When screenwriter Daniel Turkewitz was working on a script about astronauts struggling to survive in crisis conditions, he enlisted a veteran astronaut as a consultant. That worked so well that when Turkewitz began his new project, a script about Maine seceding from the Union to join Canada, he decided to enlist an expert on the legal niceties of secession. In other words, he decided to enlist a Supreme Court Justice.

via www.thebigquestions.com

Wow, a few folks saw my reply to a tweet by SheilahDavis and got riled that I was agreeing with Scalia and assumed I was being a bit of a facist prick and a Texas hater.

Uh, Scalia is right . . . I assumed most high school graduates from the US should know that this was one of the fundamental issues of the American Civil War and that the conclusion – bouyed by military might – was that States do not have the right to leave the Union (a fundamental question of State vs. Federal rights since the founding of the union which is part of a very long and still developing game of pushmepullyou – go play with the Adams-Jefferson papers).

There is an exception. Texas is the only current US state that has a legal right to leave the union whenever it chooses. That's because Texas entered the United States by treaty as a sovereign independent nation. My tweet did not say that I thought Texas should leave but that it has the right to leave based upon the conditions of entering the union (a positive condition for statehood, unlike the very negative unconstitutional conditions applied to Utah when it asked to enter into statehood, actual interference with popular religious practice).

In any case, whether or not states have a legal right to quite the union is irrelevant. If there were enough unrest and disproportionate economic or cultural clashes then one could always postulate the breaking up of the union . . . certainly recent news about a new poor class created by the recession that will continue for decades is more than a bit troubling. While it is doubtful that we will see a breaking up of the American union by the end of 2010 as Igor Panarin predicted back in 1998, it is not an impossibility . . . an improbability, yes, but not impossible . . . albeit one that would likely be based upon bloody revolution rather than legal suits and niceties.

All the best,
Brian