Secession Politics (Lux \ HuffPo)

[struggle4progress]

Mike Lux
Author, The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be
Posted April 21, 2009 | 11:13 AM (EST)

It's always fun to see conservatives openly discussing the whole secession from the union option, as Gov. Rick Perry did last week ...

... John C. Calhoun .... argued that states had originally joined the union of their own free will, and had every right to -- at any time and for any reason -- nullify national laws for that state, to refuse to enforce laws passed by the federal government, and to secede from the union.

It was the perfect philosophy for justifying the Civil War, and -- a century later -- for the defiant opposition to the federal Supreme Court decisions and civil rights laws that ended Jim Crow ...

Ronald Reagan, in the official kickoff of his general election campaign, went to a little town called Philadelphia, Mississippi .... where the civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner has been murdered during Freedom Summer, fifteen years prior.

Reagan wasn't there to talk about Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner's deaths - he didn't mention them at all. What he did do was talk about states' rights ... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-lux/secession-politics_b_189455.html