Hang on…you need 100% support to get out of the Union otherwise “you’ll have a minority of U.S. citizens who, for all effects and purposes, have been conquered by a foreign power.”
Never thought about democracy in that way before.
By analogy, I wonder where that leaves the current Administration apropos Florida, democracy an’ all ?
There was never any question that Bush obtained a smaller number of votes than Gore, though some people equate the narrow margin with a “statistical tie”. What was in question was whether Bush was entitled to Florida’s electoral votes. I’m not sure what kind of point you were trying to make, but it doesn’t appear all that relevant.
It would have been more authoritative coming from me, right Poly?
Doghouse Reilly - Yep, I agree it’s an ill-conceived – okay ‘ugly’ – analogy.
I guess I should have gone for my first instincts, which were to draw comparisons with two other situations:
1 – Referendum’s in Commonwealth democracies (example: Australia) in which a straight ‘Yes/No’ vote determines whether that country retains the Queen as Head of State or becomes a Republic, and
2 – EU membership. Also a ‘Yes/No’ Referendum, in this case where primary domestic legislation becomes subservient to EU Law. Dittto a Euro Referendum/the European Central Bank and domestic fiscal policy.
I suppose the simple point is that ‘a people’ should decide who governs them in accordance with general democratic principles – none of this 100% stuff.
It’s simple: they’re citizens of the United States, not citizens of Hawaii. Therefore, only the U.S. - as a whole - can take away their citizenship.
I don’t get the whole Florida thing either.
Ahh, but should they be allowed to decide who governs their neighbours? Besides, they do decide who governs them, by voting for Congress and for President.
Look at it this way - I own Hawaii. Well, at least part of it - as a U.S. citizen, Hawaii is part of my country, and I have certain rights to it. My taxes go to it, my troops protect it… even though I’ve never been there, that land belongs to you and me (well, maybe not you, but you get the point). So just because some of the people who happen to be living there right now want to take it away, I should let them?
Yeah, okay, the idea that secession can only be justified by a 100% vote is probably invalid. (And this is starting to edge away into Great Debates here…) I would argue that requiring something more than 50% + 1 vote is not unreasonable; some sort of supermajority (two-thirds or whatever), on the grounds that an ordinary election is reversible–you can always throw the bums out next term. Whereas, while in theory a secession is reversible too–you can always petition to re-join the Union or the Empire or whatever–in practice it’s clearly more of a step into the dark.
I’d argue that the same might apply to annexations as well. If, say, Puerto Rico were to vote for statehood by 50% + 1 vote, that would make me a little leery as well, since a state with almost half the population opposed to joining the Union to some degree of adamancy might pose serious political problems. It would look bad if a handful of people changed their minds and there was another vote two or four years later asking to be let back out again, in a way that kicking out the Dems and bringing in the GOP (or vice versa) in the next election doesn’t.
MEB - I wasn’t saying that you need a 100% vote; I was agreeing with previous posteres that you need some kind of majority (2/3 sounds good) in both the seceding state and in the United States as a whole. The 100% was only for a unilateral sucession.
I don’t know, perhaps it’s because I’m more exposed to a fluid kind of democracy where ‘nothing is forever’.
Alongside the Commonwealth and (two) EU examples, the recent establishment of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly (both with limited autonomy but nonetheless a degree of independent decision-making) create a sense of ‘now’ about democracy: Immediate and dynamic.
Different political culture, I guess.
I suppose the issue remains as to what body determines the conditions of such a Referendum – would it be the Highest Court of the State in question that determines the 2/3, 50%+1 rule ?
American citizenship guarantees its possessor a number of rights; however an individual veto over politcal representatives is not one of them. The fact that half the voters in the country didn’t choose George Bush as their president doesn’t therefore mean that their rights were violated. In essense, you’re only guaranteed the right to vote, not the right that your vote will be on the winning side.
In a larger sense, Doghouse Reilly’s post is correct that the Constitution is a contract. It is assumed that neither party can unilaterally change the terms of the contract once the agreement is made. Therefore because there are no explicit procedures of secession, any legal secession would have to be by agreement of both the state and nation.
Now an interesting question is whether the Constitution implies that secession is prohibited. If that is true, then in order for a state to secede it would require a constitutional amendment. If it isn’t true then a state could secede with only an act of congress.
To quote the declaration of independance:
While I know that the Declaration is not a legally binding document in the eyes of the federal government, it does address the moral issues of leaving the Union.
The Federal government is legitimate because the people it governs consent to be governed by it. If, over a given population, this consent is removed, the government is a tyranny with respect to that population. It is a tyranny even if it is a democracy, and it is a tyranny even if it is a republic. Arguing “The land is the property of all Americans” and that “We spent tax dollars defending them” does not make a government any less a tyranny.
askol
ps(If the Constitution is a contract, than how is it still valid now that all of the signatories are dead? It is more correct to view the Constitution a treaty between States, a treaty that (as far as I know) does not include an exit clause. Not that I understand the ramifications of viewing the Constitution as a treaty instead of a contract, but I thought I’d nitpick.)
While the signatories of the Constitution are dead, they weren’t signing for themselves. They were representatives of the 13 states (although only 12 states signed).
The Constitution isn’t a contract, it’s the organic law of the country.
As I understand it, it was really difficult to get Congress to allow new states at that time and before because prior to this time most of the eastern states had restrictions on land ownership as a qualification of voting privilige. Also the NorthEast was trying to become an industrial center and large groups of people leaving to settle new states and territories would have impacted the nessisary manpower for this to happen, also as Washington and Madison learned in Washinton’s first term during the Whiskey Rebellion it is difficult to collect taxes from rural people. Madison and his kind were very against territorial expansion and later on when Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore the NorthWest passage it was often under the guise of a nature expedition because the idea of Westward expansion was so unpopular (Jefferson was a strong naturalist, but the expedition was still to find a passage to the Pacific North West).
I’m not a legal scholar, but what the heck, I’ll play one on this board.
First, if you form a corporation with three of your friends, and then one dies, you are generally still incorporated under the original terms. You can replace the friend with another partner, and so on for several centuries. So long as the paperwork is handled appropriately, the corporation as a legal entity continues to exist, and contracts from the early days are not in question just because one or all the partners at that time are gone.
Second, even less than in my last example should the human signatories of the constitution be confused with the states that are party to that constitution. They are representatives, no more. They could all have been recalled and replaced during the convention. Moreover they could all reconvene twenty years later and issue a document repudiating and rescinding the constitution, but it would be null and void. Outside of the mandate they received from their states to discuss and negotiate in a certain place and time, they are merely private citizens. And on top of that, the states had to ratify the document, although I think Rhode Island and the other slow states were legally bound by it even before their state legislatures got around to ratifying it.
Finally, on a different topic, US citizenship can be taken away from a people in some circumstances - witness the Philippines when it became independent in 1946. Admittedly, it was not a state, but I think the citizenship issue is a red herring in this debate.
Now I see that BobT has beaten me in both speed and succinctness.
Which, Hobbes argued, is in the nature of a social contract.
Well a constitution is a unique form of contract that is not between individuals but is more akin to a corporate charter or a trust. While ours is signed by those who drafted it they were considered duly authorsized and as it is alterable through amendments there isn’t a technically valid reason to dump it entirely.
Our nation decided early on to honor contracts and charters even if we did not found them. There is the example of existing debts to England at the end of our revolutionary war, which we could have nullified but in doing so would have harmed our future credit rating so we honored our debt contracts. Then there is the college that Nathaniel Webster went to (crap I can’t remember the name of it. Someone help me out here), which was chartered by King George as a private university for the education of Native Americans. When the government tried to make it a public school it was then decided to honor the original charter that stipulated it to be a private institution (this is the invident when Webster gave a speech and cried on the floor of congress.).
dammit. Daniel webster, not Nathaniel webster. And the college was Dartmouth.
mea culpa.