Take a hot button issue… say, gay marriage. Play back the last 10 years or so, except a state is able to secede by amending the state constitution. How many states remain in the U.S.?
Now do it for the last century, and consider how many flaming buttons there were of approximately equal or greater fervor for each side in that period. How many states remain in the U.S.?
A nation cannot exist if portions of it have the right to secede. Even the South during the Civil War recognized this: The Confederate constitution explicitly denied the right to secede.
A country’s troops remaining in that country are not and cannot be an act of aggression, and the fact that surrender is even on the table is a recognition that someone else is committing an aggression to surrender to.
“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” 9th Amendment
There is no similar language reserving rights to the states, and in view of Lincoln’s position that the Union is perpetual, and his victory in the issue on the battlefield and the concession of the losing general in writing at Appomattox Courthouse, I’d say the matter is decided that States do not have the right to secede. Should they want to, they might make written application to the Congress or pass an amendment to that effect. The US Constitution gives the federal government limited powers, but supremacy over those limited powers.
I think that this post and the Lincoln quote from very early in the thread overstates the will of states or people to secede from the union and assumes that they would do so over petty squabbles.
What state in particular would actually secede (if it could do so) over gay marriage? It may have happened over civil rights in the 1960s, but that was merely an extension of the Civil War left unresolved after the feds refused to enforce the Reconstruction Amendments.
I think most proponents of a supposed right to secession would argue the Tenth Amendment is more relevant: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
That said, people who find a right to secede in this article are mistaken. As I’ve posted earlier, the Constitution recognizes the United States as a nation and a perpetual union of states. So secession was one of the powers that the Constitution prohibited to the states and therefore the Tenth Amendment does not protect it.
Bwuh ? I don’t follow. It’s sort of like saying that a business cannot exist if its employees have a right to resign. Nations and societies are (well, should be) voluntary agreements for mutual benefit. Else we move into Iron Curtain territory.
Well, as I said, it depends on where you’re looking at it from ;). From the seceded South’s point of view, the troops at Fort Sumter were foreign troops on their soil. Squatting in their fort, too !
[QUOTE=Malden Campbell]
Quite. What I’ve not been able to pin down is whether or not the Fort or the Federal Government ever said to the seceding States in those first few days after the first Secession ‘No, up yours, Sumter is ours and we’re coming to shut you all down.’ It seems they were actually surprisingly mute about the whole affair and didn’t attempt to lift any fingers to nip the secessions in the bud immediately.
Is this deliberate, as in, inviting the South to fire the first shot to better unite the North, or was Lincoln’s government actually uncertain about whether secession was legal?
[/QUOTE]
You’d have to ask a more scholarly person than I, I’m afraid. However, Wiki sez :
which reads not entirely unlike “fuck you, we’re staying, this OUR turf mate” to me.
The Canadian Supreme Court heard the case and determined that Quebec had no right to secede under Canadian *or *international law.
Maybe the 11 who passed amendments to their state constitutions banning gay marriage in 2004? Given recent rulings on gay marriage in Oklahoma and Utah that seem to guarantee that the Supremes will take it up, and likely rule against the states based on Scalia’s own dissent (sweet justice, that), what’s the next logical step? Except this time you’ve got not just the anti-gay-marriage crowd, you’ve got the anti-judicial-activists crowd joining them.
It’s not that I think that there’s a large base of support for secession. It’s that I observed that states banned gay marriage in their constitutions. Not just passing laws, but actually amendments to their constitutions over a comparatively petty issue to them, given the actual impact it would have on their lives. On a hot button topic, you can get a bunch of people wound up. Add in a bunch of money from an outside group supporting the campaign, and you’ve got a serious threat. You’ve also got precedent from 150 years earlier, and this time you’ve got a legitimate mechanism.
Another observation comes from Quebec in 1995, during the last referendum of separation, when internal polling by the separatists showed that a majority of their own supporters believed that after separation, they’d still have members of Parliament in Ottawa representing them. Literally, they believed that they would still be part of Canada after winning a referendum and separating from Canada. It’s really not clear what they believed they were doing.
Both observations are by way of saying that in electoral politics, extreme things can happen for reasons of emotion, tribalism, brinksmanship (how many people said the Republicans wouldn’t actually shut down the government because it would be crazy and self-harming to do so?), circumstance… basically, it’s plausbile that every time a hot button issue, you’d have at least a few states threatening or actually separating. Most people thought Prop 8 would lose in California.
And that’s the second thought right there: Take every issue being fought out in the public sphere, and add a layer of “if you do that, we’ll secede!” to the debate.
It’s not all that silly a notion. Maybe they simply wanted something akin to how Scotland/Wales work within the UK as I understand it, that is to say local authority over some stuff, while still being a part (and a subject) of the whole for other stuff. Independence Lite, if you will 
And ? What’s the downside of letting them secede over whatever bullshit they care to make their parting one ? Last I checked, the more conservative states were net drains on federal funds anyway. Let them thump their Bibles and hump their precious guns without farm, cattle, infrastructure subsidies or disaster relief funds. Let them evict all the eeevil illegals that keep their groceries & buildings cheap. Let them teach junk science and creationism, let them crush any semblance of union all they like, let them burn the concept of a social safety net to the ground while everyone endowed with a working brain speeds for the [del]State line[/del]border.
Point. Laugh. Have a Coke.
I thought Quebec already had that, being a Province in a Confederation, after all. But I find separatist notions to be largely emotional ones anyway.
According to Dixie Betrayed: How The South Really Lost The Civil War, by David J. Eicher, the following is in Chapter 11, Jockying For Position, pages 158-159:
So there was no explicit bar on secession in the Confederate Constitution, although the use of the phrase “It shall do so in peace” sounds to me like they were trying to place an obligation on both the Confederate and State governments if it came to secession.
As for why they rejected the amendment?
David P. Currie, Through the Looking Glass: The Confederate Constitution in Congress, 1861 - 1865, fn. 39. sheds light:
I actually agree with you that secession was (and is) not legal under the US Constitution, but it’s interesting to see the CSA take on the matter.
Quebec does already have that, yes. Canada is one of the world’s most decentralized nation-states.
Understanding the Quebec separation movement requires a bit of history; it’s not comparable to the South seceding because it’s not a matter of immediate and pressing national policy. It’s a matter of cultural divide and historical grievance.
The surprise in store for Quebeckers in 1995 was that, had the referendum succeeded, Parizeau was ready with a unilateral declaration of total independence, to be delivered the day after. There’s also no guarantee that you’ll agree on a devolution of powers–you might vote to devolve, and then the federal gov’t takes a hard line and says “you’re gone? buh-bye.”
If the mechanism existed in 1900, the U.S. wouldn’t exist by 2000. You’d be back to 50 separate states–or more likely somewhere between 35 and 50 as they sorted themselves into cultural buckets along the lines demarcated by divisive issues, and later grouped up again in looser, smaller federated states.
Now, that might not seem like a bad thing to you, but for sure the United States as a coherent entity would be long gone.
Agreed, but the point remains that the electoral mechanics and outcomes and goals of such things are rarely as clear as imagined.
I think you guys are conflating “government” to mean the winning side.
The SC could well have disagreed with the President and the North and if they had ruled with the south …
So basically, it isn’t Davis that would need convincing, it would be the people and by proxy the SC.
Just my opinion though.
The next step is to tend to your wounds, accept your loss in the courts (should that happen) and go home, the same thing that these states did when they lost abortion cases, for example.
I see zero evidence of any serious consideration of secession from these states over gay marriage or anything else.
Because no legitimate, non-violent mechanism currently exists. The situation would obviously be very different if an accessible mechanism, like amending the state constitution, were available, and 11 states did just that pre-emptively, for an issue of little real consequence to them.
Right, the issue had little real consequence so that’s why it was done. It kept in place what was already law.
Assuming that a state could secede by a state constitutional amendment, do you think that the people of Utah, for example, would give up social security retirement, Medicare, student loans, military support, and the bajillions of other federal benefits simply because gays can get married? I think that would grossly overestimate the average person’s zeal for outright revolution. The proposition wouldn’t get 5% of the vote.
This comparison, by the way, is nonsensical.
You’d be moving into Iron Curtain territory if the United States made it illegal for citizens to physically leave the United States. Refusing to allow subdivisions of the country to unilaterally secede is moving into the territory of being a nation-state like every other nation-state that has ever existed since the modern concept of a nation-state was invented.
An employee quitting his employment is a totally invalid comparison. If I resigned from my job tomorrow, it would be an inconvenience to my employer, but it would not materially detract from the corporation’s value or assets. The corporation would remain essentially whole; they would own the same material things. If the company is reasonably well run, as in fact it is in the case of mine, within a month or two you’d barely notice I had left. I’m not taking part of the company’s headquarters with me. A seceding state WOULD be taking part of the company with it.
It seems absurdly self-evident to me that the right of unilateral secession destroys the cohesion of a nation-state. You simply could not possibly run a country larger than about ten people, because you could never have a national government that compromised on anything. Every issue would become a threat to secede, and then the seceded subdivisions would immediately have had their own problems. The Confederacy, had it allowed secession (which of course it did not) would have lost Tennessee, or quite possibly had the state pull itself apart, within ten years at most. Eventually the entire CSA would have fallen apart.
It’s not revolution if there’s a mechanism in place to do it legitimately and non-violently.
Absolutely. First, those same states are the ones electing Tea Party congresspersons who want to radically cut entitlement spending and eliminate federal entities like the department of education. Second, you actually do have significant numbers of people today wanting to simply get rid of the federal gov’t–the governor of Texas had to disavow connections to them. The blunt truth is that a lot Americans feel like Washington takes tax dollars and in return imposes laws out of step with local values.
Also, as I observed actually happen during the 1995 referendum in Quebec, a majority of those wanting to declare independence from Canada believed that they would still have MPs in Ottawa representing them. There were varying degrees of belief on whether Quebeckers would still use Canadian money, Canadian passports, or share a common defense or diplomatic infrastructure with Canada. In other words, a shockingly large number of people wanting to declare independence didn’t think it would actually lead to full independence. As I mentioned, Parizeau was ready to declare independence unilaterally after a successful referendum. And it’s not that he thought Quebec would simply go it alone, though he’s said they were prepared for that. It’s that he believed they’d be in a very strong position to re-negotiate the relationship with Ottawa after a successful referendum and declaration.
Think back on how often the phrase “low information voters” get bandied about in elections, remember how trivial issues got approved for referendum and passed, count the number of different motivations for exploiting calls for secession, add a layer of right wing frothing about how Washington is broken and “states rights!”, and tell me that an issue like gay marriage wouldn’t result in at least a state or two finding itself declaring independence while people go “WTF have we done?”