A whiff of secession and nullification

In May Rasmussen Reports took a survey of a thousand adults asking if they believed that States have the right to secede. "One-in-five Americans believe individual States have the right to break away from the country, although a majority doesn't believe it will actually happen."

That a Tea Party movement sprang to life in the midst of the protests against Obamacare and then was instrumental in transferring political power in the House of Representatives in the 2010 election cannot be dismissed. People—lots of them—are increasingly wary of the central government, particularly one that has burdened them with more debt in the last three years than in the entire prior history of the nation.

In October, Pelican Press will publish Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century in which a number of scholars edited by Donald Livingston, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, examine the implications of secession, possibly by regional groupings of States, from the present federal government.

Prof. Livingston is a political philosopher and scholar, the author of two books on the British philosopher David Hume and may well be one of a handful of people who have given serious thought to the question of whether the present Union has either outlived its usefulness or, worse, become a sinkhole of power aggregating to itself total control over the States.

The Tenth Amendment clearly states that "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 is true, but I doubt there is a single Governor of any of the fifty States who cannot enumerate the ways the federal government has wrested power from them while imposing costs. When Arizona finds itself the object of a federal legal suit to prevent it from trying to control its border with Mexico, you know there's a problem.

In an article, "Decentralization for Freedom", by Prof. Livingston, he raises some issues that are increasingly troubling to a growing number of Americans. He addresses the measures States can take "to protect their citizens from usurpations by the central government." Among these are the passing of resolutions. "A continuous flood of resolutions from the States about the constitutionality of this or that issue (and widely publicized) would serve to educate the public."

Thereafter, Prof. Livingston recommends a resort to the Tenth Amendment by State legislators and governors in order to recover usurped authority. We are beginning to see another measure, the refusal to accept federal funding as regards its centralized control of education.

Resistance to Obamacare is based on the question whether the federal government can require individual citizens to purchase something they do not want. The House has passed a measure to repeal it, but it is stalled in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Reverse the situation and you have a federal government telling Americans what they cannot buy, as in the case of the 100 watt incandescent light bulb in use since the days of Thomas Edison.

"Genuine federalism in America can be recovered only by political action in the name of the State's own authority and not by Supreme Court legalism," says Prof. Livingston.

"To all of this it is often said that State interposition, nullification, and succession were eliminated as policy options by the Civil War. Brute force, however, cannot settle moral and constitutional question." While Lincoln did "save the Union", he did so at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and the destruction of the South.

Clearly the central government has grown so large, so unwieldy, so wasteful, and so unresponsive to the problems and costs it has imposed that people are beginning to wonder why 435 Representatives in the House and 100 in the Senate should control the lives, the economy, and the education of more than 300 million people in fifty sovereign States.

The President virtually makes law with "executive orders" and the nine members of the Supreme Court exercises final authority of the constitutionality of laws. Congress is so divided by raw partisanship it is barely functioning.

"The only remedy," says Prof. Livingston "is territorial division of the Union through secession into a number of different and independent political units."

"The current central government of the United States hates inequality, but it also fears the people," says Prof. Livingston, noting that "There is no law an American State can pass that cannot be overturned by the arrogant social engineers of the Supreme Court who in the last fifty years have played with the inherited moral traditions and federative policy of the American people like a quack with a hapless patient."

"Constitutionally, this means that the States must reassert their sovereignty under the Ninth and Tenth Amendments and recall those powers they have allowed to slip out of their hands to the central government."

This is not a call for anarchy. It is the realization that the modern presidency has aggregated to itself powers it does not have or, in the case of Libya, is ignoring the War Powers Act that limits its ability to engage the nation in conflicts Congress does not ultimately authorize.

It is the realization that every United Nations treaty the United States signs deprives it of its sovereign rights.

It is a call for consideration that regional groups of States with common interests might provide better government within such groups, leaving to the central government the responsibility to protect the nation via a common military, conduct foreign affairs, and return to the gold standard that would protect the value of a common currency.

When one-in-five Americans give credence to the right of secession, it is clear that the problems being experienced in all fifty States, the massive regulation of all activities within those States, the imposition of a centralized "core" curriculum to be taught in all schools, is arousing a rediscovered sense of liberty among Americans.

What steps must be taken to retain that liberty and even to restructure the Union are as yet undetermined, but they are increasingly entering the public debate.

There is no debate that something is terribly wrong when a president is elected whose eligibility and legitimacy is in serious question while the courts do nothing to address this critical constitutional issue and the Congress does nothing while sending bills for his signature.

“Damn straight states can secede.”

You sound like those radicals, Thomas Jefferson, Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton, John Hancock, Samual Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry, Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery, Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott, William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris, Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark, Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross, Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean, Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton, William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn, Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton, Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, and George Walton when they signed this document, which emerged from the flyover country of that day and age:

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. —Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

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