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To: RegulatorCountry

Something else of which you know nothing but cannot refrain from commenting on.

My favorite is your absurd claim in #84 that "...secession was specifically addressed and allowed" under the Constitution. Such lack of understanding is typical.


148 posted on 11/21/2006 1:11:38 PM PST by justshutupandtakeit (If you believe ANYTHING in the Treason Media you are a fool.)
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To: justshutupandtakeit

Before the institution of the United States Constitution, the Articles of Confederation created a government composed purely of a collection of states cooperating together, with no overruling or federal government. However, the Constitution implemented the federal government to rule over the nation as a whole, with a vague boundary between the two co-existing "levels" of government. In the event a state's law should overlap federal law, the Constitution resolved the conflict in the Supremacy Clause in Article VI in favor of the federal government, which declares federal law the "supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."

When the Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison secretly wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions that gave the classic statement of states' rights. The Union is a voluntary association of states and if the central government goes too far, each state has the right to nullify that law. As Jefferson said in the Kentucky Resolutions:

"Resolved, that the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that by compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes, delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force: That to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party....each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress."

The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions became the bedrock principles of Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party. Those supporters, such as John Randolph, who insisted loudest on states' rights, were called "Old republicans" into the 1820s and 1830s.

Another dispute occurred over the War of 1812. At the Hartford Convention, New England states voiced opposition to President Madison and the war, and discussed secession from the Union.

The matter remained unsettled, until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1869 case Texas v. White that unilateral secession by a U.S. state was unconstitutional and had no force in statutory law.


149 posted on 11/21/2006 1:24:43 PM PST by RegulatorCountry
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