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We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, [note 1] promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The leading 19th-century commentary on the Constitution, Justice Joseph Story's Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833), likewise rejected the compact theory and concluded that the Constitution was established directly by the people, not the states, and that it constitutes supreme law, not a mere compact. [11]
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. The opening words ...
The United States of America is a federal republic [1] consisting of 50 states, a federal district (Washington, D.C., the capital city of the United States), five major territories, and various minor islands. [2] [3] Both the states and the United States as a whole are each sovereign jurisdictions. [4]
The Guarantee Clause of Article 4 of the Constitution states that "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government." These two provisions indicate states did not surrender their wide latitude to adopt a constitution, the fundamental documents of state law, when the U.S. Constitution was adopted.
The Court cited the Supremacy Clause of Article VI, which declares the Constitution to be the supreme law of the land, and Marbury v. Madison in holding that the states must abide by the Court's decision in Brown. [35] Expectedly, many states' right advocates and state officials criticized the ruling as an attack on the Tenth Amendment. [36]
The first documented use of the phrase "United States of America" is a letter from January 2, 1776. Stephen Moylan, a Continental Army aide to General George Washington, wrote to Joseph Reed, Washington's aide-de-camp, seeking to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the Revolutionary War effort.
This lack of change is nowhere more apparent than in Supreme Court rulings that addressed federalism against the backdrop of the laissez-faire, pro-business Gilded Age. In United States v. E.C. Knight Co. (1895), the Supreme Court continued along the path of promoting dual federalism in striking down a provision of the Sherman Antitrust Act. In ...