Governor Perry on Texas Secession

I think this story is very interesting, and so I will do my best to cover it.

Rockwell.com Blog
- Stephan Kinsella
- April 16

I've been telling people for quite a while now how great it would be if Texas were to secede--it's big enough to be a separate country (and, of course, it was at one point, with President Sam Houston). Texas Governor Rick Perry has become my new favorite governor, by publicly entertaining the idea of secession. As noted here, "Speaking with reporters after a tea party rally in Austin today, Gov. Rick Perry said Texas can leave the union if it wants to."

"Texas is a unique place. When we came into the union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that," Perry said. "My hope is that America and Washington in particular pays attention. We've got a great union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what may come of that."See also Perry fires up anti-tax crowd.

Now I think Perry is mistaken about the treaty of annexation whereby Texas joined the Union--it merely contemplated Texas splitting up into 5 separate states--and that would probably require Congress's approval anyway. (see also Snopes) It's a common myth that this Treaty explicitly gave a right to secede; I believe this is a confusion of the 5-state-split issue. That said, however, as pointed out here, Texas, like all states, of course has the constitutional right to secede, in part because the federal government was never granted the authority to prevent this (it's inconceivable the 13 original states would have signed a compact creating a new agency that had the power to make war on them if they decided to leave the arrangement!).

(I'm sure the libertarian centralists (2, 3) will disapprove of Perry here--why, if a state were to leave the union, the federal courts could no longer tell it what to do, and the Fourteenth Amendment and its Privileges and Immunities would be lost!)Update: Kevin Gutzman writes with an intriguing argument for the right to secede:As I discuss in ch. 3 of Virginia's American Revolution and in my 2004 Review of Politics article "Edmund Randolph and Virginia Constitutionalism," Virginians retained the right to reclaim the powers they were delegating to the Federal Government (that is, to secede) in case those rights were perverted to their oppression (which has to be a matter that is for them alone to decide).

Under the Supreme Court's long-standing Equal Footing Doctrine (that all states must be treated alike), which reflects the universal understanding of the ratifiers, that means Texas can secede if it wants to. Now, of course, it could be that the president, in the mode of Lincoln, would ignore Texas's right. That's a separate issue.