What is Allegiance to the "United States"

     Allegiance to the government of the United States is not the same as allegiance to the State of which one is a legal resident. Article XIV, adopted in 1868, states that everyone who is born a citizen or is naturalized and who is subject to the jurisdiction of United States "are citizens of the United States."

     "The citizen was not, under the theory of States' rights, in contact with the National Government. He owed allegiance to his State, and the State dealt with the Nation. That theory was definitely set aside by [the Fourteenth] Amendment." *

     Americans now owed allegiance to both authorities. Congressman John Bingham was the principal author of Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment, the part with the words "citizen of the United States". "The phrase 'citizen of the United States' had been used for nearly 8 decades before the Civil War, but always to speak of persons within federal territories." Original Intent.org 

"It is federal, because it is the government of States united in a political union, in contradistinction to a government of individuals, that is, by what is usually called, a social compact. To express it more concisely, it is federal and not national because it is the government of a community of States, and not the government of a single State or Nation." John C. Calhoun

     We unintentionally created what would become a behemoth national government, and it was entirely within the purview of the original Constitution because we had amended the original Constitution. But did creating 'national powers' within the 'federal' government automatically give it the broad powers it has today, with hundreds of federal agencies allowed to make law, and the President allowed to make legally binding executive orders, when the first sentence in the Constitution states: "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives"?
     Federal powers began to expand, says Doug Fiedor, in 1825 (Wayman v. Southard) when Congress unconstitutionally delegated the power to the federal court to establish its own rules of practice." In that case, Chief Justice Marshall therefore denied that the delegation [of those powers] was impermissible," and "In 1940, that power was even written into law."
     In future blogs, I will continue to explain how federal expansionism became unlawfully practiced.
     For now it is enough to say that when I pledge allegiance to the United States, it is not the nation that James Madison and the other signers of the Constitution conceived, nor the same federal government that Calhoun described. It is a nation in which both parties conceive of positive rights as an extension of their Fourteenth Amendment duty to protect (and further define) the 'citizen of the United States'. 
     The defining of such a citizen' should have been severely limited, by by then it was too late to stop the national train.

* All asterisks in this post refer to my favorite pre-WWII reference on the Constitution: Constitution of the United States; Its Sources and Application; Thomas J. Norton, copyright 1943