Nation-Always political; pol jur
So what is a “national”? Is it THIS?
The answer is NO! There are actually TWO senses of the term “United States”: Geographical (G) and Political (P):
The U.S. Supreme has held on this subject the following:
It is the union of such states, under a common constitution, which forms the distinct and greater political unit, which that Constitution designates as the United States, and makes of the people and states which compose it one people and one country.
[Texas v. White, 74 U.S. (7 Wall.) 700, 721 (1868);
SOURCE: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1134912565671891096]
So the default “political sense” of “State” is POLITICAL rather than GEOGRAPHICAL. The “political subdivision” they are referring to is then defined as follows:
Political subdivision. A division of a state that exists primarily to discharge some function of local government.
[Black’s Law Dictionary 3678 (8th ed. 2004)]
The Constitution is a political document. Each “State” which is a party to it is a political subdivision and an independent sovereignty all its own:
The states between each other are sovereign and independent. They are distinct and separate sovereignties, except so far as they have parted with some of the attributes of sovereignty by the Constitution. They continue to be nations, with all their rights, and under all their national obligations, and with all the rights of nations in every particular; except in the surrender by each to the common purposes and objects of the Union, under the Constitution. The rights of each state, when not so yielded up, remain absolute.
[Bank of Augusta v. Earle, 38 U.S. 519, 525 (1839);
SOURCE: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=12567173859272174846]
[The] jurisdiction [of the Federal government] extends to certain enumerated objects only, and leaves to the several States a residuary and inviolable sovereignty over all other objects.
[The Federalist No. 39, p. 245 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961) (J. Madison)]
Residual state sovereignty was also implicit, of course, in the Constitution’s conferral upon Congress of not all governmental powers, but only discrete, enumerated ones, Art. I, § 8, which implication was rendered express by the Tenth Amendment’s assertion that “[t]he powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
[Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898, 919 (1997);
SOURCE: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=10894716839911389166]
When the term “United States” is used, the U.S. Supreme Court has defined it as follows:
The term “United States” may be used in any one of several senses. [1] It may be merely the name of a sovereign occupying the position analogous to that of other sovereigns in the family of nations. [2] It may designate the territory over which the sovereignty of the United States extends, or [3] it may be the collective name of the states which are united by and under the Constitution.
[Hooven Allison Co. v. Evatt, 324 U.S. 652, 671-72 (1945);
SOURCE: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=15188855763817953191]
The political sense of the term “United States” is referenced in the first of the THREE definitions of the “United States” provided in the U.S. Supreme Court case above.