Millions,
I was outside, talking to my ex-Texan boss about the lunacy that is his home state. We talked for a while about the concealed gun laws, the Alamo, and the “desolate shithole” (his words) that is West Texas. Then he tells me that Texas has it written in law that they can secede from the Union if the voters in the lonestar state say so. Now, I know Texas was once it’s own country & that then joined up with pesky ol’ America, but, do we, as a nation, really have an agreement with Texas granting it the right to secede? The bossman tells me that, in this agreement, they’d have to donate 20% of the state to America (presumably the aforementioned “desolate shithole”), but that they’d then become a separate nation unto themselves. Is this accurate? Do any other states have anything similar to this? And how fast could this take place presumably? Could they go Arnold on this, hold a special election, and be the Sovereign Nation of Texas in less than a year?
Florida & California bow to such inspired insanity.
Goddammit! I blame Monday morning, when I should really be blaming my own laziness. Apologies all. But, Polycarp, thanks for the info. Those threads will keep me busy for a while.
You mention the Alamo (without explanation of why an old mission is “lunacy”), concealed handgun laws (which nearly every state in the union has) and a myth.
I see this sort of debate crop up here from time to time and, not being American, usually end up scratching my head. I wonder - only rhetorically, of course, because I do not know enough about it and do not claim to - why a democratic country would want force a part of it to remain even if that part had demonstrated democratically that it wanted to leave.
The situation in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is absolutely nothing like that of the USA but there is one part of the UK which has the potential to remove itself from the Union with Great Britain, i.e. Northern Ireland. There is a clause in Part 2 of the Good Friday Agreement which states that the participants in the agreement, the governments of the UK and Ireland, will “…recognise the legitimacy of whatever choice is freely exercised by a majority of the people of Northern Ireland with regard to its status, whether they prefer to continue to support the Union with Great Britain or a sovereign united Ireland”. Which sounds like a sensible approach, given the history of the relationship, until you start wondering what “the majority” means: 50% + 1?
But it appears that there is no such provision in the Constitution of the USA so I’ll shut up and get back to reading Shelby Foote’s Civil War Trilogy. Only about another 1,500 pages left…
There is NOTHING to see in west Texas. It is a desolate shithole. Don’t even stop - the people will treat you rudely. You will be lucky to even find gas. There are snakes, and cacti, and mountain lions, and coyotes. All of the above are known to be aggressive, and will attack without provocation. The Davis Mountains are actually a myth, specifically concocted in 1895 to try to deceive people into planning trips through Ft. Davis, where they were immediately robbed and sent on their way.
Because if they did, the country would cease to exist? Suppose that of the five people in a household, three decide that they don’t want to be a part of the US any more. Is that household now a separate country? If a household can’t do it, then why should a state?
The counter-point to be made is probably GD territory, but at least it’s short: so what? I don’t quite get the household example (it seems to me that if my family can do it, i.e. remove half the family to form a new household, anybody should be able to do it), though.
Suppose for a minute that 100% of Illinoisians decided that Illinois really has no business anymore in the United States – why should they not be able to so decide? Sure, it might hurt United States interests, but Illinoisians should be able to put their interests above those of the states with whom they no longer desire to be in union.
The difference between U.S. states and most other political subdivisions, in the U.S. and outside it, is that the states are legally sovereign entities that have ceded a large but delimited part of their sovereignty to the U.S. federal government. Hence the term “states,” which in contexts other than U.S. government means the equivalent of “country, nation.”
Assuming arbitrarily for the sake of argument that there was both a defined way to do it and an interest in doing it, if the United States voluntarily dissolved as a nation or if it authorized secession, the surviving entity or entities would be the fifty states (or one of them if it peacefully seceded from a surviving U.S.), independent nations equivalent to Slovakia or Portugal. They are already constituted as such entities, but in a context where a large part of their sovereignty is ceded to the U.S. The Governor and Legislature of the U.S. State of Michigan would become the head of state and legislature of the State of Michigan, an independent republic.
However, this is contrary to any reasonable potentiality in the existent political climate, in which the powers that be stand by Texas v White and the U.S. is an indissoluble union. But the nature of state sovereignty is guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution, and it would take only a willingness to permit, say, Hawaii or Maine to secede, on the part of the Federal government, to enable it to become a free and independent state (which is, you’ll recall, what the Declaration of Independence declares the 13 states to individually be).
I don’t think that LOGIC can prove you wrong, as it would be quite possible for the US to have been formed in the first place with that kind of proviso built into the constitution.
But it just doesn’t work that way, with exhibit A being the civil war.
Well, I’m a Tom Paine democrat, so I think a formal secession process would be a good amendment to the Constitution.
Here’s the rundown. Strictly speaking, the 1789 Constitution, by its silence, permitted states to secede at will. That is to say, it did not forbid it. In this, secessionists of the 1860’s were legally in the right.
(I’m also a John Brown egalitarian, so I don’t think they were in the right about everything.)
The prohibition on secession is actually a tenet of the Republican Party/Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln, which won the War Between the States.
The GOP also later decided that there could only be two political parties (effectively the GOP & the allied opposition, called the Democrats), & wrote various state laws to restrict any new parties from organizing & coming to power the way the GOP did in the 1850’s.
All of this is an attempt to keep the people under their power, for better or for worse. It’s the “shut the door behind you” theory.
Of course, with the influx of boll weevils (culturally conservative & militaristic former Southern Democrats) into the GOP over the last 25 years, party orthodoxy on those points is not so strong anymore.
My opinion would definitely belong in the debate section, but I will offer it anyway…
As a matter of fact, I will use my own country as an example:
Quebec has been trying to separate for years, the hardcore “Quebecers’ want out and they believe with a 51% of the vote they should be able to do this.
I’ll tell you what…
Every country has radicals living within its borders, and imagine for a moment that anytime some small group who happens to make a lot of noise wants to separate, they are allowed to; eventually there will be no country left.
Personally, if they made me King for the day I would charge every one of these political mouthpieces with treason, and string them up by their nuts for the entire world to see.
I love my country, and I don’t believe some fringe group should have the right to break it up because they have their own agenda.
I’m sure many of my American brothers to the south might feel the same way.
I have no idea how your constitution is worded with regards to such matters, but anytime my friends and I are debating the “Quebec Separation”, we always refer to our American pals and give kudos to them for not allowing such a thing to happen within its borders.
I cannot see what harm there is in a country ceasing to exist when circumstances dictate that part or parts of it want to be separate. They do it all the time. For example, Czechoslovakia disappeared when the Czech Republic and Slovakia were created. The former Yugoslavia is now split into Serbia-Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The world still turns.
One factor to take into account is that unlike political subdivisions in Europe, which are largely based on historical ethnicities and nationalities, and, often, historical sovereignty, the states of the United States were created entirely arbitrarily. State borders cut through all kinds of commercial, political, logistical, and infrastructure lines. Although, under the law, states are sovereign, there is nothing about a state that makes it an independent socio-oeconomic entity.