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Could the USA "kick" a State out?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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Anything is possible with a constitutional amendment.
To further add, there is nothing in the Constitution which allows for having a state leave and the Constitution is where that process would be to be laid out. So, if a state wanted to leave and the rest of the country agreed, you would need a constitutional amendment to spell out that process.
Given the high bar required to amend the Constitution, having a state leave would need to be very popular politically.
Dems suggest texas can texit if the GOP drafts it.
GoP doesn't want to blink, crafts it in a way that gives Texas power when it leaves, to please the howling magats
Dems say "cool. These 31 states on both coasts are seceding. Using the process laid out, each coastal block will reorganize into its own group.
Now the red states are booted. Miller time.
There is no "gives Texas power" about that. If Texas were to leave, the big bargaining issues would be on water rights and what to do about social security.
There's no legal way for Texas to leave the union. If Texas did, it'd be treason. No bargaining, only civil war.
It's Insurrection not treason. Treason is very narrowly defined as giving Aid & Comfort to a foreign power. People misuse treason way too often.
I was only speaking to if the method of leaving the union was to be approved.
Aka, it'll never happen since one side consistently torpedoes their own bills when the other side agrees with them.
That would require Congress to be functional.
Or if most of the population just decides to ignore the constitution. But how likely is that?
If you poll half the population, they don't even know what the Constitution says. They could be ignoring it now.
Except for denying a state equal representation on the Senate without its consent; the Constitution explicitlyforbids that.
And yet that provision is itself still part of the constitution so really an amendment just needs to have an initial sentence to override that limitation first. If there’s actually support for a change, anything can be changed.
If it were really so easy to bypass that restriction, then what was the point of putting that sentence in in the first place?
Because Congress has wide latitude to set its own membership by passing laws to that effect. The size of the House, for instance, used to increase on every Census, until Congress passed a law to fix it at 435. (A huge mistake, IMHO, and part of the reason why our politics are so wacky today.)
This ensures that the Senate can never re-make itself to be anything other than the body with equal representation among states, unless the affected states also agree.
Yes, that is exactly my point: if this restriction could itself be eliminated through the amendment process, then it effectively does not exist.
No, you don't get my point, if that specific clause weren't in the Constitution then Congress could enact a law to change how the Senate is constructed. The clause serves a purpose, even if it can be itself changed via amendment.
If the purpose of that clause were to restrict the kinds of laws that Congress can pass instead of the kinds of amendments that are allowed, then why does it appear in Article V, which relates to amendments, rather than Article I, which relates to Congress?
Because it's not easy to amend the Constitution.
Sure, but once there is enough determination to deprive a state of equal representation in the Senate that there are sufficient votes to amend the Constitution once in order to do this--which, as you have pointed out, is a very high bar--then it is no harder to go through the amendment process twice in order to first drop that sentence.
Indeed, the limitation in what can be amended is in practice totally powerless. I think of it as a rhetorical flourish to emphasize the importance they placed on representing states rather than people. For what it’s worth, I advocate for the full abolition of the Senate. It’s an anti-democratic institution. There’s no way to fix it without making it a clone of the House so let’s just do away with it entirely.
It isn't worded as a "rhetorical flourish"; it is worded incredibly clearly and explicitly as a prohibition:
In fact, taking your reasoning a step further: are you likewise arguing that when the prohibition against banning the slave trade prior to 1808 was included here, that it was also understood to be a "rhetorical flourish" with no teeth behind it? If so, then why did they go to so much trouble to put it in? It seems like a lot of wasted effort in that case.
And yet it’s inherently non-operative. I’m unconcerned with how it was intended since that’s totally irrelevant to what it actually is.
If, as you say,
Then why did you waste time describing what you believed was the intention behind it earlier when you said,
Regardless, the other point that I made that you haven't addressed still stands: they put that prohibition against banning the slave trade in there for a reason, and that reason was presumably not "as a rhetorical flourish", so either the people who insisted that it be present were horribly incompetent at writing legal language that would preserve their own interests, or your personal opinion as to how Constitutional law works in this case is missing something important.
I never said that was the intention. I said that's what I think of it as. In practice all it does is underline a point. These same people also totally screwed up how we chose the president and vice president and failed to provide a proper mechanism for replacing a dead president.
Horribly incompetent? No. Flawless, or even particularly prescient? No. They got a lot of big stuff right; they got a whole lot wrong.
So just to be clear: you think that this particular language was badly written because it is so easily bypassed?
Any amendment to the Constitution to show secession or for a state to be removed would obviously change that, too.
Sure, but obviously in that case it would no longer matter whether that state had Senators or not because it would no longer be subject to the laws of the U.S. government.