Lew, I notice that the NY Times found a law professor to repeat the lie that the so-called “Supremacy Clause” of the Constitution (Article 6) supposedly makes the federal government “supreme” at all times over the citizens of the states.  Statist law professors may wish this were true, but it’s not.  Federal law is only “supreme” with regard to the powers delegated to the central government by the sovereign states in Article I, Section 8.  In his 1823 book, New Views of the Constitution, based partly on Robert Yates’s Secret Proceedings and Debates of the Constitutional Convention, a first-hand account of the convention by the New York chief justice that was published after his death, Senator John Taylor of Virginia stated:  “[T]he 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 government, going beyond the powers delegated or those reserved” (p. 78).

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