If the people of these United States have no right to leave the union, then why were they asked to join it in the first place? The U.S. Constitution would never have been ratified if the people were told that they would forever be beholden to the agreement. As populations grow all over the world, sovereign states are becoming geographically smaller. The trend is toward more countries on the map, not fewer. 400 million people cannot be governed by a few hundred elected officials. It is madness not to consider a congenial splitting of the country. Texas may very well secede, and other states will follow. Let’s start talking about how we can do it peacefully. The federal government has proven that they will not be peaceful, so the people must demand it and back the states who wish to leave the union.
Tom Woods and Michael Malice have been fantastic at publicizing the case for national divorce and it seems to have reached the halls of Congress. Woods addressed a recent exchange on the subject in his newsletter:
You may recall that your friend Woods here published a free eBook called National Divorce: The Peaceful Solution to Irreconcilable Differences.
Well, today Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) once again suggested that given the radical difference in worldviews among the American public, combined with one side’s determination to subdue the other, national divorce was the only solution.
Now yes, I know that that view is not authorized by the New York Times, and it doesn’t fall within the range of allowable opinion.
But good heavens, what could be more obvious?
Well, along came Liz Cheney, who can always be relied upon to resolve disputed questions with fact-free platitudes. You’ll never guess — she insists secession isn’t allowed! What a surprise!
She wrote:
“Our country is governed by the Constitution. You swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Secession is unconstitutional. No member of Congress should advocate secession, Marjorie.”
Secession is of course not unconstitutional. The federal government was never granted the power to suppress secession (suppressing an insurrection, which involves a state governor seeking the federal government’s assistance, is not the same thing), and Article I, Section 10 (which lists the things states cannot do) nowhere prohibits the states from withdrawing from the Union, so that more or less settles it.
The case for the constitutionality of secession is to my mind quite overwhelming, though of course none of us are taught it in school. I discuss it at length in National Divorce.
The states preceded the federal government. The sovereign peoples of the states sent delegates to the Philadelphia convention. Each state ratified the Constitution separately — there was no national vote of a single “American people” — because the states are the building blocks of the Union.
The peoples of the states did not forfeit their sovereignty when they acceded to the Constitution. In doing so they were exercising their sovereignty.
And since they retain that sovereignty, they may later choose to exercise it by withdrawing in the same manner.
This is what Emmerich de Vattel, the great international lawyer, explained in his 1758 book The Law of Nations: the mere fact of states joining a confederation does not involve forfeiting their sovereignty.
Liz Cheney, one suspects, probably hasn’t read that one cover to cover.
It’s true that in Texas v. White (1869) the Supreme Court declared, absurdly, that secession was unconstitutional. I also address that in the book. But even if that case were an insurmountable obstacle, there is another way, also covered in the book, to bring about peaceful separation that would not run afoul of it.
Get your free copy, and thereby de-LizChenify yourself:
Tom Woods
I’m downloading the book to sharpen my understanding of the subject. It feels obvious to me that we’ve gotten too big to be a single nation, but that’s not yet a popular view. Texas will be the big test and we’ll see how quickly other states follow.