Correct. The constitution offers no provisions for secession and considers the United States “a perfect union”. If California were to try to secede it seems like this would be more of a symbolic gesture than anything. California has some pretty big advantages though in that it the wealth and economy and can afford to thumb its nose at the feds by not paying its share of federal taxes and self-funding in areas that the government refuses to touch.
@nimelennar touched on some of the specifics as to how this could happen but I can’t imagine either of those options would be likely to actually occur.
Not federally.
If Yes California can get enough signatures, they’ll put the issue up for a referendum vote in 2019. If that referendum gets 55% yes votes then the state will issue articles of secession. But short of armed revolution, the only real concrete thing they can do is to withhold funds.
If Milo wanted to do a talk on my Uni campus I’d be overjoyed.
“Okay, everyone, big talk coming up. You are… what? Protest it? Why? No, no, no, you are to go there with notebooks, and I want an itemized list of all material errors and logical fallacies by next Thursday. Extra credit if you come up with a good way to visualize it. And don’t forget sources! Proper citing is what separates humans from beasts.”
This news item showed up on MSNBC, and immediately was pounced on by the trained seals on the Facebook comments as evidence of how eeeeevil the lefties are. Anything that wasn’t teaparty/Alt-right-happy was buried under an avalanche of hate mail comments.
As far as the constitution is concerned, there’s no legal way for a state to secede, right?
We have a history of willfully omitting exit strategies.
Unilaterally, yes, but Congress has the constitutional power. The issue is that Congress is naturally going to be more inclined to either suppress the executive (Nixon) or suppress the seccession (Confederacy). It’s a moot point with the current Congress unless they plan to break up the US at the behest of Putin and other elites.
Everyone has the right to express their views, regardless if the majority find it in poor taste, hateful, what have you. Yiannpoulos is a tool and a hate monger, but he does have a right to show up to an event that he was invited to speak at.
The protesters also have the right to gather and call out Yiannpoulos and the school, but it turning violent and getting out of hand hugely undermines the whole process.
I agree, but my point is that if Trump is going to defend free speech then he should be specifically asked to defend the speech rights of someone he would be very hesitant to defend. I could have said “communist” or “Muslim scholar”, but NAMBLA would make him squirm if anyone could actually ask him the question.
[EDIT: to put this another way, I don’t think Trump cares one bit about free speech unless it’s speech he agrees with. If the head of NAMBLA had been invited to speak at UC Berkely and a similar protest erupted he would not have pushed to deny them federal support, same as if it had been a communist or Muslim scholar.]
Word on the street is Bannon wants California secession- 55 fewer blue votes in the electoral college.
And there may not be provisions in the Constitution for secession, but there’s not anything saying it ain’t allowed, either. The question the Civil War answered is whether it can happen unilaterally.
They aren’t funded by the federal government, except for research grants. And it is illegal to decide research grants on anything other than the merit of the proposal.
Thing is: those guys weren’t students. Almost certainly they are right wing provocateurs out to paint the dissenters as violent. A tried and true tactic of the CIA and FBI. Check out the wikisi on Operation CHAOS and COINTELPRO. Do you think they stopped doing this? Maybe they changed the names.
What you have to understand about Trump’s tweets is that they are not intended for you so it is useless for you play whack a mole with them. They aren’t meant to signal policy. They are his own personal Rush Limbaugh broadcast sent to his followers.
