We are a federation of independent States that have granted a limited amount of authority, including foreign relations and defense, to the federal government. ANYTHING not specifically granted to said federal government in the Constitution is something the States can legally tell the government to "piss off!" over - except, of course, in cases where a partisan Supreme Court chooses political expediency over the Constitution and exceeds its authority by MAKING law instead of ENFORCING law, "interpreting" the Constitution instead of following it. (Or where ego-maniacal nutbars issue outrageous "Executive Orders" and generally act the fool enough to almost make me consider voting Democrat!)
If the Federal government had much more authority than it is granted by the Constitution and, thus, the States far less, THEN we would be more like provinces.
However, we've journeyed too far off-topic now and need to abort this conversation before the mods decide to slap us (or, more probably, just me) down for it.
Some subsets of people in the USA consistently offer a hackneyed complaint about judges "making law" (at least, when decisions go against their desires), but
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, i.e.,
As common law courts, U.S. courts have inherited the principle of stare decisis. American judges, like common law judges elsewhere, not only apply the law, they also make the law, to the extent that their decisions in the cases before them become precedent for decisions in future cases.
RustyV was correct: the Supremacy Clause is important and inevitable clashes between how state (which are essentially like sovereign bodies within the nation) and federal laws are interpreted and especially enforced ... will naturally occur. Federal always trumps state, in theory. But practice is funny and interpretation + situation matters - just as the subtle roles that justices offer at various levels to decide upon relevance and meaning from law in any given case before them, how federal and state legal matters complement and intersect is grey. Grey realities are seen as messy and randomly inconsistent to some people, but it's the natural human state.
How does this impact Melody? Not sure, honestly.
Oh, and to batten down another couple of noisy points . . . we're not just a collection of states in a federal container: depending upon where in a given state you live, there can be a combination of state/county/city/town courts, practices, interpretations and applications of law which apply to your specific situation (or not). There's layers upon layers that overlap with different missions meant to support the overall whole, but which can still cause clashes and coordination issues.
As to your claims about "Slick Willy" and the WTO, it again matters that
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rather than specious, ideological claims muddy our conversations:
The broad-gauged trade agreements entered into by the United States in the 1990s—the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement, and the multilateral trade agreements that a country must accept as a condition of WTO membership—were negotiated by the President and submitted to Congress under the terms of the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988 (OTCA) and the Trade Act of 1974. The OTCA provided the President with authority to negotiate and enter into tariff and nontariff trade barrier (NTB) agreements until June 1, 1993, authority that was later extended to April 15, 1994, in order to complete the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) Uruguay Round.1
Again, how does this impact Melody? We were talking about ages allowed in various jurisdictions for high school enrollment, I believe . . . last I knew, President Clinton was not in this game.
