Your comments do not appear to disagree (in any substantive way) with the 'Living Constitution' crowd.
That's not because there's some "right" to secession that's lost over time. There wasn't one to begin with.
Read the Tenth Amendment - and produce a specific delegation of federal power to prevent the formal withdrawal of a member State using military force, or a specific prohibition of the reserved rights of the States to do so. Can't do it? No surprise - you've made the same claim on any number of these threads, over the years, and have never been able to do it...
It's because governments can collapse in their early days before the Constitution truly becomes functional -- before people truly accept it as the real law of the land.
That seems to be your problem - a failure to accept the Constitution as the specific, written "real law of the land."
If half the states hadn't ratified and one decided to withdraw its ratification, just in practical terms it would have been easier to do so, than it would be after 70 or 220 years.
Actually, several of the ratifying States reserved the right to "withdraw," in their ratification documents. Secession therefore would not have been a problem, "in practical terms," as long as the constitutional contract [i.e., "compact] was honored. You apparently think that time magically alters the terms of contracts, and constitutions. Congratulations.
That would have meant, of course, that the US as we know it wouldn't have come into existence.
Glad to see that you are omniscient - that's an excellent fit with your 'Living Constitution' argument. All we have to do, to get things right, is listen to people (primarily D@mocrats) like you.
When you've got a history and a large national debt and national institutions already established, it's a lot harder for a state to opt out...
Sure - and in other words, 'when you've got a business relationship and a large corporate debt and subsidiary institutions already established, it's a lot harder for a party to a business contract to opt out.' Bull crap - a contract is a contract. Either it means what it says - precisely - or it means nothing. You would apparently suggest that it means nothing.
(which they didn't have an explicit right to do in the first place).
Your point is completely irrelevant - please see my Post 1523. Please note that even Mr. Hamilton disagreed with you - and that's a major accomplishment for a 'government power freak'...
Read the Tenth Amendment - and produce a specific delegation of federal power to prevent the formal withdrawal of a member State using military force, or a specific prohibition of the reserved rights of the States to do so. Can't do it?
According to Article VI the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. A state ordinance denying the authority of the Constitution would be invalid. One assumes that the federal government could take measures against a state denial of legitimate federal authority.
State "reservations" of a "right to secede" don't count if they're not written into the Constitution. Moreover, as we've seen, many of these "reservations" involved the right of the "people" to reassume their rights if they constitutional compact were violated not the "right" of states to break with the Constitution when they thought fit.
It's unfortunate that you don't see the point I was making about the practical side of things. There is no constitutional "right" to secession. A state could have gotten away with leaving the union in the early days. Not because it had a right to do so, but because the union was so weak and the meaning and validity of the Constitution so likely to be questioned or challenged. Once the Constitution was truly accepted as the law of the land, coups like that (at least on the part of a state) became harder to pull off.
A contract is a contract. Either it means what it says - precisely - or it means nothing.
Exactly. But you are reading things into the Constitution that aren't there -- things that Madison and other founders didn't see or put into the document.
Any way, in a world where so much is changing so quickly, it is comforting to see that talking to you is as pointless as it always was.
With all the discussion about Madison, I've forgot about Mr Hamilton.
“When the sword is once drawn the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation. The suggestions of wounded pride, the instigations of resentment, would be apt to carry the States against which the arms of the Union were exerted, to any extreme to avenge the affront, or to avoid the disgrace of submission. The first war of this kind would probably terminate in a dissolution of the Union.”
“It has been observed, to coerce the states is one of the maddest projects that was ever devised. A failure of compliance will never be confined to a single state. This being the case, can we suppose it wise to hazard a civil war?
“Suppose Massachusetts, or any large state, should refuse, and Congress should attempt to compel them, would they not have influence to procure assistance, especially from those states which are in the same situation as themselves? What picture does this idea present to our view? A complying state at war with a non-complying state; Congress marching the troops of one state into the bosom of another; this state collecting auxiliaries, and forming, perhaps, a majority against the federal head.
“Here is a nation at war with itself. Can any reasonable man be well disposed towards a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself — a government that can exist only by the sword? Every such war must involve the innocent with the guilty. This single consideration should be sufficient to dispose every peaceable citizen against such a government. But can we believe that one state will ever suffer itself to be used as an instrument of coercion? The thing is a dream; it is impossible.”[. Jonathan Elliot, “The Debates of the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution.” Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1876, vol. II, p.232-233.
Furthermore— James Wilson of Pennsylvania {Ratification Convention}
“The states should resign to the national government that part, and that part only, of their political liberty, which, placed in that government, will produce more good to the whole than if it had remained in the several states.”
And this implied the ability to take it back again. In the proposed Constitution, the citizens of the various states “appear dispensing a part of their original power in what manner and what proportion they think fit. They never part with the whole; and they retain the right of recalling what they part with.”