Agreed.
Obviously not true. There are any number of extant countries with economies, geographies and populations much, much smaller than most American states. The land locked ones might be problematic, but I see absolutely no reason why any country not land locked into the continental 48 couldn’t survive as an independent country. They might be worse off as an independent country, but so what?
What is it that you see that is prohibitive?
That’s not what happened. Shortly after the start of the Mexican-American War in 1846, a small group of settlers took control of the Mexican garrison of Sonoma and declared Alta California to be an independent republic. Twenty-six days later, American forces arrived and took over. The leaders of the revolt stepped aside - they didn’t apply for admission to the U.S., but simply recognized the inevitable. The short-lived republic never formed a government, nor was it recognized by any other nation. In reality, it was little more than a small bunch of guys who took over a military base.
California became a state in 1850, two years after the end of the Mexican-American War and the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill.
Texas used to be an independent country (at least it probably was, but I won’t go into that dispute). But Texas decided to join the United States and the United States wanted Texas to join. The American Constitution gives the country the authority to admit new states but doesn’t define a procedure for doing it. So representatives of Texas and the United States (John Calhoun, of all people, was the American representative) got together and began working on a treaty by which Texas would be admitted to the United States. Supposedly this treaty implied that Texas had the right to pull back out of the United States if it changed its mind (although it takes a pretty tortured interpretation of the text to come to this conclusion).
But it’s a moot point because the Senate took a look at the treaty and voted it down. Instead Congress simply passed a law saying Texas was now part of the United States and the Texas legislature did the same. These laws did not say anything about secession. And they are the legal authority by which Texas entered the Union.
As for Texas being split up into more states, that came from the act of Congress. But here’s the thing people miss - that article was put into effect long ago. The law said that the northern parts of Texas could be used to make up other states. And it was - territory that had been claimed by Texas is now part of New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, and Wyoming. So including the current state of Texas, the territory of the Republic of Texas now makes up six states.
OK, let me modify that to say “succeed as a 1st world country.” By their very nature, very few state have either the resources or the infrastructure to operate independent of the US. Think about power generation, for one. As I noted above, all the “taker” states are pretty much out of the running, since the removal of federal funding would likely drop them to the level of Benin. Then there is the political factor. Face it, any movement that succeeded in secession would be so extreme that it would dissolve into internal civil war within a decade. Nutballs who lobby for such action have zero common sense and even less idea of proper governance.
None of these would work, not even the constitutional amendment, without cooperation from the government of Texas. The one limitation on the ability to amend the Constitution is that no amendment can deprive any state of its equal representation in the Senate without its consent, and kicking a state out of the country entirely would have that effect (among many others).
They would all work if Texas wanted to secede, which was implied by my remarks. Your forgot to quoth (or read) the part where I said " If it became the will of the majority of the people in Texas and a majority of the people in the United States . . ."
So could we amend that clause of the Constitution first and then amend it again to kick Texas out?
Anything is possible… 
Nah, it’s a bunch of crap. The Convention made no such reservation of rights. Even if they had, Congress would have had to ratify it. This isn’t a contractual dispute; it’s an annexation of territory by a sovereign.
I’m still not seeing this. There’s no rule that says a sovereign state has to generate its own power; sovereign states buy lots of things they need from abroad; why can’t power be one of them? Lots of sovereign states buy power. Besides, if the newly-independent California or Texas or whatever really wanted to generate its own power, they could built the generating capacity and just buy the fuel (if they needed to; I can’t see that Texas would).
Obviously, a particular state might be economically disadvantaged by secession, but this doesn’t mean that secession is impossible, still less that they would drop “to the level of Benin”. And of course much depends on the terms of the secession, and of the relationship between the rump US and the newly-sovereign state.
Buy power with what? The probem most states will encounter is that they just don’t produce stuff other countries want, at least at a decent price. They function semi-well as a part of a larger group, but solo…nope. Most states just don’t have the financial wherewithall to build all the stuff they would need without trashing their economy. We are definitely stronger as a whole, because the parts have become too interdependent on each other. Now, if you want to give everybody a 20-50 year ramp-up to independence, that’s another stoey.
Don’t worry about power in Texas. Texas has its own power grid called ERCOT. Until a few years ago, it was disconnected from the rest of the US power grid in order to avoid federal regulation. They have recently added links to Mexico and the eastern US power grid for emergency use.
The unfounded assumption being made here is that a state that secedes will remain in the same form: a state in its own right, formerly part of the US. There is no precedent for this, so, if Texas and the US Congress agreed to a divorce, what then does the state of Texas become? Why should we assume that it will uniformly be recognized as Texas-in-its-own-right and not just acreage the used to be Texas? If they failed to get a treaty of recognition as part of their negotiation for secession, what then are they? In short, what, besides an army, would prevent New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana from summarily annexing whatever tracts of real estate they might find appealing?
Because, really, a state is a state by dint of its membership in the US, after it leaves, it is just some land and people that are tasked with establishing their identity and right before they get gobbled up by their neighbors.
For an effective, meaningful secession, independent Texas requires at a minimum recognition from the US and Mexico. It would make no sense at all for the US to accept the secession of Texas but then refuse to recognise the polity that governs Texas as the government of Texas; I can’t envisage any scenario in which the US would adopt that stance. (Even if they did, the US federal government would take a Very Dim View of any state government which embroiled the US in an international contoversy/dispute by attempts to annex non-US territory which the state government claimed to regard as terra nullius.)
As for Mexico, while it’s theoretically possible that Mexico might wish to annex an independent Texas, it’s impossible that the US would accept the secession of Texas in circumstances where Mexican annexation is realistically possible. So any secession has to be on terms that Mexico is involved, to the extent of recognising the sovereignty of Texas, or alternatively on terms that there is, e.g., a US/Texan mutual defence pact sufficient to deter any Mexican attempt at a grab.
The problem with any state seceding is that a legitimate secession process is rather undefined. In the case of Texas, it is a very diverse state that is very likely to not be unified on the secession question. If, for instance, el Paso anf the western counties were not in favor of leaving and were to petition the US to form the state of Big Bend or to be taken up in New Mexico, how would the US respond to that? It is these sort of questions that would need to be addressed. For almost every state in the nation, there are regional differences that are likely to make secession messy and impractical.
As far as neighbors annexing territory, it almost certainly would not be unilateral on the part of the annexing state, but once the larger idea of nation/state divorce is firmly established, the lesser idea of state/county divorce would be quite difficult to hold back.
And your evidence that Lincoln sent in an army to forcibly occupy a state is? In the civil war scenario, the US would attempt to resupply an army (or navy or air force) base and the Texas militia would attack the resupply ship or plane. Then the US would defend them and the fat would be in the fire. In fact, I have read that Lincoln went to considerable effort to reassure the south that the resupply ship was not going to start a war, but the south was all set to fight.
This reminds me of a possibly apocryphal quote from Lincoln. After the Battle of Gettysburg, Meade wrote a general order thanking the army for their operations and calling for “greater efforts to drive from our soil every vestige of the presence of the invader.” Lincoln is supposed to have said, “Will the generals never get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil.”
Too much blood would be shed due to the fact that no Texan would turn his back on the Army sent down to take Texas back over for the USA.
This question sure does sound familiar, perhaps it should be a sticky of MOAQ (most often asked questions)
Do you really think there were mass executions after the Civil War? What the hell kind of nonsense did they teach in your school?
Yeah then they’d all die, big deal. Don’t play with the big dogs if you tiny.
But I have to ask, when you say no Texan do you include the brown Texans? What would they be dying for?