When (and When Not) To Secede

It was 165 years ago today, Thursday, December 20, 1860, that South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union in response to Abraham Lincoln's election to the Presidency.

". . . that the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of 'The United States of America,' is hereby dissolved."

Today I am advocating for New Jersey - or California, Massachusetts, New York, or one of the other heavily Democratic states adversely affected by Donald Trump - to take the first step of secession in the hope of triggering a mass withdrawal from the Union that will necessitate the breakup of the United States and a new arrangement for the fifty states that will result in new republics and possibly some of the states becoming provinces of Canada. 

The reasons for secession are quite clear - abuse of Immigration and Customs and Enforcement agents, illegal disruptions and contractions of government services, suppression of individual and civil liberties, crimes against humanity . . . I could go on.  To respond to those who say that secession is unconstitutional, I would argue that Trump's unconstitutional actions and the failure of the other branches of government to check him render that annoying inconvenience moot.  Again: If what Trump does is not unconstitutional, nothing is unconstitutional.  Not even secession. I admit that the chances of any state seceding are slim, but I would argue that states have plenty of reasons to secede today . . . though they have fewer reasons to secede than the slave states of 1860 and 1861 had not to secede.

Empty threats are a leitmotif of American politics (though I would argue that not all of Trump's threats are empty), and the governors of the slave states of the lower South repeatedly threatened to secede throughout the summer and autumn of 1860 if Abraham Lincoln were to be elected President.  Then Lincoln was elected.  And then nothing happened for six weeks.  The slave states suddenly found themselves having to consider whether they should actually make good on their threats to secede, and President James Buchanan urged all fifteen of the slave states to wait and see what Lincoln would do once he took office in March 1861.  In the meantime, the Southern states weighed their options.  There were already plenty of reasons for them to remain in the Union.

First of all, Lincoln, though he won a majority in the Electoral College and won the most popular votes of any of the four - yes, four - major candidates of the 1860 presidential election, was very much a minority President, having won only 39 percent of the popular vote.  As with Barry Goldwater in 1964 or George McGovern in 1972, more than six out of ten voters thought Lincoln was too dangerous and radical to occupy the White House, but thanks to a four-way campaign - the Democrats fielded two nominees,  U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas from the North and Vice President John C. Breckinridge from the South, and there was also John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party - Lincoln was able to squeak through.  Lincoln's position was so precarious that he barely defeated Douglas in New York; had he lost that state, he would have been denied an electoral majority and Congress would have had to select the next President and Vice President.

Second, throughout the 1860 campaign and after the election, Lincoln promised that he would not try to abolish slavery where it already existed; he did not have the constitutional authority or the political support to do that.  He only promised to stop the spread of slavery in the territories that had not yet become states.  Therefore, Southern politicians should have been reassured that slavery could remain legal in their own states.  

Third, the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, which guaranteed slaves as property under the terms of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, was the law of the land.  The President of the United States could not and cannot change a Supreme Court decision.

Fourth, even though the Democrats were badly divided over slavery - hence two 1860 Democratic presidential candidates, one from the free North and one from the slaveholding South - they had nonetheless elected majorities to both houses of the 37th Congress that would convene in the first half of Lincoln's term as President.  The majorities, based largely in the South, could block any legislation or presidential initiative that the Southern states opposed.

Despite these reasons for not seceding, however, the slave states of the lower South saw Lincoln's election as the first shot across their bow from a purely northern party, the Republican Party, that represented the fastest growing regions in the country - the Northeast and the Midwest - which would soon overwhelm the Southern states in the House with their greater populations and in the Senate with the likely ban on slavery in territories waiting to be admitted into the Union.  The even balance of free and slave states had been upset in 1850 with the admission of California as a free state; the subsequent admissions of Minnesota in 1858, Oregon in 1859, and, in 1861 prior to President Lincoln's inauguration, Kansas as free states meant that, theoretically at least, the slave states would be outvoted in the Senate.  The states of the lower South decided that, if they didn't leave the Union immediately, they would never have the chance to do so again and would forever remain subservient to the North.   Fatuous reasoning, to be sure, but that's how Southerners felt at the time.  So, just before Christmas 1860, South Carolina, which had attempted to nullify a tariff law in 1832 because of its dependence on foreign trade and had caused a disunity crisis for President Andrew Jackson to confront, naturally became the first state to secede from the Union.

The house was divided.

Mississippi was the second state to secede and the first to secede in the new year of 1861.  Ironically, one of its two U.S. Senators, Jefferson Davis, had proposed that the slave states could remain in the Union and form a self-governing dominion within the American commonwealth.  But when his state left the Union, he resigned his Senate seat and returned home from Washington.  Then the rest of the lower South followed, in this order: Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and, at the beginning of February, Texas.  The seven new republics weren't independent for long; they soon formed the Confederate States of America, with Jefferson Davis as its President.  Eight slave states took President Buchanan's advice and waited to see what Lincoln would do as President.  Then, after Fort Sumter was fired upon, President Lincoln called for 75,000 Army volunteers to put down the rebellion.  Angered at the call for military action, Virginia left the Union, followed by Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee.  They too joined the Confederacy, and the Civil War was on. 

I don't advocate a second civil war to break up the United States when I call for my state of New Jersey to secede.  I call for enough states to secede in order to facilitate a conference not unlike the one that was held in Washington in February 1861 to avert civil war, and, this time, agree to a national divorce and not use military action to dissolve the Union.  Because when Fort Sumter in Charleston was attacked by the Confederacy, it led to a bloody conflict, and no one recalled what President Jackson had said during the 1832 Nullification Crisis: "Disunion by armed force is treason.  Are you ready to incur its guilt?"   

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 . . . 

Carolina Bound

Last month, as you will recall, I wrote a letter to former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley asking him to consider running for President in 2024 if President Biden does not.  After nearly a month, I still haven't gotten a reply.  But the political news from the past week has all but made that moot.  Because if there was any doubt about Biden's plans for 2024, that doubt was swiftly quashed with Biden's successful effort to get the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to change the order of the schedule of the presidential primaries and caucuses.

President Biden requested that South Carolina be the first state to hold a primary for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination on February 3, followed by the New Hampshire primary and Nevada caucus three days later.  Georgia would hold its primary on February 13, and Michigan would go next on February 27.  All of these dates are Tuesdays except for South Carolina's date, which is on a Saturday; Saturday primaries have been the standard there.  The DNC voted on the change and passed it overwhelmingly. 

Oh, Joe's running, all right.

Biden argues that South Carolina is more demographically representative of the party, with its large black population, and of the country, and thus it makes sense that South Carolina Democrats set the pace with their choice.  (The South Carolina Democratic Party is majority-black.)  It's also no coincidence that Biden won the 2020 South Carolina primary after biting the big one in the previous three contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.  I'm sure that South Carolina's Democratic Representative Jim Clyburn is pleased.  I'm sure that DNC Chair Jaime Harrison, another South Carolinian, is also pleased.

The change poses a great deal of problems, though.  Here's the first one.  No one is going to object to stopping Iowa from going first after it botched the reporting of the results of the 2020 caucus to the point where it hardly mattered that Pete Buttigieg won it.  But refusing to let New Hampshire go first runs afoul of a New Hampshire state law that demands that its presidential primary be first, with no ifs, ands or buts about it.  That could be a sticky wicket.  Second, South Carolina is such a strongly Republican state that it becomes meaningless for Democrats in the general election, as it hasn't voted Democratic for President since 1976.  Third, primaries are run by states, not parties, so South Carolina's Republican governor and Republican legislature would have to sign off on any change - and unless the GOP moves up the South Carolina primary to first-in-the-nation status to help former South Carolina Republican governor Nikki Haley, another possible 2024 presidential candidate, it won't do so (especially when Donald Trump wouldn't want competition from Haley, his former U.N ambassador).  Fourth, despite the fact  that New Hampshire's primary would take place three days after South Carolina's, so much focus would be on the Palmetto State, with its larger area and population and its bigger media market, that it would give the retail politics of New Hampshire, where presidential candidates can meet voters face to face and accumulate supporters one small living room or country inn at a time, short shrift.  The greater expanse of land and people in South Carolina prevents that sort of thing there.  That would mean a tougher time for dark-horse candidates like Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton from breaking through.  Joe Biden himself was a dark horse in both his 1988 and 2008 presidential campaigns, but he never made it to New Hampshire in either try and came in fifth there on his third try in 2020, and, again, it's no coincidence that he doesn't want New Hampshire to go before South Carolina. 

The fifth problem is that Democratic presidential hopefuls who have the best interests of black voters at heart but don't necessarily connect well with black voters have no chance of getting momentum out of South Carolina.  After his difficulties with blacks in his hometown of Baltimore over policing when he was mayor, which crippled his 2016 presidential run, I doubt that Martin O'Malley could make a go of it in South Carolina even if he runs in 2028.  Pete Buttigieg would also have problems with black voters in South Carolina after his own policing issues from when he was mayor of South Bend, Indiana.  Both O'Malley and Buttigieg also suffer from being the type of  presidential candidates who look like Presidents out of central casting and appeal to white yuppies, much like Gary Hart, Jerry Brown, or the horrible John Edwards, and black voters have historically resisted such candidates.   

The 2028 presidential hopeful who benefits most from this primary schedule change is Kamala Harris, simply by being black and having a good rapport with the black voters who form the Democratic Party's backbone.  Remember also that Jim Clyburn said she should be Biden's heir apparent.  Aside form the obvious fact that Democratic presidential heirs apparent (Walter Mondale, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton) never pan out, Kamala Harris is extremely unpopular and has never been tested in a presidential campaign.  (Her 2020 run imploded before anyone even cast a ballot or participated in a caucus head count.)  The Democratic Party doesn't just need a candidate who can play well among South Carolina Democrats in 2028; it needs a candidate who can pay well nationally.  Who knows - maybe the 2028 primary will actually produce someone like that.

As for Martin O'Malley . . . I'd better get used to the idea that he will likely never be President, just as we'll likely never send humans to Mars or build a high-speed passenger rail network at home.  O'Malley once said that he believed the the U.S. was capable of doing both at a forum during his 2016 presidential campaign, but his Kennedyesque call to greatness obviously impressed no one in the audience.

Oh yeah, the forum where O'Malley spoke was in South Carolina.   

Washington Hijinks

A few pundits gave been saying that the Senate health care bill isn't the final bill, just a negotiating tool.  Right - a negotiating tool to determine just how large the tax cuts for the rich will be.  But the disagreements over what to leave in and what to leave out - or who to leave out - will make it very tricky to get it through.  Meanwhile, the Democrats are fervently defending the existing Affordable Care Act tooth and nail . . . without much power to stop or retard the progress of the GOP's health bill.  It figures that they would suddenly defend and "own" the Affordable Care Act after it's too late.  They have to rely on Republican ineptitude.   Fortunately, that actually looks like a possibility.  And it may even be a reality; Mitch McConnell has just delayed a vote on the Senate bill, which likely won't come up until after Congress's Independence Day recess.

At the same time, lot of people are blaming Nancy Pelosi for the party's last special-election losses in Georgia and South Carolina.  Well, she's not going to be deposed - the old guard in the Democratic Party isn't going to let go of power so easily - but she's not to blame for these losses either.  Except for maybe her appointment of Representative Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico as the chairman of the committee that runs Democratic House campaigns, as he dropped the ball on these two races plus the the two in Kansas and Montana.  Geez, the Democrats could have won the South Carolina race if they gave more money to candidate Archie Parnell, but Luján concentrated on the the impossible dream of winning Georgia's Sixth House district seat.

It must have amused observers to see that the Democrats, having failed to make Hillary Clinton the first female President, spent so much money on this one district and saw Karen Handel and Handel's supporters use Nancy Pelosi, the first female House Speaker, in ads for Handel's candidacy in this district in order to win and become the first female U.S. Representative elected to the House from Georgia . . . and Handel, of course, was the Republican candidate.        

Carolina In My Mind

History was made in South Carolina yesterday as the Republicans nominated Indian-American state representative Nikki Haley to run for governor and voters in the palmetto State's First Congressional District nominated Tim Scott, who is black, to be the Republican candidate for that seat in the fall. Scott would be the first black Republican congressman from South Carolina since Reconstruction and the first black Republican congressman since 2003. Both are likely to win in November.

As much as I want to praise South Carolina Republicans for looking beyond race, gender, and ethnicity in these primary elections, I choose to damn them instead. Haley and Scott won largely out of right-wing anger with Washington and the Obama administration. Haley, a wealthy businesswoman, and Scott, who had the backing of the anti-tax, Wall Street-friendly Club For Growth, both represent a philosophy that promotes an unfettered market and a limited role for government - the same ideology that got this country in trouble in the first place. To give you an idea of how toxic Haley and Scott could be, both were endorsed by noted book-banning wolf killer Sarah Palin. The end.

The Republican party in South Carolina has been redeemed by the star quality of its nominees, though, after the embarrassing revelations of last year involving Mark Sanford. It's now the state Democratic party - which somehow nominated a loser named Alvin Greene to take on the horrible incumbent Republican senator Jim DeMint and has less than zero chance of unseating him - that's the joke, and the less said about that, the better.

Meanwhile, next door in North Carolina, U.S. Senate hopeful Elaine Marshall, a favorite among progressives, defeated establishment candidate Cal Cunningham for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination. This should be a big deal. Marshall did what Bill Halter couldn't do in Arkansas - defeat a Senate candidate backed by the White House. She's running in November against Richard Burr, a rather unpopular fellow, though probably not as unlikable as Jim DeMint, and one who holds a Senate seat that is a political graveyard for those who have held it in the past thirty-five years.

No one cares. No liberal commentators at MSNBC are celebrating this victory over establishment Democrats within the party. Even Ed Schultz hasn't mentioned it. As noted, Chuck Todd considers it such a long shot for the Democrats he'd rather not talk about it. But it proves that progressives are getting energized and are ready to put forward more of their own candidates. They've not only nominated Marshall to run for the Senate, in North Carolina, they've nominated Joe Sestak to do so in Pennsylvania. Two out of three ain't bad. And they pulled off their latest coup in a state where voters lean Republican but have shown a willingness to hear out Democrats. Ask Kay Hagan, North Carolina's Democratic senator. If this primary is any indication, the left is not going to let Tea Partiers suck up all the political oxygen.

He Wines and Dines With Argentines

I can't keep up with this story.

Not only was South Carolina Mark Sanford in Argentina instead of hiking in the Appalachians, he was having an affair with a woman in Buenos Aires.

He even wrote steamy love letters to his mistress with the kind of European-style erotic prose normally unassociated with politicians from the American South. He may even know how to tango.

Trouble is, he might have traveled there on the taxpayers' expense.

And he was away on Father's Day, despite the fact that he has four sons.

Wonder how this all looks to Richard Shindell, the American folk singer-songwriter who moved to Argentina in part to escape people like Mark Sanford?

A once-promising political career has ended because Sanford chose to wine and dine with an Argentine.

No Kuwaitis. That's not his style. ;-)

News of the Weird

U.S. Senator John Ensign of Nevada looked to be in big trouble when it turned out he had an affair with a staffer's wife, but when the Republican lawmaker announced the affair himself to short-circuit an extortion scheme against him, it got him a warm reception from his fellow GOP senators. They applauded him at their weekly luncheon. That showed 'em! :-D

Meanwhile, Mark Sanford, South Carolina's Republican governor, went on a five-day hike on the Appalachian Trail without telling his wife, the lieutenant governor, the South Carolina state police, and just about everyone else in the state.

Oh yeah, he might have hiked naked.

I didn't know Republicans were trying to get themselves back to the garden. Sanford wanted to get back to Eden!

He has a better chance than John Ensign.