[Blue Ink]

There’s always one or more threads going on FR where posters cleverly and originally write, “Kick California out of the Union and build a wall around it!”

So here’s my question: could the U.S. really do that? I mean, I understand the Civil War settled the question of whether a state can leave of its own accord.

But what if all the states voted to give one the boot? Constitutional or not?

[muawiyah]

Does the Pope have thermonuclear warheads? Well, not yet ~ so that's the answer about kicking a state out of the union. Lyndon Baines Johnson said we can swap Texas land back to the Mexicans ~ without Texas approval as I recall. So I guess we could swap California ~ back to SPAIN!!!! Screw the Mexicans.

Oh, yeah, and we keep the part the Russians had a claim to ~ they sold all that early on.

[FreeAtlanta]

There are a lot of good parts to California. Can we just build a fence around San Francisco and Los Angeles and then kick those cities out of the union?

We could repeat the process for several other leftist urban hell holes around country. Detroit, parts of New York, Philadelphia, etc.

We could make it temporary and bring them back in after all the rioting had finished and society has restored itself.

[SoJoCo]

But what if all the states voted to give one the boot? Constitutional or not?

James Madison posed that very question when he said, "An inference from the doctrine that a single state has a right to secede at will from the rest, is that the rest would have an equal right to secede from it; in other words, to turn it, against its will, out of its union with them. Such a doctrine would not, till of late, have been palatable anywhere, on nowhere less so than where it is not most contended for."

It's pretty clear that Madison didn't think a state could be expelled against its will, any more than he thought a state could leave on its own accord. I'm not going to second guess him.