Tejasinha Sivalingam: Constitution limits the sovereignty of the states

To The Daily Sun,

Article 13 of the Articles of Confederation required that any alteration to the Articles of Confederation be confirmed by the legislature of every state (i.e. unanimous). However, the newly proposed Constitution was adopted as law when ratified by only nine states (see Article 7).

The sovereignty of the states may have been betrayed by this seminal action.

This was the first moment when states were bullied into submitting to what would be an ever-growing centralization of power, the beginning of the end of state sovereignty.

The federal Bill of Rights was advocated for by anti-Federalists to ensure that if the sovereign states were devoured by the new federal government, and the people melted into a giant national body politic, that The People would have some semblance of individual rights and popular sovereignty preserved in the face of the leviathan.

The centralization of power in the federal government is now being fed by the right and left wing attempts to vest the federal government with the ultimate authority and power to define and secure individual rights, rather than the states. That is an inversion of our founding ideology.

The rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are absolute, not conditional (i.e. a privilege). We know this because by contrast Article 1, Section 9 gives an example of “a privilege,” the writ of habeas corpus.

However, the preamble to the Bill of Rights’ intention to expressly and exclusively limit the powers of the federal government is clear, just as Article 1, Section 10 limits the powers of the sovereign states.

Rights enumerated in your state constitutions are the express, absolute and exclusive restraints on the powers of the sovereign states. Sovereign states are the ultimate security of individual rights, and tranquility of our union.

Tejasinha Sivalingam

Ashland