Nearly two months ago, much of the world was shocked when the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in a move that was widely known as the “Brexit.” Though the vote was, ultimately, merely symbolic in that it would still require an act of Parliament to withdraw the UK from the EU, it nevertheless represented a milestone achievement in the movement by free peoples the world over to regain their national sovereignties and identities. For the first time in ages, the people of a nation have been able to express their desire to be free of the sort of globalist, internationalist bureaucratic state represented by the European Union. It’s little wonder that globalists, both within and without the EU, typically try to prevent such votes from taking place. The choice of the British people to leave the EU has already stimulated similar movements in other European countries, much to the discomfiture of the transnational globalist “elite” for whom the EU is the linchpin of their plans for one-world government.

Why did the British people vote to reject a united Europe and to go it alone? There were many reasons given by the various groups who supported Brexit. Among these were:

• The imposition of a massive regulatory regime onto the British economy which ruled practically every aspect of economic activity, down to minutiae relating to the number of bristles on toothbrushes and the wattage allowed for vacuum cleaner motors.
• Britain was unable to make its own laws, even those relating to local issues, if the EU’s bureaucracy decided to overrule them.
• The UK was forced to take in Middle Eastern “refugees” against the will of its people, and was in general unable to decide who entered or did not enter their country.
• Britain was forced to fund the European Commission, an unelected bureaucracy which had the right to impose new rules and regulations without any input from either the member states or from the largely impotent European Parliament.
• The British could not even exploit natural resources found in their own land and waters, such as the North Sea fisheries, because of EU restrictions.
• Britain, as well as many smaller states, found themselves consistently overruled by a small coalition of large states (Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, most often) and had laws forced onto them which they did not accede to or desire.

So it sounds like the British who voted in favor of Brexit had some pretty legitimate concerns, whether we look at them from an economic, social, or national sovereignty viewpoint.

Say…did anything about that list of grievances seem sort of familiar?

It sounds a lot like what the states in our own union deal with on a day to day basis here in the United States. We have a largely impotent Congress which hands over huge swaths of governmental power to unelected bureaucracies – some of which act independently of all branches of our government, and therefore fall completely outside of the whole “checks and balances” scheme instituted in the Constitution. The federal government uses all kinds of unconstitutional power grabs to impose greater and greater regulation in all of the states to the point where businesses and property owners can’t even use their own lands because of bogus environmental “wetland” rules, can’t hire who they want because of bogus “fairness” laws, and have to jump through so many regulatory hoops that the cost of doing business (and therefore also the cost of goods and services) are more needlessly expensive than they ought to be. For example, one estimate suggests that tractor trailers cost a little over $15,000 more than they otherwise would, solely because of EPA-imposed “climate change” rules – which seems like a pretty needless expense considering that there’s no actual scientific evidence to support the existence of man-made global warming.

The states were bullied into taking in thousands of dangerous, terrorism-prone Middle Eastern “refugees,” creating an immense threat to public safety and social stability. Many of the states, especially in the West, have huge percentages of their own lands locked up under federal control, unable to use them as they would see fit. Further, the states find themselves under the inordinate pressure of a cabal of large Blue states like California, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts which impose their values and priorities onto the majority of the other states which do not share those opinions.

It really sounds like America’s states could use a Brexit strategy of their own. If the federal government is not going to obey the Constitution under which is itself constituted, then it falls to the states to step up to the plate and force it to do so, or else leave this less perfect union and strike out on their own. After all, it’s not like Texas wouldn’t be one of the largest, richest countries in the world in its own right, and a confederation of southern and midwestern states ranging from North Dakota to Florida would be an economic powerhouse once it was free of Washington’s inept oversight.

It is the right of every state to nullify unconstitutional federal actions, whether laws or judicial decisions. This is true regardless of the pabulum you might have been taught in the history books. Jefferson and Madison – the two primary authors of the Constitution – both supported nullification by the states, and their opinions count for much more than those of any of today’s dime-a-dozen DC lackey lawyers. The states could refuse to take Syrian refugees, since the law under which those refugees are being distributed – as well as the open-ended powers granted to the President by that law – are grossly unconstitutional. Likewise, states could nullify the Obergefell ruling from last year by which the Supreme Court imposed gay “marriage” nationwide, even though a large majority of the states and the people had chosen against it. Indeed, any state can nullify any federal law that is not authorized by the Constitution.

The problem is not with the legality of doing so, but with finding state-level politicians who have the courage to actually act on their rights as stated by the 10th amendment and to reverse the longstanding-but-completely-false notion that “federal law always overrules state law.” In fact, it doesn’t. The Supremacy Clause of the Constitution states this explicitly when it says that laws must me made “in pursuance thereof” to the Constitution before they are supreme over state laws. The implied obverse is that when a federal law is not pursuant to the Constitution, it is of no force or validity. Indeed, while proponents of unlimited federal supremacy point to many early Supreme Court cases to support the notion that even in the early Republic, the federal government was always supreme, this is not actually the case. The relevant cases in question – Ware v. Hylton (1796), Marbury v. Madison (1803), Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee (1816), Cohens v. Virginia (1821), McColluch v. Maryland(1819), and Ableman v. Booth (1859) – all involved conflicts between the federal and state governments which turned on federal acts or institutions which were, in fact, pursuant to the Constitution. None of these involved a state nullifying an act of the federal government which was not constitutional.

Should the federal government fail to see reason, however, then the other option is secession – our own Brexit strategy.

I’m sure at this point, there are some idiots out there screeching that “secession is illegal!”

No it’s not. It’s perfectly constitutional under the 10th amendment. Oh, and the Supreme Court rulings that came right after the Civil War and declared it to be “unconstitutional”? Those rulings were themselves unconstitutional. Supreme Court rulings based on post-war emotions rather than the Constitution itself are prima facienull and void. The fact that the South lost the Civil War did not “settle” the question of whether secession was legal or constitutional. Believing that it did is a logical fallacy – cum hoc, ergo propter hoc – the faulty reasoning which supposes that because two events occurred together, there is a causative connection between the two. In this case, the suggestion is that because the South seceded and then militarily lost the war while it was in a state of secession, this therefore means that the secession itself was illegal. That’s illogical. The conclusion about correlation does not follow.

But even more important than the question of mere legality is the moral question of whether one political unit can be coerced and forced to remain in an association with another which the first does not wish to be in.

Let us ask ourselves a few questions about some successful secessions we have seen. Was it immoral for South Sudan to break away from the Islamofascists in the north? Was it immoral for the Czech Republic and Slovakia to voluntarily choose to part ways? Was it immoral for Ireland to leave the United Kingdom in 1921? Was it immoral for the Dutch provinces to leave the Spanish Empire in the 16th century?

For that matter, was it immoral for the thirteen American colonies to secede from the British Empire in 1775? Because that’s what our own War for Independence between 1775–1783 was about – secession of the American colonies from the larger political unit of which they were a part.

Obviously, secession is not an immoral act. Indeed, it is the very opposite. It is what happens when a free people make the choice to disassociate themselves from an association with others which is disadvantageous, damaging, or even downright tyrannical to them. The right of secession is the very thing that makes a free people a free people. In his remarks on the United Kingdom’s secession from the control of the larger political unit of the European Union (and a secession is exactly what the British voters chose), Donald Trump made a very salient and important observation,

“The people of the United Kingdom have exercised the sacred right of all free peoples. They have declared their independence from the European Union, and have voted to reassert control over their own politics, borders and economy.”

This man gets it in a way that very, very few others in our political system do – in either party. It is a sacred right of free peoples to choose their own political and social associations. This is (or should be) true for individuals in their personal lives and business, and it is (or should be) true for political units in their national lives.

The states of the American union retain the right, both under the Constitution and even more foundationally under the natural law, to secede from a union that has become grossly tyrannical, exploitative, and unjustifiable intrusive. The Federal government cannot and will not obey its own laws, whether the highest or any below it, so there is no reason for the states to remain. If they choose not to, that is their right to leave. Even from the very start of our Republic when the states were ratifying the new Constitution, many of these states explicitly declared that they reserved to themselves the right to resume their full and complete sovereignty should the constitutional system fail or become injurious. In essence, they were asserting their right to secede, to leave should the Constitution they were ratifying ever fail or become oppressive. Secession was not some new idea that the South cooked up in 1860 to try to maintain slavery. It was an act which the states from the very beginning understood was their right to pursue should the need arise. It is for this reason that a constitutional amendment was proposed in 1861 which would have made secession illegal (it failed to pass, by the way). If secession was already illegal – and was understood to be so – then there would not have been the need to try to declare it illegal via the amendment process.

Would it be preferable for the union to remain together than to come apart? Sure. Of course it would be better to combine the strengths and powers of the people of 50 states rather than for them to be divided up into smaller confederations or to exist as independent states in their own right. Obviously unity brings greater strength and stability.

However, there will come a time when the federal government simply goes too far (some would say that time has already come). At that point, the decision of the free peoples of each state will be between freedom or slavery. Some states – the Blue states – will almost assuredly choose slavery, since they are already essentially slave states anywise. However, many of the states will find themselves having to leave if they are to retain their ancient liberties. They may have to fight for the right to do so – however, I personally believe that the federal government would find it much more difficult to coerce recalcitrant secessionary states back into the union than it did in 1865. Having no unifying issue like opposition to slavery to provide moral legitimacy to attempted coercion, FedGov might find itself hard pressed to get the military to start shooting its own fathers and brothers in seceding states merely to maintain the FedGov’s programs of open borders, pointless foreign wars, welfare spending, anti-white racism, and endless bureaucracy.

The great irony is that the United Kingdom has shown us that opposition to globalism, internationalism, and anti-localism can be successfully expressed. If the time for it comes, Americans may well have to follow suit and pursue this strategy for ourselves.

© Tim Dunkin