> this nation was clearly intended to be a federation of states with independent control
Appeals to history like that don't work for me. You could just as easily say:
"this nation was clearly intended to be a place where only white men got to vote"
or
"this nation was clearly intended to be a place where slavery was legal and a slave was counted as 3/5 of a human being"
The emancipation proclamation, and later civil rights movements have changed those things in an explicit way. But I would argue (and I'm not alone in this) that many other legislative and judicials changes since the end of the civil war have undermined the historical notion of "a federation of states with independent control".
I don't disagree that it would be better if we were to explicitly modify the constitution to reflect these changes. But modifying the constitution is very tricky to do (a major defect in the constitution IMO), and so for now we have to deal a de-facto situation rather than one necessarily reflected in the words of an amendment or three.
The feds have never (so far) been faced with "trying to conquer Wyoming". As outlined in the quotes I gave last time, the federal government created the Wyoming territory, appointed its territorial governors, voted on whether to allow it to become a state. The federal government owns most of the land in Wyoming too. This story repeats for more or less the entirety of the western states. It is purely an imagined fiction that these were once sovereign independent nations that finally decided to join the continental union. They were paid for and controlled by the union until they decided to be states instead of territories, at which time they had more self-determination in many important ways (but less in others).
This process is more or less unrelated to the formation of the states that existed at the time of the DoI. These states had already existed for 40-100 years in various ways, and had never been part of anything other than the dominion of the British monarchy.
I would wager that even had the constitution not granted WY it's 2 senators for its 60k people, the handful of those who voted in 1889 would still have decided to become a state (the alernative was not some glorious independent future, but simply remaining as a territory).
Nice chatting with you, thanks for humoring me. If we don't modify the constitution legally, how do you propose we do it? I am aware that the constitution doesn't mean much of anything in the courts these days. But how is this different from the law of the west? The powerful make the rules with no accountability.
Historically, people have burned the government to the ground and started with a brand new document. I suppose that's what most people are advocating when they wish to change the constitution in a way which it does not allow.
If not by law, how is it decided? Can I decide? I suppose I can if I become a supreme court justice or someone like Bill Gates.
The founding fathers certainly knew that the constitution would be hard to change - that's the whole point. They saw what happened to past governments with wimpy foundations. I really can't see the point of keeping the constitution at all if we are going to violate it due to "current sentiments" - it's all a sham.
Perhaps they would have voted for becoming a state even without their 2 senators, but that seems far from certain to me. Like the American Revolution itself, I just can't see Wyoming people sitting down and taking what's given to them.
Of course, my predictions about the future of America are different from most. I think we've only just begun to hear the rumblings of a deep conflict. This election was not the climax, but the prologue.
Appeals to history like that don't work for me. You could just as easily say:
"this nation was clearly intended to be a place where only white men got to vote"
or
"this nation was clearly intended to be a place where slavery was legal and a slave was counted as 3/5 of a human being"
The emancipation proclamation, and later civil rights movements have changed those things in an explicit way. But I would argue (and I'm not alone in this) that many other legislative and judicials changes since the end of the civil war have undermined the historical notion of "a federation of states with independent control".
I don't disagree that it would be better if we were to explicitly modify the constitution to reflect these changes. But modifying the constitution is very tricky to do (a major defect in the constitution IMO), and so for now we have to deal a de-facto situation rather than one necessarily reflected in the words of an amendment or three.
The feds have never (so far) been faced with "trying to conquer Wyoming". As outlined in the quotes I gave last time, the federal government created the Wyoming territory, appointed its territorial governors, voted on whether to allow it to become a state. The federal government owns most of the land in Wyoming too. This story repeats for more or less the entirety of the western states. It is purely an imagined fiction that these were once sovereign independent nations that finally decided to join the continental union. They were paid for and controlled by the union until they decided to be states instead of territories, at which time they had more self-determination in many important ways (but less in others).
This process is more or less unrelated to the formation of the states that existed at the time of the DoI. These states had already existed for 40-100 years in various ways, and had never been part of anything other than the dominion of the British monarchy.
I would wager that even had the constitution not granted WY it's 2 senators for its 60k people, the handful of those who voted in 1889 would still have decided to become a state (the alernative was not some glorious independent future, but simply remaining as a territory).