A coworker from Vermont tells me that Vermont is the only state in the union that has the option to secede from the United States. His story is that when Vermont became the 14th State, it reserved the right to break away from the original 13 by referendum. I can’t find anything on the web about this. Is there anything to this, or am I being whooshed?
Most people wouldn’t notice . . . or care. 
Vermont can optionally secede from the U.S. along with people who optionally choose to pay income tax.
There is a Vermont independence movement
There are a lot of writings and theories in there about why Vermont should secede and its constitutional basis.
Nowhere is an “out” listed as a reason.
I’m not sure about that, but I remember a guy who is associated with the Free State Project talking last year about a town in Vermont that wanted to secede and joined New Hampshire, where it would have lower taxes (or something). He indicated that the secession went ahead as planned and was perfectly legal and is now a done deal. I don’t know any details, though.
With all that liberal thinking and maple syrup, aren’t they basically Canadian?
Of course, it’s only been in the last 20 years or so that Vermont has become a liberal haven. It used to be the complete opposite.
I missed the factual part about Vermont being a haven for liberals.
Liberal stronghold? Is that more acceptable? Liberal bastion? State with a lot of liberals in it?
Just looking for something factual.
If memory serves, the town was Killington VT, home of Sugarbush ski resort, which pulls in a lot of cash, and thus townfolk pay more taxes then they recive in benifits from the state. They wanted to succede and join NH which has lower taxes until it was pointed out to them that the actual ski slopes which provided most of the town income was not on town land.
Killington, that was it. So his talk about how it was a done deal and how Killington was now Killington, New Hampshire, was just bluster?
Is Killington even near NH? Or did they want to become a Neal Stephenson-type enclave of New Hampshiredom that was surrounded by Vermontness?
Well they have a major college town, Burlington, that is full of liberals. But of course guess Texas has Austin and no one calls it liberal.
Vermont is what conservatives used to be. They actually have real towns with a main street and real town squares and bands playing in the parks and pancake dinners at white clapboard churches. You can pretty much do and think what you like as long as you don’t do it in the road and scare the horses.
Now days conservatives live in gated McMansions, drive everywhere, shop at strip malls, and worship at churches that look like Las Vegas casinos. Not to generalize. 
According to This CNN exit poll 32% of all voters in Vermont described themselves as liberal. 44% as moderate. 25% as conservative (errors due to rounding)
In this poll CNN Exit poll for New Hampshire only 21% of people there identified themselves as liberal.
In this poll CNN Exit poll for Utah just 11% described themselves as liberal.
In an exit poll in Mississippi, one young feller said he was liberal. He hasn’t been heard from since. 
This question, or some variation on it seems to come up a lot (too lazy to look up other threads, sorry, take my word for it though.)
The answer is, NO. Vermont cannot secede. There is no provision in the constitution for secession. I don’t mean to be flip about it, but we had a whole war about this, and the answer was… NO, you can’t secede.
You sometimes here similar claims made for Texas, and that it has the right to split into 6 states or something.
The answer is always the same: the constitution is the supreme law of the land. The states are not sovereign nations, and they have no ability to make treaties and no right to reserve rights upon entering the union. You can have a theoretical discussion if you want about whether the 10th amendment gives the states the right to secede. But it doesn’t matter.
This is exactly what the civil war was all about: does a state (or group of states) have the right to leave the union. The answer was no. And NOT JUST because they lost the war, but because every Supreme Court decision has been consistent on this point: the states are not sovereign nations and they don’t have the right to pull out of th union.
Not enough donut shops?
Sorry, couldn’t resist . Cite: http://www.rawstory.com/exclusives/lanna/lanna.html
My take on it is that any state could secede if the rest of the United States let it, but that’s unlikely to happen. Of course, the Civil War was about state secession, and the Confederate States lost. However, if they could have won that war, by neutralising the North’s military strength, and by getting Northern opinion to accept that they could not win the war (or that the war was not worth it), they the secession would have been successful, regardless of US constitutional law. The Supreme Court and the Congress would just have accepted it as reality.
(Other countries have split up in recent years, in spite of what their constitutions said, including Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia, because enough people accepted the splits as political reality. If the people of the US wanted it to happen, state secession would happen.)
Killington VT is the home of the Killington Ski resort. Sugarbush is further north in Waitsbury or Warren.
The way the VT tax code is written, certain “gold” towns pay far more in taxes and essentially subsidize the rest of the towns which have much lower tax bases. Most of the owners in Killington are from out-of-state and own large, expensive vacation homes. As a result, they don’t have a lot of political clout in VT. The town is well inside VT, there’s no way they could ever join NH.
Several years ago, at the 200 anniversary of VT’s joining the Union, there were a series of debates around the stat about seceding. I don’t know if was based on some clause written when VT became a state (it was an independent country after the revolution) but I vaguely remember the premise was that this was their last chance to secede, after this it became permanent. It was all just humorous talk, they had fun with the debates.
The chief exports would be Cabot cheese, maple syrup, and Ben and Jerrys.
Of course, it’s hard for liberals to hold their position, since none of them have firearms.
I have not researched this out, but my understanding of the Texas split-up issue is that, while anyone can ask Congress to admit them as a state – Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Bahamas, Newfoundland, whatever – Congress is not honorbound to take the request seriously. The treaty and admission process for Texas, however, allows the Texas State Legislature to draft statehood provisions for up to five states to be composed of portions of Texas, and Congress would be obliged by its own agreement to consider the request seriously. It remains with Congress to decide whether or not to admit any new state, but Texas has the privilege of requiring Congress to consider the request, where in any other case it’s up to the total discretion of Congress, its members, and its committees.
That said, no state has the privilege of secession; that’s settled law, from the legal footwork involved with settling what happened during the Civil War from a legal standpoint. The closest any U.S. citizens have to doing so is the right of Puerto Rico to choose between independence, statehood, and the “free association” commonwealth status they now enjoy, which right is extended them by act of Congress on a regular basis.