You paint a picture of a rogue state legislature which moves to secede without the popular support of the people of their state. I assure you, secession won't happen in any state without the people of that state demanding it.
If the feds should decide to arrest a state legislature for treason, they'd have to do it over the dead bodies of the citizenry. Again - the will to mount a campaign of death and destruction to prevent secession of any state, does not exist.
If the feds should decide to arrest a state legislature for treason, they'd have to do it over the dead bodies of the citizenry. Again - the will to mount a campaign of death and destruction to prevent secession of any state, does not exist.
Well, I am only talking about the propaganda (spin) that would accompany federal action to assert control over a state's governmental machinery (i.e., the levers of power). Very little force would be required. The feds would not claim that the action was being taken to suppress or frustrate the desires of secessionists. Instead, the feds would claim that the action was required to protect the Constitutional rights of the American people living within the state. The media and the general public would be very supportive of that story.
Within minutes or hours of the moment that soldier's and trucks began rolling into the state capital along with choppers landing on the capital grounds, the whole thing would be over. Suddenly, there would be very few people who would describe themselves as secessionists. Suddenly, the state police would accept and follow orders from the new, "temporary" authority.
All this is very predictable and consistent with human nature. I am not painting a picture of a "rogue" state legislature; I am predicting that any state officials who participated in an attempted secession would be painted by the feds, the media and the general public as traitors who attempted to deprive American citizens of their rights under the Constitution. Beneath the fold, there would also be stories about how many of these "extremists" blatantly violated their own sacred oaths to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. "What could these people have been thinking?"
I believe that what I'm saying here provides a pretty good general description of what would really happen if political leaders of a state attempted to unilaterally secede from the union.