[central_va]

We Americans celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, but H.L. Mencken correctly evaluated the speech: “It is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense.” Lincoln said the soldiers sacrificed their lives “to the cause of self-determination — that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth.” Mencken said: “It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of people to govern themselves.”

The War of 1861 brutally established that states could not secede. We are still living with its effects. Because states cannot secede, the federal government can run roughshod over the U.S. Constitution’s limitations of the Ninth and 10th Amendments. States have little or no response.

--Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

[ClearCase_guy]

Walter Williams was a great man.

[Olog-hai]

To every Union Republic is reserved the right freely to secede from the USSR.

— 1936 USSR Constitution, Article 17

Each Union Republic shall retain the right freely to secede from the USSR.

— 1977 USSR constitution, Article 72

Aside from this being a red herring, no new amendment or law following the American civil war was established explicitly forbidding secession and no power existed to run roughshod over states’ rights until the 16^th and 17^th Amendments (specifically Marxist in nature) came to be; and if any subjugated nation tried to leave the USSR when that entity was strong, a brutal crackdown would ensue—like what happened to Hungary.