🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <DZOEY.92Sep17225713@frob.eng.umd.edu> dzoey@frob.eng.umd.edu (Joseph Herman) writes:
>In article <1992Sep17.022418.26784@openage.openage.com> ghost@openage.openage.com (Glenn Host) writes:
>
>>    Sorry this in not true - see West Virginia.
>
>Well, actually it is true.  West Virginia joined the Union during the Civil
>war when Virginia had seceded from the Union.  Virginia was not technically
>a state at that point.
>
No, that's not it.  The Constitution says that (I'm paraphrasing) Congress
shall admit states to the Union, and that no state will be admitted which is
made up of territory from an existing state (this includes splitting states
up and joining two states to make one) UNLESS all the state legislatures
involved and congress approve.  This is how West Virginia was formed.  During
the war, a bogus legislature for Virginia (loyal to the Union of course)
voted to split the state up.  Congress, purged of all rebels, approved, and
West Virginia was admitted as a state.  Virginia most definitely was a
state at the time, at least as far as the North was concerned (or at least
when it was conveniant for the North to consider it a state...there was a
lot of legal slight-of-hand during the war).  If not for
this, the North would have been hard pressed to keep England and France
out of the war.  France was desperate at the time to jump in on the side
of the south, but was held back by the English.  One of the reasons for
England's reluctance was strong pressure from the US gov't who claimed that
this was not a war between two sovereign nations, but a purely internal matter,
(sound familiar?) and that if England knew what was good for it it would 
mind its own business.

>The question is, suppose me and my neighbors get fed up paying yet another
>Willie Don tax increase.  Now suppose we vote to secede.  Is the US
>justified  in sending troops in to suppress our secession?  Think of
>the Baltics or Yugoslavia...
>

That the US has the legal right to do so was settled during the Civil War.
The answer is yes.  Whether the US has (or had) the moral right...

>			Joe H.
>

My 2 cents on DC statehood:
  a) preferred solution...give the land back to MD.
  b) maintain status quo
  c) statehood, if DC can prove it has the resources to provide the services
     a state should provide.

Ed
--
Edward Seidl                                      DCRT/CSL Bldg 12A, Rm 2033
seidl@alw.nih.gov                                 NIH, Bethesda, MD 20892  

I'm not paid enough to have an opinion, much less express one for my employer.