Is state nullification constitutional?

LaMidRighter · Jun 28, 2013

Tucker Case said:
Nobody is arguing otherwise. Immigration is not citizenship. Residency is not citizenship. Nothing in the 14th about Naturalization was new or different than what was already in the constitution except for the idea that state's could not treat naturalized citizens any differently than they treated other citizens. It has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with immigration, though. Creating uniform rules of naturalization is an enumerated power in Article 1 section 8, so defining who can become a naturalized citizen and how they go about it has always been a federal power. The 14th had no effect on that.

Ergo, the 14th could not possibly have had any effect on immigration, since nothing about naturalization changed with the 14th.

There were a couple of key changes. The fourteenth held the federal to the standards set fourth in A.1 S.8 and later bound the states to all bill of rights protections. That was kind of key in taking the states' arguments out of any immigration issues IMO.

Which has nothing whatseover to do with this discussion, because no amendment was passed regarding immigration. No amendment was passed regarding naturalization, either.

Don't have to be, the powers are already held by the federal.

False.

No, very true.

I won't even address the inherent hyperbole in your argument, I'll just point out the statement of yours, which I highlighted, which proves it is not a defense issue. Doublethink, dude. Doublethink.

It's not hyperbole, crossing borders without permission is an invasion. I was very careful to differentiate between a hostile military invasion and a simple criminal invasion. WIthout permission to be here a person is invading.

And as I said earlier, repeatedly, if the individual involved is deemed to be a legitimate threat to the nation, it returns to the federal purview under the defense powers.

Anyone crossing borders illegally committed a criminal act. There needs be no further differentiation. There is legal recourse.

You are the person interpreting the 14th. It doesn't make naturalization federal, because defining the naturalization process was always federal. Article 1, section 8. You implied earlier that you knew what the enumerated powers were in this discussion. NOw you ar eimplying that you have no idea what they are, because you seem to think the 14th had something to do with naturalization.

It's written for all to see.

There was no need for an amendment in order to state that all person's born in the US were citizens. There was a need for an amendment to ban states from treating one group of citizens differently from another group of citizens as far as laws go.

And the U.S. as well.

The key word there is citizens.

Not all Immigrants are citizens, nor are all immigrants required to be on the path to citizenship (aka in the process of naturalization).

1) That's the problem, certain people were not citizens at the time, they were slaves. 2) No non-citizen qualifies for permanent residence, every non-citizen is here at the discretion of the U.S., AND there has to be a way to enforce that, hence, immigration ties into the initial naturalization power.

So are gun bans. Logic fail.

Incorrect. Not only is there NO attachable power of the federal to regulate firearms there is a prohibition against such. Not even close to analagous.

False. Millions of non-citizens have permanent standing in the US. They are called a permanent resident aliens for a reason. They have been granted legal residency for an unlimited amount of time. that's permanent standing. They only lose that standing as a result of due process. It does not expire. Even if their green card expires, they can renew it with little difficulty. Much like how your drivers license expires and you just go and renew it without any trouble.

They can lose it through due process, all you needed to say. Most of these are asylum seekers, and if they commit a crime there is a much lower standard for deportation, a citizen must be expatriated first which has the highest standard.

think for a second, LA. Think about what you are trying to use as evidence that the federal has the constitutional authority to control immigration in a debate about whether or not this authority was usurped from the states.

Now that you've thought about that for a second, explain how saying "This is the way it is" has any ****ing bearing on a debate about "How it became the way it is".

There is no answer to it, because it's a stupid as me saying "Illinois has gun bans, ergo, gun control laws are constitutional."

Not the same thing. You can't justify a legitimate debate with something that is provably fully illigitimate.

Just because the permanent residency is conditional doesn't make it impermanent. It is the indefinite nature of the residency allowance that makes it permanent (stable, unchanging). If a person who is a PRA commits a crime, the law treats that as the choice to willingly relinquish their residency status. They are informed of the requirements for maintaining their green card when they receive it, so the only way that they can lose it is by making the choice to do so.

That's the thing, the federal has to have the right of enforcement otherwise their other power is meaningless.

Nobody has ever argued otherwise in this thread. You've simply attempted to make a false equivalency between that and immigration in order to ignore the fact that control over immigration is NOT an enumerated power, nor is it a power granted by any amendments.

You keep accusing me of making false equivalencies which is not the case. It's very simple, the federal must have enforcement powers if they are charged with the rest of the process.

The only reason a person is here illegally is because the federal government stole the power of determining residency from the states. Deportation due to unconstitutional federal laws is unconstitutional.

They already had it.

And a person can be here legally without going through the naturalization process (hint: million of pimmigrants are here legally without going through said process), so that comment is worthless nonsense that has no bearing on the discussion.

Not "plenty" in respect to the number of people here illegally. That's the point, permanent non-resident aliens have to meet very specific requirements usually based on humanitarian(read; political or other threats within their homeland) or specialized work visas. Because there are cheaters in the system the federal must have enforcement power.

Depends on what the state they reside on says about it. If the state decides they have a right to residency, they do have a right to be here. The feds stole the power to determine who has a right to be here from the states via judicial activism.

Incorrect. If they are breaking border law, they may have a right to state residency in that state but not to be in the United States period.

So then you agree that immigration (which is not crossing the border, it is obtaining residence in a country other than the country of birth) is not under the federal purview.

Immigration necessitates crossing the federal border. There are no two ways about that. No matter which way you slice it, an illegal immigrant crossed a federal border and is subject to all consequences thereof.

I'm not conflating two issues. Immigration is the act of a person seeking residence. That's what it is. One must cross a border in order to immigrate, but that doesn't make immigration the act of crossing a border nor does it mean that those who have control over who may or may not cross a border can make a determination about who may or may not immigrate. They can only make the determination of whether or not said person can cross the border, and they can only do that AT the border. If the feds fail to do their job AT the border, they lose their opportunity to make any determination about residency (according to the constitution, specifically the 10th amendment).

The immigration decision is made by the State, or was until the feds usurped via judicial activism.

You were conflating two issues, read back a bit.

MadLib · Jun 28, 2013

LaMidRighter said:
It's rare that an amendment turns out to be bad, but they are usually as easy to strike, such as prohibition. The point to making it as difficult as possible for D.C. to expand federal power is to prevent bad ideas from becoming law, every time they circumvent the process we lose.

I get that, and I agree with the idea of an inefficient amendment process, but I also understand that that is an encouragement of the federal government to attempt to circumvent the amendment process.

True, but it was understood until the WPA of 1973 to be a presidential power. Congress has a check on that with the power of the purse, they can defund any wars they deem to be frivolous, and should actually.

I could never in good faith defund a war in progress. That would be playing with soldiers' lives to preserve my own political powers.

I see your point. The problem was that the Cotton gin was still labor dependent, and small enough to justify further slave ownership. However there were other machines following, and remember, the more workers you have as a responsibility the more resources you must expend on them, food, clothing, housing, other necessities. The idea behind scholars who gave slavery another maybe 20 years was that economic laws would have caught up to new advances, making the expenditures on slave labor less economically efficient.

Twenty years is a long time if you're a slave.

The end of slavery was the only good to come out of the end of the Civil War, but remember that there were unintended consequences to follow. The federal declaring secession to be illegal took a very important tool away from the states, race relations actually degraded after the Reconstruction, southern states never forgave the north for percieved(and some real) abuses. A lot of the economic disagreements were never solved, and to this day the northern and southern states often have open contempt for each other. Matter of fact, southern agricultural plantation owners found yet another way to screw former slaves, the sharecropping model was almost as bad, with southern former slaves being seldom well educated, many were shorted in those deals.

The North really skimped on helping freedmen and the South during the Reconstruction process, I agree. That was more the fault of the corrupt Johnson and Grant administrations than Lincoln and the Civil War.

Still, there is no denying the constitutional facts at hand. The power to enforce the Union was never stated in the legally binding Acts of the constitution, and secession was never prohibited the states. That is the part SCOTUS never tried to reconcile.

There was the power to quell insurrection, which for all intents and purposes the Confederacy was.

The Constitution was meant to close a few gaps that the federal needed when the Articles of Confederation failed. It wasn't meant to create a federal government that was more powerful than the states, only to give the federal just enough power to "play referee". Main focuses were on a common defense, a common currency, and the ability to settle interstate economic disputes.

It, by and large, increased the power of the federal government, so I'd see no reason for it to take away the binding nature of the Union that existed under the Articles.

Not exactly. The states were considered sovereigns, and most of the signatories of the Constitution alluded to that.

They were more sovereign than a territory would be, but nothing in the Constitution implied that they were nations. If they were, they could form confederacies and have their own standing armies and currencies, more like the EU than the US.

I disagree to an extent. If a federal government asserts that states surrender powers and to the effect no longer represent that state's best interests, it can be more than effective to threaten secession. Either the federal reigns itself in and respects it's bounds, or finds itself at the mercy of the new trade rules from that former state, this can be a very powerful threat. Imagine Vermont maple syrup now having a higher trade value to the U.S. as an imported good, or Maine Lobster now being an imported luxury. Even more pressing, say Louisiana and Texas secede because the federal encroachment is overbearing, we have the oil, and Louisiana specifically has quite a bit of the nations seafood business, and is a popular tourism destination. Sure, seceeding states risk losing business from the U.S. at large for retaliation, but the economic damage would be mutual. Under a secession talk though, both sides are supposed to talk, when they break down it becomes a big game of "chicken", but it can be good for the discourse on proper law and rights.

At this point, it would benefit any state far more to remain in the Union rather than secede. They'd immediately lose all grant money, and interstate highways and US military installations could be seized from them at will being federal property.

And if Louisiana were to secede, I'd call for another civil war. I could never give up Cajun food.

I've come to a different conclusion based on war powers readings, I'll have to do some reviewing. Because the president is the commander in chief it would preclude that he can suspend HC, but it is specifically mentioned for Congress iirc.

The Constitution was fairly clear on martial law, I don't see how HC suspension was even implied as a wartime power of the President.

Some of those were abolitionist tools, but many of those precluded even a major abolition movement. The thing is even though slavery was obviously wrong and hypocritical compared to the constitution the constitution still allowed for no trade discrepencies amongst the states.

Did it? I can see the Framers wanting to avoid such trade discrepancies since naturally the North would be attempting to use the House to benefit itself trade-wise simply because it is more populous and would have greater influence. Nonetheless, I can't see anything in the Constitution that explicitly forbids unfavorable trade, but IIRC interstate tariffs were forbidden.

The Union could have asked for payment rather than daring the south to attack. It's not black and white as an issue.

The Confederacy could have just backed down.

I'll just leave you with this, daring a southerner is not the best of ideas.

Us Yankees are tougher than you give us credit for :2razz:

Eh, not exactly. We were an agricultural society, there are many writings of the time that show the north wanted the south to industrialize at the south's expense. It's not as simple as school history makes it out to be.

Industrial farming did work out well for the South. The thing is that agricultural economies are almost always third-world, and so such a Southern economy would bring down the entire country. Italy is a good example of this: the urban north is industrious and wealthy, the rural south is much poorer.

It's not a simple issue. It's easy to blame the south based upon the simplified history of the issue, but realistically the north was just as guilty. As well, the war was not as much about slavery as forcing the Confederacy back into the Union, Lincoln's own accounts pretty much spelled that out.

I'm aware that the Civil War was about unity, but Lincoln was also a lifelong abolitionist. Freeing slaves was a secondary issue to him, but as history shows when given the option he chose to attempt to free the slaves, even going as far as to press for the Thirteenth Amendment while the war was still going on. Wars are never as simple as good versus evil, but some come damn near close. The Civil War and WWII are some of those "just" wars, in my opinion.

Had nothing to do with the war, he was openly anti-constitution prior to his presidency when he was a college professor at Princeton. In fact, people who hate the Federal Reserve can thank him and that Congress directly.

It's interesting how a Democrat put the Fed into place considering how the first Democratic president, Jackson, was a strong opponent of national banks.

Ah, but Robert's ruling expanded the taxation powers. The government doesn't even have to prove it has regulatory or enumerated powers over something now. That's the problem, Roberts said Obamacare was unconstitutional, except for the tax. This opens the door for other powers not found to just "be taxed".

They've extended the commerce clause and now taxation, but those can only go so far.

And much of that was created by his administration, exluding the World War and the Depression obviously. FDR's expansions though are largely regarded as power grabs that accomplished nothing of real value.

It's hard to assess whether or not the New Deal helped because the war is what managed to pull the country out of the Depression. I've still seen no evidence that Keynesian economics is harmful, so I stand by it. That's another thread topic, though.

Well. The good news is there are protocols to fix whatever needs fixing, the bad news is it takes a populace so furious that a lot of lousy politicians need to update their resumes.

Politicians are always going to be manipulative and self-serving. That's part of life.

LaMidRighter · Jun 28, 2013

MadLib said:
I get that, and I agree with the idea of an inefficient amendment process, but I also understand that that is an encouragement of the federal government to attempt to circumvent the amendment process.

It's simple to me, the amendment process is to protect the states and people from the federal, if they choose to circumvent they should be removed for perjury, and possibly sentenced to prison. They take an oath to uphold the constitution.

I could never in good faith defund a war in progress. That would be playing with soldiers' lives to preserve my own political powers.

Not necessarily, you keep the transportation funds in place so that they can pull out safely, but no funding of support vehicles or anything more than defensive ammunition. It leaves no choice to the executive but to pull out.

Twenty years is a long time if you're a slave.

True, and I'm not arguing the morality of it, but rather the economics. From the things I've read over the years racism actually was more prevalent because of the blowback from how the issue was handled. Many scholars speculate that an easing to the end would have been less consequential.

The North really skimped on helping freedmen and the South during the Reconstruction process, I agree. That was more the fault of the corrupt Johnson and Grant administrations than Lincoln and the Civil War.

Not only that, a lot of political cronies, the carpetbaggers and corruption.

There was the power to quell insurrection, which for all intents and purposes the Confederacy was.

Eh, that falls under subjective interpretation. Insurrection tends to be smaller in scale, and not representative of the people in general. The state actions to secede were IMO not the definition thereof.

It, by and large, increased the power of the federal government, so I'd see no reason for it to take away the binding nature of the Union that existed under the Articles.

The articles didn't speak either way about that, realistically, the Union was never given a direct power. I think that's the biggest problem.

They were more sovereign than a territory would be, but nothing in the Constitution implied that they were nations. If they were, they could form confederacies and have their own standing armies and currencies, more like the EU than the US.

I'll have to go back, Ernst Bachmann actually produced something to the contrary.

At this point, it would benefit any state far more to remain in the Union rather than secede. They'd immediately lose all grant money, and interstate highways and US military installations could be seized from them at will being federal property.

But the Union loses commerce equity, and most states have at least one high demand item. It's a good chance for an economic stalemate, that's when talks are possible.

And if Louisiana were to secede, I'd call for another civil war. I could never give up Cajun food.

LOL. We get that alot. Careful though, we all can shoot. LOL.:mrgreen:

The Constitution was fairly clear on martial law, I don't see how HC suspension was even implied as a wartime power of the President.

Again, I'll have to review it again. Lincoln played fast and loose with the rules, I didn't personally agree with his suspension of Habeas Corpus but constitutionally my first look I didn't see a problem.

Did it? I can see the Framers wanting to avoid such trade discrepancies since naturally the North would be attempting to use the House to benefit itself trade-wise simply because it is more populous and would have greater influence. Nonetheless, I can't see anything in the Constitution that explicitly forbids unfavorable trade, but IIRC interstate tariffs were forbidden.

That's actually what interstate commerce regulations were originally intended to be. A major problem during the AOC was that certain states did not hold others to equitable trade terms, it led to part of the problems with the Articles so that was to be rectified in the Constitution.

The Confederacy could have just backed down.

But on the swing side, so could the Union. The problems swung both ways, in a way, if I felt like my economic interests were being intentionally ignored I would not back down either, there are places where compromises are possible, immediate self interest isn't one of them IMO.

Us Yankees are tougher than you give us credit for :2razz:

Some are, gotta give credit where due.

Industrial farming did work out well for the South. The thing is that agricultural economies are almost always third-world, and so such a Southern economy would bring down the entire country. Italy is a good example of this: the urban north is industrious and wealthy, the rural south is much poorer.

But, we must look at it at the time. Someone has to grow the food, and the cotton, and at the time Agribusiness was much more profitable than today in comparitive numbers. Industrializing means retooling, as well it means relearning an entire way of life, this is only ever an option when others cease to be feasible.

I'm aware that the Civil War was about unity, but Lincoln was also a lifelong abolitionist.

I've seen contrary data to that, to my knowledge Lincoln was actually indifferent to slavery but rallied the abolitionists because of their political momentum.

Freeing slaves was a secondary issue to him, but as history shows when given the option he chose to attempt to free the slaves, even going as far as to press for the Thirteenth Amendment while the war was still going on.

I think this ties in with rallying the abolitionists as well. I haven't seen anything solid to give Lincoln full credit for being a real abolitionist. However there is no excuse for slavery, not anywhere, but especially not in a country that values liberty and human rights.

Wars are never as simple as good versus evil, but some come damn near close. The Civil War and WWII are some of those "just" wars, in my opinion.

I'll agree with you on WWII, Hitler was no doubt an evil little man, and his human rights record pretty much speaks for itself. The Civil War, IMO, was very unnecessary and both sides really dropped the ball on that one.

It's interesting how a Democrat put the Fed into place considering how the first Democratic president, Jackson, was a strong opponent of national banks.

Two different philosophies. Jackson was an economic conservative, and a segregationist(iirc), by the time Wilson was in power the progressives of the day were starting to infiltrate the Democrat party, they were the ones that sided with the muckrakers, the monopoly busters, etc. They were more for economic regulatory expansion.

They've extended the commerce clause and now taxation, but those can only go so far.

I hope you are correct in that, but with the sheer amount of citizens who defer to the court I'm not as certain as you.

It's hard to assess whether or not the New Deal helped because the war is what managed to pull the country out of the Depression. I've still seen no evidence that Keynesian economics is harmful, so I stand by it. That's another thread topic, though.

The problem with Keynsianism is it relies to much on macro economics and by it's nature plays dangerous games with inflation, the big numbers are more important than accurate ones, and that is of concern. Eventually a market must reset, and that is always a painful time.

Politicians are always going to be manipulative and self-serving. That's part of life.

No argument there.

Is state nullification constitutional?

Is state nullification constitutional?

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LaMidRighter

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MadLib

monstrous vermin

LaMidRighter

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