I do personally

44 comments

  1. No, the states that would want to secede are the one that would never make it alone. We’d be screwing over American citizens.

  4. Nah. If they want to they can (reeeeeeeally) burn that bridge, but we’d have more important stuff to worry about by the time this becomes a serious possibility.

  7. Obviously not. Aside from the instability and civil war it would cause, it will instantly become allied with an adversarial country.

  10. No. Other than the original 13, states were created out of land owned by the country as a whole. States cannot just take that away.

    For the original 13 there was no agreement that they could just leave. If there were this country would never have got off the ground

  11. If some state somehow does secede now, I don’t think they should be let back in the Union

  13. Yes, they have that right since it is not expressly forbidden in the constitution and the 9th and 10th amendments exist.

    Everything about the Declaration of Independence and the constitutional convention’s expressly promote the idea that people have a right of self-determination and that when they feel their government no longer represent their interests they can dissolve those political bonds to create new ones.

    The idea that a government has an eternal right to rule by force over a set of people in an area is imperialism. Arguments that people don’t have a right of independence or that were stronger together are imperialist as well.

    The civil war didn’t settle anything except that if you try to declare independence the government will try to kill you to assert its power to rule over you. Texas versus White had no constitutional basis but was simply done to try to create a legal basis for the war which had just ended. It is one of many Supreme Court decisions that went against the Constitution in order to protect and expand government power.

    If you reject this view, you necessarily reject America’s foundational ethos, ideals, and philosophy and had you existed in the 1770s would have been a British loyalist.

    Tl;Dr people have an innate right of political self-determination, 10th amendment exists, might doesn’t make right, and imperialism is bad

  15. No. It would be extremely destabilizing and lead to constant war.

    On one side we’d have the ignorant helots in the glorified farming colonies we call red states seceding and aligning with Russia every time Tucker Carlson was paid to say something inflammatory.

    On the other side you’d have half the North East trying to join the EU to get rid of guns then immediately Brexiting at tax time.

    For a way to give people some say in whether they owe allegiance to a government they were born into, I do wonder if maybe citizenship should be optional: maybe one should have the right to exist where they were born independent of whether they accept the rights and responsibilities of membership in the body politic. If you opt in, you pay taxes, you register for the draft, you get the social programs, etc etc. If you don’t opt in, you can still live and work where you’re from, you still have basic human rights, but you don’t get the things you didn’t chip in for. And Once you opt in, you’re in for life. But I’m sure there’s a lot of things that would have to run differently for that to work.

  16. Without a constitutional amendment? Absolutely. If you win the war over your secession, congratulations on being newly independent.

  17. No, but the people who think the states should succeed are welcome to leave the US and start a new government somewhere else.

  19. I’d want the process to be fairly involved, with a requirement of a supermajority of the state population (2/3 or even 3/4) as well as the state legislature, as well as the assumption of a portion of the federal debt proportional to the population of the state, and possibly even a pre-determined wait before a confirmation vote.

    It’s not something that should be doable on a whim, but I think it’s worth considering as an alternative to a civil war if a state has such severe grievances.

  21. No.

    We’re stronger together.

    Any state leaving wouldn’t only be weakened (and weaken others by leaving), but would also create nightmares of logistics that both countries would then have to overcome.

  22. no, I do not.

    I do think territories should be able to, but it should be a high bar — like a 70 or 80% popular vote. I don’t think it would be fair for territories to secede on the basis of a 51-49 vote and regretting it a generation later. (Same goes for statehood for territories)

  24. No. We already fought a war about this. States can’t just throw a tantrum and decide to leave. The purpose of being in our federal system is for states to express their grievances and work towards a compromise

  25. I don’t think they should. However I believe that people should have the right to self determination and that if a state were to vote for independence in a Democratic referendum by a significant majority they should be allowed to separate peacefully.

  31. I don’t know.

    I think this is a tougher question to answer then people make it out to be.

    I think people have a right to be governed how and by who they want. Part of living in a democracy is accepting when you lose elections but what happens when you just don’t want to participate in the country any more and how many people in a given area have to want out for it to be a legitimate consideration? I don’t have answers to these questions but if every single person in Texas believed the US government no longer represented their interests and wanted to go their own we I see no good reason why people in New York should force them to remain part of the United States.

    Let’s remove the United States from the equation. Is there anyone here who would say Russian federal states who no longer wish to be federal states of Russia in light of current events and historical ones should be forced to remain under Putin’s control?

  33. Legally no state is aloud to. *Able* is another question entirely.

    It’s really a moot point. Whether it is aloud or not, a state or states seceding would need to fight a brutal war and win. If they are strong enough to win, it doesn’t really matter what they are *aloud* to do, because they aren’t recognizing the laws of the Union anymore anyway.

    A group willing to kill and be killed by the hundreds of thousands is unlikely to care much for a law that says they can’t. Like a bank robber walking up to a bank with a “no bank robbers aloud” sign out front and going “Dang! Foiled again.”

    There will never be a legal process set up to allow secession because the Union will never be in a position where they are not willing to fight to keep them. There would always be a military conflict involved.

  37. No. The United States is not a country forged out of smaller, individual, historic nation states like the European Union. It is a single, united country with individual states that function very much like self governing provinces for the most part. The overwhelming majority of the current states were formed by the federal government through acts of congress. No state, with maybe the exception of Hawaii as a former independent ethnic nation, can claim to have any historic legitimate reason for secession, and certainly no democratic grievances. Each, and every state in the union has a high mobility of U.S. citizens moving into, and out on a regular basis. The majority of U.S. citizens live in multiple states through out their lives. For us to give up territory simply because the current majority, which is likely to change in 10 years time, slightly vote yes, is not a good enough reason to allow secession. Also we had a war over this, and the unionist won.

  38. If they elect to do so democratically, yes. I believe in the principle of self-determination.

  39. No.

    We just got our weekly “are you more loyal to your state or your country” question from OP less than an hour ago, too.
    Let me save some work: *we are not buying any civil wars today*.

  40. Are you familiar with the Civil War? I live in the state that started it. It did not end well for SC or the other states that chose to secede.

    One of the lessons learned from the Civil War is that the Union is indissoluble. “United we stand, divided we fall.”

  41. I think it’d be dumb to do but I’m not entirely opposed providing there is an absolutely overwhelming amount of the state’s population that supports it. I’m talking like 95% support. If you can get that many people to want to secede then I saw go for it (on a reasonable timeline with all the kinks worked out and the state paying for the population opposed to move to another state and live at the same standard they did in the state seceding). But no state is that overwhelmingly tilted to one side or the other so as a practical matter I doubt it would ever happen. But in theory I’m not completely against it.

  43. I’ve wondered this.

    My initial reaction is an obvious no.

    But philosophically, would we would support most states and provinces in other countries that overwhelmingly want independence to have it. Why is ours any different? Because it logistically and practically would do more harm than good?
    It’s very obvious states *shouldn’t* secede, and I don’t even think that’s up for the debate. But should they be **allowed** to? Part of me thinks it’s unfair to say no, regardless of how bad an idea actually doing so would be.

  44. There was a whole war about that, and the winner decided that no it is not a thing.

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