It was only a small item in The Lincoln Journal-Star. It concerned an idea hatched by a Nebraska state senator named Paul Schumacher, who represents a district in what Nebraskans call the Unicameral in and around the city of Columbus, the county seat of Platte County. Somewhere north of 32,000 people live in Platte County, and about 95 percent of them are white. Anyway, if you follow it closely, Schumacher’s notion winds upward through the levels of our politics. Ultimately, it leads to a perilous place, and our arrival there as a self-governing republic is perilously imminent.

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In brief, Schumacher is proposing that the Nebraska constitution be amended to grant “sovereignty” to thinly settled areas in the western part of the state. This would allow the area to become a tax-free, deregulated entity in the hopes of luring industry and other forms of economic development.

That could tempt major enterprises that might be attracted by the prospect of no city or state taxes and no local or state regulations, Schumacher said. A major global company or coalition could have their own development in the center of the country," he said. "If I were a major business, I would not want Omaha or Lincoln or Des Moines (Iowa) telling me what to do," he said…"We're talking about Nebraska's future," he said. "To build out here, you do not have to tear down something. And property is the ultimate economic tool." This presents an opportunity, he said, to essentially "have your own state."And, Schumacher said, "nobody else has done it."

This is not a unique idea. After all, this is an age in which, with the encouragement of too many politicians and too many people whose wealth insulates them from all consequence, the centrifugal forces built into our constitutional order and our national identity have been thrown dangerously out of balance, and Schumacher’s idea has been proposed, in one form or another, in a number of states.

Paul Schumacher Getty Images

In October, the idea of California seceding from the Union was broached. Since it became a state in 1850, there have been over 200 proposals to break up California into several states and, since 1941, there’s been an idea percolating in the Pacific Northwest to carve out portions of northern California and southern Oregon to create a state called Jefferson. In 2013, a venture capitalist named Tim Draper spent $5 million in a failed attempt to put on the ballot a measure that would have split California into six different states, including one called Silicon Valley, the flag of which would depict a pocket protector, I guess. Draper’s proposal did not gather the required number of valid signatures to be put on the ballot. At the moment, Draper is promoting a new referendum on the possibility of dividing California into three states.

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One of the main criticisms of the California plans was that they seemed to be designed radically to segregate wealthy areas from poorer areas, and rural areas from them ol’ debbil cities. (There also are serious constitutional questions, as Vikram Amar points out.) This sounds a bit like what Schumacher is up to when he talks about his deregulated sovereign area and how it’s for people who “don’t want Lincoln, or Omaha, or Des Moines” telling them what to do. My guess is that, if Shumacher’s plan were to come to fruition, western Nebraska soon would look like the blasted ecological hellspout of northern Alberta, with a couple of big-box distribution centers and a wage scale a little north of that of Vietnam. But that’s because I am cynical of the essential patriotism of American corporations.

Tim Draper Getty Images

But the larger danger is that the idea of disunion, within states and generally throughout the country, has now become not only a viable topic of political discussion, but also a viable political strategy. The whole blue-red thing used to be an easy way to distinguish on television which geographical area voted for what candidate. Then, it became shorthand for all manner of political differences. It was inexact and shallow, but inexact and shallow people found it convenient, so everybody went along with it. Now, though, those divisions are driving policy in a way that they rarely have in the past, and when they have, the policies generally resulted in ghastly consequences.

For example, the portion of the recently passed tax bill involving the deduction of state and local taxes is directly aimed at the (largely blue) states that are willing to pay for a certain quality of life for their citizens through local taxes. Basically, Massachusetts is being penalized for deciding not to be Mississippi. The same dynamic is at work with Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III and his newly announced war on decriminalized marijuana, in which Colorado is being penalized for not being Alabama. This latter instance has the added power of federal law enforcement behind it, which (theoretically) puts politicians like Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey at risk. But the use of disunion as a political tool is exemplified best by the campaign to call a constitutional convention of the states under Article V of the present Constitution.

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Jeff Sessions Getty Images

Right now, the people pushing the convention—and we’ll get to them in a minute—have commitments from 28 state legislatures. They need 34 to trigger the Constitution’s provision for a “convention of the states.” Four states are on the verge of voting on the issue now: South Carolina, Kentucky, Montana, and Idaho. (South Carolina has an unfortunate history with the consequences of disunion as a political tactic, which it apparently has been encouraged to forget.) If the convention is called, the disunion that has become a faith in some conservative quarters will run amok. Economic oligarchy will be established in law, and any political check on the powers of business likely will be eviscerated.

As to the former, the Koch Brothers and other aspiring oligarchs are the money behind the movement toward a convention. As to the latter, the whole thing is being sold under the camouflage of a desire to enact a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution—aka The Worst Idea In American Politics. But even the late Antonin Scalia admitted that a convention so called cannot be limited to one topic, and, anyway, a visit to the website of Convention of the States Project, one of the most prominent organizations in favor of the convention, reveals that the convention is a device for profound political sabotage.

I support the Convention of States Project; a national effort to call a convention under Article V of the United States Constitution, restricted to proposing amendments that will impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit its power and jurisdiction, and impose term limits on its officials and members of Congress.

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In other words, the convention would be “restricted” to radical Tenth Amendment solutions that virtually would eliminate the general government’s ability to control any private enterprise. Disunion would be triumphant. The final victory of movement conservatism would be a return to Gilded Age economics tied to a rebooted Confederate States of America.

Mr. Madison saw it coming. All of it. The mercantile power arrayed against political democracy. Politicians who become servants of the money power and not the people who elected them, and opportunists who would take advantage of these conflicts for their own benefits. As he wrote in Federalist 10:

It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the rights of another or the good of the whole.

Faction, he called it. And he saw it for what it was: a genetic disorder of the republic that is fatal if not controlled.

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