The U.S. Constitution - R.I.P., 1865

Abraham Lincoln's Civil War, by not allowing the secession of the southern states, represented a usurpation of the Constitutional order.

After the Confederacy was defeated, Jefferson Davis was arrested and held by the Union army for carrying on a guerrilla war. He faced no charges, no indictments: he was held and released. The Supreme Court noted that no charge of treason could be made against him as there was nothing in the Constitution that forbade secession.

If secession was Constitutionally neutral in the eyes of a post 1865 Supreme Court, why was there a Civil War? If the Confederate States of America had won it's war for independence, the constitutional order would have been honored.

Because "the South" was not allowed to secede, Lincoln transmogrified the federal republic we lived under from 1788 to 1861 into something else: a nationalist, centralized republic. The rights of the States as entities, which before had added together to create the collective national government, became subservient to their creation - the federal government.

Lincoln’s “centralized republic” lasted until the United States morphed into a more imperialist republic under McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. Wilson's intervention into World War I was accompanied by the adoption of a national income tax and the removal of each state's direct role in selecting the Senate.

There was a "retrenchment from empire", with Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. Franklin Delano Roosevelt changed the order of our form of government completely with both his usurping of the Presidency and the complete centralization of the national government.
The second amendment "...the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" has been completely ignored by the cities of New York, Chicago and Washington D.C. as well as many others which have enacted complete and total bans on the possession of firearms.

There is a "Bill of Rights" with a the 4th Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure…against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…”. Yet today, as one can freely read in the new "Patriot Act" all of our communication is being "monitored" [i.e. "searched"] at will without judicial review. No amendment to the Constitution has been ratified.

There is this document called the US Constitution that governs terms of office, states having senators, congressmen, a supreme court etc. But significant portions of the Constitution are ignored, bypassed and superseded. In a word: usurped. And the Constitution is not a document that works well when applied only when it serves the needs of those who would use it to justify the means to their end.