The idea of sovereignty is an interesting one on an individual level but add the dimension of government and the governed and it becomes a spider web of issues, issues that the 11th Amendment to the US Constitution tried to eliminate.
11th Amendment of the US Constitution:
The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.
In short this means that to sue a state one must have that states permission as do subjects of any foreign state, meaning any other state as well as nation. This amendment alone gives the states sovereignty over their land and judiciary, which in turn means that they are their own entity as well as part of a whole.
Consider this, if a State is sovereign to itself, and all the people who reside within its borders are citizens of the Sovereign State, does this not give the states the rights of any nation over their citizens? So at this level a State should decide many of the issues that plague modern politics for themselves, issues such as education, abortion, issues of law enforcement, like the Death Penalty and since all powers for the Federal government have been enumerated by the Constitution and those issues and many more are not part of those issues the States should be creating laws for their own people. This poses an interesting question, why do so many States allow the Federal government jurisdiction into these areas?
The answer is not that simple but for the most part it comes down to tax money, who controls it and who is allowed to use it and for what. If a State decides not to use the Department of Education’s rules they do not share in a portion of collected Federal taxes, which most states are loathe to do. Maybe the practice should be that the Federal tax be reduced and the State tax raised so that the States can act on their own issues, allowing the Federal government to work on the areas in which it is supposed to be working, like interstate commerce and foreign relations.
It does not take much to see the problems with the logic of the Federal government on many issues or the logic that State governments should be responsible for the people of their state, interestingly enough there was a time that was true and yet for about a hundred years this nation has been systematically eliminating the States rights and the effectiveness of the States, I would ask a simple question, are we as a nation better or worse off now that the Federal Government has so much control? I contend we are worse off, mostly because with the rise of the Federal government we have a decline in a moral and right society, with the rise of national security we have a decline in religious belief and with the rise in Federal responsibility we have a decline in personal responsibility. It is time for us as a nation to right these wrongs and fix our system before we wake up and find another change came in the night and now we do not recognize the path we as a nation are on, we are close to self destruction so the time is now for the people to stand up and be heard.