Tuesday, August 23, 2005
This post is spawned by two stimuli of today - one a flag i saw, and one a blog post I just read. At crescat, cres-cat Will writes well about secession in theory and Quebec, and also covers nullification of the federalist kind. This post not spell-checked, as will be evident.
He writes more about the law than politics of secession, and brings up the Supremacy Clause, and some nice paradoxes of how it had to have been a state to secede before it became the new county. The error, a common one, is in looking to the constitution. The federal constitution of 1789. Instead, the relevant document is the Declaration, of 1776, which is organic law underlying the constitution. No declaration, no constitution. The constitution gets its authority from having been duly ratified by the 12 states. 12? Yes, and now comes the flag.
Today I was in the Indianapolis City-County Building, wandering away from civil court three, when I paused in the second floor lobby and noticed a flag. Why it is there is another story for another day - something about juries, the other sort of nullification. It first caught my eye because it was the only flag in the whole godforsaken building that didn't have a yellow fringe. My wingnut friends find the fringe deeply symbolic, while I prefer to see a bit more in the way of empirical verification to that claim. But then I looked closer. Twelve white stars in a square, in the blue field in the upper left. Thirteen red and white stripes.
It took awhile to sort this out. This is not the flag of the Declaration, or of the war. It's not today's flag with 50. It has 12 stars, because at the adoption of the constitution and bill of rights, 12 states signed on. One, Rhode Island, hung back for a number of years. [update: not sure i have Rhode Island details rights."Rhode Island had ratified the Constitution May 29, 1790" so apparently it just held out a couople years fort eh Bill of Rights to be added.] So the flag with 12 stars hangs in the lobby of Marion County city-county building, as a reminder of the bill of rights, specifically, the right to trial by jury. I'd never seen a flag lke that before. Marion, by the way, was Francis Marion, the terrorist. Mel Gibson's The Patriot is sort of losely based on Marion.
My conclusion, and I hope it's not too obscure, is that states have a right to secede, one which is prior to the adoption of the supremeacy clause. Otherwise we'd by flying the flag with 12 stars, and a yellow fringe.
See post below on the guy with the micronation inside Vienna.
My wingnut friend carol moore used to publish a newsletter on secession.
I'm from Delaware, which didn't exist until it seceded from Pennsylvania in 1776,
which we commemorate with the statue of Ceasar Rodney on a horse. Rodney didn't ride that horse - he was dying of cancer and rode in the coach in the back. This is how secession works - get away with it, then build statutes.
He writes more about the law than politics of secession, and brings up the Supremacy Clause, and some nice paradoxes of how it had to have been a state to secede before it became the new county. The error, a common one, is in looking to the constitution. The federal constitution of 1789. Instead, the relevant document is the Declaration, of 1776, which is organic law underlying the constitution.
Today I was in the Indianapolis City-County Building, wandering away from civil court three, when I paused in the second floor lobby and noticed a flag. Why it is there is another story for another day - something about juries, the other sort of nullification. It first caught my eye because it was the only flag in the whole godforsaken building that didn't have a yellow fringe. My wingnut friends find the fringe deeply symbolic, while I prefer to see a bit more in the way of empirical verification to that claim. But then I looked closer. Twelve white stars in a square, in the blue field in the upper left. Thirteen red and white stripes.
It took awhile to sort this out. This is not the flag of the Declaration, or of the war. It's not today's flag with 50. It has 12 stars, because at the adoption of the constitution and bill of rights, 12 states signed on. One, Rhode Island, hung back for a number of years. [update: not sure i have Rhode Island details rights."Rhode Island had ratified the Constitution May 29, 1790" so apparently it just held out a couople years fort eh Bill of Rights to be added.] So the flag with 12 stars hangs in the lobby of Marion County city-county building, as a reminder of the bill of rights, specifically, the right to trial by jury. I'd never seen a flag lke that before. Marion, by the way, was Francis Marion, the terrorist. Mel Gibson's The Patriot is sort of losely based on Marion.
My conclusion, and I hope it's not too obscure, is that states have a right to secede, one which is prior to the adoption of the supremeacy clause. Otherwise we'd by flying the flag with 12 stars, and a yellow fringe.
See post below on the guy with the micronation inside Vienna.
My wingnut friend carol moore used to publish a newsletter on secession.
I'm from Delaware, which didn't exist until it seceded from Pennsylvania in 1776,
which we commemorate with the statue of Ceasar Rodney on a horse. Rodney didn't ride that horse - he was dying of cancer and rode in the coach in the back. This is how secession works - get away with it, then build statutes.
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