Ikki Nikki

States' rights are wonderful.

States' rights are the reason one state does things differently from another.  They're what enable Pennsylvania to run a chain of "state stores" at which to buy alcoholic beverages, enable Maine and Nebraska to proportionally award some of their presidential electors, enable Hawaii and Utah to ban gambling, and enable New Jersey to require expiration dates on water, which doesn't really expire, which means that expiration dates get printed on water bottles in all fifty states because it's too expensive to print dates on only bottles sold in New Jersey . . . oh, and it's illegal only in New Jersey to pump your own gas.  (Okay, maybe New Jersey is a bad example here.)

States' rights are guaranteed in the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, written by Founding Father Roger Sherman of Connecticut, the only state with a stand-alone gift tax (and it's Connecticut's right to have one!), which reads as follows, and I quote:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

So, the rights of the states matter a lot.  But the states do not have the right to withdraw from the Union in defiance of federal policy regarding the restriction in federal territories of a practice legal in certain states and banned in others, because secession under any circumstances is unconstitutional.  No state has the right to secede on the basis of issues regarding federal powers and individual liberties, and that was especially the case regarding . . . slavery.

But Nikki Haley, campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination in New Hampshire, seems to think that the cause of the Civil War  was a issue over states' rights, personal liberty, and federal government overreach.  

Which is particularly strange when you remember that her home state of South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union after Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860, said it was doing so because "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution."

Haley has since tried to backtrack on her statements, but the very idea that she could talk about the cause of the Civil War and not acknowledge slavery would be laughable if not for the fact that she will happily dodge any inconvenient realities of American history to avoid offending Trump supporters whose votes she doesn't have a prayer of getting anyway.  How bad it is for her?   She has Ron DeSantis - who approved educational guidelines in Florida to suggest that slavery provided skills to those in bondage - criticizing her, and she has Chris Christie laughing at her!  

We seem to be in an Alice in Wonderland situation when a South Asian woman married to a white man in the state where Bob Jones University is located can't talk openly and honestly about race.

Then again she is a Republican . . .