150
Souter, J., dissenting
for the immunity of a State as against the jurisdiction of the national courts would have been sheer illogic.
2
We said in Blatchford v. Native Village of Noatak, 501 U. S. 775, 779 (1991), that "the States entered the federal system with their sovereignty intact," but we surely did not mean that they entered that system with the sovereignty they would have claimed if each State had assumed independent existence in the community of nations, for even the Articles of Confederation allowed for less than that. See Articles of Confederation, Art. VI, § 1 ("No State without the consent of the United States in Congress assembled, shall send any embassy to, or receive any embassy from, or enter into any conference, agreement, alliance or treaty with any king, prince or state . . ."). While there is no need here to calculate exactly how close the American States came to sovereignty in the classic sense prior to ratification of the Constitution, it is clear that the act of ratification affected their sovereignty in a way different from any previous political event in America or anywhere else. For the adoption of the Constitution made them members of a novel federal system that sought to balance the States' exercise of some sovereign prerogatives delegated from their own people with the principle of a limited but centralizing federal supremacy.
As a matter of political theory, this federal arrangement of dual delegated sovereign powers truly was a more revolutionary turn than the late war had been. See, e. g., U. S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, 514 U. S. 779, 838 (1995) (Kennedy, J., concurring) ("Federalism was our Nation's own discovery. The Framers split the atom of sovereignty").43 Before the new federal scheme appeared, 18th-43 Regardless of its other faults, Chief Justice Taney's opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 393 (1857), recognized as a structural matter that "[t]he new Government was not a mere change in a dynasty, or in a form of government, leaving the nation or sovereignty the same, and
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