On Tue, 12 Aug 1997, Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law wrote:
On Tue, 12 Aug 1997, Steve Schear wrote:
So, if the people (legal voters in the states which planned to withdraw)
No, "the people" is the people of the united states as a whole. The federalist papers deals with this somewhere, where they explain that of course the voting had to be organized state by state, because that tracked the reality of how everything was organized, but nonetheless it was intended to be a national pleblecite to produce a national government.
Someone should tell the U.K. - I don't remember "A plebecite among all members of a political collective is necessary to sever a single member" as being one of the self-evident truths in the Declaration of Independence. After all, the parliment said they really did represent the colonies, so their votes count, and anything that happened in Philadelphia should have no legal force. Jefferson suggested a new convention every 20 years with the argument that you cannot morally bind a new generation to an old structure - they probably would not change it much, but personal assent gives moral authority. Even the abolitionists considered it tyranny when the constitution gave legal force to the fugitive slave laws. What do you do when a piece of paper is used to justify continuing usurpations - and that same paper created the body of an earlier document which was the spirit of liberty and declared the ephemeral English law and its executive no longer in force because of such usurpations? When the spirit leaves a body, that body is called a corpse. And the Constitution is a dead letter if the spirit of the Declaration is missing. When legal authorities crawl over it looking for loopholes to impose more federal power, it is not merely dead, but an undead vampire seeking to devour the spirit of liberty. The constitution, and the law in general is alive and in robust health only when it is acting to preserve and increase liberty. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if someone actually put the issue of secession to a vote - many northerners wanted the south to leave. But the chances of Lincoln and the Congress calling such a vote were less than that of King George III calling a similar vote on our earlier situation. Eventually every state ratified the constitution, though they had to threaten Rhode Island. It would have been more interesting if a few the larger states didn't ratify and held out after the "required" number were met. If the southern states "didn't do it right", what is the right way to seceed from the united states? And can it be done when the leadership is acting as tyrants? --- reply to tzeruch - at - ceddec - dot - com ---