this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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Do states even have a legal way to secede?
Didn't have a way to legally secede from Britain
But this time there would be no ocean between the two sides.
See: American civil war
Define "legal".
Enshined in law, so that state can unilateraly decide to secede and federal govt must accept it.
Nope. The south already tried that.
If you want to gain independence, you have to fight the federal government's monopoly on violence. At its core, that's how all law is backed up. Two things you need to be a country. First, the ability to backup your independence with force. Second, the acknowledgement of the international community and their willingness to sign treaties with you. Sealand doesn't have any issues defending their "independence", but no one has signed a treaty with them for instance.
No but there's no law against expelling a state from the union. Kind of a reverse secession if you can piss trump off enough for him to actually do it (no law saying that only Congress can expel them, so it would go to the courts).
To take this in a different direction, legal or not (considering the "higher power" generally gets to define what is and isn't legal and might do so for its own benefit rather than in the best interest of everyone, if there even is such a thing), how can it be determined if a subset of a power structure breaking away from that power structure is a good thing or bad thing? What arguments other than "we'll use force" are there to support a region needing to remain under the thumb of a power they no longer wish to serve?
No. A full breakdown here https://youtu.be/1dhvry6E0jA
That's the Deceleration of Independence.
That's the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. And for as much as it is a foundational document of the US, it's also not a legal document.
The preamble to the Constitution is NOT the same as the preamble to the declaration of Independence. They were completely separate documents written more than a decade apart.
in fact:
You have both corrected me well, I admit I was wrong. Sorry.