"The denial of the right to secede from a voluntary union is itself a primary justification for secession."
This would seem to be self-evident...
As soon as the Federal Government declares that States do not have the right to secede...it's pretty much time to do it...yeah?
The Gunsligner
Except that was over 100 years ago. Just sayin'.
ReplyDeleteSecession? What kind of alternate reality are you peeps living in?
ReplyDeleteAn example of the whacked-out minds of wing-nuts.
Anon...does it really matter? Truth is truth.
ReplyDeleteSteve, I'm sure someone in the original colonies said to the Founders exactly what you just said to me.
Yeah...totally CRAZY!
Jefferson thought we should have a revolution every few years—to keep the government honest. That might be a little extreme...but I think the time is fast approaching.
And he did say that stuff about the blood of tyrants and patriots...
If get the feeling you haven't been paying attention.
There are a whole lot of people in Texas and Oklahoma that are just about ready to support secession. There are a whole lot of people in other parts of the country that would probably move here if we did.
ReplyDeleteI'll be one of those moving if anyone DOES finally make the break. I know it isn't gonna happen here. But I'm heading where it happens. I agree with your assessment, gunslinger. Prima facie.
ReplyDeleteI'll be there in a New York minute...
ReplyDelete(forgive the reference!)
"If get the feeling you haven't been paying attention."
ReplyDeleteWhat do you mean I'm not paying attention? Olbermann and Matthews talk about the crazy secessionists all the time.
LOL....Steve...you're KILLING ME!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the laugh, dude.
Is steve really Jag?
ReplyDeleteWow! Good old Jag...he's been missing in action for months.
ReplyDeleteI guess he got sick of us realists.
Or he figured out Øbama was a fraud, and is too embarrassed to admit it.
Poor Jag.
I miss him.
You have been busy on this subject. I confess to not having had a chance to catch up since your post that linked to Gary Barnett's "Case for session", perhaps you answer the case more convincingly than he did, I'll catch up and find out this weekend. But there are other issues beyond whether secession can be accomplished without civil war, after accomplishing it there would be that moment from "The Candidate" where we'd have to turn to ourselves and as "Now what?" Maybe you've answered that, I'll see soon.
ReplyDeleteWe should keep in mind what brought us into union in the first place. When we think of what brought about the original Constitutional convention, "Shay's Rebellion" is the instance most commonly cited... and that was the spark, but to many of the founders minds their was tinder and logs already arranged and awaiting that spark, and they feared for a coming conflagration which set them to thinking of Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Corinth... they feared that without union, we would repeat the eternal war of the ancient Greek city states. As Catherine Drinker Bowen notes in "Miracle at Philadelphia", the states were already dealing with each other as foreign nations, and not particularly friendly ones at that. Pardon a longish quote (from pgs 9-10)
"...But prosperity remained a local matter; money printed by Pennsylvania must be kept within Pennsylvania's own borders. State and section showed themselves jealous, preferring to fight each other over boundaries as yet unsettled and to pass tariff laws against each other. New Jersey had her own customs service; New York was a foreign nation and must be kept from encroachment. States were marvelously ingenious at devising mutual retaliations; nine of them retained their own navies. (Virginia had even ratified the peace treaty separately.) The shipping arrangements of Connecticut, Delaware and New Jersey were at the mercy of Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts.
Madison saw the picture clearly. "New Jersey,: he wrote, "placed between Philadelphia and New York, was likened to a cask tapped at both ends; and North Carolina, between Virginia and South Carolina, to a patient bleeding at both arms." When Virginia passed a law declaring that vessels failing to pay duty in her orts might be seized by any person and prosecuted, "one half to the use of the informer and the other half to the use of the commonwealth,: she was not aiming at Spain or England but at the cargoes of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Massachusetts. "Most of our political evils," Madison wrote, "may be traced to our commercial ones."... Massachusetts cannot keep the peace one hundred miles from her capital and is now forming an army for its support."
Can you imagine New York in commercial competition, backed by militaries fiercely on the lookout for any transgression? To say nothing of Illinois and Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky.... There are to this day boundary disputes between the states, Nevada and California just recently. Even if secession were accomplished without civil war... war would follow within a generation, and on all fronts.
Revolution is needed, hopefully a civil one, but I do not believe secession offers any solutions beyond dissolution, and I believe unimagined destruction would follow in its wake. As fouled up as we are, we are still one nation, and we jeopardize that at the peril of ourselves and posterity.
Just sayin'