EU member states have more sovereignty than US states by a big margin. There isnt even a federal tax in EU.

The "real reason" people "freaked out" about Trump dismantling agencies is that he was and has been ignoring the law by fiat and not executing the law as is his constitutionally defined role. It would be one thing to veto a refunding of the DoEd, to approve a dismantling of the DoEd; it's another to unilaterally dismantle institutions that have been enacted into law by Congress. The DoEd is no more unconstitutional than the DoD or any other cabinet-level institution.

I think it's fair to have a hard discussion about the effectiveness of or need for the DoEd, but the way to do that is in Congress, not by fiat by the president. The way the Trump administration has approached it IMHO is grossly unconstitutional and a violation of the separation of powers. The only semi-reasonable rationale I can think of is that Congress is implicitly approving of or voting on the president's actions by not impeaching him, but that seems like an unreasonably high bar, equates lack of action with active approval, and it also infringes on the power of the Congress that enacted the law.

As someone else here on HN noted recently: what is the point of anything pertaining to congressional vote procedures, veto authority, overrides, and so forth if the president ignores, and is allowed to ignore, the laws that are passed anyway?

> mental shackles of subordination to psychological abusers and manipulators that are constantly pushing the idea that state's rights are subsumed to federal rights

Wow. The inter-state commerce clause is a real thing and it does give the federal government broad lattitude to regulate "commerce" across state lines. Commerce seems to entail the flow of both goods and services. We are in this situation because people at the state level decided, democratically, that some decisions should be made federally so as to avoid a huge patchwork of differing laws. To put it bluntly, I don't want to have to carefully review and compare Oregon state law with say Texas state law before I undertake any travel lest I accidentally commit a felony in Texas by doing something that isn't against the law in Oregon, and that's a really good reason to try to limit the differences between the two. If you don't, you'll necessarily chill travel and commerce across state lines because those differences will present a huge barrier to entry and create a big suck on peoples' time and attention.

> These United States, and after the Civil War the de fact illegitimate federal government called itself The United States

This is getting into Soverign Citizen type reasoning.

Wow, a lot of words to say you wish you owned slaves. Usually, these types of arguments were cloaked by going after FDR.