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It hasn’t even been a week since the election, and already Americans in 20 states have decided they’ve had enough with the grand experiment in democracy that is these United States.
The White House’s website is filling up with citizen-promoted petitions calling on the Obama administration to permit various states—mostly southern, but a few blue states, too—to quit the union and form their own autonomous governments. The White House’s “We the People” petition section allows visitors to vote on the various petitions; any petition that collects 25,000 clicks gets an official response. The petition section has been quite successful in other pursuits, notably the publication of the White House’s beer recipes after a petition launched by the D.C. Homebrewers organization.
But secession? Well, at least they’re being more peaceable about it this time. So far, there are petitions for Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. Nearly all of them use the same boilerplate text:
As the founding fathers of the United States of America made clear in the Declaration of Independence in 1776:
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
“…Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and institute new Government…”
In case you’re curious, that list includes the entire former Confederate States of America save Virginia. Either the Old Dominion is truly comfortable with its newfound blue-state status, or a petition just hasn’t been launched yet. More alarming, though, is that a few Democratic Party strongholds are on the list. New York, New Jersey and Oregon are hardly the flowerbeds of disunion that some of the other states represented here have been in the past.
The Texas petition has garnered the most signatures, with more than 19,000 votes as of this writing. Louisiana is closing in on 14,000.
Frankly, on most of these petitions, we say let ’em go. Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Carolina and Tennessee are no-brainers. We’re actually surprised Florida wants a petition to “peacefully leave.” After all the nonsense that state puts the rest of the country through, it’s a little surprising there isn’t a White House petition asking the Obama administration to expel the Sunshine State.
As for the rest, they’ll need to stay in the union. Much as there might be standard-issue New York hatred among certain segments of D.C. Internet people, our parent company is from there, and we at DCist have little interest in the tax issues that come with earning income from a company based in a foreign country. New Jersey, meanwhile, has in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, become a model for federal disaster relief. A successful secession drive would only drive a wedge between the growing friendship between President Obama and Gov. Chris Christie.
Louisiana, we need for New Orleans’ food and music. Allowing Louisiana to quit the country might be worth revisiting after the final season of David Simon’s HBO series Treme. North Carolina needs to stay, too, if only because Merge Records is headquartered in Durham, and it would be terribly awkward if the Canadian lefties/Obama campaign surrogates in Arcade Fire were represented by a label based in a state that departed the United States following Obama’s re-election.
Oregon is a tough call. Yeah, there’s lots of good music and beer, and Portland is a great city for biking. But voters last week rejected a law legalizing marijuana. Also, the second season of Portlandia kind of sucked. Oregon can go.
And Kentucky seems like a good candidate for the no-brainer list given its inherent, um, Kentucky-ness. But consider: All the bourbon comes from Kentucky, and we do not want to pay import fees on bourbon. Kentucky must stay.
That leaves Texas. Sure, Texas might be a big, ungovernable nightmare. Yes, it’s given us such things as Rick Perry, the Dallas Cowboys, oversize novelty belt buckles and the films of Robert Rodriguez (Machete excluded). And there’s that whole attitude problem. Ask a Texan what makes their state so great, and they’ll probably say something about how it is the world’s 15th-largest economic power. Or maybe something about South by Southwest and keeping Austin weird.
But consider Texas’ history. If Texas were to actually leave the United States, it wouldn’t be for very long. Between the annexation, the Mexican-American War and the Civil War, the United States has already conquered Texas three times. Sorry, but Texas belongs to America. Hook ’em.
