"State" does not mean province or sub-state. Each of the United States were called "states" because they were viewed as states, not as provinces, or sub-states. The Founding Fathers were quite explicit about what the word meant at the time when they coined "United States." Their greatest fear was that one day a grand central government seated in Washington could form a single "consolidated" state, which would be worse for the people's freedoms then then was the Britishcentral colonial government. Thomas Jefferson in the famous Kentucky Resolutions (#8) writes against this consolidation occurring: "[We] view this as seizing the rights of the States and consolidating them in the hands of the General Government, with a power assumed to bind the States, not merely as [to] cases made federal (''casus foederis''), but in all cases whatsoever, by laws made, not with their consent, but by others against their consent... This would be to surrender the form of government we have chosen and live under one deriving its powers from its own will and not from our authority." In his letter of 1882 to William Barry: "The foundations are already deeply laid by their decisions for the annihilation of constitutional State rights and the removal of every check, every counterpoise to the engulfing power of which themselves are to make a sovereign part." I quote these to show, that the Fathers considered each state ''sovereign'', that is a full state, not a province or imaginary "sub-state." Indeed, Jefferson opens resolution #1 with the statement: "Resolved, That several States cvomposing, the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that, by a compact under the style of a Constitution for the United States... a government for special purposes -- ... reserving, each state to itself, the residuary mass of their right to ''their own self-government''..."
Now certainly we no longer have such an arrangement today under the "evolving constitution" about which Scalia complains, but that is a political question. It may really be that the US is something like a single state, composed of sub-states. But the Founding Fathers didn't ''mean'' that when they coined the term "United States." In their use, the "states" were each a kingdom without a king, a complete sovereign political unit, and that's what the word state means today. State means state, ''rice.''
