People keep talking about “Federalizing the National Guard” and now you’ve got other States pledging their NG to Texas in defiance of the Supreme Court (see image).
enslaved person being emancipated in 1942 Beeville, Texas
From the Wiki article…
In September 1942, Alfred Irving, who is believed to be one of the final chattel slaves in the United States, was freed at a farm near Beeville. Alex L. Skrobarcek and his daughter, Susie, were indicted by a federal grand jury in Laredo, Texas on November 9, 1942.[11][12][13][14] The pair were found guilty in Federal court in Corpus Christi, Texas on Thursday, March 18th, 1943. Alex L. Skrobarcek was sentenced to only four years in prison, while his daughter, Susie Skrobarcek, received two years. [15]
It all seems quite a bit overblown to me. There’s legal precedent for the President to take over a state’s national guard and use federal troops to enforce a court order (see Brown v Board of Education):
“In September 1957, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas Army National Guard to block the entry of nine black students, later known as the “Little Rock Nine”, after the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. President Dwight D. Eisenhower responded by asserting federal control over the Arkansas National Guard and deploying troops from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division stationed at Fort Campbell to ensure the black students could safely register for and attend classes. […]” (Source: en.wikipedia.org/…/Brown_v._Board_of_Education)
The current wording of the Insurrection Act provision (which has been amended a few times since initial adoption), according to Wikipedia:
<span style="color:#323232;">"Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion."
</span>
Just my $.02 but I’d guess either the feds back down or Texas does. Hopefully nobody gets trigger happy.
The aftermath of racial desegregation court victories are some of the most interesting things in recent US history. A law would be struck down and sort of left like that… and people would take it upon themselves to organize and challenge the new law, often in the face of violent opposition. Freedom Riders taking busses down to the south to challenge desegregation of public transit being met with mobs and put in jail.
The reference to Little Rock Nine suddenly made me realize that Forest Gump was 38 at the time of Forest Gump.
I’m 38 now. As tired as I am of Hollywood reimagining films from the nineties, I would appreciate a Forest Gump born in the 80s. The whole concept could really be repeated every 30 years or so.
Most Americans aren’t interested or even capable of fighting in a civil war. When you live paycheck-to-paycheck, you’re not going to abandon your family to fight on the front lines.
And a huge percentage of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck.
Bingo. If Texas tried to leave, a HUGE chunk of the population would revolt against the State of Texas. Many more would just leave. Very little good would remain.
You’re wrong though. The general public is more likely to engage in civil unrest when they’re struggling. The reality though is that while many Americans might be living paycheck to paycheck, they’re not poor and not struggling. They are just bad at managing their finances and they have a lot to lose.
If you have more to lose than to gain, you won’t participate in a civil war. But when you’re a slave working in a cotton field, you have nothing to lose, only something to gain.
The idea that your average American is so poor is just laughable.
over half a million live on the streets. flat out homeless. and then, the working poor, which you are if you live paycheck to paycheck. also, if you can’t live unless you work, you’re the working class.
Either you’re being purposefully deceitful, or you have a horrible understanding of macroeconomics. But please, let’s just continue to ignore the elephants named record-inflation, rent records and housing crisis in the room.
Abraham Lincoln thought they could not. In his inaugural address, he opined that the union was formed for perpetuity and that if the accession of a state to the union required the consent of all other states, so would its secession. He was, among other things, a lawyer so he usually knew what he was talking about.
Legal Eagle just released a video on exactly this topic. Spoiler: the whole Texas being allowed to secede is basically a myth and pretty much all scholars agree that Texas nor any other state has the ability to leave except by a mutually agreed dissolution or via revolution.
The thing about law though, is that it’s just a framework of written social contracts between rational parties agreeing to abide by the terms and consequences.
Reality is a bit different.
Texas could halt physical transport of goods/services. Refuse to buy US imports. Stop collecting tax revenue. Gun down federal employees that don’t swear Texan allegiance.
It doesn’t really matter what legal papers say, when it comes to actions.
Sure - there may be consequences for such “illegal” state actions, and the documented illegality would be articulated as official justification after administering such consequences.
But that also only matters if Texas is defeated … in the unlikely event they “win,” - they’d write their own narrative with legal justification.
I’m not saying they have any chance - just making the point that “legal” and “illegal” are arbitrary and determined by whoever is the dominant power. Texas seceding is “illegal” only so long as the US remains powerful. If by some unholy miracle, Texas were to win independence from the US, they would probably write their own laws to say rejoining the US is illegal.
Another pair of cases to make my point - the Holocaust was “legal” to the Nazis. After they were defeated, the UN made genocide “illegal.” But how many genocides have occurred around the world since 1949?
Laws are only as good as they are enforceable, which is exactly what you underscore by citing the strength of the US military. Is it “legal” to make drone strikes or drop a nuke on Texas? 🤷
So far as I understand, there is a common idea that Texas has the legal ability to leave it it wants, but it’s just a popular myth as far as I’m aware. Whatever their state constitution says doesn’t matter anyway, because federal law trumps state laws and as far as I’m know there’s not a legal mechanism for states to leave again, it’d have to either get the government as a whole to make legal or possibly even constitutional changes to allow it, or leave illegally, either by force or by having a sympathetic government just not press the matter and just ignore the laws in question. I can’t really see them getting enough support for the former two, they’re too weak compared to the federal government for an actual war, and the current administration is not likely to just let them go, so I don’t expect them to go anywhere unless one of those things drastically changes.
Even if they voted for it and ratified it they couldn’t over turn it or legally secede from the USA.
In the 1869 case Texas v. White, the court held that individual states could not unilaterally secede from the Union and that the acts of the insurgent Texas Legislature — even if ratified by a majority of Texans — were “absolutely null.”
When Texas entered the Union, “she entered into an indissoluble relation,” Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase wrote for the court. “All the obligations of perpetual union, and all the guaranties of republican government in the Union, attached at once to the State. The act which consummated her admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final. The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration, or revocation, except through revolution, or through consent of the States.”
Chase added: “The ordinance of secession, adopted by the convention and ratified by a majority of the citizens of Texas, and all the acts of her legislature intended to give effect to that ordinance, were absolutely null. They were utterly without operation in law.”
Another source of confusion and misinformation over the years has been language in the 1845 annexation resolution that Texas could, in the future, choose to divide itself into “New States of convenient size not exceeding four in number, in addition to said State of Texas.” But the language of the resolution says merely Texas could be split into five new states. It says nothing of splitting apart from the United States. Only Congress has the power to admit new states to the Union, which last occurred in 1959 with the admission of Alaska and Hawaii.
Now that’s not to say if it was challenged again in today’s Supreme Court that they wouldn’t overturn that like they did with Roe v Wade. But as far as I can tell they legally can’t right now.
I got downvoted elsewhere for saying this, but let me ask - if they just …went rogue and reeeeeeally started stirring shit up - like setting blockades on highways, rail stations, and ports, stopped exports - like really tried to cause the US economic trouble - attacking federal buildings etc.
What’s any legal precedent matter? Aside from justification for getting totally railed by the US military.
I mean, isn’t this kind of keeping with the theme of US civil wars so far?
If I was creating a civil war bingo card based on history of civil wars in the US, “starts over how people with darker skin can be abused or not” would certainly have been on it.
A lot of you all must be too young to remember. This isn’t a new thing for Texas to do. They threatened to secede at least once (maybe twice) while Obama was president. Once it was straight out of the North Korean playbook, claiming a training exercise the military was conducting was a cover for a military invasion of Texas.
The Dollop did a podcast on Jade Helm as it was happening. Definitely recommend listening to that one if you like American history podcasts. It’s episode 100 I believe
And thats why I’m not worried about them doing anything other than what they’re already doing. They know they would be fucked if they leave.
And if they do? Well then we deal with it when that time comes. Hopefully a bunch of left leaning people leave, including my brother and his wife, and a bunch of MAGAts can go there and talk about how much they love America while also leaving it.
The older I get the more I eyeroll at the political posturing. It’s definitely worse than when I was younger, but also it’s all happened before. It’s just loud people trying to be loud to keep us all afraid and obediently going to work, then every 4 years it gets loud again so we vote for who they want us to.
Real convenient the border is such a huge issue a few months before the election.
Of course we still have to take it seriously, the minute we let our guard down they start implementing stuff, look at roe v wade, but even then they didn’t know what to do after that. It’s all about staying in power for them
I get what you’re saying, but at some point we have to admit that there really aren’t any adults at the table. A direct example is the governments covid response and another more recent is the emergence of the so-called freedom caucus. Basically I subscribe to the depressing notion that all these fuck head fascists that came before have sewn their seeds and now there is an alarmingly large amount of the populace who have drank the koolaid, made from those seeds, and even worse is a lot of the original sewers (heh), have lost the thread and are drinking their own koolaid…
Texas has made an issue over their independence and God-given right to be Texas, in defense of their the right to own chattel slavery since their first secession. From Mexico. In 1836.
Texas reconfirmed their desire to die on the hill of their divine right to own people, by seceding from the US in 1861.
After the civil war, Texas was a haven for the Confederates - and their ideology has been fomenting ever since
They’ve been talking of secession openly since at least the 1990s.
I think this is the first time since the civil war that other states have involved their national guards in support of a hotbed issue that could lead to a secession.
Those states are going to be in a rude awakening when they realize they are broke because the blue states are by far the largest contributors to federal funding. When they cut that off, the welfare state will come crawling back quickly.
The welfare states regularly turn down federal funding because they do not care about the lower income portions of their state. Alabama will just have fewer people able to feed their selves.
We can beat them! The US Army, Navy, Air Force, and that other one that no one cares about, they don’t stand a chance!
Like, we can all joke about civil war and splitting up the red and blue, but, like, when it comes down to deciding who gets the nukes in the divorce, it becomes pretty obvious that it’s just super dumb to think about realistically.
From what I’ve heard, the supreme court decision was mostly about the feds having access to the border, and the ability to cut down the razor wire, rather than any specific opposition to the razor wire existing in and of itself. I would wager this whole deal is mostly just a kind of political play, to try and egg biden into doing something stupid, while simultaneously keeping up the appearance that everyone at the head of these states is doing something dangerous, anti-institutional, and counter-cultural, even though they’re all kind of inherently unable to do anything along those lines just as a matter of their positions.
Everybody’s correct when they say that the political divides in this country are less clear-cut, but I also don’t think that the radicalization that we’ve seen, as a matter of perspective from being in online space, necessarily reflects reality. I think if you look at most people, most people want social security of some kind, and want healthcare of some kind, and want drug legalization of some kind, and want us to stop fighting wars in some form. Those are all kind of generalities, because the specific mechanism by which people want those things achieved differs from person to person. It’s very fractured as a matter of course, as a matter of how our political system and society is set up, and the ruling class has taken advantage of this to enact a divide and conquer strategy, where they can selectively promote whatever ideological positions benefit them the most, and cordon everyone off into a relatively small set of solutions over which they have a high amount of control. Rather than, you know, what a good democracy might do, which is come to a compromise solution, that everyone but the most extreme propagandized radicals might be kind of okay with. There is a reason why lots of conservatives like communism, as long as you use the right words. Both parties attempt to be mostly “populist” parties. This is all kind of obvious, right, but people understate the degree to which it’s a deliberate thing, and the overstate the degree to which it’s been successful, you know, which isn’t surprising, because, again, serves the interests of the powerful. People aren’t, broadly, morons, people have realized that this is all the case. That’s mostly what the “radicalization” that you’ve seen online has been, people just realizing that they hate these shitass solutions that aren’t really compromise solutions. See how everyone is cripplingly disappointed with the democratic party, and also how, likewise, conservatives are consistently disappointed with their own party, as well, and for many of the same reasons, barring the extreme radicals.
Most people are focused on how the internet divides people into radicalized swaths and conspiracy theorists, which is true, but even the mainstream monopolized internet is kind of a good tool for mass mobilization. See the occupy movement and the arab spring for older examples, for more recent examples, maybe the george floyd protests, or the french retirement protests. The only risk of these is kind of that they more easily get co-opted as a result of their visibility, i.e. “defund the police” gets turned into an argument for “fund the police”. If you were an asshole, you could cite charlottesville, or jan 6th, for examples of internet mobilization, but those are relatively smaller scales of things, compared to the others, which were more popular, they just got disproportionate media attention relative to their size, and had disproportionate political effects.
I think if we’re looking at the true, extreme political radicals, we’re seeing them come about as a result of a kind of well-oiled engine. I’m not gonna say that this is an institutional kind of thing, and it’s maybe more of a third level effect of active decisions, but it’s still something that, nonetheless, has been deliberately constructed. 4chan is funded by a japanese toy company and a hands off japanese internet techbro, and is administrated by some former american military freak who’s deliberately organized the site. The more radical offshoots, that use the same source code, tend to be funded by oil money, and political action committees, but through second-level effects, where they fund some small level conservative actor, and then they prop up the space. Which churns out some radical terrorists that are capable of your more fucked up bombings, and shootings, and controlled and coordinated protests. And then you kind of get military people at almost every level of this, in lower numbers, who act to control the space.
I dunno what I mean to extrapolate from all of this, but yeah. There’s probably not going to be a civil war.
Apologies, but too verbose and meandering to gain insight/understanding from (and I tried). Also, its murder trying to read that on a phone (vs PC monitor) to boot.
Appreciate the attempt though, thank you for that.
If you read the popular opinions around 1860, we have the same “we are right and we’ll show them” attitude building up in the new poor-people-and-women slave states.
The US Regular Army (RA) was founded in 1775. State militias supported the RA through the various wars fought on what is now US soil (including the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812). In the Civil War, the RA was supported by volunteers and fought on the side that ultimately won. The Confederate Army was similar to the RA at the time. Currently, the RA has been absorbed into the US Army (including Army Reserve and National Guard).
So… yes there was a federal military, but it was a different thing than the US Army is now. How that would play out if things went bonkers in 2025… who knows. There are a LOT of people around the world watching VERY closely though… and really hoping (not that confidently though) that sanity will prevail.
What is curious to me is these are state departments disagreeing, though the previous civil war was fought between federal and state governments with raised armies.
This time I was expecting the police vs. militants. Uncontrolled civil unrest. Portland and Minneapolis but spread across the nation, cranked to eleven.
The states are beginning to openly disrespect the authority of the federal government. Texas Gov. Abbott directly said he believes Texas State law supercedes federal law. There is no basis for that position in law; the law dictates exactly the opposite. If Texas refuses to respect the authority of the United States of America and the rulings of the Supreme Court, the only way to resolve that is civil war.
Add comment