What if the Right of Secession had been made explicitly and clearly legal in the U.S. constitution?

The state supreme basically have free reign on how they set up their governmnet at this point right?

So what happens if a pro-secession faction violently upends a state government or even a by the books "legal coup" does the federal government have the power to step in?
 
The state supreme basically have free reign on how they set up their governmnet at this point right?

If they've decided to place the right for secession at that level, the state level, which seems to make the most sense for early USA. The right to secede could be argued as the right to set a non-republican or non-constitutional government, for example, and that could be the largest effect of this change.

Perhaps a native state could be admitted under different terms in this USA? Perhaps Hawaii is admitted with the local monarch acting as the governor?

So what happens if a pro-secession faction violently upends a state government or even a by the books "legal coup" does the federal government have the power to step in?

If they haven't laid out a process for secession they're asking for trouble when someone does want it.


The right of self-determination just isn't something governments can believe in. If they make it technically legal, they'd also make it impossible to accomplish (Catalonia is in a kafkaesque situation), or they'd consider it a hostile act from the new state (Brexit sort of, and every proposed secession from the USA is assumed to immediately create a new and hostile neighbor).
 

Skallagrim

Banned
The right of self-determination just isn't something governments can believe in. If they make it technically legal, they'd also make it impossible to accomplish (Catalonia is in a kafkaesque situation), or they'd consider it a hostile act from the new state (Brexit sort of, and every proposed secession from the USA is assumed to immediately create a new and hostile neighbor).

While it's true that governments typically don't like secessions (it removes people from their power, which costs them revenue, and also they tend to believe that their power is right and proper), it's not true that governments can't support mechanisms of secession. Especially when the government in question is a weak congress overseeing a collection of legally sovereign states that very recently seceded from another government.

I remain quite confident that had the issue been forced, and an article regulating secession been put in the USA's constitution, it would have been a very moderate mechanism that makes secession neither overly easy nor extremely difficult to effect. Whether the federal government at a much later date would accept secession of find a dubious pretext to forcibly prevent it is another matter, of course.
 
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