The GOP candidate had said last week that states could secede if they felt the need to do so.
Nikki Haley, fresh off her Civil War history refresher on this week’s Saturday Night Live, appeared to remember what the Constitution allowed when it comes to state secession: nothing.
Haley again walked back her comments saying states could choose if they wanted to secede from the U.S., telling CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday that she didn’t believe the Constitution afforded them that right. It came days after she told radio host Charlamagne tha God that states like Texas could “make the decisions that their people want to make.”
“According to the Constitution, they can’t,” Haley told CNN. “What I think they have the right to do is have the power to protect themselves and do all that. Texas has talked about that for a long time. The Constitution doesn’t allow for that.”
The GOP presidential candidate then tried to pivot to why Texas would consider such an option, citing Gov. Greg Abbott’s frustration with the Biden administration’s handling of the Southern border and the state’s desire to protect itself.
I mean, Haley is right about one thing: all government decisions here are theoretically up to the people. If there is enough of a legit consensus that a state needs to secede, then they will try to make it happen.
However, it is also true that the Constitution doesn’t currently have a mechanism for that. So in order for a state to secede, all the other states need to agree on a framework for it and amend the Constitution to make that happen, or we need to rip the whole thing up and start over from scratch. So while Haley is technically correct in what she said, she left out the hardest bits.
For what it’s worth, I think tearing up the whole thing is the Conservative’s endgame in all this. They fetishize the founders so much that they would do anything to be the “new” Founders, and bind future Originalists to their views for hundreds of years. They’ve been trying to call for a new Constitutional Convention under Article V to make amendments, but that convention could also start over from scratch if enough states sign on. While there are some progressives who have embraced the Article V cause, thinking it is the best way to overturn Citizens United, most people on the Left think it is a bad, bad idea. Here is a good link describing the movement (from a liberal group that doesn’t like it at all…)
https://www.commoncause.org/resource/u-s-constitution-threatened-as-article-v-convention-movement-nears-success/
How else are you going to end the corruption and get money out of politics, if not for an article V convention to ban the bribes via an amendment? It can’t be done through the corrupt politicians in DC, it has to come from the states.
Fear mongering over what conservatives might do, as an excuse to do nothing, is such a laughably classic neoliberal strategy which always accomplishes nothing. The system is broken, it isn’t working, and we either do something drastic to fix it now or the empire will fall.
I am not against an amendment to reverse Citizens United. (let’s do another one for Supreme Court Term Limits while we’re at it). All our prior amendments have been ratified without a convention.
My issue with an Article V Constitutional Convention is that the only one we ever had was the one that gave us the entire Constitution, before the article even existed. There are no limits on what the convention could do – and the last one tore up the Articles of Confederation and rewrote it all. Some people think that Congress might put limits on what the Convention can discuss, but it’s totally untested.
It’s not even settled how the voting would take place. If the Convention decides to have each state have one vote, then it pretty much guaranteed that the Conservative minority in the country would be writing the whole thing. We will even see problems if it’s weighted more like the Electoral College is right now. One thing that’s guaranteed is that, since it’s the smaller conservative states wanting it, they will come up with rules that favor them.
Any output of the convention would need to be ratified by 3/4 of the States. That’s really the only check against the convention going totally off the rails.
3/4ths ratification rule is the safeguard, and why we could be reasonably assured of a narrow scope if the convention is held. It’s also a 2/3 requirement to even call the convention to begin with.
You’re right that this is effectively unprecedented, but so are a great many modern day political developments in the US. If the outcome means ending the corruption resulting from the corporate stranglehold on our politicians, then I say try it. The left might be surprised to find allies on the right in this regard…if you listen to what MAGA folks think, often their motivations lie in being consistently failed by their government since the 70s. They believe in the promise of America, and are willing to try increasingly desperate measures to bring it to fruition. If both sides can agree that citizens united is the problem, then meaningful reform becomes increasingly possible, if not probable. The trick is overcoming the sleight of hand played by media and political pundits, on both sides, frankly.
The alternative to confronting the fierce urgency of now, means maintaining the status quo. A system in which normal Americans have no representation at all, and where America consistently costs more for far worse outcomes across virtually all aspects of life compared to other western peers. It’s unacceptable.
We don’t need a convention to make an amendment to overturn Citizens United. But Conservative groups have been actively gaming out how to take control of a constitutional convention like this and rewrite the whole thing.
They’ve been planning this for years. There are already 28 Conservative states who passed resolutions calling for one, in spite of there being no established rules so far. Only 6 more are needed. And if it happens, they don’t intend to play fair. If you’re pissed about how Mitch McConnell engineered a conservative Supreme Court that doesn’t reflect the views of the majority in the country, just wait until he gets to rewrite the Constitution.
Respectfully, I insist we do need a convention to pass that amendment.
99% of Congress is addicted to this very legal bribe money. How are you going to convince them to amend the constitution to take that away? Consider how Pelosi laughs in the face of anyone inquiring about the STOCK act, as indication of the levels of greed and corruption we’re dealing with here. They won’t do it of their own volition, and they sure as hell won’t listen to the voters. The states must force the issue.
Why would you think the very people you say are too corrupt to ever fix the problem would somehow fix the same problems if you temporarily gave them more power?
I don’t think they are given more power in this case. afaik, there’s nothing that says article V convention delegates must be state legislators, or even that the legislators need be appraised of the goings on at the convention. It supersedes them. The delegates’ deliberations reign supreme in our republic, literally emanating from “We the people” in that circumstance. In 1787 they met in secret for that matter - the state legislators didn’t even know what was happening.