[guitarplayer1953]

No, we cannot secede. The Supreme Court ruled on it and said it was unconstitutional.

Do you have a case number for this finding?

[conimbricenses]

The Supreme Court did nominally deem secession "unconstitutional" in the case of Texas v. White, decided shortly after the Civil War. The case is far from the court's finer moments though, and its ruling is questionable on several grounds - among them that it was authored by Justice Salmon Chase, previously Secretary of the Treasury, on a lawsuit about the validity of treasury securities under a policy that Chase himself authored and implemented while Secretary. His argument itself is also rather poor, consisting of a clumsy melding between the weaker and more extreme iterations of Lincoln's "union mysticism" and an intentionally selective reading of American constitutional history to that point in time.

It is a ruling against secession, and as such has carried weight in its subsequent use by the court. But to state that it precludes secession (or "nullification" for that matter) in perpetuity as an unquestionable and unchallenged matter of fixed precedent is something akin to saying the same for any poorly reasoned court rendering (that is to say Plessy v. Ferguson meant the same for segregation in past decades, or Roe v. Wade means the same for abortion today) when in fact we know that the court can and should vacate such bad positions, and actually does just that from time to time.

[BobL]

“No, we cannot secede. The Supreme Court ruled on it and said it was unconstitutional.

Do you have a case number for this finding? “

What? The hell if I’m going to ask for permission to secede, from the oppressors. It’s like asking Japan if it’s ok to declare war on them the day after Pearl Harbor.