Cite as: 521 U. S. 898 (1997)
Opinion of the Court
These problems are avoided, of course, if the calculatedly vague consequences the passage recites—"incorporated into the operations of the national government" and "rendered auxiliary to the enforcement of its laws"—are taken to refer to nothing more (or less) than the duty owed to the National Government, on the part of all state officials, to enact, enforce, and interpret state law in such fashion as not to obstruct the operation of federal law, and the attendant reality that all state actions constituting such obstruction, even legislative Acts, are ipso facto invalid.6 See Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee Corp., 464 U. S. 238, 248 (1984) (federal pre-emption of conflicting state law). This meaning accords well with the context of the passage, which seeks to explain why the new system of federal law directed to individual citizens, unlike the old one of federal law directed to the States, will "bid much fairer to avoid the necessity of using force" against the States, The Federalist No. 27, at 176. It also reconciles the
laws" means impressibility into federal service for "courts and magistrates" but something quite different for "legislatures." Moreover, the novel principle of political science that Justice Souter invokes in order to bring forth disparity of outcome from parity of language—namely, that "the essence of legislative power . . . is a discretion not subject to command," ibid.—seems to us untrue. Perhaps legislatures are inherently uncommandable as to the outcome of their legislation, but they are commanded all the time as to what subjects they shall legislate upon—commanded, that is, by the people, in constitutional provisions that require, for example, the enactment of annual budgets or forbid the enactment of laws permitting gambling. We do not think that state legislatures would be betraying their very "essence" as legislatures (as opposed to their nature as sovereigns, a nature they share with the other two branches of Government) if they obeyed a federal command to enact laws, for example, criminalizing the sale of marijuana.
6 If Justice Souter finds these obligations too insignificant, see post, at 972-973, n. 1, then perhaps he should subscribe to the interpretations of "essential agency" given by Madison, see infra, at 914-915, and n. 8, or by Story, see n. 8, infra. The point is that there is no necessity to give the phrase the problematic meaning which alone enables him to use it as a basis for deciding this case.
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