I hear ya but then we still have the casus belli thing. That does not mean the US would send the tanks in but they might feel they could and the new government will have to consider that.
If that’s the case, the new state can choose the best moment, i.e. a weak president and defiant congress at a time when the U.S. faced other crises…
Besides, I gotta assume that for a state to want to secede in the first place, they’d have to perceive some major flaw with the existing constitution that they plan to “fix” within their own borders.
As it is, the proposed list of conditions essentially says any state that wants true independence will never get it until they build up a sufficient military to make invasion prohibitively expensive, which (I guess) is pretty much necessary for any truly independent state.
? My mum gets social security payouts … and I can bloody well state that at 87 and with alzheimers she is not holding down a job.
I wasn’t very clear, was I? I meant that it’s not a retirement fund in the sense that the specific money I am putting in is designated as my money to take back out later when I retire, like an IRA. My current payments in are funding current beneficiaries, and when I retire, my benefits will come from payments being made by taxpayers at that time.
The point being that I don’t have any vested right to future social security payouts the way I would with a pension or an IRA. So cutting off social security upon secession would not be breaking a contract in that sense.
I think for a secession to be considered legitimate it would have to be passed by both the state and the national government and be ratified by a referendum of the state’s population.
We might consider some kind of reimbursement program for the real estate and businesses of people who want to leave the seceding state in order to remain American citizens.
If a state leaves the union and forms its own sovereign nation, I see no reason for items 4, 6, 7, or 8. They’re an independant country now. It can run its own government under its own laws and any dealings with the United States can be handled by regular diplomatic channels.
Yes it would be - I would be seriously pissed off if the monies I paid in were not replaced in kind when I hit the magic age. If the money was not going to be repaid to me, why the fuck did I put it into the system …
Social Security is a social insurance program officially called “Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance” (OASDI), in reference to its three components. It is primarily funded through a dedicated payroll tax. <snip>Covered workers are eligible for retirement benefits and for disability benefits; if a covered worker dies, his or her spouse and children may receive survivors’ benefits. The program does not have individual accounts and tax receipts are not invested on behalf of the worker. Instead, current receipts are used to pay current benefits (the system known as “pay-as-you-go”), as is typical of some insurance and defined-benefit plans.
So I am vested, for all it is worth. Theoretically the money will be there when I retire/finish being handicapped.
Well sure. At the end of the day anyone can do anything they choose regardless of commitments they may have made. History is rife with governments going back on their word. The best anyone can do is try to make it difficult or unwise to break prior commitments and hope that it is enough.
As for them being upset with the constitution doubtlessly there would be things changed but I suspect most of the Bill of Rights anyone would be happy with except maybe tossing separation of church and state stuff.
Great way to end prison overcrowding - just release any prisoner who agrees to move to New Country. They’re not **our **problem anymore!
Worked for Castro. 
If the seceding state has no coastline it’s screwed by this provision. How does the seceding state propose to move goods when it is surrounded by a foreign country? Now a free trade agreement has to be negotiated, a right of passage has to be negotiated… by the time the negotiations are over, the seceding state will be a de facto member of the union anyway, so there’s no point in seceding.
There are a bunch of countries in the world that are wholly landlocked and surrounded by other countries.
Lesotho is wholly surrounded by one country, South Africa.
How would you handle the case where the residents of a significant region of the succeeding state don’t want to succeed. Like, say for example California wants to succeed, but the residents of Northern California overwhelmingly don’t want to succeed?
I dunno, Lesotho seems pretty prosperous and on-the-ball.
Wait… no, it isn’t.
It would be interesting to include language that would allow any named subgroup (say, county) to vote to stay in the Union. Wholly impractical but it would cause some interesting debates in the state.
Heck, we vaguely meandered in that direction here in Quebec, with one segment of the population agitating for secession (or at least something in that direction) and another segment saying “fuck that”. I figured what might have ended up happening is Quebec, the largest province, turns into the small republic of Quebec, a larger semi-autonomous Aboriginal territory administered from Ottawa and the new still-Canadian province of Montreal Island.
I think any state should be allowed to secede if they take Limbaugh, Beck, Palin, Jesse Jackson, and Rev Sharpton with them.
If the state is independent, then why is it the business of the United States what rights it gives its citizens, what its environmental policy is or what its foreign relations are? It seems like you’re not really giving the state independence, you’re just making it a US puppet, and at the same time saddling it with debts and details that will just make it more dependent on the US.
When Quebec held its last referendum on separation in 1995, the Cree in the northern part of the province held their own referendum prior to the vote, and voted 96% to stay in Canada. No one knew what that meant if Quebec’s referendum succeeded and the Quebec Provincial Government issued the unilateral statement of separation they had planned, but it threw a huge wrench into the proceedings. The Cree claimed something like 15% of the territory of the province. The Quebec government actually had the nerve to say that their referendum to separate from Quebec didn’t count, while Quebec’s did.
A related question: are there any states that could potentially succeed after secession? Off hand I would guess only Texas and California.
Are there any states that have a true incentive to? Same guess: getting 80 cents on the dollar from the federal government isn’t a winning proposition. And in California’s case, it’d also have the opportunity to reconfigure state government and not have to deal with other states bashing it after they’ve taken their welfare checks from California coffers.
Per http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/266.html , looks like:
New Jersey
Nevada
Connecticut
New Hampshire
Minnesota
Illinois
Delaware
California
New York
Colorado
Massachusetts
Wisconsin
Washington
Michigan
Oregon
Texas
Florida
All receive less federal spending than what they pay out in taxes. New Jersey only gets 61 cents on the dollar.