The political winds are blowing toward secession

by Bob Livingston 

The political winds are blowing toward secession
When a marriage becomes untenable for either the husband or wife, or both, the marriage is dissolved. They get a divorce, and few – outside of religious circles – would argue against their right to divorce or its necessity if one or other of the parties determines there are “irreconcilable differences” and a legal dissolution of the marriage is in his best interest.
Yet when secession – which is the divorce of a state from the nation – is mentioned, people go apoplectic.
In the days after President Barack Obama’s reelection hundreds of thousands of Americans in 47 states went on the White House’s “We the People” page and filed and/or signed petitions for peaceful secession.

It was a purely symbolic move and the wrong way to go about seceding, but that was not truly their aim. Their goal was to express their frustration that Obama’s reelection would bring on more government growth, expanding bureaucracy and a growing regulatory burden, and an understanding that neither party seems to represent their wishes.  That sentiment has only grown as their fears bore out.
Of course, lovers of Obama and Big Government (is that redundant?) quickly chimed in with claims that racism was behind the movement. There were even petitions begun that sought to remove citizenship from those who deigned to exercise their rights under the 1^st Amendment.

No doubt the irony that those who petition their government, using a right guaranteed them under the 1^st Amendment, should be stripped of their rights for doing so was lost on those starting and signing those citizenship removal petitions. That’s a testament to the work of pseudo historians, the propaganda media, the public (non)education system and statist politicians who have bamboozled the masses about the nature of our republic and its founding.
The Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution, ostensibly, to create a vehicle to keep a check on government. It was a compact of states, and the document was ratified by the states (see Article VII). It was not ratified by the people in a mass election, but by the states one by one.

The Constitution drafted by the Founders was not intended to form a strong “national” government with heavily centralized power, but as a means to represent a group of states only on matters that concerned them all. The government was given a list of enumerated powers in Article I, Section 8. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 14:

In the first place, it is to be remembered, that the general government is not to be charged with the whole power of making and administering laws. Its jurisdiction is limited to certain enumerated objects, which concern all the members of the republic, but which are not to be attained by the separate provisions of any.

In Federalist No. 45 Madison wrote:

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several states will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the State.

The Constitution was not a document designed to restrain the people or the states, but to place restraints on the federal government the Founders were creating. This is an important distinction. It would not have been ratified if not for the promise of a bill of rights to further check the federal government. That’s because most of the Founders — particularly the Anti-Federalists — feared the Constitution wasn’t strong enough to prevent the Federal government from stealing power from the states.
It was commonly understood prior to 1861 that the states reserved the right to secede. There had been talk of secession by the New England states many times. They called it “disunion.”

As I explained in “From republicanism to tyranny: How did we lose our rights?,” New England Federalists in the early 1800s believed that Virginia was gaining too much power and would act against the interests of New England states and in the interests of Southern ones. Many of them also opposed the War of 1812.  After Jefferson’s election, Federalist Stephen Higgenson claimed the federal government “had fallen into the hands of infidel, anti-commercial, anti-New England Southerners” who would “govern and depress New England.”
New England Federalists’ complaints mirrored those made by Southerners advocating for secession in the 1860s. And in fact, in the 1830s and 1840s, abolitionists, chief among them William Lloyd Garrison, called for “disunion.” A New England Anti-Slavery Convention was held and attendees voted in favor of secession by a margin of 250-24.

So we see that secession was not a wholly Southern construct. Even Abraham Lincoln, as a representative, recognized the states had the right to secede — he only changed his mind after he held the reins of the presidency.
To “save the Union” – which Lincoln stated at the outset was his goal in prosecuting the war, whether he had to preserve slavery or abolish it to do so – Lincoln trampled on the rule of law. The natural result of Lincoln’s actions is the empirical presidency we have today. Obama once claimed he fancied himself a modern-day Lincoln. It’s probably the only truth he’s uttered since he took office. OK: Queue the inevitable zombie commenters that will label me a racist for expressing a truth.
Secession movements have sprung up in California, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Texas, New Hampshire and Vermont.

And secession talk is not confined to the U.S. In 2014 the Scots voted “no” on independence, but it was a close vote. The secessionists came close enough, against the odds, to win big concessions for their case from the London government. Other secessionist movements are still active and determined. Spain, Italy, Belgium, France, Monaco and Denmark are all dealing or have dealt with groups of citizens wanting to break away on their own. And on June 23, British voters will decide whether the U.K. should remain in the European Union or pull out in what is commonly being termed “Brexit.”
There is a stark division in the U.S. between the blue and red states about how the nation should be governed. America is a house divided by ideological polarization far more complex than, but equally as heated as the conflicts that led to the Civil War.

The lines as drawn by the two presumptive party presidential nominees reflect that divide. One claims to stand for America-first nationalism, reduced foreign entanglements and individual rights – particularly the right to keep and bear arms. The other obviously stands for cronyism, graft, the banksters and more foreign entanglements… and a full-court press effort to separate people from their guns.
Last week’s ruling by the 9^th Circuit that there is no right to carry a concealed weapon and that there may be no right to have a gun outside the home, and Hillary Clinton’s recent statements about the 2^nd Amendment that,  “If it is a constitutional right, then it, like every other constitutional right, is subject to reasonable regulations, and what people have done with that decision is to take it as far as they possibly can and reject what has been our history from the very beginning of the republic, where some of the earliest laws that were passed were about firearms” makes this election one about gun rights… and individual rights.

Blue state pseudo-intellectual progressives, gun grabbers and egalitarians (another redundancy?) can barely contain their contempt for those of us in flyover country who believe in the concepts of individual liberty, state’s rights and the 2^nd Amendment. And many of them are saying that they won’t want to live in a Donald Trump America.
And if the Witch from Chappaqua is elected and she and her court attempt to eviscerate the 2^nd Amendment, most of us in flyover country will not respond well to efforts to disarm us, which we see as the beginning of the end of all individual rights. In fact, it will quickly become a violent and bloody effort.

The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America invokes the self-evident truths that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that governments are formed to protect these rights and gain their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that when a government becomes abusive of these rights, it is the right — no, it is the duty — of the people to alter or abolish that government.
It looks like either way a substantial portion of the country will believe the government will become “abusive of these rights” regardless of the election’s outcome. A divorce appears inevitable.
A peaceful divorce would be far better.