Cheif Justice Roger Taney explained why succession is unconstitutional in a memorandum on 1 February 1861.
"The South contends that a state has a constitutional right to secede from the Union formed with her sister states. In this I submit the South errs. No power or right is constitutional but what can be exercised in a form or mode provided in the constitution for its exercise. Secession is therefore not constitutional, but revolutionary; and is only morally competent, like war, upon failure of justice."
In other words, there is no way for the concept of unilateral secession to be exercised under the US Constitution, for no mode or form of such is provided in that document
This is the Chief Justice Justice of the United States BEFORE the Civil War even started.
That was an opinion of a man.....nearly one million died to debate it. He is not right because his side won......I repeat, there is absolutely zero in the US Constitution that prohibits secession. There wasnt in 1861, and there still isnt.
“This is the Chief Justice Justice of the United States BEFORE the Civil War even started. “
Chief Justice’ sometimes get it wrong and sometimes wrong
in a really bad way. Roberts? Who’s to say Taney wasn’t
as big a quack or compromised?
The Constitution did NOT prohibit secession, and since we have the 10th Amendment, states DID, and DO, have the RIGHT to leave the Union. What one justice says doesn’t change that.
Just for a moment, lets agree that it would be illegal. Wasn’t it also illegal for the US to leave Britain? Yet it was done, and it could, and should, be done again.
I believe it is legal for a state to leave the union, from reading our Constitution, but even if it’s not legal, I believe it should still be done.
“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.”
6 states had already seceded by the time of the decision, with a seventh, Texas seceding on the date of the memorandum. The shooting hadn’t begun, but Taney, who was a Unionist, certainly knew it was coming.
“No power or right is constitutional but what can be exercised in a form or mode provided in the constitution for its exercise.”
Taney is making this up. If it were true it would nullify the 9th and 10th Amendments.
Odd that you would adopt a view expressed in a memorandum written by the judge who authored the Dred Scott decision.
Chief Justice Roger Taney - the man who declared that negros weren’t really people but only property and the man considered by many to be the “father” of The Fugitive Slave Act. (Henry Ward Beecher, the great abolitionist preacher, when asked what he wanted written on his tombstone, declared that it should read “Here lies Henry Ward Beecher. I spit on the Fugitive Slave Act.”) And as far as the USA “invading” a seceded Texas, most of the officers and soldiers in the army are from the south and/or Texas. What percentage of them do you think would open fire on their fellow Americans who feel the same way they probably do? This is all academic since Obama is going to be trounced but I’m surprised how many Freepers are ready to blindly accept anything the Supreme Court says - aren’t you glad those men at the Concord Bridge didn’t feel that way?
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
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 to 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 shown 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. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government.
Has justice failed?