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United States Commonwealths

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• Kentucky

• Massachusetts

• Pennsylvania

• Virginia

The Northern Marianas Islands in the Pacific and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean are also commonwealths.

Dictionaries and encyclopedias that I have consulted offer two definitions of the word commonwealth:

• A state in which the government functions with the common consent of the people. This definition would seem to me to be virtually identical to that of a democracy. One source describes the USA and its individual states as being commonwealths in this sense but with only the states listed above officially designating themselves as such. The term would therefore appear to be merely a description and to have little or no precise meaning.

• A fixed but flexible association of states, as in the British Commonwealth and the Commonwealth of Independent States.

I think the definition of a commonwealth is a state (for lack of a better word) where local governments have precedence over regional. In other words, municipality legislation is "law of the land" over county policy, which matters more than state level decree.

That's what they told me at the Allegheny County Emergency Response Office today, anyway.

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Most recently modified 15-Jun-03