Disgruntled States Attempt to Break Borders with Union

By RYAN QUINT

Some people don’t like the fact that President Obama was reelected. They really, really don’t like that fact. They’re so mad they could secede.

Almost immediately after the election, starting with Texas and Louisiana, and spreading to several states, petitions to the White House were submitted online for secession. White House protocol says that petitions have to garner 25,000 signatures for review, and the first two petitions to secede have gathered more than that. Texas, last I checked, has around 38,000 signatures, and Louisiana. has about 27,000, which means victory for those groups, right?

Except not at all. Secession in the U.S. is illegal. No discussion necessary; just flat-out unconstitutional.

This country had a Civil War, and it was extremely bloody. New reports out of Binghamton University in N.Y. say about 750,000 soldiers were killed during the war. It would go to figure that, after the shooting stopped, the government would hope to close any further avenues of secession. And they did.

They did so in the 1869 Supreme Court case Texas v. White, in which Texas claimed they no longer had to pay for federal bonds owned before the war because their secession had nullified any previous contracts. The federal government responded by saying secession is a big old bag of illegality, and tough luck. To shorten everything to a single line: since 1869, secession in the United States has been declared unconstitutional and illegal.

That doesn’t mean that the people can’t petition to the government to vent their frustration, it just means that the Obama Administration can take the petitions and throw them out the window without a second glance.

The Confederacy didn’t just fill out some petitions and say, “Hurray, we’re our own country!” They raised an army to back up their claims, and for four years, they didn’t do half-bad. But, conservatives raising their own army in 2012 would be a whole different story.

I’d like to apologize to those people who so badly do not want Obama as their president that they would rather break away from the U.S. altogether, but secession is illegal, folks.