With all the anger & obvious election fraud, some states are over the 25,000 signatures needed for the signed petitions to get a reply from the White House. Assuming the White House will not grant the peaceful request to secede, could we really have states like Texas & Louisiana closing their borders, maybe joining forces, declaring their own sovereignty, print their own currency, etc? On a scale of 1 - 10, how likely is it that they’ll actually take steps to secede once their initial request is denied? Aside from the Civil War & Panama Canal, has America ever voluntarily lost territory?
.1; barely possible, but highly, highly unlikely. And you can forget closing their borders or anything like that; that wouldn’t be allowed. The US military is both much too powerful and much too loyal; they could neither fight it off nor break off pieces of it to fight for them.
Edit: Especially since we are not taking about the states themselves, but a tiny minority of crazies within those states. This wouldn’t even be Texas & Georgia and so on against the US military; it would at best be a few not-too-bright militia nuts against the US.
Since none of them have asked to secede, zero. The “petitions” are random people on the internet pressing a button on a website.
And thus we see once again the folly of ever asking the Internet its opinion of anything.
The President can’t grant that request – he doesn’t have the authority to do so.
Congress might, but that’s controversial – there’s no description in the Constitution of any procedure for dis-uniting from the United States. One might say that logically it would be the reverse of the procedure to join the US (request by a convention of the residents of the state, which is then approved by a vote of Congress). But others say no procedures is specified because joining the union is permanent, and can’t be undone. We did fight a long & bloody war about this once.
To the second part of the question…
Yes the US has, through treaty, voluntarily surrendered various islands, shoals, reefs, banks and such that were claimed through the Guano Islands Act.
Neither of those were a loss of territory, voluntary or otherwise. We didn’t lose any territory as a result of the Civil War and the Canal Zone was never US territory at all. We just had a long term lease which was relinquished.
630 acres of Texas were ceded to Mexico in the 60s.
This is fascinating, & I never heard of it before. Was the area completely uninhabited? If not, what happened to the Americans living there - were they forced to vacate, forced to accept Mexican citizenship, or allowed to live there as American permanent residents? Were they subject to Mexican law via taxes, car registration, gun ownership, etc.?
Here is the actual Wikipedia article on it. It is rather confusing, but as far as I can make out, it is unlikely that any US citizens were directly affected by the settlement. Rather the disputed area (which was, thanks to a shift in the river, on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande), was already inhabited by Mexican “outlaws” (outlaws because the Mexican government did not have legal authority over the area) well before the issue was settled.
I suppose it is possible that some Americans lost land when the river originally shifted, or when teh outlaws moved in, but that was not due to any government action.
Take a lesson from the on-going dispute where a fanatic minority in Quebec wants to secede from Canada. They play upon the “us vs. them” aspect of French vs. English Canada to try to persuade the population as a whole to vote for succession. In the last referendum they came fairly close, resulting in the federal government saying “Lets clarify the rules”:
-separation (seccession) requires a significant majority of the population to vote in favour, not just 50%+1.
-The question must be clear.
-The seceding province will inherit their share of the national debt. (The separatists had somehow twisted the issue to say that Ottawa would PAY Quebec the equivalent amount???)
-Then there’s the question of whether smaller parts of the seceding province could separate and stay with Canada. The separatists went wild over the idea that the aboriginals in Northern Quebec or the less francophone Montreal could choose to secede from Quebec; no, they said, Quebec is an indivisible territory. Oddly, they did not see the irony in this assertion.
So the same might apply with the USA. If Puerto Rico or Alaska or California felt so strongly about secession that they would make an intact country unworkable, maybe the federal government would accept that. Maybe.
The biggest reason why it would not happen down south, is that the USA is a very mobile society. There isn’t much in the way of self-identified areas, that might say “I’m a Louisianer(?) before I’m an American.” The mass culture is pretty much the same everywhere, the population more identifies themselves as American. Contrast that with Quebec, where a different language and a distinctive culture that goes with it help them identify to some extent as “different”.
Heck, in the last open-ended ethnicity poll, the plurality of white southerners said they were “American” when asked what “ethnicity” they were. As opposed to non-southerners who tended to answer the question as “German” or “Polish” etc.
The primary ethnic stock of the South is of course Anglo-Celtic, a people whose history has long been one of nativism: claiming Americanness for themselves and themselves alone.
And the secessionist wanna-bes know that. They’re probably more interested in jack-off fantasies about killing their own countrymen than in actually starting their own country.
In Texas v White (1869) the Supreme Court ruled secession unconstutional and the Union indissoluble. Period.
Not exactly a “lease.” To nitpick, the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty gave the US sovereign rights over the Canal Zone “in perpetuity,” a clause that was relinquished in the Carter-Torrijos Treaties. But your main point stands that the Canal Zone was never officially US territory.
Groups from 30 states have filed petitions to secede. I must be living in a vacuum, for I never heard of this “overwhelming national movement” until today. What – that is WTF – is going on? These people can’t be serious – is this just a stunt, and if so, what will it accomplish?
I’d almost rather they put their money where their mouths are and start organizing homegrown terrorist cells. They’d get their asses handed to them by the feds and we could get on with the business of the country.
Well, then, the only recourse for a legal secession would be amending the Constitution first to allow it.
Anglo-Celtic mixed with a certain quantum of Cherokee & Choctaw. I’ve read somewhere that the Indian blood in the southern Appalachian population was an influence in the regional choice of ethnic group as “American.” That plus the other stuff you said. (These days, I’ve been getting in the habit of seeing America from the Indian point of view.)
“Louisianan,” typically.
Have you traveled much in the United States?
You’re right that language is a big factor–it’s part of the complex of dynamics that distinguish American states from each other, and parts of states and subcultures within them from each other. (Surely you’ve heard of French and Creole speakers in Louisiana? Spanish in New Mexico and Texas?)
But even excluding everybody who doesn’t speak English first, there is great variation. It’s a big country, and while migration is certainly easier than in years gone by, most people don’t relocate to entirely different parts. (More than one-third of Americans have spent their entire lives in and around the same town. More than half have always lived in the same state.) And if they do move, they tend to be pretty aware of the differences.
While there is of course a certain level of mass culture that is transmitted across the whole country (elements of which are shared across national borders, too), there’s still quite a lot of American culture that is far more regionalized. (Aren’t persistent geographic voting trends themselves substantial evidence of this?)
In my experience, quite a lot of people identify with their state or region, not necessarily “before” the nation, but at least in parallel.