note the phrasing: the right of the people, not states. Had the people of the union decided to abolish it, then yes, secession / dissolution would have been legal. States seceeded, (in undemocratic ways - Black voices aside, the undemocratic maneuvering in SC and VA for two examples are well documented) not the people.
That said, had the South won the war… all this becomes moot. After all, the Patriots (before they became 'Founders") were first traitors to the legal government of the United Kingdom. But even success doesn’t change the fact that, legally, Washington, Franklin, Adams (all of them!), etc., etc., and all those New England Farmers who overthrew Royal Government in 1774 were legally traitors. They just didn’t have to hang seperately!
As a tag-along question: what events/technologies/etc eroded the fervent loyalties to one’s home state that used to exist in those days? Is it really as simple as the automobile, homogenization, etc?
Hard to see how the Colonies had the right to secede from Great Britain, but Vermont doesn’t have the right to secede from the U.S. [Assuming support for both actions by the People of the seceding territories].
Okay, let’s say there’s a referendum to validate a law signed by the legislature of Vermont, which bears the same language as the Congressional text, which passed both houses and which the President signed. Constitutional?
Jimbabweosu, I’m not following the thesis of your Fourteenth Amendment argument.
Paul in Qatar seemed to be making the argument that because the United States is composed of several states, no state may leave without the consent of the other members. And I wondered if the same was true of the people. May one of the citizens of Ohio leave without getting the consent of all the other citizens of Ohio? If so, how is that different from secession? Neither the person nor the state have agreed to be bound in perpetuity, never able to leave.
Whatever “legal” constructs a group initially uses to justify its revolt, the battlefield is the courtroom. Since the Union defeated the South, their rebellion was illegal.
Madison and Jefferson wrote in the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions that the Constitution was a compact amoung the states.
From Kentucky Resolution number 1 written by Jefferson “That the several states composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that, by compact, under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes, delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each state to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force; that to this compact each state acceded as a state, and is an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party; that this government, created by this compact”
Here is Madison in the Virginia resolution “That this Assembly doth explicitly and peremptorily declare, that it views the powers of the federal government as resulting from the compact to which the states are parties, as limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting that compact, as no further valid than they are authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact; and that, in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the states, who are parties thereto, have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose, for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining, within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties, appertaining to them.”
Possibly. Maybe even probably, based on the Supreme Court’s hint in Texas vs. White (but that was 150 years ago). But it isn’t explicitly stated in the Constitution, and it’s never been done that way, so it would ultimately depend on a ruling from the current Supreme Court.
Forgive my ignorance, but how would the court test it? If Congress, the president, and Vermont approved it, would (say) the State of Texas sue the federal government?
Remember, this was an argument for the new Constitution, over against the Articles of Confederation. This wasn’t a “if we adopt the Constitution AND we’re wise enough to preserve the Union” argument. The underlying assumption is that the Union will be preserved through joining together under the Constitution.
The Colonies didn’t have a right to secede from Great Britain. What they did was illegal under British law and the British tried to stop their secession. But the Americans won the war and that meant that they could ignore what British law said.
Same thing with the southern secession. Obviously, it was legal under Confederate law. The question we’re debating is whether it was legal under American law. It wasn’t. But that wouldn’t have mattered to the Confederates if they had won the Civil War because then American law would no longer apply to them.
A question for those making the state sovereignty argument.
Imagine Massachusetts decided that the Second Amendment no longer applies to it. It just made a public announcement that it was withdrawing from that part of the Constitution and was going to ban all firearms in the state.
Would that be legal?
I imagine most people are saying no. So my follow-up question. If a state does not have the sovereignty to withdraw from one article of the Constitution, how does it have the sovereignty to withdraw from the entire Constitution? (Including the article you just said it couldn’t withdraw from.)
A state is not an individual, but a body politic. An individual may leave a body politic by removing himself completely and permanently from the territory of that body. The situation that you identify is not analagous to the secession of a state. I am not you: you may leave. But I am a citizen of the Unites States, as are you. We (all of us) agreed in 1775 to form a Union- a body politic. That body politic of Citizens then authorized states to form. States cannot leave the organic law- only people can. As the people (all the citizens of the United States) did not authorize the dissolution of the union (State citizenship is only a sub-species of federal citizenship), the union, despite protestations to the contrary, was NOT dissolved.
As to Puddleglum’s point of Jefferson and Madison’s first use ofthe theory of Nullification in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. They were wrong. The resolutions would not have withstood constitutional scrutiny. They were resorted to by the Jerffersonian Republicans because they were convinced that the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by Adam’s Federalists were against the Bill of Rights (and the Supreme Court eventually agreed, in an informal decision). Their problem was that they couldn’t figure out how to get them decared such. The Constitution’s main flaw is that it does not say who has jurisdiction over the Constitutionality of a law. The Supreme Court would only assert its right to do so in Marbury v Madison, but the issue was not really settled until the 1870s. KY and VA resolutions were Jefferson’s way around the problem by declaring that states were sovereign, and that the Union was NOT a union of the people as the Constitution clearly stated it was, and as it was in fact. The resolutions declared that the States had the right to decide what was or was not constitutional, and that they could nullify and refuse to obey any lay that they deemed unsavory. This would have made the Federal union meaningless- if states could simply choose to ignore any law they wanted to. Either the Congress of the United States was sovereign, and could pass laws for the people, by reprsentatives of the people (if your state’s delegation votes unanimously against a law that passed- it’s still a law in your state) or the states are sovereign, and federal laws are unenforceable. The STATES, formed by orders of Congress in Spring of 1776 are not sovereign, the people of the United States are. If a majority in a democratic body in which you are represented passes a law, it is the law. the Supremacey clause of the Constitution makes Federal law supreme to any state law because states are only subspecies of the Union.
The KY and VA resolutions legal theory was simply incorrect, and only proposed because of Jefferson’s inability to get the hated Federalists to do what he wanted.
Jefferson was not in Philadelphia deliberating over the Constitution. As to his theory of nullification, well ask Senator / Vice President Calhoun and President Andrew Jackson what they thought. Can you have a meaningful national government if states only obey some laws, but not others? Fortunately the Federal Government is of the people of the United States, not states.
As to the Vermont and Congress passing the same law declaring the membership of VT in the Uniuon dissolved, no war would be needed: the people of the United States, represented in congress, have given their consent. That union would be dissolved.
I have a rather different understanding of federalism and the Constitution. The people of Maryland created the state of Maryland, for example, and then the states created the United States. The United States didn’t come into existence first and “authorize states to form.” The states already existed, with constitutions and everything.
And I have no idea what you think occurred in 1775 to form a body politic.
I say let them secede (not just southern states, any state stupid enough to do it); fence them off, embargo them, disallow access to them thru the US, point a bunch of missiles at them and fire them if they even look like they’re going to give us one iota of shit. Door/Ass, etc.
