> The state and federal governments are both “sovereign,” and the states were there first, exactly like the EU. To borrow from Mao Zedong, "sovereignty" grows

> The state and federal governments are both “sovereign,” and the states were there first, exactly like the EU. To borrow from Mao Zedong, "sovereignty" grows from the barrel of a gun — in that sense, only one U.S. state has been sovereign in the past couple of centuries,* not least because of the Supremacy Clause in the Constitution, to say nothing of the Civil War Amendments and the 19th and 26th amendments (giving women and 18 year olds the right to vote). And the former Confederate states are a special case: They probably make the most noise about their alleged sovereignty (apart from a few of the low-population, right-wing outliers in the non-coastal West), but they indisputably haven't been sovereign since Appomattox — they gambled and lost in a world-historic example of FAFO. * The one exception was Texas, which was an independent republic from 1836 to 1845, with its own small army and navy as well as embassies in Washington, London, and Paris; Texas, of course, was one of the rebelling Confederate states that incontestably lost its claim to sovereignty in 1865.