Can Texas Really Secede from the Union? Not Legally
U.S. Secession Petitions: Not Legal for States Like Texas to Break Away
It’s beginning to feel a lot like the 1860s — and not just because Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln opened nationwide this past weekend. There is a secessionist movement afoot: hundreds of thousands of Americans from all 50 states have signed petitions to secede. Texas is in the lead — no great surprise, perhaps — with ABC reporting last week that the Lone Star State’s petition was the first to get more than 25,000 signatures. It now has more than 100,000.
That 25,000 mark, which at least seven states have hit, is significant. The petitions were shrewdly placed on a White House website called We the People, which invites members of the public to appeal directly to the federal government. The site promises that petitions that garner more than 25,000 signatures within 30 days — subject to some exceptions — will get a response from the White House.
What exactly are the states’ grounds for seceding? The answers are a bit scattershot. The Texas petition complains that the U.S. is suffering economically “from the federal government’s neglect to reform domestic and foreign spending” and throws in alleged abuses imposed by the Transportation Security Administration, which could be summarized with the phrase “Don’t touch my junk.” Virginia’s petition cites, with somewhat arbitrary punctuation and capitalization, “Corruption,Lies,and Cover-Ups.Including potential Voter Fraud.”