Webster’s dictionary 1828
WELFARE:
applied to stales: Exemption from any unusual evil or calamity; the enjoyment of peace and prosperity, or the ordinary blessings of society and civil government;
applied to persons: Exemption from misfortune, sickness, calamity or evil; the enjoyment of health and the common blessings of life ; prosperity; happiness;
The government has deemed itself a person and therefore believes it has the right to use the term as it is applied to persons becaue the term as it is applied to states & governments is too limited.
Decided in 1899 that corporations are to be called “PERSONS” and thus the United States, Inc in which the IRS is the enforcer became a “PERSON”.
“The government has deemed itself a person and therefore believes it has the right to use the term as it is applied to persons becaue the term as it is applied to states & governments is too limited.”
Of late I’ve been using a similar notion: Sovereignty.
One of the principal causes for the American Revolution was the growing awareness that the Crown and its Ministers (or even Jurist) could essentially recast the English constitution at will to suit them.
They could do this because the King was a Sovereign and his Ministers and Jurist were able to exercise this Sovereignty on his behalf.
But the United States federal government is more akin to a chartered corporation than a Sovereign Person (which may help raise your point to its clearest light). Thus Chief Justice John Marshall wrote: “The powers of the Legislature are defined and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken or forgotten, the Constitution is written. To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing, if these limits may at any time be passed by those intended to be restrained? The distinction between a government with limited and unlimited powers is abolished if those limits do not confine the persons on whom they are imposed, and if acts prohibited and acts allowed are of equal obligation. It is a proposition too plain to be contested that the Constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it, or that the Legislature may alter the Constitution by an ordinary act.”
... and as for the rule of the courts, Marshall wrote: “From these and many other selections which might be made, it is apparent that the framers of the Constitution contemplated that instrument as a rule for the government of courts, as well as of the Legislature.”
So there is no hint, especially under Marbury when taken in proper context, that the federal is to be sovereign over itself — to be able to further establish and define its powers by ordinary means available at its disposal (legislation, executive orders, opinions and the like).
THAT power, Sovereignty over the Constitution, IS retained within the specific context of Article 5 and Article 5 alone.
That means that ultimately WE THE PEOPLE are Sovereign over our government (echoing the DoI no less) but only within a specific context (amendment ... not mere elections) are we able to work out that Sovereignty for ourselves and our Posterity.