s, that, to the
extent of those powers, it must be supreme. If it be not superior to the
authority of a particular State, it is not a national government. But as
it is a government, as it has a legislative power of its own, and a
judicial power coextensive with the legislative, the inference is
irresistible that this government, thus created _by_ the whole and _for_
the whole, must have an authority superior to that of the particular
government of any one part. Congress is the legislature of all the
people of the United States; the judiciary of the general government is
the judiciary of all the people of the United States. To hold,
therefore, that this legislature and this judiciary are subordinate in
authority to the legislature and judiciary of a single State, is doing
violence to all common sense, and overturning all established
principles. Congress must judge of the extent of its own powers so often
as it is called on to exercise them, or it cannot act at all; and it
must also act independent of State control, or it cannot act at all.

The right of State interposition strikes at the very foundation of the
legislative power of Congress. It possesses no effective legislative
power, if such right of State interposition exists; because it can pass
no law not subject to abrogation. It cannot make laws for the Union, if
any part of the Union may pronounce its enactments void and of no
effect. Its forms of legislation would be an idle ceremony, if, after
all, any one of four-and-twenty States might bid defiance to its
authority. Without express provision in the Constitution, therefore,
Sir, this whole question is necessarily decided by those provisions
which create a legislative power and a judicial power. If these exist in
a government intended for the whole, the inevitable consequence is, that
the laws of this legislative power and the decisions of this judicial
power must be binding on and over the whole. No man can form the
conception of a government existing over four-and-twenty States, with a
regular legislative and judicial power, and of the existence at the same
time of an authority, residing elsewhere, to resist, at pleasure or
discretion, the enactments and the decisions of such a government. I
maintain, therefore, Sir, that, from the nature of the case, and as an
inference wholly unavoidable, the acts of Congress and the decisions of
the national courts must be of higher authority than State laws and
State decis