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That is talking about a state that is still considered part of the Union refusing to honor the laws of the United States. In that respect it makes sense. A state cannot be part of the United States if it refuses to honor U.S. law. However, the law you are quoting does not address the issue of secession. If you really want to make a case against secession you would have to amend the Constitution and make it expressly forbidden to the states. No law passed by Congress can override the Constitution. As it stands, secession falls under the protection afforded by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.

A state cannot be part of the United States if it refuses to honor U.S. law.

The act authorizes the president to use the militia of the several states to ensure that it -is- part of the United States.

What this means is that the concept of unilateral state secession cannot be supported in U.S. law.

Walt

As it stands, secession falls under the protection afforded by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.

Jefferson Davis didn't think so.

"Conscription dramatized a fundamental paradox in the Confederate war effort: the need for Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends. Pure Jeffersonians could not accept this. The most outspoken of them, Joseph Brown of Georgia, denounced the draft as a "dangerous usurpation by Congress of the reserved rights of the states...at war with all the principles for which Georgia entered into the revolution." In reply Jefferson Davis donned the mantle of Hamilton. The Confederate Constitution, he pointed out to Brown, gave Congress the power "to raise and support armies" and to "provide for the common defense." It also contained another clause (likewise copied from the U.S. Constitution) empowering Congress to make all laws "necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers." Brown had denied the constitutionality of conscription because the Constitution did not specifically authorize it. This was good Jeffersonian doctrine, sanctified by generations of southern strict constructionists. But in Hamiltonian language, Davis insisted that the "necessary and proper" clause legitimized conscription. No one could doubt the necessity "when our very existance is threatened by armies vastly superior in numbers." Therefore "the true and only test is to enquire whether the law is intended and calculated to carry out the object...if the answer be in the affirmative, the law is constitutional."

--Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson P.433

Your position is fantasy. If the federal government can coerce the states in the matter of conscription, why not secession?

Walt