The question people most often get wrong about states' rights is the question of what they are for. They are not instruments of local prejudice or shelters for the powerful to hide from accountability. They are load-bearing walls in a structure designed to keep any single center of authority from growing so large that no citizen can reach it. When I wrote the Kentucky Resolutions in 1798, I was not defending geography; I was defending the individual, who has no practical recourse against a government too distant and too consolidated to hear his voice. The federal union is a compact among the states, and a compact implies parties who retain their standing — parties who can object.

The danger I spent my public life fighting was consolidation — the slow, almost gravitational drift of authority toward the center. I warned that the natural tendency of power is to flow uphill, away from the citizen and toward the executive, away from the county and toward the capital. That tendency has not changed because the century has. When a federal agency issues a rule that governs the daily conduct of every business, school, and household in thirty-eight diverse states without meaningful deliberation by their elected representatives, I would call that consolidation by another name. It does not matter whether the consolidating agent calls itself a king or a bureau.

And yet — here I must be plain — the history of this Republic carries a grim lesson that I helped create and cannot escape. States' rights were invoked for generations to preserve slavery, to enforce racial subordination, to deny the equal citizenship that the Declaration's premise requires of us. That perversion does not discredit the principle; it indicts those who weaponized it. The remedy for a principle misused is not to abolish the principle but to insist on its honest application: that the rights retained by states exist to protect the liberty of all their citizens, not to authorize one class of citizens to govern another without consent.

What I would urge today is a discipline of clarity. Ask, in every dispute between federal and state authority: who is actually being protected, and from what? If the federal arm reaches in to guarantee rights that a state government is denying to its own people — equal protection, freedom of conscience, access to the ballot — that is the Constitution functioning as intended, because the compact was made among free people, not among governments at their citizens' expense. If the federal arm reaches in to standardize, to control, to extract revenue, and to silence local experiment, that is consolidation, and it should be resisted on principle.

The federalism I believed in was not a map; it was a method — a way of keeping power distributed enough that a free citizen always had somewhere to turn. That method is as necessary in 2026 as it was in 1798. The scale of government has changed. Human nature has not.