There being no such intermediate body between
the State legislatures and the people interested in watching the conduct
of the former, violations of the State constitutions are more likely to
remain unnoticed and unredressed.
2. "This Constitution and the laws of the United States which shall be
made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made, or which shall be
made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law
of the land, and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any
thing in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary
notwithstanding."
The indiscreet zeal of the adversaries to the Constitution has betrayed
them into an attack on this part of it also, without which it would have
been evidently and radically defective. To be fully sensible of this, we
need only suppose for a moment that the supremacy of the State
constitutions had been left complete by a saving clause in their favor.
In the first place, as these constitutions invest the State legislatures
with absolute sovereignty, in all cases not excepted by the existing
articles of Confederation, all the authorities contained in the proposed
Constitution, so far as they exceed those enumerated in the
Confederation, would have been annulled, and the new Congress would have
been reduced to the same impotent condition with their predecessors.
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