08-02-2018, 01:37 PM
(07-31-2018, 11:25 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Secession has no justification in opposition to likely policies of a President or Congress. Southerners gave Lincoln no chance to suggest how he would abolish slavery if he wanted to do so. A model existed in Britain, and it could have been applied to slavery in America -- the government forces the compulsory sale of any slaves who want freedom and settles the Freedmen in the West. The Civil War made such impossible in part because so many slaves seceded from the Confederacy to the Union lines, and the US Army was not going to maintain slave status of the most peculiar contraband.
Is secession a valid means of escaping a despotic or tyrannical President? Maybe -- as America has had no such President before Donald Trump. I see evidence of many states that were close in 2016 rejecting the President at the Thirteenth Hour. We have a federal system which allows for some independence of the states for budgeting and criminal law. There is no federal law banning murder as such, but there are federal statutes against murders on federal property or of federal officials doing their jobs, and military personnel have the Uniform Code of (federal) Criminal Justice that the Federal government can allow, at its discretion, to give way to state courts.
Donald Trump has pushed the limits of centralization of authority and attempts to assume powers of Congress (including a desire to give unilateral tax cuts to the very rich). Dictatorial government of the United States or "Republic of Michigan"? I'll take the Republic of Michigan, fully understanding that it is unviable enough that it would need to ask for annexation by Canada.
Janet Grantholm as PM wouldn't be so bad after all!
I think most seceding blue states could join up with Canada or even Mexico. There could be a continuous territory of the coasts and northern lake states joined with Canada. It would be a strange geography though; a cross continental trip through this new Canada would have to run all the way up the west coast to BC and then across Alberta etc.