Noxious Numbskullery for Secession

When you lose a game or two at the card table, you generally have two choices. You can keep playing or gather up your chips and go home. If you decide on the latter, you can be a man about it and just admit that your skill or your luck played out. Or you can you can whine that the deck was stacked against you. When the game is politics in America, you have to face the fact that the game is going to go on. Trying to cash out is a fool's choice.

In recent presidential elections, states have become increasingly polarized. A Democratic candidate has a snowball's chance in El Paso of winning Texas or South Dakota. A Republican candidate will win Massachusetts only under the shade of flying pigs. Unfortunately for Republicans, a number of key states are leaning Democrat in a reliable sort of way. Republicans have lost the popular vote nationwide in five of the last six presidential contests.

It is no wonder, then, that some folks in Republican leaning states want to leave the table. A bunch of folks in something like twenty states have signed petitions on behalf to those states to secede from the Union. Is this something anyone should be concerned about? No.

It is unclear how many people actually signed the petitions. There is nothing to keep the insurgents from signing petitions in other states, so we may be looking at a group about as large as the total number of Wayne Newton fans. Heck, they may even be the Wayne Newton fans.

Our neo-secessionists may be fire breathers of old, but they are collectively incapable of warming a single ice fishing hut. They don't represent the Republican Party or the Tea Party movement, let alone the states wherein they really reside. They're crackpots.

It is nonetheless a good occasion to consider the old idea of secession. Several years ago I listened to a Civil War reenactor in Confederate garb who told the room that the Constitution guaranteed the rights of states to secede from the Union. I told him afterwards that there was no such thing in the founding document. He seemed confused. He was.

This Republic was ordained and established by We the People of the United States. It can only be dissolved by the same, and not by the people or government of any state or of any group of states. Any doubt about that proposition was settled when Lee surrendered to Grant.

Southerners like to consider themselves gentlemen and so they are on the whole. Secession in the 1860's was not a gentlemanly act. The South participated in an election and then refused to accept the outcome. That's like agreeing to accept the outcome of a coin toss and then going back on your word. I didn't vote for Barack Obama, like most of my fellow citizens in South Dakota. He won, fair and square. That means he has my consent to be President. Only a child could pretend otherwise.

Comments

[Stan Gibilisco]

Sure are some excited people on Cory's blog when it comes to this issue.

I agree that these people are crackpots. I also think that they'll chill down with time, if the mainstream pays them no attention.

Of course I could be wrong.

[Cliff Hadley]

Sloppy, professor, sloppy. Current circumstances have zero in common with institutionalized slavery that led to secession and war. Today's "secessionists" are signing petitions in symbolic protest, not as an actual step to breaking away. By the way, I haven't signed any such petitions.

There's one small parallel, though, in that Northern states chafed at the electoral control of the South in national affairs for the first 80 years of U.S. history. Now a half-dozen states drive presidential politics, and even those may soon morph into Democratic Party sure things a la the Northeast and Left Coast.

My prediction: Longtime Republican-led states like South Dakota and in the South will push back against federal coercion by refusing to comply with Obamacare and EPA regs. Won't work, but it'll be part of the scene as we lurch toward societal and fiscal disaster.

[Tawanna]

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As an example, instead of creating a rule against hitting, make
a rule that simply lets embracing.

[Donald Pay]

Cliff,

Regarding South Dakota pushing back against "federal coercion" on EPA regulations, I have a little experience in that area. You are very mistaken---there is no coercion.

South Dakota receives federal funding to implement and enforce environmental rules and regulations. The Legislature and Governor could, at any time, simply give up this money and hand those duties back to the EPA. This would, of course, be opposed by the corporate interests, who rather like the favorable treatment they get from DENR, as opposed to the treatment they might receive from EPA.

All of DENR's and EPA's rules and regulations are subject to public comment and hearings. If you have a problem with any of them, you can comment, suggest changes and testify in public. Rules are also subject to amendment and citizens can petition for rulemaking. The State of South Dakota comments at length on EPA rulemaking, as do many environmental groups and corporate interests. And, if you don't feel the rules as enacted are justified, you can sue. In short, there are plenty of avenues to "push back" without engaging in illegal nonsense like "refusing to comply with environmental laws and regulations.

In several instances environment groups and I in particular urged EPA not to approve the state's programs in certain areas because the state was lax in its enforcement, particularly regarding open records. We were successful in getting EPA to pressure the state to open its records in the area of environmental regulation. This is an instance where EPA actually help state residents with a state government who has a bias toward keeping secrets from its people. If there is some area you have a problem with, you can urge EPA to strip the state of its authority.

We also sued and successfully settled a citizens enforcement suit requiring the Brohm Mining to obtain certain water discharge permits. Our suit was opposed by the state and supported by EPA, who subsequently agreed to require the permit. As a result, EPA took over the discharge permitting for that mine until the state figured out it, too, agreed with our position.

So, Cliff, when you throw out predictions it might pay to have a little more reality-based understanding of the issues.

[Bill Fleming]

Good post, KB. Thanks.

[Ken Blanchard]

You're welcome as always, Bill.

[Ken Blanchard]

Cliff: You are right to point out the difference between a serious secessionist movement and secessionist rhetoric as a symbolic protest. The former would be insane. The latter is merely ridiculous.

In pointing out the latter, I don't think I was being sloppy at all. Obama won fair and square, twice now. ObamaCare is what happened because he won big the first time. Protesting that by secessionist petitions only makes the protester look like a sore loser. Ya pays your money and ya takes your chances.

[www.michaelkorsmontre.info]

Because most of us were thus busy while using the move (and working with the arrival on the new baby a little bit over four weeks later), we didn't soda open those people boxes for a long time. In simple fact, we didn't even reach those box until center of the fall season.

[Cliff Hadley]

Don: You and I live in alternative universes. The process you describe is an appalling thing only bureucrats love, suitable more for a special ring in Hell than for a freeborn, self-governing people. In any event, my concern -- and I suspect of most of those who signed petitions -- is government overreach. Example: Interior (if I remember correctly) just closed 1.6 million acres in the West to oil and natural gas production. Any hearings on that? Would it make a difference if there were? And should EPA ban fracking -- which it's itching to do -- will North Dakota and Pennsylvania just shrug it off? They can sue, but it will take years and lots of money, which the feds have and the states don't. And, yes, that's coercive. Heads they win, tails we lose.

Professor: As de Tocqueville saw, and politicians have long known, the people can be bribed with their own money. And as you say, "Ya pays your money and ya takes your chances." So cheerful pessimist that I am -- it's the temperament of a conservative -- I make the best of things. But given Obama's hostility to profit and his appeal to envy, it would be foolish to believe my leaders have citizens' ordered liberty at heart. As I said above, societal and fiscal disaster is upon us. And I know Obama will blame me and all producers (I own a business) for not doing enough to increase the "fairness." My government treats me as an enemy. If I resist, does that make me a sore loser?

[Donald Pay]

Cliff,

Sorry that you have no interest in performing the duties of responsible citizenship. I don't understand your insistence that everything be set up to have no citizen input, which is really the way bureaucrats and the corporate elite want it.

You make a couple claims here, but you seem to not really understand what you are talking about. That's probably a result of you not taking very seriously your totally fake beliefs. I hope you would agree with me that being a freeborn, self-governing people requires that those people understand what is going on. You don't believe it, because you wouldn't deliberately misrepresent on this blog what the Obama Administration did with respect to oil shale development in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, not oil and natural gas fracking in the states you mention.

These were, by the way, oil shale proposals that Bush tried to give away through hastily drawn up executive orders without public comment. Now there's a tactic that ought to rankle a freeborn, self-governing people. But you are too stuck in your ideology to really understand that we've now had public comment, thanks to Obama's Interior Department. We, also, now have a draft proposal which is subject to further public comment. By the way, that proposal does allow for oil shale development, just not the totally cave in to the oil shale industry. You might want to read some back comments by KB as well on a conservative reason to oppose oil shale development, which requires massive federal subsidies. But, even if you decide to remain completely ignorant on the facts, you are more than welcome to provide your brand of misinformation to the Obama Administration on this issue if you can figure out what the hell it is your are commenting on. If not, just go on pretending you are a freeborn, self-governing person.

http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/267095-interior-proposes-shielding-federal-lands-in-west-from-drilling

[Cliff Hadley]

Mr. Pay:

The comment period on oil shale is classic politics of delay, delay, delay. Nothing will change.

Your back-to-Eden, utopian, anti-human beliefs default toward stupifying bureaucracy over individuals. The Constitution protects each of us from the depredations of government, yet enviros an always be counted on to want ever more government. (After 20,000 pages of appropriate comment is generated, of course.) I believe in free markets, the rule of law, ordered liberty, and small government. Because the math is simple: The more government grows, the less freedom is left for you and me.

Aw, what the heck. I give up. Please, Donald, hop into your coal-powered Volt, take a month off to somehow get to Washington, and report my apostasy to the Central Committee. Do your duty, comrade!

[Donald Pay]

Cliff,

I just have to wonder about your philosophy of government. If you are so unhappy here in the Untied States of America, why don't you self-deport? Nothing could be more inhuman and hostile to a free, self-governing people than any government, large or small, ramrodding a proposal through without concern for the rights of individuals. By the way, oil shale development depends on government subsidies, not free markets. If you studied the issue, rather than mouthing a lot of empty jargon, you might come to see things differently.