Does a State have the right to secede?

[Don1946]

(08-20-2013 04:44 PM)Rob Wick Wrote:  According to Texas v. White, no they don't. Before that, the Constitution was silent. It neither prohibited nor allowed it.

Lincoln's points on secession are clear, and in my opinion, valid.
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Best
Rob

Good points. Lincoln really joined issue with this question in the first inaugural and it remains one of the most forceful practical, as opposed to legal, arguments against secession as a practice.

"It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination," he stated. He might have added that the CSA debated and rejected the idea of making secession legal in their own constitution. Interesting.

There was, Lincoln admitted, a revolutionary right to dissolve the Union or overthrow the government of any nation. This was an extra-legal natural right, according to the philosophy embedded in the Declaration of Independence. "no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances."

Lincoln was intent on first denying the legal right to secede and then denying that there was any just cause for revolutionary action. That is what led him to guarantee the safety of slavery in the states, a position he would have to walk back as the rebellion continued.