There was a lot of discussion about states that wanted to secede from the US when Obama was elected, but that was before this latest shit from Ted Cruz and his pals.
I’ve had it. If Texas wants to secede, let it. If Mississippi and Alabama and any other red states want to join it, let them.
I think the US would be better off without them. Yes, there are a lot of good people there, but for whatever reason, they elect idiots to Congress, and those idiots are more interested in fighting whatever a black president is for, than in helping the country. They’d be happier on their own, I’d be happier without them, sounds like a win-win.
We could agree on no tariffs, and open bidirectional immigration for the first five years, so trade would be unencumbered, and nobody would be stuck where they didn’t want to be. They could require everybody to carry a machine gun; we could enact single payer universal health care. Everybody’s happy.
I’m a fan of this idea. Give 'em the southeast from Texas to South Carolina. If we could flip flop AZ and NM, that would help. As far north as KS and MO.
Resettlement for some period. Go be crazy ass all you like. Leave us alone.
Because if you allowed states to just leave any time the political winds changed we wouldn’t have a union. Hate to break this to you, but there are northern states where there are folks who also drone on about secession too. And states in the south west where folks talk the same silly shit. And then there are folks who, because of politics want to just get rid of states where their own political persuasion isn’t in a majority, such as, oh, say this OP.
Here’s the reality. There aren’t any red states. Nor are there any blue states. What we have is a lot of purple states where, in some, there is more red than blue, and in others there is more blue than red. And in all of them there are a small minority of folks who are idiots and talk big about leaving the union. Sometimes they even manage to get elected…for a time.
They’ve got no lock on stupidity via the populace or politicians. Idiocy is ubiquitous. Let every damn state secede then based on whatever minor disagreement they have deemed important at the time and see what you end up with. Not a very worldly view.
Texas doesn’t want to secede, so that is the first step to your problem.
Also, in the United States we fought a Civil War and a lot of people died establishing the concept that you don’t get to secede. That whatever the opinions of your State political leaders everyone in those States are American citizens, and their political leaders have no right to cut them away from the jurisdiction and protections of the United States Constitution.
That being said, in many other OECD countries secession isn’t a kooky thing that only nutjobs talk about. Most of them are at least begrudgingly willing to allow votes on it and most expect they’d honor the outcome if they voted to break away. There are or have been serious secession attempts in the past in various places. Quebec has held a vote on breaking away, for example. Scotland is going to have a vote soon. Belgium is dangerously close to splitting up etc.
It’s interesting that in most of the Western world there is an intrinsic acceptance of the idea that regions that wish to be disassociated with their country should have some right of self-determination. In the United States the concept is basically a punch line.
I’ll admit to being against it as a concept myself. I don’t think the UK should be split up, or that Quebec should be allowed to go its own way etc. I think the age of extreme nationalism (which is usually what underlies these things) is widely recognized as having been a very bad time and we should be beyond this stuff.
They can’t secede without permission; that doesn’t mean that we can’t let them go willingly. Hypothetically, if the Federal Government and the government of Texas were to both agree on secession, it would happen; it’s not like some other country or the UN would send a occupation force to stop it.
If the 13 southern states seceded it would be good for the US on the federal level, our politics wouldn’t be so dysfunctional or plutocratic. Not so good for minorities in the south, but the other 37 states would be better off for it.
I’m so sick of that racist crap. Obama could be white as the driven snow and conservatives would still be fighting the liberal policies he stands for tooth and nail.
Quite. Here is a map of the so-called “red and blue states” based on the 2008 Presidential election, but broken down county-by-county, and with colors shaded to give some indication of what percent of the votes supported each candidate, not just a binary “red” or “blue”. And here is one (from the 2004 Presidential election) where the geographic borders have been distorted to show the relative size of the populations of the counties (rather than their areas).
You don’t have “red states”. You have…“red strings”, surrounding “blue bubbles”, with “purple blobs” all over the place. (And all of that is without even considering that people can change their minds over time–there are surely people who voted for George W. Bush at least once who later went on to support Barack Obama–and people who vote for Democrats sometimes and Republicans other times in different elections for President, U.S. House, Senate, and state offices; and neither party is some kind of unified monolith–there are different factions and groups within both parties, including within the Republicans.) Separating out these “red” and “blue” populations would make the ethnic partitions of the former Yugoslavia look like a picnic.
That’s why people would have to be free to relocate. I’d.be hoping that the central T of Pennsylvania (the non Pittsburgh and Philly parts) would feel a calling to join their homeland.
Along with resettlement, there would also be a “speak now or shut the fuck up policy.”
I recall from a ski trip to Vermont long ago, saw a humorous paperback in a gift shop, beginning with the proposition that there’s a little-known clause in the Constitution that allows Vermont to throw all the other states out of the Union whenever it pleases.
“An irony of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is that one of its key provisions, the individual insurance mandate, has conservative origins. In Congress, the requirement that individuals to purchase health insurance first emerged in Republican health care reform bills introduced in 1993 as alternatives to the Clinton plan. The mandate was also a prominent feature of the Massachusetts plan passed under Governor Mitt Romney in 2006. According to Romney, ‘we got the idea of an individual mandate from [Newt Gingrich], and [Newt] got it from the Heritage Foundation.’”
