By Kevin Rackham
It’s amazing that in a world where Israel and Palestine’s fragile truce could erupt into another major conflict the U.S. faces a fiscal cliff. Elections have only been over for a few weeks and we’re already having slow news days. We must be, because it’s unimaginable that we’re seeing news stories popping up about states’ petitions to secede from the union.
miles sanguinetti/VANGUARD STAFf
Searching “secession” on The Oregonian’s website results in multiple pages of hits. The newspaper’s got a column about it, along with several news stories, and the forum is rife with the topic. Stories about the petitions have been reported on TV, people have shared it on Facebook and Reddit, and residents from all 50 states have apparently filed petitions for the right to vote on secession.
Maybe the people reporting haven’t seen very many online petitions before. Signing an online petition is an even less effective way to change something than posting a Facebook status about it. Sure, these petitions are being filed officially on Whitehouse.gov, which supposedly gives them weight. Petitions that meet a signature requirement will be viewed, and responded to, by the Obama administration.
But Whitehouse.gov has also been the home of such illustrious petitions as: pleas for a full disclosure of the contents of Area 51, demands for President Obama’s resignation and a request for the official White House beer recipe. Anyone with an email address—from a political organization or nonprofit pushing for reform to an angry guy in his recliner who refuses to believe Obama isn’t Kenyan—can file a petition.
The petitioners’ reasons for secession follow similar lines: The government isn’t acting in the best interest of the states, it’s going against the Constitution, freedom from tyranny, yada yada yada. The only state I have any sympathy for is Ohio. If I’d spent the last six months seeing nothing on my TV besides political ads, I’d want to secede, too.
The fact that people are filing petitions to secede means nothing. It indicates that the apparatus for filing them is absurdly easy, and the really far right is pissed that Obama won a second term.
This isn’t news, though. This is America, and this is the Internet. The far right is always angry, and people on the Internet doubly so. That hundreds of thousands of people have signed these petitions isn’t significant in a nation of hundreds of
millions of people.
Allegedly, a petition for Texas to secede has more than 100,000 signers, and here at home, 13,000 Oregonians have put their name on a similar petition. Big emphasis on “allegedly.” Just like anyone with an email address can create a petition, anyone with an email address can sign one. There’s nothing to stop out-of-state people from signing these petitions.
Oregon’s petition has people from South Dakota, Nevada, Virginia, Texas and Ohio.
This issue deserves no press attention, and my hope is that, after 400 more words, I won’t have to think about it ever again. There will always be a loud group of people angry with the government. The kind of person who believes the government tramples all over the Constitution and is a socialist tyranny can’t be reasoned with, and furthermore, probably hasn’t read the Constitution.
Secession isn’t a valid option for most states (don’t worry, Cascadia movement, I’m not done). It’s more of an option for places on the East and West Coast that already have strong international trade. A lot of angry people in the loudest red states don’t realize how dependent they are on federal money. New Mexico and Mississippi receive twice as much money from the federal government as they pay in taxes. Other traditionally red states like Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee and Arizona are also net beneficiaries of federal funding.
It’s also been upheld multiple times, in multiple courts, that secession is illegal. The Confederate States of America was legally defined at the time as a rebellion and never recognized as a sovereign nation. In the eyes of the courts, Confederate States members never seceded because states aren’t granted the right to secede by the Constitution that our modern day secessionists claim to hold so sacred.
The bottom line is that secession isn’t possible, probable or news. Those petitions that gathered enough signatures will be addressed by the Obama administration (meaning his press team) sometime next month, and hopefully we won’t have to hear about it anymore after that. No one’s going anywhere.