- Joined
- Oct 1, 2005
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- Political Leaning
- Libertarian - Right
The re-admission process was the outrgowth of Charles Sumner's legal rationalizations of "state suicide" and statewide felo de se.
The flaw in the logic is that if a state has the capacity to dissolve itself via secession from the Union, then secession becomes accomplished fact, and that the inhabitants of the presumably dissolved state are then free to establish such government outside the Union as they see fit; felo de se fails because there was no statute prohibiting such dissolution, nor does common law address the notion as applied to states, and thus no state felonious conduct.
However, if a state, by secession, ceases to be a state, then the territory of that dissolved state necessarily is outside the United States--it cannot be a territory of the United States because the territory was not "owned" by the United States for the duration of statehood, and thus, upon secession/dissolution, the territory of that state is outside the jurisdiction of the United States, and the inhabitants of that territory are unencumbered from fashioning a new government for themselves.
It is worth noting that even Texas v White, the one Supreme Court ruling I know of touching on secession, did not absolutely say that secession was unequivocally legally impossible.
If there can be "consent of the States," there can be secession.
Even if you follow Texas v. White, it doesn't change anything -- "the States" didn't consent.