Cracks in Federalist Ideology

The Confederacy Reborn

It appears that Confederate principles are alive and well in the United States.  Not only that, they are being applied more and more at the "grass roots", municipal level.

Confederate political ideology was based upon the principle of States' Rights--that the individual states of the Union were a more fundamental political authority than the federal union of the States.  Each state had a right of withdrawal from the Union, implicit in the states deciding to join the Union in the first place.  A modern parallel might be the promised referendum in the United Kingdom (or, as held recently in Scotland) to vote on whether the UK should withdraw from the EU (or, in Scotland's case, to withdraw from the UK and become an independent, stand-alone national state).

Clearly the Brits still subscribe to the principles of States' Rights and are busy applying it to the United Kingdom.  Clearly, the political ideology of the UK and its Constitution subscribe to ideological and constitutional principles more aligned with nineteenth century American Confederate political principles, than with the one-way Federalism of the current United States of America.  Once in the Union, there is no exit door.  Or so Federalist ideology claims.

But, perversely, Confederate principles are making a huge comeback in the United States.  Only now, it's not States' Rights, but Municipal Rights--although the principles are the same.
  The issue is not slavery, and the rights of State's in the Union to determine such issues for themselves, but immigration.

Victor Hanson writes in National Review Online:

There are now 340 sanctuary cities in the United States — and the list is growing. All of them choose to ignore federal immigration law by refusing to report detained undocumented immigrants to federal authorities under most circumstances.  Partly as a result, deportations of those who entered the U.S. illegally are at a 10-year low — even according to the Obama administration’s new rigged redefinition of deportation as also occasionally preventing illegal entry at the border.

The elected municipal officials and authorities in three hundred and forty sanctuary cities have withdrawn from the Union of the United States of America--at least over the issue of immigration.  They are refusing (via their municipal representatives) to be subject to US Federal law.  Hanson points out that the unintended consequence of these ill-advised actions is that such cities become sanctuaries for violent criminals in whose tender embrace innocent people get mugged, shot, raped, and murdered.

Some of the 1,000 undocumented immigrants who go unreported to federal authorities each month and are thereby shielded by sanctuary cities from deportation have been accused of violent crimes. According to a new report by the Center for Immigration Studies, more than 2,000 of the immigrants released have used their freedom to commit crimes.

Last year, San Francisco alone released from its custody 252 undocumented immigrants whom federal authorities had asked the city to hold, according to the report. Most notoriously, the city protected Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez — five times previously deported, seven times previously convicted of felonies — who once free allegedly murdered 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle in front of witnesses.

But terrible though this is, it is not what interests us here.  What does intrigue us is the apparent recrudescence of Confederate political principles in cities deeply opposed to the ideology of States' Rights.  It's just that it is now known by a different name--and its object is to advance the avant-garde Progressive cause of unrestricted immigration into the United States.

The existence of sanctuary cities in the United States implies a significant undermining of the ideology of Federalism is at work.  We hazard a guess this would be an unexpected consequence the champions of sanctuary cities never contemplated.

For us Christians it may well serve as an inspiring an instructive example of lawful resistance to tyrannical overreach.  See those sanctuary cities?  That's how its done.  Hanson concludes:

. . .  if cities can declare supposedly conservative federal immigration law invalid, then some states might do the same, deeming lots of federal statutes too liberal.  I thought the Civil War ended these dangerous ideas for good. Apparently not. [Emphasis, ours.]

Quite.