Civil War II

[queerbychoice]

Why is hardly anyone talking about the utter lunacy that the Georgia state senate voted 43 to 1 to support? Why do people go around accusing Democrats of being "anti-American" for any un-Republican statements they ever make, yet when the Georgia state senate votes overwhelmingly to secede from the United States and declare the United States "disbanded" as a nation, nobody seems to get particularly upset about how anti-American that is? And since this thing the Georgia state senate voted for states in part that the federal government has no authority to prosecute any crimes other than "treason, piracy and slavery," why do none of these same Georgia state senators seem to have considered the idea that declaring the United States to have been "disbanded" as a nation sounds an awful lot like an incitement to begin committing treason?

Meanwhile, the governor of Texas has apparently declared an interest in seceding from the United States too! legolastn commented, "Is it really coincidence that the Georgia Senate and the Texas Governor have started touting secessionist rhetoric while the nation is being [led] by its first black President? Somehow I think not." Unfortunately, I have to agree.

Comments

[juanoclock.livejournal.com]

This is for real... ok.

Oh, and oddly, during the Teabagging, it is reported that Obama has somehow become both fascist and Marxist. I'm not quite sure how that works...

[placenta.livejournal.com]

whoa whoa whoa what??

this is crazy and i completely agree with your last remark.
this is ridiculous.

[beraht.livejournal.com]

So, why AREN'T the authors being tried for treason?

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

I think it's more an incitement to treason than actual treason. For now, they haven't exactly taken action to damage the United States, but merely stated that the United States no longer exists, which implies that people should take action to damage anyone behaving as if the United States does exist and has power to control Georgia's laws. So for now, they're still in the realm of free speech that I believe should be protected. But if they practiced anything close to what they've just preached, they'd have to commit treason.

[saxifrage.livejournal.com]

woah, I had heard about Texas, but nothing about Georgia, and that happened a while ago. Why wasn't this in the mainstream news?

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

That's exactly what I want to know!

[liquidjewel.livejournal.com]

Well, it passed like that because of a little slight of hand of the authors - the Georgia Senate is busy rushing through bills since they're adjourning soon, and this was presented as a bill "affirming States' rights" by its authors. The thing was considered a symbolic gesture and was voted on with most people not having read it.

More worrisome, this has been going on for a while. South Dakota had a similar bill in the House, and Oklahoma actually passed legislation like this in both Senate and House.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Not having read it is a terrible excuse, arguably even worse than if they had read it. I find it a huge problem that it is considered in any way acceptable, normal, or unworthy of horror and outrage for senators and representatives to vote for things they haven't actually read. I'm sure it would be very time-consuming to have to read all the laws that they vote for, but come on - that's what they're paid for. How can they possibly claim to be doing their jobs when they don't even know what the laws they pass actually say?

[sammka.livejournal.com]

What's actually even more horrifying, to me, is that the legal norms they're objecting to are almost all based on either the Commerce Clause of the Constitution or the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The Fourteenth Amendment is the reason that state governments can't abridge freedoms protected in the Bill of Rights, and is the explicit source of authority for a great deal of federal criminal law (not as much as the Commerce Clause, but still significant).

The words "Fourteenth Amendment" never appear in the Senate Resolution. Neither are "equal protection," or "due process" except in cases that are not related to the Fourteenth Amendment. Coincidence? The Ninth Amendment certainly gets cited a lot. They obliquely acknowledge the Thirteenth. It would make sense to discuss the Fourteenth Amendment since it is the reason cited for a lot of the phenomena they don't like. They could at least bother to explain why it doesn't "really" give the authority to the federal government that everyone else thinks it does. But they don't.

The extreme states' rights argument found here is also scarily reminiscent of the "flesh and blood" theory, a bizarre states-rights myth originally perpetuated by white supremacists who didn't appreciate being federally prosecuted under the Ku Klux Klan laws, which also argued that the Federal Government had no authority to prosecute crimes other than treason/piracy/etc., and that laws or even constitutional amendments stating otherwise were automatically void.