When the founders met in Philadelphia at what became known as the Constitutional convention they struggled mightily with the issue of divided sovereignty.
The problem before them on this issue was how to give the Federal government enough sovereignty to do what it needed to do while maintaining the legitimate sovereignty for the individual States so that they wouldn't lose their individual identity.
The divided sovereignty plan that they finally arrived at included not only sovereignty that was vertically divided between State Governments and Federal Government but also they reached for sovereignty that was horizontally divided between the different branches in the Federal Governments.
They attempted to achieve this horizontal sovereignty by locating the Sovereignty of each branch of the Federal Government in different constituencies with the House having its sovereignty source in those who had the franchise, and the Senate having its sovereignty source in the respective State legislatures who would elect US Senators and the Executive having its sovereignty source in the Electoral College.
All of this makes it clear that the Founders had no problem with Sovereignty in Government as long as it was decentralized, properly distributed (diffused) and limited to its proper sphere.
Sovereignty, when considered as a temporal phenomenon is finite and is an inescapable category in any culture or society. The question thus is never whether a culture or society will have exercised sovereignty but rather the question is where will the finite amount of sovereignty dwell.
The Framers of the Constitution, knowing and experiencing the perils of consolidated sovereignty, desired sovereignty not to congeal in any one location. In pursuing divided sovereignty they were shaping the character of the American Institutional soul in a Feudal direction as it was informed by Biblical thought categories.
We have made three points in the above paragraph on which we need to expand.
1.) Temporal Sovereignty is finite
2.) Consolidated sovereignty is perilous
3.) America is a country shaped by feudalistic tendencies, which were themselves informed by Biblical categories.
With temporal sovereignty being finite we must understand that if you give a set amount of sovereignty to one location, you must, by necessity delete that much sovereignty from another location.
This was part of the problem that lay behind the American War for Independence. Questions and conflicts arose regarding where sovereignty was located. Was it located exclusively with the King? Was it located exclusively with the English Parliament? Was sovereignty shared with Colonial political institutions?
Because the Colonialists had experienced firsthand the scourge of the claim of Centralized sovereignty they were determined that their experiment in Government would not allow sovereignty to rest in any one person or institution and so they set about to divide the finite sovereignty of the political governmental realm into different governmental spheres of influence.
What needs to be immediately noted at this point is that the Framers were only dealing with Sovereignty as it pertained to the realm of the political magistrate. There are no claims in the Constitution that no other realms of sovereignty existed besides the sphere of the political Magistrate.
Such a claim would have made culture and society into merely a political entity denying the existence of other historic spheres of sovereignty such as Familial and Ecclesiastical.
As we consider the issue of consolidated vs. divided sovereignty as we fast forward into the 21st century we must admit that such an idea as diffused government that was codified in our founding document is far removed from the contemporary American mindset.
In what was intended to be a system where the sovereignty of the political Magistracy was divided and so diffused we have gone to a Government of consolidated power where the Magistracy of the State Governments serve merely as the bribed mouthpieces for the Magistracy of the Federal Government.
Worse than that though, the Federal Government, not being satisfied with dominion in the civil realm of Magistracy, has for decades been thieving more and more sovereignty from the possession of the spheres of Family and Church.
This is seen by the attempt to weaken family sovereignty through policies such as the inheritance (death) tax, and confiscatory taxation in general and through institutions such as the government schools that have the effect of weaning children away from the authority, structure and sovereignty of their family organism, while attaching them to the authority, structure and sovereignty of the Federal political magistracy.
This is also seen by the legislation that disallows Churches, on pain of tax litigation, their rightful sovereignty to speak to particular issues from the pulpit.
In forbidding the Church to deal with certain subjects the State is seizing the Sovereignty of Christ in the Church in order to protect the sovereignty of the State over the citizenry.
Because of this successful sovereignty drain in the spheres of Family and Church in favor of a Behemoth State, Americans have gone from an understanding of temporal sovereignty that is diffused to both different spheres of sovereignty (individual, Family, Church, State) and diffused within particular sovereign spheres (Husband & Wife share designated sovereignty in family, Federal Governments, State Governments and County Governments share designated sovereignty in the Civil-politico realm) to an understanding of sovereignty where the expectation is that the State is supposed to be a kind of God walking on the earth in which Americans are both, to live and move and have our being and in which we find the backdrop against which we can define ourselves.
The consequence of such consolidated power at least twofold.
First, we now have Statist tyranny and its exercise can be seen all along the cultural contours of America in such recent cases as Terry Schiavo murder where the State is given the sovereignty to end life, The Kelso Supreme Court decision where the State is given the sovereignty to possess private property on a tyrannical whim, The Dover Delaware Court decision on Intelligent Design where the State takes sovereignty to forbid other religions besides the State established religion from being 'taught' in schools, and the most recent Supreme Court case sustaining Oregon's medical assisted suicide laws where the State determines that the right to kill must be held inviolable.
All of these cases are examples where the State has seized Sovereignty which once belonged in other spheres with the consequent result that the other spheres of authority become anemic while the State becomes Leviathan due to its absconding of sovereignty from other spheres.
The second consequence is a willingness on the part of the American people to play the well provided for child to the State's role as suffocating Nanny.
Now this notion of divided, decentralized, and diffused sovereignty that used to be the American expectation was expressed in the US Constitution is the legacy of feudalism, which itself was the consequence of Biblical thinking that understood that since only God alone is Sovereign in an absolute and exhaustive sense and since fallen man is totally depraved and therefore prone to abuse unchecked sovereignty all temporal sovereignty therefore must be divided, decentralized and diffused in order to both honor God's unique exhaustive sovereignty and to protect man from the Tyranny that would inevitably result where sovereignty was concentrated in one temporal institution.
Such Feudal / Biblical thinking where sovereignty is parceled out in a multitude of freely entered into contractual / covenantal arrangements that results in a culture enriched by a sovereignty on a human scale has been eclipsed by a Socialistic / Mercantilist arrangement where sovereignty is massive and top down and results in a culture characterized by the mailed fist.
The desire of the Constitution party is to return to taking the Constitution seriously, which means a return to an understanding that temporal sovereignty is finite and so must be divided among those who have warranted jurisdiction in legitimate spheres.
Furthermore in order to take the Constitution seriously we must once again believe that consolidated sovereignty is perilous to both those who would wield such sovereignty and to those who would be ruled by such sovereignty and so we must once again de-centralize the sovereignty of the political magistracy.
Only by embracing again such ideas will we return to the original intent of the Constitution, which was informed by Feudal categories that were themselves a fruit that grew out of Biblical soil.
Constitution Party of Michigan - www.ConstitutionPartyMI.net