By J.B. Shurk
December 14, 2023 - States should dissolve the federal government and form new unions. Is that such an awful thing to say? The colonies came together voluntarily, and the states should be permitted to just as voluntarily exit when the preservation of their citizens’ lives and liberties demands that they do so. An appreciation for the individual states’ sovereign powers and a guarantee that the imposition of federal authority would be limited in scope were key
assurances for persuading skeptical colonial representatives to bind their discrete political bodies together. This understanding of each state’s enduring right to secede from a Union that no longer represented its interests was common right up until the death and devastation of the Civil War. Then the states looked around at the carnage and realized that the federal government was playing for keeps. Violent coercion, in other words, altered a well-established belief that deference to the federal government was based upon continued consent from each state’s citizens. Isn’t it time for “consent of the governed” to again actually mean something?
