Texas Secession Fever: The Cost of Freedom
The state of Texas has successfully achieved over four times the required signatures necessary to acquire an official response from the president regarding its petition for succession.
A number of states have begun petitions for secession after President Obama was elected to his second term. Of those states, over seven have collected enough signatures to have earned a mandatory, official response from the President. Residents in all 50 states have submitted petitions requesting to leave the union, according to Market Watch.
It has been argued since the Civil War that states should have the constitutional right to secede, however, it was never made legal.
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"The bottom line is that any state- or confederation of states- can illegally secede from the Union. But the result, as we discovered in 1861, is Civil War," Richard Dunham reported in The Houston Chronicle.
The state of Texas has made the largest plea for secession, gathering over 117,000 signatures on its petition, which could likely be the result of Texas governor Rick Perry. Perry has been an avid opponent of Obama since the Affordable Care Act was first passed. He responded to the legislation by hoisting a secessionist flag and then falsely suggested that Texas may have a special ability to secede.
Perry claimed that when Texas "came in the Union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave, if we decided to do that." This is not the case, according to other reports.
But secession is not in the best interest for most states, if any, in regards to tax dollars, according to Brett Arends of the Wall Street Journal.
Arends argues that states receive "far more back from Uncle Sam in government spending than [they] pay in federal taxes." He lists Alabama as an example, which received $1.66 back from the federal government for every $1 it paid in taxes. That alone would lead a lone state to an inevitable recession.
