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The United States Constitution provides the basic laws under which the national and
state governments are to operate. It lays down the powers that each level of government must
abide by, especially when it comes to specific enumerated duties and powers. For instance,
the Supremacy Clause (Article VI Clause 2) guarantees that the Constitution and all laws and
treaties enacted by Congress constitute federal laws which are superior to state legislation, to
the extent that they are consistent with the provisions of the Constitution.
The Tenth Amendment requires that the central government performs the duties
delegated to it by the Constitution. But the absence of a concise statement as to exactly what
draws the line between central and the regional governments has been the subject of sharp
differences between the federalist and the Democratic-Republican interpretations of the
mandate of both governments. I concur with the federalist philosophy, but only for the reason
that in any united family, there must be a head and subordinates, and to the extent that the
head should not exceed the limits set forth by the rules of the house.
One of the areas which the United States Supreme Court and state courts have expressed as one to be under the
governing of the federal jurisdiction is international relations.
Firstly, under the federalist’s view, the central government has been given irrefutable
powers to deal in issues affecting all citizens of the nation. The characteristic nature of the
federalist views was created by the circumstances in which the federalists promoted the
enactment of the four Acts that constituted the Alien and Sedition Acts.
The Acts were an act of self-protection and to some extent, a defensive mechanism. The French had expressed a
position that threatened to breach the existing peace in the United States, and, in the interest
of protecting its sovereignty, the United States was obliged to create laws in order to
safeguard its citizens from alien invasion from all foreign countries. As such, it had to enact
immigration laws that restricted aliens from becoming citizens if they were a threat to the
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People, permit arrests of suspected enemy spies in the country in times of war among other
protection policies. The federalist opinion would thus become that the enactment of the Alien
and Sedition Acts was in pursuance of the Constitution, since the matters involved affected
the international relation of the nation and foreign sovereign states.
Secondly, the Constitution is to the effect that the two levels of government derive
their separate powers from it, and not from each other. The statements propounded by
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolves respectively
may have had legitimate grounds, but only to the extent that the federal authorities ought not
to extend their mandate as granted by the Constitution.
It is impractical to determine and enumerate every possible situation where the Constitution implicitly provides for the extent
of the relationship between the federal and state jurisdictions. More so, it is illogical to follow
Jefferson’s theory of strictly construing the provisions of the Constitution and then creating a
policy that allows states (especially individual states) to nullify a federal law. This would
amount to division in the nation, and would contravene the very essence of the Constitution.
If the Democratic-Republican theory were to be followed strictly, the nation might
just end up in several states purporting to secede and do away with the whole idea of unity
among the states. One level of government must be above the other, and the central
government cannot be subject to the state legislature, so long as the central government
abides by the provided mandate in the Constitution (Kommers, D., P., Finn, J., E. &
Jacobsohn, G., J., 2004).
A great example of the best application of the constitutional provisions is the 1803 Supreme Court decision in Marbury v Madison. In this case the court
declared the provisions of the Judiciary Act of 1789 which gave a Justice of the Peace the
right to place a claim of commission unconstitutional. Therefore, the court accepted that the
national constitution gave rights to both levels of government. It gives the federal government
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authority to govern issues that affect the nation as a whole, and gives the state governments
authority to handle matters affecting their regions.
Reference
Kommers, D., P., Finn, J., E. & Jacobsohn, G., J. (2004). American constitutional law:
Governmental powers and democracy. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.