Sovereignty of the People

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Constitution- Article 4§4.  Guarantees a Republican Form of gov’t.  “...a system of government in which the people hold sovereign power and elect representatives who exercise that power”  Blacks Law Eighth Ed.

 

United States v Cooper Corp., 312 US 600.  “Since, in common usage, the term 'person' does not include the sovereign, statutes employing the phrase are ordinarily construed to exclude it.”

Yick Wo v Hopkins, 118 US 356.  “Sovereignty itself is, of course, not subject to law, for it is the author and source of law; but in our system, while sovereign powers are delegated to the agencies for government, sovereignty itself remains with the people, by whom and for whom all government exists and acts.”

 

Carter v Carter Coal, 298 US 238.  “And the Constitution itself is, in every real sense a law- the lawmakers being the people themselves, in whom, under our system, all political power and sovereignty primarily resides and through whom such power and sovereignty primarily speaks.”

 

U.S. v Lee, 106 US 196.  “Under our system the people, who are there called subjects, are sovereign.”

 

Schlesinger v Reservists Committee to Stop the War, 418 US 208, 232-3.  “We tend to overlook the basic political and legal reality that the people, not the bureaucracy, are sovereign. … Executives, lawmakers, and members of the Judiciary are inferior in the sense that they are in office only to carry out and execute the constitutional regime.”

 

Afroyim v Rusk, 387 US 253; 87 S.Ct. 1660.  “In our country the people are sovereign and the Government cannot sever its relationship to the people by taking away their citizenship.  Our Constitution governs us and we must never forget that our Constitution limits the Government to those powers specifically granted or those that are necessary and proper to carry out the specifically granted ones.”

 

Seminole Tribe v Florida, 517 US 44, 153.  (Souter dissenting) “When individuals sued States to enforce federal rights, the Government that corresponded to the ‘sovereign’ in the traditional common law sense was not the State but the National Government, and any state immunity from the jurisdiction of the Nation’s courts would have required a grant from the true sovereign, the people, in their Constitution, or from the Congress that the Constitution had empowered.”

 

Terry v State of Ohio, 88 S.Ct. 1868 (1889).  (Justice Douglas commenting upon police powers said:)  “Yet if the individual is no longer to be sovereign, if the police can pick him up whenever they do not like the cut of his jib, if they can ‘seize’ and ‘search’ him in their discretion, we enter a new regime.”

 

West Coast Hotel Co. v Parrish, 300 US 379.  (Sutherland dissenting) “Constitutions can not be changed by events alone.  They remain binding as the acts of the people in their sovereign capacity, as the framers of Government, until they are amended or abrogated by the action prescribed by the authority which created them.”

 

Hale v Henkel, 201 US 243.  “The individual may stand upon his constitutional rights as a Citizen.  He owes no such duty to the state, since he receives nothing therefrom, beyond the protection of his life and property.  His rights are such as existed by the Law of the Land long antecedent to the organization of the State, and can only be taken from him by due process of law, and in accordance with the Constitution.  He owes nothing to the public so long as he does not trespass upon their rights.”

 

United States v Mine Workers, 330 US 258.  “There is an old and well-known rule that statutes which in general terms divest pre-existing rights or privileges will not be applied to the sovereign without express words to that effect.”