Thursday, April 08, 2010

You got a funny way of showing it, Lady

A letter in the Star Tribune today:

As one of the delegates to the Minnesota Republican Party's Second Congressional District convention who supported the resolution asserting the right of states to secede from the union, I feel compelled to respond ("Secession movement," Opinion Exchange, March 31).

Some may believe such a resolution is unpatriotic and un-American. On the contrary, it is my very love for America and our Constitution [italics are mine] that moved me to speak in favor of this resolution.

The Constitution of the United States became the law of the land when it was voluntarily ratified by the sovereign member states as prescribed in Article VII. The states freely agree to be governed by the Constitution, which clearly spells out the powers delegated to the U.S. government, reserving all other powers to the states and to the people. If the union is insoluble, why would the federal government feel compelled to be constrained by the Constitution? What recourse would the states and the people have if the federal government acted outside of its constitutional authority? The right to secession serves as a reminder of the rule of law by which the states have agreed to be governed and provides a protective check to ensure fidelity to the Constitution.

The union is a free association, and although the secession of any member state is unlikely, the right to secede without being threatened with violence needs to be recognized.

Emily Conley, Belle Plaine

What recourse would the states and the people have if the federal government acted outside of its constitutional authority?

Well first of all Emily, you might check with Article III of the Constitution, since it seems to fall readily to hand, and also with Marbury v. Madison, an early Supreme Court case that held that the court had the power to declare acts of the federal government unconstitutional:

The justices held, through Marshall's forceful argument, that [  ] the Constitution was "the fundamental and paramount law of the nation" and that "an act of the legislature repugnant to the constitution is void." In other words, when the Constitution--the nation's highest law--conflicts with an act of the legislature, that act is invalid. This case establishes the Supreme Court's power of judicial review.

Sedition, of course, sounds so much more romantic.

The union is a free association, and although the secession of any member state is unlikely, the right to secede without being threatened with violence needs to be recognized.

This is part of the Kool-Aid kredo (yes, I know how to spell it; don’t write in) that goes back to, well, the Civil War. The opening paragraphs of the Mississippi Secession Resolution state:

Whereas, The Constitutional Union was formed by the several States in their separate soverign [sic] capacity for the purpose of mutual advantage and protection;

That the several States are distinct sovereignities [sic] [written by an early Tea Partier, no doubt], whose supremacy is limited so far only as the same has been delegated by voluntary compact to a Federal Government, and when it fails to accomplish the ends for which it was established, the parties to the compact have the right to resume, each State for itself, such delegated powers;

That the institution of slavery existed prior to the formation of the Federal Constitution, and is recognized by its letter, and all efforts to impair its value or lessen its duration by Congress, or any of the free States, is a violation of the compact of Union and is destructive of the ends for which it was ordained, but in defiance of the principles of the Union thus established, the people of the Northern States have assumed a revolutionary position toward the Southern States;

As Lori Sturdevant said, we had a war about that. And the Union not only threatened violence, it brought it. The United States is not a voluntary association; it was entered into voluntarily, but we’re all in it now for the duration. People who say otherwise are not constitutionalists; they are insurrectionists.

Here are the last couple of sentences from the Gettysburg Address, pronounced by President Lincoln, over, among many others, the dead of a decimated Minnesota First Regiment that had made a suicidal charge off of Cemetery Ridge to give the Union Army time to reinforce the center of the line: a pivotal movement in a pivotal battle in the Civil War. It may well have saved the Union.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Col. Colvill (there’s a town in Minnesota named after the colonel) and his men must be spinning in their graves over bilious, poisonous effluent such as Ms. Conley’s letter.

If Minnesota has the right to secede over a health care bill, or nullify an act of Congress over incandescent light bulbs, presumably Mississippi can secede over civil rights.

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