“If you disagree with…
“If you disagree with the constitution so much you have a choice and it’s one you’ve always been free to make: Leave the country.”
I believe we were originally talking about the folks who were in the area in 1788, rather than me. Of course, you’re aware (whether or not you happen to use that awareness in this particular instance) that millions of people had no option at all about whether to stay or to go because they would be hunted down, captured, and flogged, mutilated, or even killed for daring to try to leave. A few (adult white males not indentured) had the legally recognized right to move at their own pleasure, but this brings us to the second question:
Why should they have to leave? You’ve provided no basis at all for thinking that the arbitrary will of a handful of convention participants and the 5%-10% or so of the adult population that was able to vote to approve them should have any morally binding force at all on the vast majority of the American population at the time, let alone all their future descendents and future immigrants, any more than my arbitrary declaration of myself as Emperor of North America should require that everyone else either to hightail it out or be subject to my absolute authority. Why should it? What is the difference? At this point you have clearly abandoned any attempt to justify this dictation of terms by the consent of the majority (the better for you, since empirically there wasn’t any majority to begin with), but then what does justify it? Divine right? Force? The fact that, in retrospect, you happen to like the substantive political regime that resulted?
Please note that this is a rather important point, since in the absence of having provided any justification whatsoever for treating the demands of the Federalists as less arbitrary than my demands to be recognized as Emperor of North America, all you’ve given is an argument that could justify absolutely any form of tyranny whatsoever. Don’t like the War on Drugs? Then leave the country or you’re accepting its legitimacy. Don’t like apartheid? Then leave the country or you’re consenting to it. Don’t like the Nuremberg Laws, Shariah, the gulag, the killing fields? Leave the country, or you are signing on to that social contract, and by God the terms of that contract will be enforced.
How are any of these arguments any different at all from the argument you’ve given to defend the legitimacy of enforcing the Constitution on non-voters or dissenters?
Anticopyright.