Was it not this, and this only?--that when it authorized a body other than itself, though constituted of the same members, a convention to choose a senator, that body must proceed in the choice of a senator according to the universally received Parliamentary and common law upon the subject of elections.
Blaine emphasizes the necessity of following established parliamentary law when a legislative body delegates authority to another body for election purposes.
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The States are colleagues of one another, and if some of them shall conquer the rest, and hold them as subjugated provinces, it would totally destroy the whole theory upon which they are now connected.
And if Congress shall break up the present Union by unconstitutionally putting strife and enmity and armed hostility between different sections of the country, instead of the domestic tranquility which the Constitution was meant to insure…
If it be true that war cannot be declared, nor a system of general hostilities carried on by the Central Government against a State, then it seems to follow that an attempt to do so would be ipso facto an expulsion of such State from the…
But this is a totally different thing from an offensive war to punish the people for the political misdeeds of their State Government, or to enforce an acknowledgment that the Government of the United States is supreme.
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