “the expression in the constitution, ‘shall be the supreme law of the land,’ is restricted by its limitations and reservation, and did not convey any species of supremacy to the governments, going beyond the powers delegated or those reserved.” He refers, of course, to the delegated powers in Article 1, Section 8.  The central government was “supreme” in that regard, but the Tenth Amendment, which Jefferson considered to be the keystone of the entire document, reserved all other powers to the people and the states. This would include nullification and secession since, as Article 7 proves, the people of the states were sovereign.

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9:48 am on January 22, 2011