Not-So-Random Thoughts (I)

Links to the other posts in this occasional series may be found at “Favorite Posts,” just below the list of topics.

Secession

Ilya Somin, writing at The Volokh Conspiracy, on secession:

The US Constitution, of course, is one of many where secession is neither explicitly banned or explicitly permitted. As a result, both critics and defenders of a constitutional right of secession have good arguments for their respective positions. Unlike the preceding Articles of Confederation, the Constitution does not include a Clause stating that the federal union is “perpetual.” While the Articles clearly banned secession, the Constitution is ambiguous on the subject.

Even if state secession is constitutionally permissible, the Confederate secession of 1861 was deeply reprehensible because it was undertaken for the profoundly evil purpose of perpetuating and extending slavery. But not all secession movements have such motives. Some are undertaken for good or at least defensible reasons. In any event, there is nothing inherently contradictory about the idea of a legal secession.

Of course, whether or not a secession is legal, it may be morally justified. Conversely, a legal secession may be morally unjustified, as was the case with the Southern secession. But the history of the Southern secession does not taint the legal and moral grounds for secession. As I say here,

The constitutional contract is a limited grant of power to the central government, for the following main purposes: keeping peace among the States, ensuring uniformity in the rules of inter-State and international commerce, facing the world with a single foreign policy and a national armed force, and assuring the even-handed application of the Constitution and of constitutional laws. That is all.

It is clear that the constitutional contract has been breached. It is clear that the Constitution’s promise to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” has been blighted.

Desperate times require desperate measures. I suggest that we begin at the beginning, with a new Declaration of Independence, and proceed from there to a new Constitution.

Obamacare

In a post at The American, John F. Gaski writes:

On the central issue of ObamaCare’s notorious mandate—i.e., whether it is constitutional for the federal government to compel a consumer purchase—everything hinges on the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause. That element of the Constitution gives the federal government authority to regulate interstate commerce or activities affecting it. So far, so reasonable.

But the crux of the issue is whether forcing Americans to buy healthcare is regulation of commerce in the first place. Opponents note that non-purchase of healthcare should not be considered commerce or commerce-related activity. ObamaCare apologists, including some federal judges, make the remarkable claim that a decision not to purchase qualifies as interstate commerce or activity affecting interstate commerce, the same as a decision to purchase or a purchase itself. But even the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, in its 2009 assessment of likely PPACA constitutionality, acknowledged that Commerce Clause-based federal regulatory authority targets genuine activities that affect interstate commerce, not inactivity.

How to resolve this disagreement? The answer is staring us in the face, but has remained obscure to some lawyers and jurists who cannot quite see the forest for the trees. All you really need to know is what the word “commerce” means. To wit, commerce is “exchange of goods, products, or property . . . ; extended trade” (Britannica World Language Dictionary, 1959); “the buying and selling of goods . . .; trade” (Webster’s New World Dictionary, 1964); “the buying and selling of commodities; trade” (The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 1974); “interchange of goods or commodities, especially on a large scale . . . ; trade; business” (Dictionary.com, 2012). Uniformly, we see, the definition of commerce involves activity, not just a decision to act, and certainly not a decision to not act. The meaning of the concept of commerce presumes action, and always has. Moreover, even casual philology will confirm that the accepted meaning of “commerce” at the time of the Constitution’s drafting referenced activity, not inactivity, at least as much then as it does now (see C. H. Johnson, William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal, October 2004). In the same way, the Commerce Clause has long been construed to apply to action in or affecting commerce, from the 1824 Gibbons v. Ogden Supreme Court case onward.

I am in complete agreement:

[T]he real issue … comes down to this: Does Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce extend to “health care” generally, just because some aspects of it involve interstate commerce? In particular, can Congress constitutionally impose the individual mandate under the rubric of the Commerce Clause or the Necessary and Proper Clause?…

It is safe to say that a proper reading of the Constitution, as exemplified in the authoritative opinions excerpted above, yields no authority for Obamacare. That monstrosity — the official, Orwellian title of which is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) — attempts to reach an aggregation known as “health care,” without any differentiation between interstate commerce, intrastate commerce, and activities that are part of neither, namely, the choices of individuals with respect to health insurance.

It may be a valid exercise of Congress’s power to regulate actual interstate commerce that touches on the provision of health care. It is not a valid exercise to aggregate everything called “health care” and to regulate it as if it were all within the reach of Congress. When that happens, there is no room left — in “health care” nor, by extension, any other loose aggregation of activities — for State action or individual choice.

In sum, Obamacare is neither a valid regulation of interstate commerce nor necessary and proper to a valid regulation of interstate commerce. It is a governmental seizure of 1/9th of the economy. The individual mandate — which is a central feature of that seizure — is nothing more than coercion. It is no less peremptory than the military draft.

Freedom of Conscience

Yes, Virginia, there is freedom of conscience in Virginia:

A bill that ensures that faith-based adoption agencies in the state of Virginia won’t be forced to place children in households led by same-sex couples has passed both houses of the General Assembly and is heading to the desk of Gov. Robert McDonnell, a supporter of the legislation, who is expected to sign it soon.

Gov. McDonnell and the majorities in the Virginia legislature are standing up for freedom of conscience, which is among the negative rights that is trampled by grants of “positive rights” (i.e., privileges). These

are the products of presumption — judgments about who is “needy” and “deserving” — and they are bestowed on some by coercing others. These coercions extend not only to the seizure of income and wealth but also to denials of employment (e.g., affirmative action), free speech (e.g., campaign-finance “reform”), freedom of contract (e.g., mandatory recognition of unions), freedom of association (e.g., forced admission of certain groups to private organizations), freedom of conscience (e.g., forced participation in abortions), and on and on.

Income Inequality

Thomas A. Garrett, a sensible economist, says good things about income inequality:

The apparent increase in U.S. income inequality has not escaped the attention of policymakers and social activists who support public policies aimed at reducing income inequality. However, the common measures of income inequality that are derived from the census statistics exaggerate the degree of income inequality in the United States for several reasons. Furthermore, although income inequality is seen as a social ill by many people, it is important to understand that income inequality has many economic benefits and is the result of, and not a detriment to, a well-functioning economy….

…[O]ver time, a significant number of households move to higher positions along the income distribution and a significant number move to lower positions along the income distribution. Common reference to “classes” of people (e.g., the lowest 20 percent, the richest 10 percent) is very misleading because income classes do not contain the same households and people over time….

The unconstrained opportunity for individuals to create value for society, which is reflected by their income, encourages innovation and entrepreneurship. Economic research has documented a positive correlation between entrepreneurship/innovation and overall economic growth.9 A wary eye should be cast on policies that aim to shrink the income distribution by redistributing income from the more productive to the less productive simply for the sake of “fairness.” 10 Redistribution of wealth would increase the costs of entrepreneurship and innovation, with the result being lower overall economic growth for everyone.

I am losing track of the posts in which I have made the same points. See this one and this one, and the posts linked in each of them.

The Left-Libertarian (“Liberal”) Personality vs. Morality

Will Wilkinson, a left-libertarian (i.e., modern “liberal”) if ever there was one, writes about his score on the Big-Five Personality Test:

I score very high in “openness to experience” and worryingly low in “conscientiousness”.

A true libertarian (i.e., a Burkean) would score high on “openness to experience” and high on “conscientiousness” — as I do.

As I have said, differences

between various libertarian camps and between libertarians, Burkean conservatives, yahoo conservatives, “liberals,” and so on — are due as much to differences of temperament as they are to differences in knowledge and intelligence.

But temperament is a reason for political error, not an excuse for it:

[T]he desirability or undesirability of state action has nothing to do with the views of “liberals,” “libertarians,” or any set of pundits, “intellectuals,” “activists,” and seekers of “social justice.” As such, they have no moral standing, which one acquires only by being — and acting as — a member of a cohesive social group with a socially evolved moral code that reflects the lessons of long coexistence. The influence of “intellectuals,” etc., derives not from the quality of their thought or their moral standing but from the influence of their ideas on powerful operatives of the state.

The Southern Secession Reconsidered

A post by The Vociferous Reader, “Lincoln’s War,” prompts me to revisit the issue of secession. The main obstacle to serious consideration of secession is its association with the secession of the Southern States, which was motivated by the issue of slavery. The resulting Civil War had three principle outcomes:

reunification of the United States by force (which did not determine the legality of secession)

the end of slavery in the reunified nation

the persistent myth of the South as especially bigoted and oppressive, despite the North’s undeniable record of racial tension, discrimination, and de facto segregation.

What tends to be forgotten is the South’s pre-Civil War stance with respect to the central government. Southern resistance to the centralization of political power, and to the central government’s unconstitutional exercises of power, long pre-dated the Southern secession and was founded on a valid interpretation of the Constitution.

The Civil War, as a forcible act of reunification, is defensible only insofar as a main result was the end of slavery in the United States. On constitutional grounds, however, the Southern secession was valid and should not have been contested.

I have elsewhere laid out a general case for secession. Here it is, in part:

[S]ome of the people of the Colonies put an end to the union of the Colonies and Great Britain, on the moral principle that no person or people is obliged to remain in an abusive relationship. That moral principle is all the more compelling in the case of the union known as the United States, which — mysticism aside — is nothing more than the creature of the States and the people thereof.

It was only by the grace of nine States that the Constitution took effect, thereby establishing the central government. Those nine States voluntarily created the central government and, at the same time, voluntarily granted certain, limited powers to it. The States understood that the central government would exercise its limited powers for the benefit of the States and their people. Every State subsequently admitted to the union has entered into the same contract with the central government.

But, as outlined above, the central government has breached its trust by exceeding the powers granted to it. In fact, the central government’s abuse of power has been so persistent and egregious that a reasonable remedy on the part of the States — individually or severally — is to declare the Constitution null and void. Each and every State, in other words, has the right to secede from the union and to withdraw from the central government its support and the support of the people.

My argument is buttressed by the pre-Civil War history of the United States, which includes the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s, the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and 1799, the Nullification Crisis of 1828-33, and the Northern States’ Rights movement, which flourished before the Civil War and was sympathetic to the idea of Southern secession. Some of these events find their way into a review by David Gordon of Kevin R.C. Gutzman‘s The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution.

Here are some relevant excerpts of Gordon’s review (page references omitted):

The principal thesis of the book is that the Jeffersonian, states’ rights understanding of America’s founding and the Constitution is correct. When the American colonies assembled in the Continental Congress and adopted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, they did not create a new nation, Abraham Lincoln to the contrary notwithstanding.

…The Declaration said that the colonies were now states, i.e., independent governments. “In the Declaration’s culminating fourth section, Congress declared the colonies to be ‘free and independent states’ and claimed for them the right to do everything that free countries could do.”

Nor did the Articles of Confederation change matters. Each state retained full sovereignty over all matters not “expressly delegated” to the United Sates….

As Gutzman makes clear, some delegates to the Philadelphia Convention certainly wished to change the nature of the American system. Instead of the usual split between nationalists and their opponents, however, Gutzman maintains that there were three parties in the convention: “The first was the monarchist party, the chief exemplar of which was New York’s Alexander Hamilton. The monarchists were intent on wiping the states from the map and substituting one unitary government for the entire continent … The second party consisted of nationalists, people who — without ever avowing admiration for the monarchical form — wanted to push centralization as far as could reasonably be hoped … Finally, there was a cohort in the Convention of members insistent on proposing a reinforcement of the central government while maintaining the primary place of the states in the American polity — a truly federal, rather than national government.”

Gutzman rightly points out that neither of the two nationalist parties got its way. Madison, the “Father of the Constitution”, wanted the federal Congress to have the power to veto state legislation, but this proposal was rejected. So far, our author has given a standard account, but now comes his key interpretive move.

He maintains that crucial to understanding the meaning of the Constitution were the intentions of the delegates to the ratifying conventions. These delegates, after all, were the people whose votes established the Constitution as legally binding. Gutzman concentrates on the Virginia convention, and he places great stress on one point.

The Virginia delegates looked on the new Constitution with great skepticism, fearing that it would become a tool for the federal government to crush the states. To placate opponents such as Patrick Henry, the leaders of the pro-ratification forces, who included Governor Edmund Randolph, the proposer of the nationalist Virginia Plan at Philadelphia, had to make a concession. They had to agree that the powers of the new Congress were limited to those “expressly delegated” in the Constitution. The delegates repudiated in advance any move by the new authorities to expand their powers beyond this. Further, they wrote into their ratification statement the right to withdraw from the new government, if it exceeded its proper powers.

Gutzman contends that because this understanding was part of Virginia’s instrument of ratification, no stronger central government can claim Virginia’s authorization. And since it would be senseless to think that the Constitution gives the federal government more power over some states than others, the Virginia restrictions apply to all the states.

This is the Jeffersonian view of the Constitution. Gutzman’s great contribution is to show that the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and 1799, the key statements of the Jeffersonian position, restated the understanding of the Virginia ratifying convention. Contrary to the Federalist opponents of the Resolutions, Jefferson and Madison did not act as innovators in 1798; and their position cannot be dismissed as merely one of several competing interpretations. It was firmly based on the legally valid Virginia ratification instrument.

Gutzman summarizes his main contention in this way:

“Most history and legal textbooks say that Jefferson and Madison invented the idea of state sovereignty. But … they only argued for what the founders had already understood to be true about the sovereign states from the beginning, even if some of the founders(the nationalist and monarchist wings) wanted to change that understanding.”

However sound the Jeffersonian understanding of the Constitution, it of course has not prevailed in subsequent American history. Gutzman assigns federal judges a large share of the responsibility for the transformation of the original understanding; and one judge in particular arouses his critical scorn. The judge in question is the foremost of all federalist judges, Chief Justice John Marshall….

For Gutzman, Marshall’s chief sin is … his repudiation of the Jeffersonian understanding of the limits of federal power. In McCulloch v Maryland, Marshall “wrote that while the Articles of Confederation had specified that Congress had only the powers it was ‘expressly delegated,’ the Constitution included no such language, so no such principle applied to it. This was an extraordinary argument, given that Marshall himself and other Federalists … had assured their ratification colleagues that this very principle of limited federal power … was implicit in the unamended Constitution even before the Tenth Amendment was adopted.” [It was, moreover, clear from the construction of Article I, Section 8, and the discussion of that portion of the Constitution in the The Federalist Papers (e.g., No. 45): ED.]

Given his Jeffersonian views, it comes as no surprise that Gutzman thinks the Southern states acted fully within their rights when they seceded from the Union in 1861. “The Federalists always insisted during the ratification debates — knowing that they had to win support for the Constitution — that the states were individual parties to a federal compact. Spelling out the logic of the compact, three states — Virginia, Maryland, and Rhode Island — explicitly reserved (in the act of ratifying the Constitution) their right to secede from the Union.”

Gutzman has made a very strong case for his Jeffersonian understanding of the Constitution. A critic might challenge him on the grounds that we need not today care about how the Constitution was understood by its eighteenth century ratifiers. But Gutzman could in response say that this is what was legally enacted; those who favor other views of government should not attempt to attain their goals through misreadings and distortion of the constitutional text.

Just so. There is no point in memorializing an agreement unless that agreement is meant to stand for all time, or until the parties to it agree to revise or revoke it. Legislators, executives, and judges are not parties to the Constitution; they are its sworn caretakers. And they have long failed in their duty.

As for Lincoln, he did his duty as he saw it — which was to preserve the Union. It is hard (for me) to fault the man who ended his first inaugural address with this:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

P.S. The foregoing makes a legal case for secession. A different case, which I make here, is that secession is valid because the Constitution did not bind the whole of “the people” when it was ratified, and could not have bound future generations.

* * *

See “The Constitution: Myths and Realities“.

Re-Forming the United States

UPDATE: The urgency of re-forming the United States is underscored by “Our Perfect, Perfect Constitution.” The author, Michael Stokes Paulsen (Distinguished University Chair and Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota) School of Law), restates the entire Constitution in the form of twenty provisions that reflect the current state of constitutional law as established by decisions of the Supreme Court. Paulsen’s version of the Constitution is true, depressing, and enraging.

Paulsen wrote his paper before U.S. District Judge Gladys Keesler opined that the central government may regulate mental activity. Judge Keesler’s view, which is applauded on the left, is the last straw. The juggernaut that rules from Washington is nothing more than an alien occupying force. It should be treated accordingly by liberty-loving Americans.

The specter of constitutional revitalization haunts “liberals”:

Imagine that, a few years from now, Americans are suddenly plunged into a constitutional crisis. Imagine an economy still muddling in recession; a government rendered inept by the complete collapse of the Senate as a serious institution of deliberation or a continued division between House and Senate; a conservative Supreme Court gripped by a passion to restore the pre-New Deal version of the Commerce Clause (which treated commerce merely as the physical movement of goods across state lines); a militant Tea Party movement convinced that the Tenth Amendment imposes real limits on the lawmaking power of Congress, and is not simply a hollow “truism” saying that Congress can only do what it is constitutionally empowered to do. These days, conjuring up such a vision is not so hard. Imagine that somehow the belief took hold that what the Constitution needed was not a revision here or there, but wholesale replacement. (Jack Rakove of Stanford University, in “American Ratification,” Harvard Magazine, January-February 2011)

How much misrepresentation and distortion is packed into that paragraph? Let’s see:

1. The United States has been in constitutional crisis since the 1930s, when the Supreme Court — frightened by the Great Depression, cowed by FDR, and then reshaped by him — allowed Congress and the States to exceed their constitutional authority. To the Rakoves of this world, a constitutional crisis is what happens when there’s a movement to honor the spirit and letter of the Constitution.

2. The state of the economy, the state of the Senate, and a “divided” House and Senate (i.e., not both controlled by Democrats) are hardly the stuff of a constitutional crisis. The standing of the Constitution is — and should be — unaffected by such things, unless one believes (with the New Deal Supreme Court) that the law should bend with economic winds, and that it is the rightful place of Congress to actively involve itself in every nook and cranny of Americans’ lives.

3. The pre-New Deal version of the Commerce Clause is the correct one, contrary to Rakove’s desire for an all-powerful state.

4. The Tenth Amendment isn’t “hollow.” It underscores — for the benefit of the willfully obtuse, like Rakove — the express limits that the original Constitution places on Congress’s power. In leaving no doubt that the States and the people retain the powers not specifically assigned to Congress, it removes (or should remove) any ambiguity about the limited role that Congress (and the federal government) should play in the lives and businesses of Americans. It says that the Constitution means what it says. It is “hollow” to Rakove and his ilk only because they don’t want the Constitution to mean what it says.

5. In that vein, I must add that the “militant Tea Party” movement seeks to honor the entire Constitution, not just the important Tenth Amendment. Rakove wants to believe — or wants his readers to believe — that the Tea Party movement is made up of morons who don’t understand what’s in the original Constitution. Well, the true morons are the Rakoves, who believe that their expansive view of governmental power can’t be turned against them.

6. Rakove posits two options for dealing with the so-called crisis: a revision here or there, or wholesale replacement of the Constitution. There’s a third option: wholesale rewriting to reassert, in no uncertain terms, the meaning and purposes of the Constitution. That’s what Rakove and his ilk really fear, because they’re wedded to the judicially created, left-statist version of the Constitution that has replaced the real thing without benefit of an amendment.

For non-Rakovians — that is, for devotees of the real Constitution — I counsel the following steps:

A sufficient number of States (at least one-half of them) would declare their independence from the United States, on the ground that the central government has breached its contract with the States by persistently abusing its powers over many decades.

Those States would then convene a constitutional convention to re-form the United States, by adopting a new Constitution that — in no uncertain terms — restates the principles of the original Constitution and ensures their enforcement through additional checks on the central government.

With regard to the second point, Article V of the new Constitution would include this:

A judgment of any court of the United States of America may be revised or revoked by an act of Congress, provided that such any revision or revocation is approved by two-thirds of the members of each house and leads to a result that conforms to this Constitution.

There is this, in Article VI:

Each State retains the right to secede from this Union, but secession shall in each case be approved by three-fourths of the members of each house of a State’s legislature and ratified by the executive of the State within thirty days of its approval by both houses of the State’s legislature.

Articles VII and VIII, Keeper of the Constitution and Conventions of the States, open thusly:

The responsibility for ensuring that the legislative, executive, and judicial branches adhere to this constitution in the exercise of their respective powers shall be vested in a Keeper of the Constitution. The Keeper may review acts of Congress, the executive branch, and judicial branch that have the effect of making law and appropriating monies.

* * *

Delegations of the States shall convene every four years for the purpose of considering revisions to and revocations of acts of the government that is established by this constitution. Such conventions (hereinafter “convention of the States”) may revise and/or revoke any act or acts and/or any holding or holdings, in the sole discretion of a majority of State delegations present and voting.

Article IX would authorize petitions and subsequent elections for the revocation of a broad range of governmental acts and the expulsion of members of Congress, the President, Vice President and justices of the Supreme Court. Also, a constitutional convention may be called pursuant to a successful petition.

I understand that I am proposing a radical step, but I believe that it is impossible to reinstate the real Constitution in any other way. Perhaps the threat of radical measures would have a sobering effect on those who are content with the status quo or incremental progress… but probably not.

See “The Constitution: Myths and Realities“.

Secession, Anyone?

Please choose only one answer. Before answering, you might want to read these posts:

Secession

Secession, Redux

A Declaration of Independence

Zones of Liberty

Arnold Kling offers some suggestions for slowing or reversing our present decline into totalitarianism. One of his suggestions begins with this:

[E]nable people to escape the power of monopoly government. This could be all-out escape, as in seasteading or charter cities. Or it could be incremental escape, as I propose in Unchecked and Unbalanced, with vouchers, charter communities, and competitive government, meaning mutual associations and standard-setting bodies in which people enter and exit voluntarily.

I like the idea of charter communities, which I see as a form of competitive government. I call my version zones of liberty. These would be experiments in liberty. If successful, they would lead the way to the kind of federalism envisaged by the Framers of the original Constitution.

The 50 States (and their constituent municipalities) are incompatible with the kind of federalism envisioned by the Framers. Today’s State and municipal governments are too bureaucratic and too beholden to special interests; they have become smaller versions of the federal government. For, in today’s populous States and municipalities, coalitions of minority interests are able to tyrannize the populace. (The average State today controls the destinies of 25 times as many persons as did the average State of 1790.) Those Americans who “vote with their feet” through internal migrration do not escape to regimes of liberty so much as they escape to regimes that are less tyrannical than the ones in which they had been living.

The kind of federalism envisioned by the Framers — and the kind of federalism necessary to liberty — would require the devolution to small communities and neighborhoods of all but a few powers: war-making, the conduct of foreign affairs, and the regulation of inter-community commerce for the sole purpose of ensuring against the erection of barriers to trade. With that kind of federalism, the free markets of ideas and commerce would enable individuals to live in those communities and neighborhoods that best serve their particular conceptions of liberty.

What do I have in mind? A zone of liberty would be something like a “new city” — with a big difference. Uninhabited land would be acquired by a wealthy lover (or lovers) of liberty, who would establish a development authority for the sole purpose of selling the land in the zone. The zone would be populated initially by immigrants from other parts of the United States. The immigrants would buy parcels of land from the development authority, and on those parcels they could build homes or businesses of their choosing. Buyers of parcels would be allowed to attach perpetual covenants to the parcels they acquire, and to subdivide their parcels with (or without) the covenants attached. All homes and businesses would have to be owned by residents of the zone, in order to ensure a close connection between property interests and governance of the zone.

Infrastructure would be provided by competing vendors of energy, telecommunications, and transportation services (including roads and their appurtenances). Rights-of-way would be created through negotiations between vendors and property owners. All other goods and services — including education and medical care — would be provided by competing vendors. No vendor, whether or not a resident of the zone, would be subject to any regulation, save the threat of civil suits and prosecution for criminal acts (e.g., fraud). Any homeowner or business owner could import or export any article or service from or to any place, including another country; there would be no import controls, duties, or tariffs on imported or exported goods and services.

The zone’s government would comprise an elected council, a police force, and a court (all paid for by assessments based on the last sale price of each parcel in the zone). The police force would be empowered to keep the peace among the residents of the zone, and to protect the residents from outsiders, who would be allowed to enter the zone only with the specific consent of resident homeowners or business owners. Breaches of the peace (including criminal acts) would be defined by the development of a common law through the court. The elected council (whose members would serve single, four-year terms) would oversee the police force and court, and would impose the assessments necessary to defray the costs of government. The council would have no other powers, and it would be able to exercise its limited powers only by agreement among three-fourths of the members of the council. The members, who would not be salaried, would annually submit a proposed budget to the electorate, which would have to approve the budget by a three-fourths majority. The electorate would consist of every resident who is an owner or joint owner of a residence or business (not undeveloped land), and who has attained the age of 30.

A zone of liberty would not be bound by the laws (statutory and otherwise) of the United States, the individual States, or any of political subdivision of a State. (The federal government could impose a per-capita tax on residents of the zone, in order to defray the zone’s per-capita share of the national budget for defense and foreign affairs.) The actions of the zone’s government would be reviewable only by the U.S. Supreme Court, and then only following the passage of a bill of particulars by two-thirds of each house of Congress, and with the concurrence the president. (A zone could be abolished only with the approval of four-fifths of each house of Congress, and with the concurrence of the president.)

Absent such an experiment, I see only one hope for liberty — albeit a slim one — a Supreme Court that revives the Constitution. Politics as usual will only take us further down the road to serfdom.

A Declaration of Independence, Updated

If you haven’t read “A Declaration of Independence,” or haven’t read it since I revised it, I recommend a first or second look.

A Declaration of Independence

See “The Constitution: Myths and Realities“.

A New (Cold) Civil War or Secession?

Max Borders writes:

. . . Toleration and open discourse is, well, no longer tolerated. We are slowly becoming a place of mere de jure free speech. And even that is being eroded by the day. I have to blame so-called “progressives” the most for this. They are people for whom the end justifies the means. So any lip-service they occasionally pay to civil liberties is but a tool of convenience to be employed on the way to getting things their way. A new cold civil war is emerging.

There is much truth in that. But I would go further.

Thanks to the lethal combination of left-statist demagoguery and voter irrationality, Americans are, among other things, saddled with

a debilitating tax and regulatory burden, which has accrued since the “progressive” agenda began to take hold in the early 1900s

the destruction of civilizing social norms, together with a high threshold of tolerance for criminals and a concomitant softness on matters of national defense

the continuing nationalization of medical care, which began in earnest with Medicare and continues in the guise of Obamacare (with all of its potential for bureaucratic abuses of power)

severe restrictions on economic output in order to satisfy the dictatorial urge to puritanism that lies behind the “warming” industry

As I have said,

[t]hese encroachments . . . are morally illegitimate because their piecemeal character has robbed Americans of voice and mooted the exit option. And so, we have discovered — too late — that we are impotent hostages in our own land.

I am reminded of these words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

What we need is not a civil war — cold or hot — but a serious movement toward secession:

The legal basis for the perpetuation of the United States disappears when the federal government abrogates the Constitution. Given that the federal government has long failed to honor Amendment X [among many other parts of the Constitution], there is a prima facie case that the United States no longer exists as a legal entity. Secession then becomes more than an option for the States: It becomes their duty, both as sovereign entitities and as guardians of their citizens’ sovereignty.

See “The Constitution: Myths and Realities“.

Secession Redux

In “Secession,” I wrote:

The original Constitution contemplates that the government of the United States might have to suppress insurrections and rebellions (see Article I, Section 8), but it nowhere addresses secession. Secession, in and of itself, is not an act of insurrection or rebellion, both of which imply the use of force. Force is not a requirement of secession, which can be accomplished peacefully.

Therefore, given that the Constitution does not require a subscribing State to pledge perpetual membership in the Union, and given that the Constitution does not delegate to the central government a power to suppress secession, the question of secession is one for each State, or the people thereof, to determine, in accordance with the Tenth Amendment. The grounds for secession could be … the abridgment by the United States of the “rights, privileges and immunities”of its citizens.

What about Texas v. White (U.S. Supreme Court, 1868), in which a 5-3 majority anticipated … arguments for a mystical bond of Union; for example:

When … Texas became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation. All the obligations of perpetual union, and all the guaranties of republican government in the Union, attached at once to the State. The act which consummated her admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final. The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration, or revocation, except through revolution, or through consent of the States.

Considered therefore as transactions under the Constitution, the ordinance of secession, adopted by the convention and ratified by a majority of the citizens of Texas, and all the acts of her legislature intended to give effect to that ordinance, were absolutely null. They were utterly without operation in law. The obligations of the State, as a member of the Union, and of every citizen of the State, as a citizen of the United States, remained perfect and unimpaired. It certainly follows that the State did not cease to be a State, nor her citizens to be citizens of the Union.

It would have been bad — bad for slaves, bad for the defense of a diminished Union — had the South prevailed in its effort to withdraw from the Union. But the failure of the South’s effort, in the end, was owed to the superior armed forces of the United States, not to the intentions of the Framers of the Constitution.

In any event, the real jurisprudential issue in Texas v. White was not the constitutionality of secession; it was the right of the post-Civil War government of Texas to recover bonds sold by the secessionist government of Texas. Moreover, as Justice Grier noted in his dissent,

Whether [Texas is] a State de facto or de jure, she is estopped from denying her identity in disputes with her own citizens. If they have not fulfilled their contract, she can have her legal remedy for the breach of it in her own courts.

The majority’s ruling about the constitutionality of secession can be read as obiter dictum and, therefore, not precedential.

Clifford P. Thies makes a similar case in “Secession Is in Our Future“:

The US law of secession is thought to have been decided by the US Supreme Court in White v. Texas, following the Civil War. The actual matter to be decided was relatively insignificant. The Court used the occasion to issue a very broad decision. Chief Justice Chase, speaking for the Court, said,

The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through consent of the States.

…

The first sentence I just quoted invokes words such as “perpetual,” and in so doing may create the impression that the Supreme Court decreed that no [S]tate could ever secede from the Union. But, on careful reading, the relationship between Texas and the other [S]tates of the Union is merely “as indissoluble as the union between the original States.” In other words, Texas, having been a nonoriginal [S]tate, has no greater right of secession than do the original [S]tates. As to how [S]tates might secede, the second sentence says, “through revolution or through consent of the States.”

As to why a [S]tate might secede, … Chief Justice Chase presciently discusses the … 10th Amendment[] to the US Constitution, which reserve[s] to the [S]tates and to the people thereof all powers not expressly granted to the federal government, and that the design of the Union, implicit in the very name “United States,” is the preservation of the [S]tates as well as of the Union:

the preservation of the States, and the maintenance of their governments, are as much within the design and care of the Constitution as the preservation of the Union and the maintenance of the National government.

In other words, the federal government abrogates the Constitution when it fails to honor Amendment X:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Thies puts it starkly:

The so-called United States of America ceases to exist when the political majority of the country attempts to rule the entire country as a nation instead of as a federal government. In such a circumstance, the “indestructible union of indestructible [S]tates” of which the Court speaks is already dissolved.

I would put it this way: The legal basis for the perpetuation of the United States disappears when the federal government abrogates the Constitution. Given that the federal government has long failed to honor Amendment X, there is a prima facie case that the United States no longer exists as a legal entity. Secession then becomes more than an option for the States: It becomes their duty, both as sovereign entities and as guardians of their citizens’ sovereignty.

See “The Constitution: Myths and Realities“.

Secession

Rick Perry, governor of Texas, has expressed sympathy for proponents of the secession of Texas from the United States. “Liberal” commentary to the contrary, current secessionist sentiment arises not from a desire to own slaves, or otherwise to deprive certain groups of their constitutional rights, but from righteous and rightful opposition to the hell-bent-for-fascism-regime now ascendant in Washington.

The question then arises whether Texas could secede peacefully, under the Constitution of the United States. An argument for secession can be found in the Treaty of Annexation between the people of Texas and the United States of America (1844). Article II of the treaty reads as follows:

The citizens of Texas shall be incorporated into the Union of the United States, maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty and property and admitted, as soon as may be consistent with the principles of the federal constitution, to the enjoyment of all the rights, privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States.

A case can be made (if not won) that the federal government has abridged the “rights, privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States,” including Texans, through various unconstitutional actions. (I will not attempt to detail those actions here, for they are legion. I have written about some of them in many of the posts listed here. Robert Levy and William Mellor have analyzed the most egregious unconstitutional actions of the U.S. Supreme Court in their book, The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom.)

There is, moreover, a general case for secession as a constitutional act. I begin by referring to an anti-secessionist, one Timothy Sandefur of the blog Freespace. Sandefur — a lawyer of wide-ranging abilities and interests — has written “How Libertarians Ought to Think about the U.S. Civil War,” which also instructs us how to think about secession. He avers that “the Constitution does prohibit secession.”

Sandefur’s argument that the Constitution prohibits secession is an inferential one that rests on his conclusion that the action of a State (qua State)

cannot change the nature of the federal Constitution as adopted in 1787: it is a binding government of the whole people of the United States. No [S]tate may unilaterally leave the union.

Actually, Sandefur (and other federalists) to the contrary notwithstanding, the people of each State adopted the Constitution, not the whole people of the United States. And the people of each State were at liberty not to adopt the Constitution. In evidence, I introduce Article VII of the Constitution:

The ratification of the conventions of nine [S]tates, shall be sufficient for the establishment of this constitution between the [S]tates so ratifying the same.

Note, first, that ratification was accomplished State-by-State, not by the people of the United States as a whole. Note, second, that although the Constitution could have gone into effect upon being ratified by the conventions of only nine of the thirteen States, it would have been binding only upon the States whose people ratified it, that is, “between the [S]tates so ratifying the same.”

That all thirteen States did, eventually, ratify the Constitution is beside the point. Four of the States could have remained outside the Union; that is, they could have “seceded” preemptively. I therefore draw the following inference: If a State has the right to decline membership in the Union, it must have the right to withdraw from membership in the Union, inasmuch as the Constitution nowhere proclaims membership to be perpetual.

My inference, unlike Sandefur’s, finds support in the Constitution. I begin with the Tenth Amendment (ratified only three years after the original Constitution), which says:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The original Constitution contemplates that the government of the United States might have to suppress insurrections and rebellions (see Article I, Section 8), but it nowhere addresses secession. Secession, in and of itself, is not an act of insurrection or rebellion, both of which imply the use of force. Force is not a requirement of secession, which can be accomplished peacefully.

Therefore, given that the Constitution does not require a subscribing State to pledge perpetual membership in the Union, and given that the Constitution does not delegate to the central government a power to suppress secession, the question of secession is one for each State, or the people thereof, to determine, in accordance with the Tenth Amendment. The grounds for secession could be, as stated above, the abridgment by the United States of the “rights, privileges and immunities”of its citizens.

What about Texas v. White (U.S. Supreme Court, 1868), in which a 5-3 majority anticipated Sandefur’s arguments for a mystical bond of Union; for example:

When…Texas became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation. All the obligations of perpetual union, and all the guaranties of republican government in the Union, attached at once to the State. The act which consummated her admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final. The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration, or revocation, except through revolution, or through consent of the States.

Considered therefore as transactions under the Constitution, the ordinance of secession, adopted by the convention and ratified by a majority of the citizens of Texas, and all the acts of her legislature intended to give effect to that ordinance, were absolutely null. They were utterly without operation in law. The obligations of the State, as a member of the Union, and of every citizen of the State, as a citizen of the United States, remained perfect and unimpaired. It certainly follows that the State did not cease to be a State, nor her citizens to be citizens of the Union.

It would have been bad — bad for slaves, bad for the defense of a diminished Union — had the South prevailed in its effort to withdraw from the Union. But the failure of the South’s effort, in the end, was owed to the superior armed forces of the United States, not to the intentions of the Framers of the Constitution.

In any event, the real jurisprudential issue in Texas v. White was not the constitutionality of secession; it was the right of the post-Civil War government of Texas to recover bonds sold by the secessionist government of Texas. Moreover, as Justice Grier noted in his dissent,

Whether [Texas is] a State de facto or de jure, she is estopped from denying her identity in disputes with her own citizens. If they have not fulfilled their contract, she can have her legal remedy for the breach of it in her own courts.

The majority’s ruling about the constitutionality of secession can be read as obiter dictum and, therefore, not precedential.

Perhaps the good people of Texas, if sufficiently riled, will give the Court something more substantial to chew on.

See “The Constitution: Myths and Realities“.

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