Opinion ID: 2621395
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Secession Is Clearly Unconstitutional.

Text: Kohlhaas argues that the appropriate time to review the constitutionality of 03INDP is after its enactment rather than before its certification, since there is no controlling authority clearly establishing its unconstitutionality. The crux of his argument is that neither the Alaska Constitution nor the United States Constitution contains provisions expressly prohibiting secession. The state argues that 03INDP is clearly unconstitutional under Supreme Court decisions addressing secession. We agree with the state that secession is clearly unconstitutional. Shortly after the Civil War, the Supreme Court considered whether the Confederate Texas legislature had the power to pass legislation resulting in the sale of bonds that the federal government had issued to Texas on its admission to the Union in 1845. The bonds in Texas v. White , [19] issued by the United States before the Civil War, were not payable without the Texas governor's signature. During the war, the Confederate Texas legislature repealed the signature requirement and sold the bonds. After the war, the Supreme Court held that the sales were invalid since the Confederate legislation was void, having been enacted for the unlawful purpose of funding treason. [20] The nullity of the Confederate legislation is essential to the holding. [21] Kohlhaas maintains that Texas v. White contains highly suspect reasoning because it fails to discuss the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. He argues that because the Constitution is otherwise silent on secession, secession is one of the rights reserved by those amendments. The decision quotes the Tenth Amendment almost exactly and discusses at great length the rights of the states and the people within the Union: Under the Constitution, though the powers of the States were much restricted, still, all powers not delegated to the United States, nor prohibited to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. . . . [T]he people of each State compose a State, having its own government, and endowed with all the functions essential to separate and independent existence[;] . . . without the States in union, there could be no such political body as the United States. Not only, therefore, can there be no loss of separate and independent autonomy to the States, through their union under the Constitution, but it may be not unreasonably said that the preservation of the States, and the maintenance of their governments, are as much within the design and care of the Constitution as the preservation of the Union and the maintenance of the National government. The Constitution, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible States. When, therefore, Texas became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation. All the obligations of perpetual union, and all the guaranties of republican government in the Union, attached at once to the State. The act which consummated her admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final. The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration, or revocation, except through revolution, or through consent of the States.[ [22] ] Furthermore, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Tenth Amendment in a manner contrary to the interpretation Kohlhaas urges. In considering whether states could impose term limits on their federal legislators, the Court held that the Amendment could only `reserve' that which existed before. [23] Thus `The states can exercise no powers whatsoever, which exclusively spring out of the existence of the national government. . . . No state can say, that it has reserved, what it never possessed.' [24] Like representation in Congress, secession from the Union springs from joinder to the Union. No state possessed a right to secede before admission, and so no state would retain such a right under the Tenth Amendment. Kohlhaas also suggests that Texas v. White should not be taken as black letter law since the decision is tainted by the context, emotions, and political situation immediately following the Civil War, and has not been cited except as dicta by modern cases. This argument not only trivializes the impact of the Civil War on the Nation but also ignores a plenitude of Supreme Court cases holding as completely null the purported acts of secession by other Confederate states. [25] Unsurprisingly, the Supreme Court has had little occasion since Reconstruction to address the legality of secession. In 2004 the Supreme Court observed that inclusion of the word indivisible in the Pledge of Allegiance was significant because the question whether a State could secede from the Union had been intensely debated and was unresolved prior to the Civil War. [26] Even though secession is not explicitly addressed in the United States or Alaska Constitutions, it is clearly unconstitutional since opinions of the Supreme Court interpreting the federal constitution  including Texas v. White  constitute controlling authority. [27] Kohlhaas's attempt to discount the force of Texas v. White is wholly misplaced. In 1960 Justice Frankfurter characterized that decision thus: The readjustment of the relationship between the States that had remained in the Union and those that had seceded presented major issues not only for the political branches of the Government, the President and the Congress, but also for this Court. Insofar as the perplexing and recalcitrant problems of Reconstruction involved legal solutions, the evolution of constitutional doctrine was an indispensable element in the process of healing the wounds of the sanguinary conflict. It was in aid of that process that this Court formulated the doctrine expressed in the famous sentence in State of Texas v. White : The Constitution, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible States.[ [28] ] When the forty-nine-star flag was first raised at Juneau, we Alaskans committed ourselves to that indestructible Union, for good or ill, in perpetuity. To suggest otherwise would disparage the republican character of the National Government. [29]