Jonathan, where I disagree with your premise is that preserving the Union is the only moral choice. If the US is founded on anything, it’s on the right of the people to decide. If both sides are using the processes of the ballot box and negotiations, instead of UDI and armed secession, and there is no major moral issue like slavery hanging over it all, I don’t think either side has a monopoly on moral high ground.
What if a state, in a free and fair referendum, votes heavily in favour of peaceful secession from the Union? And both Senators from that state, and three-quarters of the House delegation from that state support it, and introduce a constitutional amendment under Article V to separate? And both houses of the State legislature and the Governor all support it? And they say “we know that it’s complicated to unravel the association, so let’s commit to a fair process to allocate assets and debts flowing from the separation”?
I don’t see that it’s possible in that case to say that the only moral choice is to resist separation. There would be good political arguments in favour of the Union, and appeals from the heart and the head that can be advanced, but if the proposal is for a fair and democratic approach to secession, as opposed to UDI backed up by force, I don’t think the supporters of the Union have a monopoly on morality here.
Quoth the Canadian, who’s been thinking about this issue on and off since a certain night in November, 1976.
So if I’m a black person living in Texas, and Texas gets a 51% referendum plus congressmen and senators voting for it, what exactly is the fair process for me being forced to either leave my home or give up all of my rights and protections as a US citizen to the mercies of a Texas legislature so far gone they’re actually leaving the union? I don’t believe that there is such a thing as a “fair process” for taking the homes of millions of American citizens and handing them over to a foreign power over their objections. Or such thing as a “fair process” for deciding that someone’s rights as a US citizen are no longer worth protecting.
There are all kinds of unpleasant things that happen to us because of 51%.
If 51% of legislative lawmaking decides to double my taxes, they’re doubled. If they want to alter my health insurance, it’s altered. If they want to make my Smart Car illegal, it’s illegal.
Not saying that what the 51% want is necessarily right - but there will always be people objecting to something passed by majority legislative vote, saying “I don’t like this.” If we were to always cater to the minority who says they don’t like the majority decision, then democratic government would cease to function altogether.
And yet at the same time, there are a lot of unpleasant things that are not allowed o happen because of a 51% vote. For example, losing your right to vote, losing your US citizenship, and being sold into slavery are currently not allowed with a 51% vote. Secession removes your protection against all of those things, and likely forces some of them to happen (like loss of citizenship) but you want to allow them to happen with a 51% vote from a narrow geographic area.
But what if the state government says “we appreciate for something this momentous we need more than 50% + 1, so in our “Secession Referendum Act” we’ll put in the legal requirement that the “Leave” option needs at least 60% to win.”
For one thing, I don’t think that any vote for a ‘leave’ referendum is valid for enacting any actual change whatsoever. To have any real validity, the vote would need to be for a concrete proposal that would spell out exactly what the ‘leave’ option actually entails. I don’t believe you’re actually going to get a 65% vote for any concrete proposal for secession that would also be acceptable enough to the rest of the states to support the 3/4 vote needed to pass an amendment, even if they completely ignore the blatant and obvious problem that such an amendment would spell the end of the US as a functioning country and examine it only on a narrow, short-term basis. The difficulties of handling citizenship, immigration, tax structure, federal property, federal debt, and a host of other issues after secession are being glossed over here.
Getting people to vote for “you’re going to lose your ability to move to what was the US, your taxes are going up, and you’re not getting social security checks in the future” is a much tougher sell than getting them to vote for just “leave”.
None of those things might be in the leave package. Emigration would probably still be possible, your taxes may go up but so could your services, including a more secure retirement plan. If the Pacific Coast states ever request severance, it will be because they think they have a better plan than the remainder of the country at large.
You have a better chance of two states merging than one breaking away from the union, and on that topic, why not have Massachusetts and Rhode Island merge
With just 30 miles in length, how the heck did Rhode Island become a state?
Yeah, they will be in any realistic package that’s actually acceptable to 3/4 of the other states and that accomplishes the kind of goals people talking about secession have put forward. From what I’ve seen, most people talking about secession don’t really have any idea how they would handle citizenship and borders after secession, they seem to have a vague idea that they’d get the benefits of US citizenship but not pay US taxes and still get social security and medicare but not pay the taxes for those either, which all seems rather unrealistic to me.
My requirement was that they actually would need to spell out a plan in the first place rather than the sequence that amounted to ‘hold an empty ‘leave’ referendum’, use that as a mandate to push other states to accept a vote by the state legislature to leave, and use that vague ‘leave’ vote as justification for stripping people of their home country’. Your idea that states would only request severance if they have a plan runs directly contrary to US history and very recent British history. For US history the Confederacy didn’t have a plan until after the war had actually started (Firing on fort Sumter just happened, for example, it wasn’t part of a coherent plan), and for recent British history there was nothing remotely resembling a plan behind the Brexit vote. I don’t buy that a half-assed ‘leave’ vote provides any sort of moral justification.
Also, the idea that there is some ‘better plan’ for Pacific coast states that is also acceptable to enough of the other states that 3/4 of them will vote to agree with it doesn’t appear to be based on any realistic appraisal of the situation. Why wouldn’t the other states want to get something out of the deal too?
You don’t even need to disrespect their sovereignty to stop playing nice. For example, arguing that Social Security is a program for real Americans and not secessionists, then passing a law that no social security payments will be made to any of the trecherous scum living in Calexitfornia (or whatever region) doesn’t seem like that hard of a sell within the US. Although it’s certainly not ‘palying nice’, it also doesn’t disrespect anyone’s sovereignty. And people who think they’re going to get out of US income taxes but keep US citizenship are in for a shock when they learn how non-nice the US currently plays on that front, and even more if the remaining US gets pissy and refuses to grant a FEIE exemption for us citizens in Calexitfornia (or whatever region).
These arguments, some of which are really hard for me to understand enough to agree or disagree with, appear to be mostly about possible complications – and, yes, there are millions – affecting a peaceful schism, mostly from the POV of people in the seceding areas. But they don’t really seem to address the primary question offered by the OP, which is about the moral strength of this and future governments to oppose secession.
One of the big reasons for a government to oppose secession is to protect the rights of those living in the effected areas who wish to remain U.S. citizens. That requires a certain strength of will and moral conviction. He won’t be there forever but our current president could, by all historical evidence, be persuaded to expedite a peaceful secession by the act of writing him personally a large check.
I think Californians leading any secessionist movement would try to sell the idea of self-sufficiency. The reality is more complicated, as any state or country that has seceded can tell us. Assuming California were to secede, there’s no guarantee that “California” would keep its current shape on the map. Some regions of post-exit California might want to secede from California nation. The State of Jefferson might become a thing.
I pointed this out earlier, but people like to avoid that topic and think that groups like the Free State Project in New Hampshire would certainly never think about the possibility of seceding from a state that has decided to secede from the US to join Canada and take away their guns. Even though the discussions from the founding of the group talk quite a bit about secession and retaining their guns.
That would be completely antithetical to the Libertarian migrant movement. Their goal is to make NH their playground. I believe they’re baked most of the time and their progress kind of reflects that, so it is not a model of logical protest or of independence.
That’s not to say there aren’t homegrown libertarians here, but Free Staters are a whole other thing.
I think it is worth pointing out that the South fired first. My understanding is that Lincoln made it clear that he was sending a ship to Fort Sumter only for the purpose of resupply and the southern hotheads treated this as a provocation is fired on the fort. I have long wondered what would have happened had they held their fire. Imagine a scenario in which the two sides maintained a wary cold war for a year, stretching to two, five, ten, fifty. At this point the de factor secession is pretty much a fait accompli. Of course, the fugitive slave law is a dead letter and the southerners would be driven off the court. I don’t know what would have happened to the non-secessionist slave states. I suspect that slavery would eventually have been outlawed, but maybe not for a long time.
One difference between then and now is that in those days, I imagine the federal government didn’t impinge much on the day-to-day life of citizens. No social security for example and no income tax. A lot of these issues come up in the question of Quebec separations. For example, what do you do about people who wish to remain Canadian citizens. And Federal property inside Quebec. And the portion of the national debt that can be reasonably attributed to Quebec. It would make Brexit look like a walk in the park.
It is not all that complicated. Norbert is a state by dint of being one of the United States. If Norbert and Congress agree to allow Norbert to secede, the definition of the Great State of Norbert gets stricken from the registry of the Acts of Congress. Hence, Norbert becomes undefined territory and must then assert itself as a sovereign entity; even county lines would no longer matter, neighboring states would basically be at liberty to eat up as much of the former Norbertian lands as it may be unable to defend.
Unless, of course, the US formalizes a treaty of recognition as part of the secession process. Something that elaborate, well thought out and well executed, though, does not sound like “secession” as such but more of a mutual redefinition of a political relationship.
