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

[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.