I’m thinking of Hawaii. They have a small nationalist movement. At some point could Congress just tell them, “Fine. We’ll convert the navy bases to 99-year leases, like on Cuba, fence them off and you will have your islands back under local control”
Or is there something that would prevent this?
This probably should be linked to this thread.
I think that all would agree that any state can be admitted, expelled, or allowed to seceed provided 2/3 of the states agree. As long as we are correcting past wrongs, I think we should give West Virginia back to Virginia considering Lincoln clearly violated the Constitution (Article IV, Section 3) in allowing West Virginia to seceed from Virginia.
I couldn’t find a cite in the Constitution, but I don’t think a state can be expelled from the Union.
Saint Cad, what was the status of Virginia at the time West Virginia was admitted? I know Virginia had to be readmitted to the Union after the war.
No, but they can sing a few lullabies and trying feeding it some warm milk before putting it back to bed.
From the North’s point the part of Virginia that didn’t secede was Virginia. The government that was set up was the government of Virginia and it gave it’s consent for the state to be divided.
Basically, a group of West Virginians formed a self-styled government in Wheeling, Virginia which Lincoln chose to recognize under Article IV of the Constitution which in of itself was hypocritical since they were not popularly elected (Article IV gives the federal government the right to ensure that a state has a republican form of government). These people then voted to split Virginia into two states and then petitioned the Feds to accept West Virginia as a state with thenselves as the government, which of course they were more than happy to do. Virginia sued in Virginia v. West Virginia (1871) but lost. I think that the punishment aspect the courts used after the Civil War is often understated. For example, The Lee family lost Arlington because the tax collector refused to collect the property taxes even though the Lee family tried giving him the money. He then foreclosed for non-payment of taxes. When the Lee family sued, the courts ruled that since it was now a national cemetary, it could not be returned. I think that many of those court cases would be overruled if SCOTUS were forced to rule on them anew.
Can the U.S. Government remove someone’s citizenship without due process (or at all)? Because if it couldn’t, even if it managed to kick Hawaii out of the Union, the former state would still be full of American citizens.
They would probably be given the same status as expatriates, i.e. citizens of the US but not citizen of a specific state.
I heard (from Shelby Foote) that the plantation was condemned by the US Government at the behest of the Army Quartermaster, whose son was killed in action in Virginia. I have never heard of the Federal Government levying property taxes. That’s usually done by local governments.
True, but remember that Arlington was occupied territory and under Federal control at the time.
The federal government didn’t levy property taxes. You really should check out the correctness of some of the things you assert.
Nor is it an open and shut case that the creation of West Virginia violated the Constitution. It was a debateable case, that much is true.
Finally, there certainly is no concensus that any 2/3 of the states could get together and agree “that any state can be admitted, expelled, or allowed to seceed.” I’m not quite sure what your reasoning is; nothing in the Constitution allows for that, and it takes more than a 2/3 vote of the states to amend the Constitution. Nor is it at all likely that the Constitution would be amended just to deal with one state, since there would be potential ramifications down the road if the amendment was made, unless it was state-specific and I suspect the chance of that happening would strongly depend upon the perceived need for action.
Really, SaintCad, you need to do better than that…
Well that would make for a fun court challenge in a Presidential race where a candidate loses the election by the margin of West Virginia’s electoral votes:
“Your honor, it is our position that West Virginia does not legally exist.”
Isn’t there a provision that anything not clear in the constitution is left to the congress?
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The story I read was from a biography of RE Lee. The property taxes were levied by the local occupation government who then refused to accept the payment of the taxes and seized the property. The local government then turned control of Arlington over to the federal government (Perhaps in the manner that saoirse cites. I did not read about that part of the story.) for a national cemetary.
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So the Supreme Court ruling in Virginia v. West Virginia (1871) affirming West Virginia’s annexation of two counties did not establish the Constitution of West Virginia’s statehood? I would say that it “[is] an open and shut case” today. Perhaps what you meant was that it was not an open and shut case before 1871.
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Texas v White put forth the idea that since the Federal government sets the rules for statehood, they can also set up rules for allowing states to leave without amending the Constitution. Off hand I cannot think of a reasonable case where the US would expel a state, but I’m sure that given a bizarre set of circumstances it could happen like:
Taiwan petitions for statehood as protection from Red China
Congress accepts them in a fit of anti-Chinaism
The next day, Congress sobers up long enough to say, “Oh shit!”
They expel the State of Taiwan
They try to convince the PRC that it was an April Fool’s Joke.
Same deal, Alessan’s point stands: you now have 1 million US citizens who have rights and somehow have been expelled from US territory for no fault of their own – they did NOT volunteer to secede, remember the scenario? What do you do with them? That alone would give pause to anyone trying to propose such kind of action.
Back to the OP: as has been mentioned, nowhere in the Constitution is there any provision for expulsion of a state, you would have to make it up as you went along. But (besides the reality check to the effect that in the example case the Hawaiian Nationalist movement is a minority) in the end it’s a political decision, and the precedent for when a state acts up is that the Federal authority intervene and bring it to heel (from cutting off funding to indicting or suing officials… all the way to armed occupation).
What, you mean that for all these 200 years we’ve been taking cases to the Supreme Court for no reason whatsoever?? :smack: JK – what you’re thinking of is this: The Federal government has such powers and authority as are enumerated in the Constitution, and can also do that which is incidental to or derivative from those (the powers and rights NOT enumerated in the Constitution are reserved to the States and to the People); in doing so, anything within that sphere of action that is not spelled out in the Constitution itself, is to be filled in by Congress as Law, of course, because you do NOT want a 150,000 page-and-growing Constitution to include every least possible scenario of the running of the government. That’s no “provision”, it’s the essential nature of the Legislative branch of a republic. HOW this is done is subject to being challenged in Court, and to analysis as to whether that Act of Congress is at odds with what the meaning of the Constitution has been interpreted to be. The Congress and Courts are historically cautious about enacting or adjudicating about something for which they canot point to somewhere in the Constitution as the source of their power or right to do, so they will stretch and twist and knot together language and concepts to find SOMETHING that justifies what they want to do.
I was simply trying to raise the point that US citizenship and state citizenship do not imply each other. My stepfather’s son is a US citizen but has lived in Germany since he was 3 so he is not the citizen of any state. If a state were expelled, the residents would still be allowed to maintain their US citizenship. Of course this makes the assumption that the US could and would expel a state which as you point out is a completely different issue.
Re: West Virginia…
After the state of Virginia ratified its ordinance of secession, representatives of the western counties met in Wheeling and refused to secede arguing that the Constitution did not grant states that right. Adopting the stance that since the legislators in Richmond had thus exceeded their authority and must be replaced, in late June of 1861 they created the “Restored Government of Virginia” with its capital in Wheeling and Francis H. Pierpont as governor.
In August the Second Wheeling Convention adopted a “dismemberment ordinance” providing for the formation of a new state to be called Kanawha. Voters approved the new state on October 24th, 1861.
(OK, to be fair here all the poling places were guarded by Union troops so voting against it might be…err…”embarrassing”)
In 1862, the restored Virginia Legislature gave formal consent to the formation of a new state and the matter was presented to the US Senate. On July 14 the Senate approved the West Virginia Statehood Bill, which Lincoln approved on December 31.
West Virginia was admitted to the Union on June 20, 1863 as the 35th state.
This presented a problem for the Restored Government of Virginia its capital was now in another state. Pierpont decided to move the capital to one of the areas in Virginia under Union control…Alexandria.
Alexandria served as the capital of Virginia until the Union Army captured Richmond in April 1865.
Another little tidbit they forgot to tell us about in our West Virginia Studies class is that West Virginia entered the Union as a slave state…
This statement is quite incomprehensible, nor is your response to me in any way clarifying. Why would 2/3 of the states be able to do anything? Even if one was to concede that any of the obiter dicta in Texas v. White on the subject was of any value? Explain yourself.
Which is it, sir? Is it an unconstitutional act (which I have asserted was not “clearly” the case), or was it declared constitutional by the Court in Virginia v. West Virginia, 78 U.S. 39?
The answer, of course, is that it was not “clearly” unconstitutional to establish West Virginia (for legal reasons easily argued; for the simple practical reason that once the government of the State of Virginia tried to secede, they could hardly be heard to object to what was done on behalf of the state by a govenment recognized as legitimate by the federal government, duh), and the Court in Virginia v. West Virginia never addressed the issue of the constitutionality of the creation of West Virginia, since it was not put in issue by the State of Virginia at the time. :smack:
As for Arlington Cemetary: I suggest on a web site devoted to The Straight Dope you read the whole story first, refresh your recollection about it, and then offer your factual analysis of the situation. It saves embarrassment.
What was established was that Congress can pick and choose which state government it wishes to over the wishes of the electors in the state. As for the Arlington Cemetary story, do you use the ad hominum fallacy in your
legal briefs? I’m sure judges love your method of arguments.
I pointed out that it was seized for non-payment of taxes (true) and the federal government refused to return it (true). I never claimed that the Federal government was the one that levied the taxes although the local government at the time was an occupation force under direct Federal control. And guess what, I never claimed that the Lee’s won or lost the court case or whether the seizure was legal or illegal. What I said was:
which is also true.
So at what point did I make a factual error about Arlington?