The Line Of Secession
by dday
With all the talk of torture memos recently, we’ve skipped over the return of secession talk to the national forefront. Seeing Rick Perry mocked on late-night show and cable-chattering show alike, I do think his comments flipped the light switch on for some people. You can’t escape this – for eight years, George Bush broke the economy, rang up massive debt, started unnecessary wars, wiretapped American citizens and committed torture in our name, and crickets from these folks. In under 100 days, Obama has inspired cries of secession. I guess the tax cut wasn’t big enough.
Perry has since tried to walk this back, simply suggesting that he was asserting the sovereignty of the state of Texas under the 10th Amendment. This is classic Overton window stuff, putting secession at the extreme while making this assertion of sovereignty – and by extension the belief that the President is violating the Constitution – seem banal and reasonable. But of course, this is ridiculous. The President in the stimulus package offered states the ability to accept federal funds, with certain qualifying guidelines, the way, you know, highway funds are contingent on the national speed limit. States can comply to the guidelines and accept the funds, or refuse the funds. That actually is the very definition of the 10th Amendment. It’s not the President’s fault that, during a recession, it would be deeply unpopular not to change the guidelines. Indeed, Secessionist Perry’s own legislature in Texas voted to accept stimulus money for unemployment benefits by changing their guidelines. Which I guess makes King Richard want to secede from the Texas legislature.
It’s worth watching indicted former Congressman Tom DeLay make up a bunch of gobbledygook to try and defend this.
Q: You can’t secede from the Union!
DeLAY: Texas was a republic. It joined the Union by treaty. There’s a process in the treaty by which Texas could divide into five states. If we invoke that, and the last time it was voted on was 1985, the United States Senate would kick us out and nullify the treaty because they’re not going to allow 10 new Texas senators into the Senate. That’s how you secede.
About 4% of that is true.
It goes without saying that if any Democratic elected official ever even dipped their toe in the secession water, they’d be the second coming of Ward Churchill and forced to resign. When a Republican Governor does it, Rasmussen runs a poll. They found that 31% of Texans thought that ” individual states have the right to leave the United States and form an independent country,” and 18% answered yes to “If you could vote on the issue, would you vote for Texas to remain in the United States or to secede from the United States and form an independent country of Texas?”
To borrow a Tristero-like construction, roughly one out of every five people in the state of Texas think they should go ahead and form an independent country. If you’re in line at the bank with five people, one of them believes this.
18% of the voting public from the last election would be around 20 million people. Which puts the 250,000 or so teabaggers in perspective, doesn’t it? Maybe they should poll how many of them think Obama is Hitler.
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