The next time I hear some well-meaning conservative wax poetic about the virtues of federalism and the states as “laboratories of democracy,” I may tear out what’s left of my hair.
True, the political system created by the Constitution was intended to divide sovereignty between the states and the federal government or, in Madison’s words from Federalist #39, to create a system which was “partly federal and partly national.”
On the other hand, only four essays later, Madison also states that all governments, even state governments, are bound by “the transcendent law of nature and of nature’s God, which declares that the safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim, and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed.” All legitimate governments must secure to their citizens their inalienable rights.
Put another away, there is nothing sacred about federa
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