THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume XIII, Issue # , 2011
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
A WHIFF OF SECESSION & NULLIFICATION
By Alan Caruba
GIVING SERIOUS THOUGHT TO THE QUESTION OF WHETHER THE CONTEMPORY AMERICAN FEDERAL UNION HAS EITHER
OUTLIVED ITS USEFULNESS OR, WORSE, BECOME A SINKHOLE OF POLITICAL POWER AGGREGATING TO THE U.S. CENTRAL
GOVERNMENT, GIVING IT TOTAL CONTROL OVER THE FIFTY STATES: DO MEMBER-STATES OF THE UNITED STATES
OF AMERICA HAVE THE RIGHT TO SECEDE FROM THE UNION OR TO NULLIFY ACTS OF CONGRESS & DECISIONS OF THE U.S.
SUPREME COURT? WHAT MEASURES CAN STATES TAKE TO PROTECT THEIR CITIZENS FROM USURPATIONS OF
AUTHORITY BY THE U.S. NATIONAL GOVERNMENT?
FULL STORY:
On May 30-31, 2011, Rasmussen Reports took a survey of a thousand adults, asking if they believed that
member-states of the American Federal Union (United States of America) have the right to secede from the Union.
“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 U.S. 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 American nation.
In October, 2011, Pelican Publishing Company will publish Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First
Century, in which a number of scholars, edited by Donald W. Livingston, Professor of Philosophy at Emory
University in Atlanta, Georgia, examine the implications of secession, possibly by regional groupings of states, from the
present Federal Union, or Federation.
Professor 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
American Union has either outlived its usefulness or, worse, become a sinkhole of power aggregating to the U.S. central
government, giving it total control over the fifty states.
The Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly states that “The powers not delegated to the United States [i.e.,
the central government] 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 central
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 Professor 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, Professor 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, due to its
inevitable consequence, centralized control of education by the U.S. national government.
Resistance to Obamacare is based on the question of whether the national government can require individual citizens to
purchase something they do not want. The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a measure to repeal the objectionable
item in the federal legislation, but the House-passed measure is stalled in the Democratic Party-controlled Senate. Reverse
the situation and you have the central 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 U.S. Supreme Court legalism,” says Professor 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 questions.” While Lincoln did “save the Union,” he
did so at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and the destruction of the American 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 U.S. House and 100 in the U.S.
Senate should control the lives, the economy, and the education of more than 300 million people in fifty semi-autonomous
states.
The President of the U.S.A. virtually makes law with “executive orders” and a bare majority of the nine members of the U.S.
Supreme Court exercises final authority in determing the federal constitutionality of federal, state, and local laws. Congress
is so divided by raw partisanship that it is barely functioning.
“The only remedy,” says Professor 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 Professor
Livingston, noting that “There is no law an American state can pass that cannot be overturned by the arrogant social
engineers of the U.S. 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 autonomy 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 American nation in
conflicts Congress does not ultimately authorize.
It is the realization that every United Nations treaty the United States of America signs deprives it of its rights as a
sovereign nation-state.
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, which 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, centralized regulation of nearly all activities within those states, including 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 the President's signature.
-----------------------------------------------
© Alan Caruba, 2011
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
U.S. Constitutional Law & Political Philosophy
The Constitution of the United States of America
The American Constitutional System:
Principal Characteristics -- Federalism
Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. An author, commentator and business and science writer,
he is the Founder of the National Anxiety Center, a clearinghouse for information about media-driven "scare campaigns" designed
to influence public opinion and public policy.
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THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
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Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
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Conservative Government Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity