Pause for a moment to congratulate the Arkansas legislature. It was a small, symbolic thing, but defeat of the state sovereignty resolution separated us from the secessionists, bigots and assorted nut jobs who’ve taken up this cause nationwide.
Matthew Sledge has an interesting Huffington Post item here on the subject. It includes a bit on Arkansas’s defeat of the idea. Best to be apart from Texas and Alaska on most anything. How nutty is this idea? Even the governor of Oklahoma — Oklahoma! — wouldn’t go along. But the idea has been popular in red states, coincidental to arrival of a black president.
Arkansas State Rep. Lindsley Smith (D-Fayetteville), says she is a “huge supporter” of the Tenth Amendment. But the arguments emailed by some fringe supporters there reminded her of “the siren call by 50s ‘states rights’ supporters related to the [Little Rock] Central High School crisis — an event that fueled so-called states rights advocates during the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s.”
She also believes the online rhetoric of some members of the state sovereignty “movement” is marked by “pointed personal attacks on the Obama Administration.”
RELATED UPDATE: Nate Silver examines the many movements for secession and separatism in the U.S. and around the world and what works against it in practice in U.S.