A particularly pernicious idea. I thought perhaps that the sickening writeup above might be a troll, but in the end, I decided it was too dangerous to leave unanswered.
This bit of legalistic claptrap is frequently used by people who fantasize about undoing the result of the Civil War. Face it, buddy. It's over. If it were merely an exposition of the loopholes left in the Constitution, it might not be so bad. Unfortunately, the author goes further, attempting to present a political and economic "justification" for secession! Right off the bat, we are told
laws only restrict; they forbid rights, so that people, in excercising certain harmful rights, will not harm others.
Does anyone else see a fundamental disconnect here? A significant portion (and, in Mississippi and South Carolina, a majority) of the South's population were treated as livestock, subject to harm at the whim of their owners. An appeal to rule of law is a spectacular bit of psychological transference, a way of deflecting attention away from the institution of chattel slavery which was the fundamental cause of the war.
(And yes, slavery was the fundamental cause of the Civil War. During the Colonial Era, Southern slaveholders had marginalized themselves economically by becoming dependent upon the labor of their slaves, inflating their net worth by including human beings in their property holdings. Racism was used as a divide and conquer mechanism to gain political and economic control over non-slaveholding whites. These were fed racial hatred from the cradle, resulting in their transferring dissatisfaction with their lot in life onto black people. As the years progressed, the lifestyle to which the slaveholders had become accustomed squeezed them more and more economically.)
The idea of Southern slaveholder as a victim of "economic oppression" is particularly laughable. If their toll in human life and dignity were not enough, slaveholders extracted all of the labor and economic output of their slaves, and gave nothing in return. The amount of wealth stolen in this way staggers the mind. However, instead of recognizing slavery as one of the greatest crimes in history, the possibility that it might have been ended is presented to us as a justification for secession!
So, perhaps, the southern states wanted to secede for reasons of their own, and perhaps nothing in the Constitution was stopping them from doing it. Certainly no sense of morality was.