Re: The opposite..

Michael Haslam wrote:

Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Michael Haslam wrote:

Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Michael Haslam wrote:

Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

However, regarding the word "devolution," they differ. Over there,
it is familiar from the process of according limited
self-government to Scotland and Wales. Over here, it has no such
specific usage (because the problem doesn't occur),

Naturally, as Scotland and Wales are not part of the US, unlike 10
Downing Street.

No, Michael. Because the 9th and 10th Amendments deal with relations
between the state and federal governments. Once again, you guys should
have written out a Bill of Rights some time before this millennium.

That's as may be. In some slightly cumbersome ways we now enjoy
protection under the Human Rights Act and the ultimate European Court of
Human Rights (which has nothing to do with the EU).

See the summary of the erosion of civil rights in the UK in the latest
*Vanity Fair* (it's by an English columnist who is notorious for
challenging Blair's new limitations -- apparently he couldn't get away
with publishing it over there any more).

I'll try to find it. But I don't believe he couldn't publish it in the
UK. It would be a cause celebre.

Could not Texas or
California decide to become independent or start some process of
altering its relationship with the Union? States have been added since
the Constitution and its amendments; could they now not be taken away?

A few of them tried that in 1861, and presumably you know what happened.

There was a war ISTR, presumably because diplomacy broke down.

There doesn't seem to have been much diplomacy -- there was a series of
Compromises, beginning around 1830, but James Buchanan, the president
before Lincoln, is widely judged to be the worst president before the
current incumbent. Lincoln 's cause was not the end of slavery, but
preservation of the union (his view of the negro was no more enlightened
than Jefferson's or most anyone else's in the first half of the 19th
century), and the Emancipation Proclamation (June 1863) was basically a
political ploy -- it had no force in the Confederate States anyway.

Southern historians continue to insist that Secession, and the ensuing
Civil War, were not primarily over slavery, but over economics (and
Britain nearly entered the War on the side of the CSA because it liked
getting cheap cotton -- during my afternoon in the (then) BM (now
presumably at the BL) looking through Austen Henry Layard's papers, I
learned that after his "excavations" at Nineveh that stocked the BM with
amazing antiquities, he entered the Foreign Service and was the point
man in those discussions.)

I know the EU isn't comparable to the USA, constitutionally speaking,
but there are RWNCs in many Member States (eg the UK, France, Denmark)
who campaign on a "let's get out of Europe" ticket. The response is
generally along the lines of "It would be a financial disaster; we would
lose far more than we might gain"; never on the "I'm sorry, you can't
leave - remember what happened to the Southern States in the USA!"!

The EU isn't (yet) a "nation" on a par with the USA, which had been one
since 1787. Its member states still think of themselves as sovereign.
(Heck, some of them don't even use the same currency!)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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