Growing Calls for Secession – CounterPunch.org

The upcoming 2024 presidential election poses two key questions: What happens if Donald Trump wins? And, equally troubling, what happens if he loses the election?

Attempts to address any of these issues now—months before the election and a newly elected president takes office—are purely speculative. Some have already begun to consider the first question. In March, Trump addressed the second question in no uncertain terms, warning of the consequences if he loses the election in November:

“If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole… it’s going to be the least of my problems, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country, it’s going to be the least of my problems.”

Trump’s “bloodbath” threat is delivered with the grave authority of a president who instigated the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In his speech at a “Save America” rally preceding the attack, he taunted his audience by shouting, “We’re fighting like hell. If you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore.”

A second front that is rarely discussed in MAGA’s contingency strategy should Trump lose the election is the growing calls for a session.

In February 2023, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-R) tweeted, “We need a national divorce. We need to split into red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.” She added, “Everyone I talk to says it. From the sick and disgusting problems of woke culture being forced upon us to the treasonous policies of the Democrats in America Last, we are finished.”

Greene isn’t the only one increasingly calling for a session. During her presidential campaign, challenging Trump, Nikki Haley declared on the radio show “The Breakfast Club,” “if Texas decides they want to do it, they can do it.” She continued, declaring, “If this whole state says, ‘We don’t want to be part of America anymore,’ that’s their decision to make.” She cautioned, noting, “Let’s talk about what the reality is. Texas is not going to secede.” Her words were so radical that she soon reversed her position.

Support for secession is most strongly voiced by Daniel Miller, president of the pro-independence Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM). He warns, “If you see major anomalies in the 2024 election, the calls for TEXIT (i.e. Texas independence movement) will become overwhelming, and I believe the same thing will happen if Joe Biden is re-elected president of the United States.”

Hy McEnery, vice president of Free Louisiana, insists that state secession is constitutional. He declared:

“The freedom of a state to withdraw its membership in any union is a state power that was not given up when the states created the federal government. The United States Constitution has a list of things the states cannot do, but it does not include secession. And the Tenth Amendment says that all powers that the states have not delegated to the federal government are reserved by the states or by the people.”

A 2022 poll of 625 Louisiana adults found that 50 percent support the state becoming an independent state, while 49 percent oppose it.

There is a growing belief among Republican and conservative voters that the time has come for secession. Such efforts are being promoted by GOP legislators in states as diverse as Texas and New Hampshire; in Arizona, one in four Republicans supports secession.

A 2024 YouGov poll found that nearly a quarter (23%) of Americans support secession, and “Republicans are more likely than Democrats to support their state seceding.” The poll found that the states with the highest support for secession are Alaska (36%) and Texas (31%).

Calls for secession are spreading state by state. In Illinois, Jersey County officials have suggested it secede from the state and become part of Missouri. In Madison County, residents will vote on whether it could secede “from Cook County to form a new State and apply for admission to the Union.”

Individual states do not have the right to secede from the Union. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Supreme Court ruled Texas vs. White (1869), which states that it “entered into an indissoluble relation.” This view was supported by former Justice Antonin Scalia, who noted in 2006, “If the Civil War settled any constitutional question, it is the lack of a right to secession.”

Amid the growing controversy over illegal immigrants, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has challenged that long-held belief. He has argued that the Biden administration is violating the federal government’s “compact” with the states by failing to secure the border. He and 25 other GOP governors have insisted that Biden’s alleged failure justifies the usurpation of federal authority at the border by the states. They argue that Constitution is a “pact” or agreement, not a binding “contract.” According to one interpretation, “This language embodies the conception of the Confederate Constitution as a mere compact from which the states may withdraw when they feel it has been broken.”

Support for Abbott’s position on secession was voiced by California State Assemblyman Bill Essayli (R-Riverside). In a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom (Dem), he noted:

“As a border state, California has suffered significant economic and social harm due to a porous border. While I appreciate your efforts to combat fentanyl smuggling by increasing the number of California National Guard members deployed to intercept drugs at U.S. ports of entry, more needs to be done to secure our southern border.”

The MP asked Newsome to “make a public declaration of solidarity” with Abbott.

Insight into the potential appeal of a call for secession is suggested by Wisevoter’s map of the two most conservative state clusters. The first is in the Northwest and includes Idaho (40% conservative voters), Montana (39%), Wyoming (46%), North Dakota (39%), South Dakota (45%), and Utah (41%). The second is in the South-South Central region and includes Louisiana (43%), Mississippi (50%), Arkansas (41%), Alabama (46%), Georgia (39%), South Carolina (41%), Tennessee (43%), Indiana (39%), Oklahoma (43%), Kansas (39%), and Missouri (41%).

It is hard to imagine what the outcome of a second secession would be. But one can imagine such a movement growing in the Southern/South Central States as it did a century and a half ago. On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president; on December 5,^twon the Electoral College in terms of popular and electoral votes; and on December 20^tSouth Carolina seceded from the Union, soon joined by Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. On April 12, 1861, Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, and the Civil War began. Could this be recreated in 2025?

Looking to the Northwest, four states—Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Idaho—suggest what could be a second front in the push for secession. According to Conservative Move, Wyoming is “the most conservative state in the United States.” It adds: “Wyoming has a 2023 Partisan Voting Index score of R+25, with 69.9 percent of its voters supporting Trump in the 2020 presidential election.”

Wisevoter notes, “Wyoming’s dominant values ​​tend toward conservatism, with a strong emphasis on limited government intervention, individualism, and gun rights.” North Dakota had a PVI of R+20, with 65.1 percent of voters supporting Trump in the 2020 election. In 2020, Idaho was classified with a PVI of R+18, with 63.8 percent of Idaho’s votes supporting Trump. Equally telling, as Conservative Move points out, “this means the state has consistently voted for Republican candidates and has not elected a Democratic presidential candidate since 2000.” Montana had a PVI of R+11, with Trump winning 56.9 percent of the vote in 2020.

These four states have some of the highest rates of private gun ownership in the country. According to the website Ammo.com, the states rank as follows in terms of “gun owners per capita”: Wyoming (No. 2 at 245.8), South Dakota (No. 3 at 72.2), Idaho (No. 4 at 40.2) and Montana (No. 1 at 33.2).

Many white Americans, especially men, feel they are being “replaced” by women, African Americans, Jews and a growing number — and variety — of immigrants who have settled in the U.S. over the past quarter-century. Fox TV host Tucker Carlson went on an on-air tirade about being replaced months before Jan. 6^t attack. “In political terms,” he said, “this policy is called the ‘Great Replacement,’ the exchange of older Americans for more compliant people from distant lands.” More disturbingly, white nationalists who attended the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanted slogans such as “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.”

That outrage was most evident in the failed 2020 kidnapping attempt on Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, by 13 men, seven of whom were members of the Wolverine Watchmen, a paramilitary militia group. Times report, the kidnappers “threatened to start a civil war ‘leading to the collapse of society’ and planned to kidnap the governor and other government officials.” The kidnappers’ actions could foreshadow the kind of backlash that could follow Trump’s 2024 election defeat.

The 2024 elections are slowly approaching, and their outcome remains uncertain. Nevertheless, the outcome—regardless of who wins—says a terrifying fate for the country, especially if far-right groups and Republicans pursue a secessionist agenda that could become a second civil war. As Rachael Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warns, “The events of January 6 are not the past. They are the prelude.”