"Is it not strange again that it appears not to have been perceived by any one at that time that the whole of this controversy arose out of a departure from the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and the substitution of state sovereignty instead of the constituent sovereignty of the people, as the foundation of the Revolution and of the Union. The war from the beginning had been, and yet was, a revolutionary popular war. The colonial governments never had possessed or pretended to claim sovereign power. Many of them had not even yet constituted themselves as independent States. The Declaration of Independence proclaims the natural rights of man, and the constituent power of the people to be the only sources of legitimate government. State sovereignty is a mere argument of power, without regard to right — a mere reproduction of the omnipotence of the British parliament in another form, and therefore not only inconsistent with, but directly in opposition to, the principles of the Declaration of Independence." -John Quincy Adams, April 30, 1839
It is difficult for a person to quote a passage of any real length, on this kind of topic, without including material that he disagrees with. Nevertheless, I have posted this quote because it helps to express an idea that I want my fellow conservatives and libertarians to consider: that though the "several states" of the United States have an important constitutional role and powers guaranteed to them by the United States Constitution -- a role and powers that they ought to keep or resume -- describing these by using the term "states' rights" is a mistake, and it would have been a mistake even if that term had not been associated with racism, discrimination, and injustice (due to its use in defense of policies associated with racism, discrimination, and injustice).
States do and should have, or were meant to have, definite and extensive legal rights. However, they do not have those "rights" for their own sakes as legally-constructed, inorganic corporate entities; any rights that they have, they have for the benefit of the people within their borders. Those powers and jurisdictions that they were meant to have were not reserved for them by our federal Constitution because states are necessarily more trustworthy, wise, humane, or just than a federal government tends to be; that authority was reserved for a combination of political and practical reasons, including the benefits of certain types of division themselves: the division into separate states making it unnecessary for every part of the union to have the same laws and government in every respect (in areas of law and government where the interests of effective government -- in its proper role -- and justice did not require uniformity throughout the union, and likely would have been difficult to establish) and the division between the state and federal governments allowing voters to elect different officials to address different types of subject-matter.
There was nothing sacred or inevitable about the state borders as they froze around the time of the Revolutionary War (over the relatively short course of their existence, the colonies were founded with highly variable forms of government and were then consolidated, broken apart, sometimes recombined, and occasionally fundamentally altered in their form of government; several of our current states were, in 1776, considered a part of other states), and there is nothing about the collections of individuals that those borders happen to contain at various times that gives them a greater right to govern themselves than Americans possess together.
There is a proper reason for conservatives to advocate federalism, of course, and it is the reason that I would prefer to hear conservatives use: the Supreme Law of the Land, our Constitution, guarantees it, and it is in the interest of the people of the United States to maintain it.
