[Non-Sequitur]

My personal opinion is that if the Constitution does not explicitly prohibit something then it is reserved to the States or the people respectively. But that is just my opinion and opinions are all we have.

But that isn't what the Constitution says or what the Supreme Court has ruled. Implied powers reserved to the United States can be identified and one of those it the power of Congress to approve any change in the status of a state.

[Arkinsaw]

But that isn't what the Constitution says or what the Supreme Court has ruled. Implied powers reserved to the United States can be identified and one of those it the power of Congress to approve any change in the status of a state.

The courts are a branch of the central government. The founders (Madison and Jefferson in the Kentucky-Virginia Resolutions) already said that the central government is not the final arbiter of its own powers, the States are. The States are equal judges and can judge for themselves the violation and the method of redress. Some States indicated in their ratification documents that they were not unfamiliar with the concept of withdrawing the powers they were delegating.

Conservatives traditionally bemoan the left's attempts to weaken the 10th Amendment, to treat it as an unimportant part of the Constitution. Conservatives also bemoan the left's efforts to centralize the government and take power away from the State and local level. Conservatives have traditionally supported peaceful self-determination such as in the cases of Taiwan, the Baltic countries, East Timor, Gibraltar etc. It appears that every people in the world are free to remove themselves from a consolidated central government but that the people of the US are bound for eternity to their central government no matter what that government does, how it acts, or regardless of whether the people give their consent to be governed by that government.

It doesn't make much sense to me, and its certainly not consistent.