Is Secession Legal?

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus
a reply to: face23785

The Equal Footing Doctrine was first constitutionalized in Pollard’s Lessee v. Hagan (1845), where the Supreme Court held that as a matter of basic sovereignty all states have ownership of the beds of their navigable waterways (submerged lands under major rivers and lakes), and that, because newly admitted states must be on an equal footing with the existing states, newly admitted states obtained these same ownership rights when they joined the Union. Source

I could be mistaken but the section on navigable waterways would include adjacent states.

You actually disproved yourself in your own citation, my emphasis:

all states have ownership of the beds of their navigable waterways

If Oregon wanted to partition a section of their state into a new state, adjacent to Idaho, there would be precisely zero effect on the ownership of Idaho's sovereign waterways. None. None of Idaho's territory, including water, is involved. So they get no vote. Why would they? Only Oregon's waterways are involved in the proposal, and Oregon has sole sovereignty over their own waterways. Your citation actually bolstered my case.

[edit]

originally posted by: CIAGypsy

originally posted by: new_here
a reply to: CIAGypsy

I mean, if they succeed in seceding, then they are no longer under the purview of the former legislature. So, it becomes a moot point and the body that seceded is now under its own laws.

Except that legalities are not that simplistic. This is the same reason that you or I can't claim to be a sovereign citizen and that the laws don't apply to us while remaining on US soil. This situation is addressed in the article. Did you read it?

Agreed. Just because you declare yourself exempt from the law, and successfully resist attempts to enforce the law, do not mean the law is inapplicable to you from that point on.

*** ATTENTION ***

Please remain on topic and the topic isn't one another.

originally posted by: CIAGypsy

originally posted by: AutomateThis1
Pretty funny it's now the neoliberal/Democrats that want to secede this go around. I say we let em. Let em find out how little no one cares for them.

No, let's not. I personally do not want a Venezuela on our doorstep. I'd rather bring the globalist corruption into the spotlight and have an open dialogue to explain to misguided millenials what they should have been taught in school but weren't - namely, why socialism and communism is a failed ideology which doesn't work on a national level.

Omg not the millennials. You do know that the vast majority of us are in our 30s and early 40s right, and that most of the ones that are neoliberal commie wannabees are only that way because of the older GenXrs and baby boomers being dirty hippies and being helicopter parents too afraid of hurting their child's feelings.

You're lucky GenZ has a decent proportion of people growing up to be conservative/libertarian in nature.

So yah, let them secede, let foolish people move there, and then watch it implode. That way we can use it as yet another example of why that crap is a pipe dream.

Texas threatened to secede during the Obama administration; they should have imo.

In fact they should do it now. Maybe they could lower my property taxes.

smartasset.com...

There was no supreme court case pre-civil war, there was post civil war if memory serves.

End result sescession is no longer a legal option the only way to leave would be by force, either forced out or you force them to let you go.

Im going to be honest: "legal" has no real definition. In a country where we worry about if a judge is "liberal" or "conservative", im not so sure justice is blind.

originally posted by: AutomateThis1

originally posted by: CIAGypsy

originally posted by: AutomateThis1
Pretty funny it's now the neoliberal/Democrats that want to secede this go around. I say we let em. Let em find out how little no one cares for them.

No, let's not. I personally do not want a Venezuela on our doorstep. I'd rather bring the globalist corruption into the spotlight and have an open dialogue to explain to misguided millenials what they should have been taught in school but weren't - namely, why socialism and communism is a failed ideology which doesn't work on a national level.

Omg not the millennials. You do know that the vast majority of us are in our 30s and early 40s right, and that most of the ones that are neoliberal commie wannabees are only that way because of the older GenXrs and baby boomers being dirty hippies and being helicopter parents too afraid of hurting their child's feelings.

Sadly I have to agree. I'm on the 80s end of the millennial spectrum, and being raised by the hippy generation really did not help us at all. Although, at some point, we are responsible for our own actions and can't just blame our parents, and we're well past that. We have had access to a wider range of information than any generation prior to us, and should have been able to break our indoctrination. Some of us have, some of us haven't.

You're lucky GenZ has a decent proportion of people growing up to be conservative/libertarian in nature.

I've been noticing this as well. I also think it has something to do with the access to information. It's a double-edged sword. Of course Big Tech is trying to turn them all into uber-liberals, but you still get exposed to alternatives. The indoctrination worked so well on us because we had no alternatives. ALL we heard was what Hollywood, corporate media, and our teachers/professors wanted us to. By the time we started being able to get more than that, late 90s, early 00s and beyond, most of the damage was done.

So yah, let them secede, let foolish people move there, and then watch it implode. That way we can use it as yet another example of why that crap is a pipe dream.

In a way you're right. Occasionally people need a tangible reminder. History just stops being poignant enough. That's why wanting to show people how socialism doesn't work only gets so much traction when you have all these supposedly "smart" people swearing upside down that it will, if we do it right. I get CIAGypsy's concern about having a Venezuela on our doorstep, but I feel we could adequately contain the problem. Watching those smart people who "know how to make socialism work" catastrophically fail might be the only way to make people truly understand that it doesn't.

originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan
Im going to be honest: "legal" has no real definition. In a country where we worry about if a judge is "liberal" or "conservative", im not so sure justice is blind.

Except most of the time the argument is really whether the justice is liberal or will follow the law.

I've asked this question a couple of times before and never really got a straight forward answer:
What would happen if there was overwhelming support in a state for it to leave The Union, an independently monitored referendum on secession takes place and the state votes overwhelmingly in favour of leaving the USA and becoming a fully independent nation on its own?

Would the USA respect The Right to Self-Determination or would it supress democracy?

Granted, its a purely hypothetical situation but it seems more and more people are talking about something like that happening.

a reply to: Freeborn

It would supress it, there used to be a legal means to leave... that got settled rather emphatically, that was then followed up by a supreme court case that said it was illegal.

Also we are so inter dependent the odds of any state even Texas could stand on their own or this close to now potentially hostile nation even if they joined another country they would be retaken by force.

Heck north california has been tryign to leave south california for years and it will never happen.

a reply to: Freeborn

Would it be "suppressing democracy" or would it be following the law? There's a reason why, for example, there are such complicated and hard-to-clear bars for amending the Constitution. The Founders knew people are fickle and democracy can lead in very bad directions. Remember that Hitler failed to seize power by force in Germany in the 20s. He later came to power and consolidated it through Germany's legitimate democratic processes.

If there were a national referendum in the US to ban free speech and 52% of the people voted in favor of it, it would not be honored because that's not the proper legal procedure for amending the Constitution. That's not suppressing democracy. In the long run, it's likely protecting it.

originally posted by: Irishhaf

Also we are so inter dependent the odds of any state even Texas could stand on their own or this close to now potentially hostile nation even if they joined another country they would be retaken by force.

Heck north california has been tryign to leave south california for years and it will never happen.

Those are completely separate issues though. There is at least a legal mechanism for northern California to split off as a separate state. It's just unlikely to ever happen because California's Democrat state legislature would have to approve it.

By contrast, it appears there is no legal mechanism for a state to secede from the union.

a reply to: Irishhaf

Do you see a time when a state may want to leave The Union and go it alone?

Why would there be an assumption that a newly independent country would be hostile?
Surely there would still be many shared interests.....it would just be that they wanted to be in charge of their own affairs.

a reply to: face23785

Its interesting that everyone brings up Hitler's rise to power when wanting to point out democracy's shortcomings.
As far as I can tell every single political system devised by man has had its failings.

Its true Hitler used Germany's democratic process.....but he bent it, manipulated it and changed it out of recognition whilst also using highly illegal methods to gain total control.
Its quite an over-simplification to say or imply he gained power purely by democratic means.

So what you are saying is that The Right to Self-Determination has no legal or even moral standing in the USA and that people's wishes can be ignored with impunity when deemed fit?

a reply to: TerryMcGuire

Balkanization is not necessarily bad.

I mean, at least the Balkan peninsula has supported a disproportionately diverse group of nations in a relatively small geographic area long term.

Balkanization is not bad. Who ever says it is / was is not paying attention so much IMHO.

originally posted by: Freeborn
a reply to: face23785

Its interesting that everyone brings up Hitler's rise to power when wanting to point out democracy's shortcomings.
As far as I can tell every single political system devised by man has had its failings.

I didn't suggest otherwise. Pretty much anything devised by man has failings, not just political systems.

Its true Hitler used Germany's democratic process.....but he bent it, manipulated it and changed it out of recognition whilst also using highly illegal methods to gain total control.
Its quite an over-simplification to say or imply he gained power purely by democratic means.

It's not an oversimplification at all. He gained power through Germany's democratic processes. The only real argument against that is that Germany's system, like pretty much everyone's, isn't pure democracy. There's a reason pure democracy is hardly used anywhere.

So what you are saying is that The Right to Self-Determination has no legal or even moral standing in the USA and that people's wishes can be ignored with impunity when deemed fit?

No. What I'm saying is that we should follow the law, and if there is something wrong with the law, follow the legal processes that have been established to change it. Self-determination is not absolute. People's wishes are not absolute. There are limits to everything.

originally posted by: Fowlerstoad
a reply to: TerryMcGuire

Balkanization is not necessarily bad.

I mean, at least the Balkan peninsula has supported a disproportionately diverse group of nations in a relatively small geographic area long term.

Balkanization is not bad. Who ever says it is / was is not paying attention so much IMHO.

Correct. And we are already balkanized in a way, that's kind of what the states are. The entire idea behind having separate states as individual entities and not just geographic regions is that people with differing views could go off to their own little pockets of the country and live how they wanted, to an extent. Splitting California into two states, for example, would be a furtherance of idea. There are huge swaths of people in California who have significant grievances with how their state is run, and they're not a tiny minority. I can certainly understand why they'd want to break off for their own state. In many other states, the differences aren't quite as stark and in such large quantities of people.