As the founding fathers of the United States of America made clear in the Declaration of Independence in 1776:
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
“…Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and institute new Government…”
Created: Nov 07, 2012
SchwartzReport Commentary Below the Line:
As many of you know the White House has a website (click through below) where any citizen can propose a petition to the President. If you can get 24,999 others within a fixed time to sign your petition, the White House will respond. I learned about this when a reader told me about the site and suggested that I! sign, as she had, the Marijuana petition — which I did. On an intuition I checked in with the site today. This is what I found. It was filed the day after the election.
This trend is going to grow. It is not really driven by economics. It is arising because the U.S. is becoming a nation of minorities, and a certain number of white people fear that, and are in denial about its inevitability.
It's a shame they cannot trust the wisdom of the Founders. Although they couldn't handle race they understood that they had to create a national democracy predicated on much of the population being immigrants. They or their families were. Everyone had come from somewhere else. It was a big empty country. They could see clearly it needed people. So although they didn't deal with racial issues, they left a political mechanism that could. We need to embrace that. And we will. It's just a question of how much pain we will inflict upon ourselves.
I see all of this as part of the Great Schism trend. I don't think the U.S. is going to break up; there are many good reasons why old-fashioned succession isn't going to happen. But I do think that states and bio-regions are going to become the loci of much more power than they enjoy now, and the Federal government will have less. There are a growing number of forces working in this direction. The Marijuana legaiization in Washington and Colorado, for instance, plays a part in this trend. Climate change is another driver.
Washington, Oregon, and California, west of thes Cascade make up one such bio-region. Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and East Texas make up another. The Northest states make up a third. They have many common interests and are increasingly banding together.
Click through to see how many have signed it. When I looked they had 7,317, and needed 17,683 more signatures.
Phi Beta Iota: Nullification, including a refusal to enforce specific federal laws, is one step down from secession.
See Also:
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Self-Determination & Secession
