25 Percent Of Americans Open To Secession

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If the Union is pertpertual, how can anyone join it? Surely, by adding another state to the Union, it would be changing a Union which is not supposed to be changed, and if it is a contract between the states, then adding a state without the permission of all others would not be lawful?

What, also, of West Virginia, or of Kentucky? Surely, the intergrity of the states is not permitted to be violated, and Congress does not possess the authority to overrule that?

That's not even talking about the territorial integrity of the British Empire...

The civil war established that the union is between the people not the states. Any question of secession would need to be settled by a national referendum.

Having said that, I fully support Texas session. Those douchbags need to GTFO!


Then I say, deport all Randians to this newly minted Galt-o-slavia!

Oh please! This post would be HUGE if I dug up all the examples.


Mm hm....
But you've been browbeaten into admitting you were wrong on political issues several times that I remember. Usually, though, it?s only momentary and you reverse yourself again.


Really?
If I were to sit down and write a list of the things I disliked abut the Bush administration I would find that the Obama administration is equally guilty on many of them. Maybe even most depending on the comprehensiveness of the list. There is not much for me to like about Bush and I admit that and have admitted it on numerous occasions in this forum. I don't take the attitude; "Hey, at least he wasn't a democrat."

Just because you and Dox believe you schooled me in anything doesn't make it so.
And as far as Obama being on par as bad as Bush - Obama didn't leave the economy in shambles, and he certainly didn't leave us in Middle Eastern quagmires. No, he's dealing with those disastrous mistakes.

But neither does the Constitution say that it isn't perpetual. It says nothing about secession. By the constitutional literalism of conservatives, that would mean that yes, the union is perpetual, and no, secession is not legal or permissible.

Oh there have been others but not as often or as persistently.

Not yet.....

Iraq and Afghanistan have been hashed out in previous threads. Obama is not the lord and savior you wish he were.

Well, I would agree except his reasoning is correct (IMHO) - the articles of confederation does in fact lay forth the idea of a perpetual Union: "Articles of Confederation and perpetual Union between the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts-bay Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia." , while the Preamble of the Constitution states: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union" - so first the Constitution is acknowledging that the States are already formed into a Union before the Constitution was written, and if the Union is already perpetual, and we want to make it perfect, how can it be more perfect if it is no longer perpetual when the Constitution goes into effect? Yes, the Constitution does not explicitly declare the Union is perpetual, but does it really have to?

Because perpetuity does not equal immutability. If there exists a union between state A and state B, adding a third member state C to the Union does not invalidate the pre-existing Union between A and B. Whereas before A and B were united to each other, afterwards A is united to B, A is united to C and B is united to C. Thus A and B are still united and the original, perpetual union is maintained. On the other hand, if B wants to succeed from this new Union, then it is attempting to break the original, theoretically perpetual union it has with A.



US Constitution, Article 4, Section 3 states: "New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress."

With regard to West Virginia, if I recall correctly, those who wanted to split from Virginia basically declared the existing state government to be invalid due to the succession and then formed a new state government which in turn consented to forming the new state of West Virginia from Virginia's territory. Admittedly, at best this is probably an end-around of what was intended in the Constitution, but the Constitution doesn't really contemplate succession. In any case after the war the Supreme Court weighed in and determined what happened was valid - right or wrong.

No, Obama's not the Lord And Savior - but he's far from wrecking the country like his predecessor had done. And I seriously think he's incapable of said predecessor's incompetence that would bring down the economy. And as far as Iraq and Afghanistan are concerned - again, that's a mess Obama had inherited. A mess that wouldn't exist had a dullard not have destabilized the Middle East for the sake of personal aggrandizement by trumping his father's accomplishments. On top of that, Obama isn't going to be so monumentally ignorant as to be surprised by the notion that not all Muslims are of the same theological and ethnic divisions, and or that destabilizing the area would not bring about democracy, but bloody anarchy.

Powers not explicitly given to the federal government in the constitution do exist and left the people and the states.

I think the meaning of a 'perpetual union' can be debated as well but I don't agree that just recognizing there was a union beforehand means that it is perpetual whatever definition that is put on that. Marriage can also be defined as a 'perpetual union' and you don't see too many people these days opposing divorce. The 10th Amendment establishes that powers not specifically enumerated to the federal government do not exist and the 9th Amendment recognizes that the people have rights that exist outside those enumerated in the Constitution. The Declaration of Independence lays out of our founders belief in sovereignty and self determination that are inalienable.

But again, no where are the states even allowed to just pack up and leave the union whenever they want. And we know there are limits to what states can do, as was demonstrated during the civil rights era when the federal government had stepped in to protect the rights of non-Caucasian Americans that some states had been suppressing for generations.

I'm not sure how the meaning of a 'perpetual union' can be debated. I mean, what other interpretation of it could there be other than that the union shall endure in perpetuity? I'm perfectly open to some alternate interpretation, if there is a reasonable one, but it seems pretty cut and dry in this instance. As for marriage, at best it could be defined as a life-long union, not a perpetual one - at least in Christian / US terms, marriage generally lasts until the death of one spouse or the other, and since we are not immortal, marriage is assumed to not be perpetual in the sense that it lasts for a finite amount of time, not an infinite amount of time. A union of states, on the other hand, can be perpetual in an infinite sense since a state does not, inherently, have a finite lifespan. If the state can endure in perpetuity, then a union that it forms with other states can also endure in perpetuity.

Looking at in another way, its important to look at what's not said in the Constitution. If the Articles of Confederation specified a perpetual union, and the framers of the Constitution acknowledged that Union, if they wished to change the terms of that union to be in some way non-perpetual, then they could (and should) have specified this in the Constitution itself. Instead, the Constitution goes to great lengths to describe the process by which the states must ratify it, but says nothing about how a state can exit from its terms - unratify it, if you will. The constitution states that it shall be the "supreme law of the land", and by ratifying the Constitution, a state agrees to those terms. While its true that the 9th and 10th amendment reserve powers for the states and rights for the people that are not explicitly assigned to the federal government in the remainder of the Constitution, if the power/right to succeed is one of those reserved powers / rights because its not explicitly mentioned elsewhere in the document, this makes little sense because the power / right to succeed would negate all of the powers / rights that the Constitution explicitly does assign to the federal government. Saying there is a right to succeed because the constitution does not explicitly say otherwise is tantamount to saying that there is a right to ignore the laws passed by congress because the Constitution does not explicitly say otherwise.

As I said I believe that self determination is inalienable human right so it doesn't matter how one interprets the Articles of Confederation or the Constitution as our rights do not come from them. The phrase 'perpetual union' appears on the Article on Confederation a few times but isn't defined(in the sense that it says secession is illegal) and does not appear in the Constitution which makes it explicitly clear that powers not granted in it are given to the states. Another interpretation of 'perpetual' is that it it is in effect until a party to the agreement opts out as opposed to a sunset ending on a specific date or action. To infer so much power from that undefined phrase while at the same time glancing over the fact that it does not appear in the Constitution which is the supreme law of the land because you say it is implied anyways seems pretty wrong to me. If so much was implied by it in the Articles of Confederation then surely it not being in the Constitution is meaningful in its interpretation as well. A more perfect union does not imply it is perpetual without the freedom to leave.

The "contract" the states signed permits Congress to admit new states to this Union, so no Congress would not need to go and seek the permission of all the other states to admit a new state.



Kentucky was land that was eventually gotten rid of by Virginia in the very early period where it was not clear how far west some states were supposed to stretch. West Virginia is a special case, because the state it seceded from was in rebellion. Either way, the Reconstructed legislature of Virginia retroactively legitimized the change.

If self-determination is an absolute, inalienable individual right then the concept of government is meaningless and anarchy would ensue. After all, any person subjected to the rule of a government that he/she does not like could simply 'self-determine' their way out from under its authority at any time, rendering the entire exercise meaningless. A contract that contains provisions, explicit or implicit, for any party to the contract to terminate the contract at any time and without any penalty is a meaningless, unenforceable contract that no one would bother to sign.

As for the idea that perpetual means until one party opts out, this is not an accepted definition of the word perpetual. "Never ending", "unchanging", "for all time" are definitions you'll find in the dictionary. You are claiming that there is some sort of ambiguity about the term when, in fact, there really isn't. It is not an undefined phrase.

As for the idea that a perpetual government would be more perfect if the member entities had the freedom to opt out is backwards - as Lincoln said in his speech, its safe to say that no government ever contained a provision for its own termination. Some things are so obvious that failing to explicitly specify them is not an omission that makes them no longer true.