Litigation

If at First You Don?t Secede ?

By Neil Kinkopf

Evidently, the way to get reelected in Texas is to fan the flames of states? rights and secession.  At least that appears to be Governor Rick Perry?s strategy.  Locked in a reelection race against Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Gov. Perry appeared at a rally yesterday where his crowd screamed for secession.  After the event, Gov. Perry offered that it could come to that.  This came a day after Gov. Perry publicly endorsed a resolution that Texas call upon ?the federal government, as our agent, to cease and desist, effective immediately, mandates that are beyond the scope of [its] constitutionally delegated powers; and, ? [t]hat all compulsory federal legislation that directs states to comply under threat of civil or criminal penalties or sanctions or that requires states to pass legislation or lose federal funding be prohibited or repealed.?

This may call to mind the states? rights populism of bygone Governors like George Wallace and Orval Faubus, but it is strikingly modest compared to the crackpot resolution passed by the Georgia Senate on (when else) April Fool?s Day:

that any Act by the Congress of the United States, Executive Order of the President of the United States of America or Judicial Order by the Judicatories of the United States of America which assumes a power not delegated to the government of the United States of America by the Constitution for the United States of America and which serves to diminish the liberty of the any of the several States or their citizens shall constitute a nullification of the Constitution for the United States of America by the government of the United States of America?.

[And t]hat should any such act of Congress become law or Executive Order or Judicial Order be put into force, all powers previously delegated to the United States of America by the Constitution for the United States shall revert to the several States individually. Any future government of the United States of America shall require ratification of three quarters of the States seeking to form a government of the United States of America and shall not be binding upon any State not seeking to form such a government.

If we were to take the Resolution seriously (admittedly this may be too great a suspension of disbelief even for a measure that passed by a vote of 43-1), Georgia has almost certainly already seceded.  Read more…

Full post as published by The Gavel on April 16, 2009 (boomark / email).