re: Texas can’t legally secede from the U.S., despite popular myth

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You don't ask for permission to declare independence

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One of my favorite lines from 1776:

ROGER SHERMAN: "We still have friends in England. Do you think it wise to offend Parliament?"

JOHN ADAMS: "This a revolution dammit! We're going to have to offend somebody"

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Boy, with some gerrymandering, that could be an interesting idea.

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but your are talking TX House Republicans who kept Joe Strauss as speaker until he made the decision to quit

OK fine split it into 4 states. Austin and 3 conservative states.

The republicans could use the extra senators.

Should happen about an hour after the dems do DC and PR.

Any state can secede. States are the superior government who delegate powers to the feds. Lincoln being a power hungry tyrant does not change that.

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Number of Posts: 904
Registered on: 11/8/2016

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It was her turn!

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Texas can’t legally secede from the U.S., despite popular myth

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This is what you get when the LAW is interpreted differently depending on your wealth and political classification. Sorry when the pendulum swings back and gives you a full dose of my favorite law: The Law of Unintended Consequences.

Cross-posted in another thread; it’s relevant here as well.

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Donald W. Livingston, PhD.
Department of Philosophy Emory University

Secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy…. (Lord Acton to Robert E. Lee, November 4, 1866)

The idea of a modern unitary state goes back to the philosophers of the seventeenth century, but its first appearance in the world was the work of the French Revolution. The unitary French republic has since been the model for would-be modern states throughout the world, including the United States after 1865. The modern state was said to be one and indivisible, and so was conceived from the start as a state from which secession was impossible. From 1790 until 1990 there were only a few cases of successful peaceful secession. Belgium seceded from the Netherlands in 1830; Norway from Sweden in 1905; and Singapore from the Malaysian Federation in 1965. All were negotiated peacefully. But suddenly after 1990, the number of successful peaceful secessions surged. Fifteen republics seceded from the Soviet Union. A Czech and a Slovak republic were created out of Czechoslovakia through secession. With the exception of the secession of Eritrea from Ethiopia, all the successful secessions since 1990 occurred without violent resistance from the respective central governments. This was true even of Yugoslavia. There was only half-hearted resistance to the secession of Slovenia and Croatia from the central government, then dominated by Serbia. the present conflict is over the Serbian enclaves in Bosnia and Croatia who are not allowed to secede and join Serbia.

It is paradoxical and demands explanation why peaceful secession by referendum should have occurred in so-called totalitarian communist states whereas in western liberal states, during a period of two hundred years (1790-1990), there have been only two cases of peaceful secession, but a great number of cases in which secession attempts were brutally defeated by the central government.

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What we must begin to do is throw into question the legitimacy of the modern consolidated state itself. We must stop working on the Tower of Babel. Constitutionally, this means that the states must reassert their sovereignty under the Ninth and Tenth Amendments and recall those powers they have allowed to slip out of their hands to the central government. We must restore the Jeffersonian and Madisonian tradition of state interposition.22 The States must once again become constitutional members of a genuine federative polity as they were during the ante-bellum period and beyond when states throughout the union interposed their authority and even nullified actions of the central government that they judged unconstitutional. History textbooks present nullification as a wild and unpatriotic policy of John C. Calhoun. But a genuinely federative polity, designed to preserve distinct social and political societies, must allow some form of legal corporate resistance.

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There is a profound lack of political imagination in America. We still look superstitiously to the central government as the object of all our hopes and fears. Many Americans do not know their own constitutional history; they do not know the constitutional authority States have exercised and can exercise again. For over a hundred years we have been taught the ideology of the modern state in the version that Lincoln seared into the national consciousness with a writ of fire and sword. It teaches that divided sovereignty is a horror; that consolidation is a good thing and that secession is a bad thing. It tells us that sovereignty originally resided in the American people in the aggregate and not in the people of the several states, and that the central government created the states as administrative units of itself. All of these teachings are false.

The Lincolnian myth must be refuted with the Jeffersonian account that the constitution is a compact between the people of the states creating a central government as their agent and endowing it with only enumerated powers; and, further that the central government is not and cannot be the sole authority in determining what powers were delegated and what reserved. The Jeffersonian story is one of dynamic federalism and the self-government of distinct political societies. The Lincolnian story is one of increasing centralization, consolidation, and political ossification. That we have fallen under its sway explains the surprising lack of political imagination in America today.

As part of expanding this imagination, we must work to remove the moral and philosophical prejudice against the very idea of secession. America was born in secession; secession is essential to the idea of a self-governing people; and until 1865 was widely considered an option available to an American state in all parts of the union. But secession short of national sovereignty is also possible. Parts of cities and counties may secede. A part of a state may secede and form another state as twenty-seven counties in northern California proposed to do in 1992. The mere discussion of the merits of such proposals, whether or not they succeed, will serve to detoxify the idea of secession and re-awaken in Americans the long slumbering notion of self-government induced by the opiate of the Lincolnian ideology of a modern unitary American state.

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Who cares about law anymore anyway

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Texas can’t legally secede from the U.S.

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Well this is just wrong.

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Texas can’t legally secede from the U.S., despite popular myth

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Oh, well, somebody better tell them so they won't do it.

Show me the law that makes it illegal. I didn't think so, either.

Regardless, when they get ready to do it, they're not going to ask for permission.

Ever read about Marbury vs. Madison? Part of the case revolved around whether or not the SCOTUS had the authority to decide the case, in the first place. In response, the SCOTUS essentially said that, "since we decided to hear it, we have the authority to hear it. Do something about it." In other words, "All the while you're throwing a tantrum and pounding the ground about how we can't do something, we're doing it. So, yeah, we can do it."

Secession will be the same way. A bunch of fricking idiots will jump up and down and scream and yell about how they "can't" secede.

Meanwhile, Texas will have seceded. And several others probably will have joined them.

Oh, and frick you.