Simply Complicated
Countries and Borders evolve
Friends,
Before getting to the Constitution, last week I suggested that many of Trump’s “policies” were better understood as an attempt to assert dominance. He confirmed that idea last week by telling a gathering of donors that after he imposed global tariffs, other countries were calling and “kissing my ass”.
Good News
A federal judge said Tuesday that the White House’s decision to punish the Associated Press by eliminating its access to President Donald Trump’s events, the Oval Office and Air Force One is unconstitutional.
Bad News
The Trump administration is increasingly ignoring court orders and now appears to be ignoring an order of the Supreme Court. After SCOTUS ordered the Trump administration to return a man who the government has illegally kidnapped and delivered to a prison in El Salvador, DOJ attorneys appeared in court and told federal judge Paula Xinis that they had no knowledge of the man’s location or efforts to repatriate him. Meanwhile, the White House responded to the ruling by saying “The Supreme Court made their ruling last night very clear that it’s the administration’s responsibility to facilitate the return, not to effectuate the return.”
For those of you still looking to find a method to the madness, Trump confirmed there is none, he just makes it up. President Donald Trump told CNN’s Jeff Zeleny that he decided to institute a 90-day pause on new reciprocal tariffs because he thought “people were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy,”.
We’ve moved from football metaphors to golf. When a golfer has unsteady hands while putting, it’s called having the “yips”…Tourists from the UK and Germany have been detained and imprisoned at the border before being released days or weeks later.
Administration officials are discussing the possibility of seeking a consent decree to ratify any agreement the White House reaches in its negotiations with Columbia University, after the federal government canceled about $400 million in grants and contracts and accused Columbia of failing to stem harassment of Jewish students on campus last year.
The Trump administration may seek to have a federal judge enforce any deal it reaches with Columbia University in an arrangement that could ensure that the White House has a hand in the school’s dealings for years to come.
The far right MAGA party has long been a home of antisemitism. Now Trump is using government research funding as an extortion tool to effect the government takeover of a private university claiming the university is guilty of antisemitism. Trump has also frozen $1B in research funding to Cornell and $790M to Northwestern.While the administration is claiming to be defending Judiaism as a cover for its attacks on universities, Rubio has ordered State Department employees to report on any instances of coworkers displaying “anti-Christian bias” and will collect examples of anti-Christian bias through anonymous employee report forms.
Hegseth has ordered the library at the Naval Academy to be purged. Gone is “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Maya Angelou’s transformative best-selling 1970 memoir chronicling her struggles with racism and trauma. But two copies of “Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler are still on the shelves, along with “The Camp of the Saints” by Jean Raspail, a 1973 novel, which envisions a takeover of the Western world by immigrants from developing countries, and The Bell Curve,” which argues that Black men and women are genetically less intelligent than white people.
He also fired the woman commander of the military base in Greenland that Vance visited, and Navy Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield, the U.S. representative to NATO’s military committee, also a woman.More than 1,200 scientists who responded to a Nature poll, three-quarters of the total respondents, are considering leaving the United States following the disruptions prompted by Trump. Europe and Canada were among the top choices for relocation.
Who Trump has targeted for retribution (too long to list)
Lyrics to Simply Complicated (Jimmy Buffett & Bill Withers)
Fixing the Constitution
I’ve recommended the constitution be amended in three ways to move the U.S. government closer to a democracy.
National election standards which ensure every citizen an equal opportunity to vote.
The President is the candidate who wins a majority of the popular vote.
Senate seats are proportionally apportioned to represent the people, not the states, and in a manner which would better accommodate candidates from multiple parties.
I went on to suggest that since those change would require support from 38 states, and significantly shift the political power within the country, the changes would have to look more appealing than the alternative. I suggested that we needed to offer secession as an alternative. Most people’s first reaction to the idea of secession is that it’s very radical and second is the question of whether it’s possible. So let’s look at those two responses.
Evolution of Countries
Political boundaries are constantly shifting across the globe and the United States is no exception.
1776-1783: Original 13 colonies along the Atlantic seaboard
1803: Louisiana Purchase: Doubled the nation's size by acquisition from France
1819: Florida acquisition from Spain through the Adams-Onís Treaty
1845: Texas annexation - previously an independent republic
1846: Oregon Territory through a treaty with Britain
1848: Following the Mexican-American War the U.S. added California, Nevada, Utah and parts of what later became other states.
1854: Gadsden Purchase from Mexico for southern parts of Arizona and New Mexico
1861: Eleven states attempted to secede by force which led to the American Civil War. The war concluded when the US Army occupied the confederate states in 1865 and the confederate states conceded.
1867: Alaska purchased from Russia
1898: Hawaii annexation following the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy by US agribusiness.
1898: Spanish-American War acquisitions including Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.
1903: With support from the the U.S., Panama seceded from Columbia and the U.S. received rights to the canal zone which were then abandoned in 1979.
1929: American Samoa became a U.S. territory
1946: The Philippines separated and became an independent country
1959: Hawaii and Alaska became states
Elsewhere:
In 1905, after having been in a union since 1804, Norway split from Sweden.
In 1921, Ireland, after having been in a union with the United Kingdom since 1801, became an independent country while North Ireland remained in the union.
In 1944, Iceland seceded from Denmark after having been in a union since 1918.
In 1993, Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and Ethiopia split into Ethiopia and Eritrea.
The point is that countries come and go, geographical boundaries evolve and unions of over a hundred years are dissolved. These are common events in the geo-political world.
Secession of a state of the United States
First and foremost, the Constitution neither prohibits nor contains a mechanism for secession. The authors of the Constitution placed other constraints on the states and could have prohibited secession, but they did not.
In 1869 in Texas v. White, SCOTUS clearly left the door open to peaceful secession when it ruled [emphasis added]:
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.
Certainly peaceful secession would be the product of lengthy negotiation as there would be a number of assets and liabilities to be divided between the seceding state(s) and the United States. In addition there would probably be mutually beneficial treaties to be established between the new country and the U.S. But those peaceful negotiations have been successfully concluded before in the examples cited above.
In conclusion, secession is a real bargaining chip that could be used to achieve changes to the Constitution. At the same time it is possible that secession could become the goal, preempting reform of the Constitution. Once the discussions begin it is impossible to forecast how they would evolve. Given the interest in secession by many states, it is entirely possible that a sufficient number of states would welcome secession by states who do not share their ideological perspective. However, given the relative military forces of any seceding state(s) and the United States, it’s difficult to see why there would ever be a replay of the Civil War.
What You Can Do
You’ve heard a lot about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and maybe also heard them called Large Language Models (LLMs). I posted some links earlier, but I imagine they were too long and too techie to be read by many. This seven minute video will give you a much better understanding of what’s happening when you use an LLM like Claude or ChatGPT. I urge you to stop and replay some sections of the video so a thorough watching may take half an hour, but I think you’ll be surprised at what you learn. You’ll come away with a better understanding of the current limitations and boundaries of LLMs, but keep in mind that it is a rapidly evolving technology.
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Remember
The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. - Steve Jobs
All great changes are preceded by chaos. - Deepak Chopra