So Antonin Scalia believes that constitutional issues like secession are “resolved” by war as opposed to civilized means. This is Lincoln’s theory of the Constitution, namely, that the founding fathers believed that it would be perfectly legitimate for the central government that they created for their own protection to raise an army of conscripts and mercenaries to invade any state that seceded, burn its cities to the ground, murder its citizens by the hundreds of thousands, plunder its private wealth, rape its women, and then rule over it with a military dictatorship. In reality, as opposed to Lincoln’s bizarre and, frankly, insane, theory, the Constitution would never have been ratified by a single state if that was the understanding of the founders.
As Judge Andrew Napolitano wrote in his book, The Constitution in Exile (p. 63), “During the Constitutional Convention, a provision was proposed that would have permitted the federal government to use force against a state that did not comply with congressional mandates. Edmund Randolph, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention from Virginia, presented his “Virginia Plan,” which provided that the government could use force against states of the union that neglected to fulfill their obligations. Much of the Virginia Plan was adopted into the Constitution, but the provision allowing for the use of force by the government against the states was conspicuously omitted. ”
What the “Civil War” resolved, Mr. Scalia, is that the government of the United States is no longer voluntary and consensual. The voluntary union of the founders was destroyed, and American citizens became servants rather than masters of “their” government.
