The colonies came together voluntarily, and the states should be permitted to just as voluntarily exit when the preservation of their citizens' lives and liberties demands that they do so.  An appreciation for the individual states' sovereign powers and a guarantee that the imposition of federal authority would be limited in scope were key assurances for persuading skeptical colonial representatives to bind their discrete political bodies together.  This understanding of each state's enduring right to secede from a Union that no longer represented its interests was common right up until the death and devastation of the Civil War.  Then the states looked around at the carnage and realized that the federal government was playing for keeps.  Violent coercion, in other words, altered a well-established belief that deference to the federal government was based upon continued consent from each state's citizens.  Isn't it time for "consent of the governed" to actually mean something again?

The Union has been lovely, but it shouldn't be a suicide pact.  States should not suffer the deadly consequences of the federal government's decision to aid and abet illegal immigration.  Individual states' citizens should not have their wealth and savings confiscated by a profligate federal government that debases the Union's common currency by printing money and spending well beyond its means.  Individual states' citizens should not be forced to embrace the federal government's "woke" religion or to labor under the federal government's "politically correct" delusions.  The states should not have to follow the U.S. government's march into the new world order's insane asylum.