Long Live the Free Republic of Gotham
For anyone watching history and thinking ahead in the wake of November 2, the secession of New York City from the United States of America is no longer a question of ambiguities but practicalities, not a question of why but how. Yet the city's pundits and politicos continue to agonize playfully over the former while avoiding the real issue, which is constitutional, because it brings a tingle to the genitals without requiring anyone getting dirty. What's more narcissistically sexy than being culturally better endowed than an entire nation, but also impotent before the mass?
And we are. The reason is that we make lots of money, and we do it in blazing-hot pursuit of life, liberty and happiness; though, granted, our government tempers that enthusiasm more generously than elsewhere in the nation (budgeting for health, education, labor, the environment, education and public transit-sharing the wealth). Money-who's making it, who's taking it-has always been and always will be the only argument for American rebellion; it was the predicate for the original New World secession from the English empire in 1775. If taxation without representation was the complaint then, it remains the rub today. Mayor Bloomberg's office claims that New York City sends as much as $11.4 billion more to Congress than it receives in services. The current hacks in the White House opt-among many other indignities-to blow our prodigious revenue on the occupation of Iraq, which as of May 2004 had cost New Yorkers $2.1 billion. The darker burden, of mortal consequence, is the vast terrorist recruitment the war has spawned, with New York-dense, vital-still the most coveted target.
The city's match with the state government in Albany is equally rapine. The New York State legislature for the most part represents the ingrate pawing of upstate cretins while netting an estimated $3.5 billion more annually from hardworking city taxpayers than it returns in spending on city services and infrastructure. Queens Councilman Peter Vallone Jr., who in 2003 floated a secession proposal for the establishment of New York City as the 51st state, claims that independence from the Albany thieves-the first step in secession from the odious United States-would gain the soon-to-be Free Republic of Gotham a billion-dollar annual budget surplus, with vastly reduced business, property and personal income taxes.
Vallone's "plan," if we can call it that, unfortunately moves with the typical glaciation of a New York lawmaker, which leads one to suspect that it was bullshit grandstanding from the start. First, offers Vallone, we establish a committee to set up a vote on a referendum to set up a committee to look into the idea. Then the committee meets for six months and Vallone and his committeemen draw paychecks while nothing happens.
Secession dreams are nothing new in New York. Mayor Fernando Wood argued the case in 1861, kowtowing to king cotton's collusion with the city's merchants, who feared the effects abolition would have on business. The Norman Mailer/Jimmy Breslin ticket hung their 1969 mayoral run on the idea, hanging their political careers in the process.
There is a reason for the recent failures: After nearly 150 years of propaganda, the centerpiece of which is the deification of Abraham Lincoln, secession has been branded in the popular imagination as something ridiculous, illegal, treasonous. The Declaration of Independence states otherwise. "Governments," wrote Thomas Jefferson, "are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...[W]henever any Form of Government becomes destructive?it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government." Such is the call to self-government in the founding documents: Secession is the primal American act.
The Constitution itself is silent on the matter of secession. Up until the Civil War, this silence implied consent. Among antebellum constitutional scholars, it was axiomatic that if the states were once sovereign entities that acceded to join the union in a mutually beneficial treaty, they implicitly retained the right to rescind the treaty and withdraw. The Tenth Amendment appears to back such a right: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States," the amendment reads, "are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
William Rawle, a constitutional scholar and friend of George Washington, typified the common thinking when he observed in 1825 that to deny the right of state secession "would be inconsistent with the principle on which all our political systems are founded, which is that the people have in all cases, a right to determine how they will be governed."
Secession was once taught at West Point. Petulant states constantly threatened it, with New Englanders early on showing an especial fondness for cutting loose from a Union that increasingly catered to Southern slaveholder interests. In 1804, New England lawmakers, in channels with New Yorkers, plotted a failed secession movement, which nonetheless had the approval of Aaron Burr and would have comprised today a perfect blue-state swath. The war of 1812, which threatened New England's trade with England, catalyzed wider secessionist threats in the Northeast. On the eve of the Civil War, secession was such an entrenched American principle that dozens of Northern newspapers spoke on behalf of the legality of the Southern independence movement and the newly born confederacy.
All this had changed by 1865, when, as historian James Ronald Kennedy puts it, "the moral persuasion of bloody bayonets" rewrote history and the Constitution.
The persuasion persists today, though even a casual review of the anti-secession argument reveals a mess of fabrications, confusion and casuistry.
Consider Lincoln's 1861 inaugural address: No American state had the right to secede, Lincoln claimed, given that "no government proper, ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination."
This is an interpretation of the silence of the Constitution, attempting to make noise where there is none. Worse, it speaks, absurdly, to the metaphysical: Somewhere, out there, beyond the letter of the law, Lincoln tells us, the "organic law" of the abstract thing known as "government" provides somehow for the Union as an infinite entity, "indestructible" and "perpetual."
Lincoln advances what at first appears to be solid thinking. There was in fact a "perpetual union"-so went the clause-established in 1781 under the Articles of Confederation, grandfather to the Constitution, and the "perpetual union" was indeed rendered, in the words of the Constitution's preamble, "more perfect" in the abiding document that was at last ratified in 1791. The "perpetual union" clause, however, was dropped from the Constitution's final language because the sovereign states refused to accept indissoluble bonds under the new government. (Some states were so skittish of joining the federal power that three of them-Virginia, Rhode Island and, key to our cause, New York-wrote escape caveats explicitly preserving the secession right.) Moreover, the real significance of "more perfect union," at its core a near meaningless abstraction and probably a rhetorical flourish, has never been clear-of what exactly did the founders conceive as "perfection"?
Luckily for Lincoln, the U.S. Supreme Court, stacked with his hacks, stepped into the post-war fray to seal the issue of secession by eliding it. Lincoln apologists today turn to the 1868 case of Texas v. White, in which Lincoln's ex-treasurer and court appointee Salmon P. Chase, who wrote the legislation that financed the war, issued the judicial coup de grace to secession. Chase's decision in the highest court, though established law today, was as fundamentally weak in reasoning as Lincoln's on the brink of war.
"There must have been an overwhelming fatefulness in Chase's mind," observes John Remington Graham, author of The Constitutional History of Secession. "This enormous conflict had cost something like three-fourths of the assessed value of all taxable property in the United States in 1860, and had multiplied the national debt fifty-three times in only four years. Under the circumstances, [Chase] could not write the truth, so he wrote something else."
Thus began a century and a half of whitewash.
Michael Dorf, professor of law at Columbia University, suggests a snippet of secessionist hope in the Chase decision. Dorf believes that Texas v. White may have illegalized "unilateral secession," but under Chase's logic the door remains open to secession "through consent of the states," as Chase himself wrote. Dorf calls this method "secession by mutual agreement," and he offers that while the Constitution provides (again) no answer on how to effect such a secession, the process of constitutional amendment might suffice. This means a two-thirds vote in each house of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures, which ensures that every federalized state agrees to the departure of the seceding state. Ê
Drinking heavily and disgusted with the fraud that Lincoln and history have perpetrated on the American people, I posed the idea of a New York City secession movement one evening in a Brooklyn bar. I presented my arguments, as laid out above. I spoke first to the financial interest. Assuming both that Councilman Peter Vallone's numbers are correct and that Wall Street, our principal asset, continues its residence here post-secession rather than fleeing to New Jersey, I offered that New York would be a kind of Hong Kong off darkened China-a money mecca, but also a hub of trade, books, news, movies, advertising, art, fashion and free-thinking. Why, I asked, should New Yorkers, galvanite forces of growth and creativity, remain the fleeced animals of a corrupt regime 200 miles away that wastes our wages and workforce in a criminal war? I talked about legalizing marijuana, psychedelic mushrooms, acid, ecstasy and prostitution. (Casino gambling, however, the province of hypocritical moral degenerates like Bill Bennett, would be punished by 5000 years in prison).
I noted to my listeners, many of them drug addicts (or observers of addicts as social workers, or beer drinkers who behave like drug addicts), that the prison population would be vastly reduced by retroactively annulling the Rockefeller drug laws. I noted that New York City poses a threat to no one, that we'd have no army or navy or air force, that we'd have no territorial designs. Hence, no foreign power, aside from the United States of America, would ever bother to invade us, and that if the U.S.A. ever tried it we'd have the twentieth-best-funded army in the world, the NYPD, to oppose the invaders, not to mention millions of able-bodied men in our heavily armed enclaves (Bed-Stuy would make Fallujah look fun). The Free Republic of Gotham would be the Switzerland of America: peace-loving, gorgeous for business (our GDP, $414.1 billion, would stand at almost twice that of the Swiss Republic). I talked of how the sickly of Gotham would purchase cheap drugs from Canada, how the indigent would have homes subsidized, how the poor, no matter how unlucky or unwanted or stupid or crazy or lazy, would get a piece of the prize. Many of my listeners being hunters, I also spoke of gun rights in the new republic.
I was explaining how all of this and more could be done when a nasty tone shot into the conversation. These were hardworking drug addicts and alcoholics, but also Medicaid and Medicare and other federal-aid recipients. They were wary.
I said that a popular referendum, led by drunks like themselves, could go to the polls in a super-majority and demand the establishment of a secessionist republic. There was more suspicion. The idea of going to a voting booth scared them, and anyway it all sounded like a lot of work. Secession is legal only among states, and the city's secession from the state requires the approval of the larcenous state legislature and the U.S. Congress-pretty much spelling doom for "legal" secession in any case, as both bodies are recognized chambers of corruption, indecency, mendacity and calcified interest, and would never approve the departure of a money machine like New York.
Yet there resides a higher law, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence. This is the moral law that says that governments "are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." No one in my Brooklyn bar understood the concept. The patrons cried out, "But I'm an American! We're Americans!" Things went badly.
After escorting myself into the night, I understood that a New York City secession movement is hopeless. People aren't ready for it. Yet I can't help but think of what Tom Paine wrote in his explosive pamphlet, Common Sense, in 1776: "A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason."