No, the People of the United States ratified the Constitution, not Virginia or New York, or any other arbitrary political entity. It says so right in the Preamble.
You are clinging to the fiction that Lincoln copped off old Daniel Webster, who cobbled it up to deny -- wrongly -- that a State has the right to leave the Union. It's all lies
And that is complete bullshit. What I am denying is that a state, any state, can leave without the consent of all parties in the bargin. The state laving impacts the wellbeing of the states remaining. I happen to believe that they should have a say in the matter. In your world they have no say, and no protections under the Constitution. Only the leaving states have any rights. The ones remaining have none.
As long as I'm a politician in the majority, nobody can leave the Union because I'm going to fleece everybody in the room, nobody gets to leave, no exceptions
I find that believable given your positions. In your view the states may leave and walk away from any obligations, any responsiblilty, and take any action that they choose regardless of the impact it may have on the remaining states. So long as you're a politician I find it way that you would be willing to screw the states six ways from Sunday, so long as those states are Northern ones.
[You, denying the billboards of history] No, the People of the United States ratified the Constitution, not Virginia or New York, or any other arbitrary political entity.
There is no unitary, lumpen People. One colony, one State. One State, one People -- each one granted sovereignty and recognition as a stand-alone entity. You've seen all the quotes; you're just being recalcitrant now, because of what's on the table. I'd love to play bourre' with you: I've never owned a house in Illinois before.
It says so right in the Preamble.
Preamble, shmee-amble. The Preamble isn't binding, it's descriptive. Where the rubber meets the road is in the body of the Constitution, and in its Articles of Amendment.
You cling to the Preamble because it alone, of the articles of the Constitution, preserves the language that Hamilton intended for the whole document, of a statist document instituting a centralized national government with total power -- run by him, and people he agreed with. He didn't get it, but the convention didn't go back and change the language of the Preamble to parse with what they'd written, which was a constitution of a limited, federal republic whose States remained sovereign and retained important undelegated powers intact.
You want it all in your pocket, is your problem. You should scratch that itch and run for Chicago alderman someday. Maybe they'll let you be in charge of beating up visitors they don't like.
Yeah? Well, the next time the U.S. abrogates a treaty its chief executive has signed, like, oh, Kyoto, say, try suing the United States Government to demand compliance, on grounds that the other signatories hadn't given the United States permission to withdraw. See what happens.
The state laving impacts the wellbeing of the states remaining.
That happens a lot, when sovereignty is involved. The imperial Russian government still owes some American estates a lot of money. Heard about any collections lately?
I happen to believe that they should have a say in the matter.
Operative word, "believe". You would be incorrect, however.
As I pointed out above, the States retained rights and powers of sovereignty when they ratified the Constitution, and you cannot produce any clause of the Constitution that abrogates them. The exercise of rights and powers shows why they are called that quite precisely because other parties that may be affected by the exercise have no right or power to interfere, suspend, or block the exercise of same.
The States retain certain rights and powers even as members of the Union: Ohio's supreme court adjudicated an eminent-domain case the other day, coming to a resolution diametrically opposed to Associate Justice Souter's opinion last year on the same subject; but Ohio's case was brought under Ohio's constitution, and so that case is not subject to federal review. This would be true even though the Ohio court had reached a conclusion inimical to the interests of an out-of-state development company whose management might have expected Ohio to follow Souter's reasoning to Souter's holding. The out-of-state developers couldn't now sue Ohio for holding without regard to the effect on the out-of-state developers' interest. Neither could their home state, despite a possible loss of tax revenue, in-state wages, etc., which might ensue from the Ohio court's decision.
I was employing a rhetorical device -- can't remember the name of it. I was describing the position of the Republican politicians and Northern industrialists who were absolutely determined to make their pile at the expense of the agrarian States.