40 Different Private State Secession Ballots

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I ran into this somewhere online where the topic was being broached, supposedly as of Tuesday over 500k people has signed these, Texas being most popular with 80k votes.

I know what the knee-jerk reaction tends to be here, that this was simply conservatives who cornhole their cattle. The discussion I heard though I think was much more objective. People have been talking about 1860 a lot in the past few weeks I've noticed and the drama that lead up to the Civil War. The problem is - such murmers started and grew in the 1830's. I knew that the Civil War was about economics but what I heard in addition was that it had even more specifically a great deal to do with growth of central government and southern states becoming disgruntled about their tax money being shifted to northern states.

I really think that to say this is just a bunch of people who want to ruin what they see as a coloured in office is sticking one's head in the sand. On one hand we (in the US) have a country where many states have been paying for both debts of a central government where those spending decisions have gone sharply against their own wishes (not to mention the possibility of bailing states out who have done similar things themselves). You then to the other side of things have a Federal government that threatens Colorado and Washington on their decision to legalize marijuana and will not negotiate the federal edict.

So.....do you guys think this will lead to a much more in depth state's rights discussion on the national level? If not now perhaps even in ten years? I really have my doubts that anyone wants to secede from the union but I do see our country diverging in culture. Seems to me like an epiphany is starting to take shape on the national stage that having an overbearing central government that's too liberal for some states or too conservative for others is not only disadvantageous but such a central government having all the power will mean nothing but gridlock and inaction in the face of major problems.

If we had stuck with the original Federal Pl;an as envisioned by the Founders we would not be in this jam. But we have National Government, rather than Federal Government. Injustice and corruption are the inevitable consequences.

ruveyn

Injustice and corruption are the inevitable consequences of any form of government, except Anarchy, which is social Darwinism (imho).

Conservatives don't want higher taxes, but they supported a conservative who got us into a multi-trillion dollar war - with a claim of WMDs that didn't exist and a claim that the leader of that country had something to do with 9/11, which he didn't.

They supported the Patriot Act and Homeland Security, which represent the biggest power centralization our government has ever seen and brings the government literally into our living rooms, hampers our travel options (I personally WILL NOT submit to TSA, therefore I will not travel by air), and listens in on our internet and phone without warrants.

Conservative presidents and legislatures let our infrasctucture go to hell while they spent money in foreign places trying to bring democracy to people who are perfectly capable of doing that themselves - whether they choose to or not is their business.

NOW that all that money has been spent elsewhere and big banks were allowed to take our economy (as well as the economies of many other countries) to the cleaners with paperless credit default swaps and other questionable financial instruments - now that it's time to clean up the mess, conservatives balk at paying their share, and even balk at making the super-rich who benefit so much from our country pay their share.

And now (ETA - these secessionists, who I assume are conservatives, since they're doing this right after Obama was re-elected) don't like that government is too big so they want to secede.

Poor things. Maybe they should move to Iraq. I mean, Bush fixed that place up, right? We spent a lot of tax dollars there, and everything is better - mission accomplished. Right? Good luck.

These are people who were happy to be part of creating the problems but now that it's time to fix them just want to back out. I have no patience or sympathy for them. IMO they're traitors. Maybe not prosecutable as traitors, but still, ethically, traitors.

Lead, follow or get out of the way. There are people here who are trying to make our country better again. If they can't help or won't help, then maybe they should just leave.

Last edited by SpiritBlooms on 17 Nov 2012, 5:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

This is why I think the "conservatives this, conservatives that" and pinning this whole thing up as conservative hypocrisy is truthfully suicidal. There's a real problem, just like you really don't have many cookie-cutter conservatives or liberals, you just have people trying to find what matches them best. When you have a federal government out of control and the side that's more likely to point it out just gets the hammer for endorsing growth of government at certain times therefor making the whole argument completely null and void for anyone to make - that's exactly how we demagogue our way out of addressing the real issues and continue on a road that reinvents 1860.

It might be cathartic right now to just beat on conservatives as poor election loosers but remember, there's also Washington and Colorado to think about. Soon enough I do believe liberals will have just as much grievance and reason to be saying similar things, even if for much the opposite reasons.

After a quick check, I determined that there is currently no state with a ballot measure for or against secession.

We'll see if even one state floats a actual proposal to the voters, and if the majority of voters actually vote it in.

Can you imaging what might happen if no state votes to secede? Disgruntled voters will be drawing up petitions for counties to secede from their states, cities to secede from their counties, neighborhoods to secede from their cities, blocks to secede from their neighborhoods, and individual homeowners seceding from their next-door neighbors.

Why can people just get over the butt-hurt and simply deal with not getting their way this time?

The conversation I was tuned in on though brought up a good point - the White House bulletin may very well be a point from which those who are disgruntled may be able to get each other's contact info and organize into a grass roots movement. Having an organized movement more people would add themselves to that movement as time went on and the heat got turned up under the states rights issue. You don't have states filing secession documents but what you do have is states suing or filing injunction against the federal government left and right.

I really don't think anyone sees secession as an option but as (more aptly 'if') this grows it would feed a dialog that would be geared toward the issue of just how much cart blanc do we want the federal government to have over state and local matters as well as taxation power. Something that could easily accelerate the problem would be either the central government's actions threatening to collapse the US economy or even just a big enough pocket of states having almost all of their tax money taken and nothing given back (adding with no decrease in the national debt).

I'm a liberal and I also see a need for a dialog about states' rights - for instance in view of marijuana laws. I'm sure lots of liberals do. But using the threat of secession right after the re-election of a black president seems unnecessarily divisive a move, if that's that they're really after. (I don't think it is, btw.)

There's a real problem and the problem is that conservatives are insane.

I really have my doubts that black has all that much to do with it. Things were increadibly mean during the Bush years, they're mean now when the position is reverses; I really think you're just seeing that much disagreement and disgruntlement on whichever side of center feels like its rights to either grow private business in peace or grow government in peace is being trampled.

Repugnican vs. Demagogue. I'm not sure there's a sane anywhere.

The population of the U.S. is what, three hundred and ten million plus some change? Let's use 310'000'000 for now.

According to two online percentage calculators (which could easily be wrong, I'm absolutely horrid at math so please correct me if it is wrong), those five hundred thousand signatures account for .1613 of the U.S. population. That's a laughable and utterly insignificant minority.

So, can we kindly get over this now?

Lol, no.

That was done with thirty seconds of google research and two online plug and play calculators. If there's a number wrong in there, please tell me where so I can fix it.

I just mean take a look around the PPR forum and see what kinds of topics get broached here. No one's really revved up or worried about this, at least I'm not, but if I were to put my finger in the air and lick it I think the wind may be blowing toward states rights dialog - that's really all I'm saying with this.

In a forum where the majority of topics are already somewhere between trite and kitsch I don't see why this particular topic is so far out or egregious that someone reminding us that its less than 1/6 of a percent petitioning means that the thread needs to end.

311,591,917 people in the U.S. of A. as of July, 2011 (Source: U.S. Census Bureau). This number may have increased since then.

~500,000 divided by 311,591,917 equals ~0.001605, or 0.1605 percent.

Let's call it "One-Sixth of One Percent" (0.166667%). Even this is certainly not a significant percentage of the population, any way you look at it.