new balkanization news, come get your civil war slop
The Utah bill, introduced as the “Utah Constitutional Sovereignty Act,” was signed into law by Gov. Spencer Cox on January 31.
“The Legislature may, by concurrent resolution, prohibit a government officer from enforcing or assisting in the enforcement of a federal directive within the state if the Legislature determines the federal directive violates the principles of state sovereignty,” the law states.
With the bill, Utah joins a long-standing small-c conservative push to promote states’ rights, particularly when the federal government is controlled by the opposing party. It’s a debate going back to the original founders of the US Constitution, through the “Nullification Crisis” of 1832-33, when South Carolina tried to avoid paying federal tariffs, and into the Southern states’ attempts to avoid racial integration in schools in the 1950s.
Most recently, Texas and the US have been in a legal battle over security at the US-Mexico border, historically under the federal government’s control. Last month, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of the federal government, but the tight vote suggested the principles of the Supremacy Clause “might be in a degree of flux,” according to CNN Supreme Court analyst Steve Vladeck.
Utah Sen. Scott Sandall, who sponsored the Sovereignty Act, said he hoped the bill spreads to other states.
Waging war on the US government because you want to do a slightly different kind of theocracy seems like such a strange decision. Though I know that a lot of mormon converts in the early days were recruited straight from Britain, which is why Utah today is one of the least germanic states in the US, and it’s too satanically racist to allow central americans to live there with any permance.
whoops that was a very poor characterization, they weren’t trying to secede really, they’d just entered the US basically managing their own affairs, and they raised militias and did some massacres when the federal gov’t decided to appoint officials and enforce anti polygamy laws.
rolled right over when the army arrived, to the officers’ disappointment