You’ve obviously never been in a typical Vermonter’s home. Vermont has some of the most lax gun control laws in the nation. Concealed weapon permit? Doesn’t exist. Any law-abiding citizen (non-felon) over the age of 16 can carry a concealed gun around on the streets if they want to.
I went to HS in VT, and during deer season it wasn’t unusual for kids to bring the carcases of the deer they had shot to the school in their pickup trucks to show thier friends. Politically the state is very liberal, but culturally its a long way from San Francisco.
Do people has rights that supersede the rights of states or nation-states? The Court may have ruled that the right to succession is unconstitutional but I remember that by signing the Declaration of Independence, the delegates were committing treason. I think that the will of the people should always ultimately pervail, even if it means revolution or otherwise. I wonder if member states of the European Union can secede and I don’t see why non-sovereignty of Vermont or any other state would make a difference.
I wish I had a cite, but I thought that while this right was originally granted to the then independent Texan nation, that it was rescinded upon their “readmission” after the Civil War. I realze “readmission” is the wrong word here since the Civil War of course determined that the Confederate states actually never left the Union, but I’m not sure what word to use.
No, “readmission” is the correct word. Following the Civil War, the Union ruled the seceding states through military governments – first operating under direct Presidential authority, later under the Reconstruction Act of 1867 – which slowly organized civilian governments who held power at the occupying forces’ sufferance. Congress denied seats to senators and representatives from those states until they had complied with certain conditions – such as ratification of the 14th amendment – and been formally readmitted to statehood under the Reconstruction Act. Congress eventually did readmit each seceding state. From Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction (1990):
Pp. 109-10.
P. 122.
I had never heard that whatever right Texas may have enjoyed of dividing into five states was impaired by the act readmitting Texas after the Civil War. (The issue was mentioned in, but not impaired by, the Compromise of 1850 – after Texas’s statehood, but a decade before the Civil War.) But that proposition seems dubious since, as Polycarp explains, that “right” wasn’t particularly formidable. Texas couldn’t (and can’t) unilaterally admit four new states carved out of its current territory: it could (and can) only ask that Congress accept its wish to that end, if it ever expressed such a wish. See Texas into 5 states?
Maybe we could trade Vermont for Puerto Rico and a coupla draft picks to be named later.
The misconception about Texas having the power to split into five states at least springs from language in the act of admission, which to the uninitiated, appears to confer special powers. This new claim on behalf of Vermont lacks even that much as a foundation.
Here is the very unexciting act of Congress which admitted Vermont to the union in 1791. This was the first time Congress exercised its power under Article IV Section 3 to admit a new state.
And here is the equally unexciting petition sent to Congress by Vermont’s Constitutional Convention, in which the delegates asked for admission and explicitly acknowledged that the Union “shall be binding on us, and the people of the State of Vermont, forever.”
So E72521, tell your coworker he will have to do better. We like errors we have to work a little harder to rebut!