35 US states petition for secession – on White House website

One week after a deeply divided US re-elected Barack Obama as its 44th president, citizens unhappy with that outcome are using the White House's own We the People website to create petitions promoting the secession of 35 of the country's 50 states.

The Obama adminstration set up the website in September 2011 with the goal of soliciting opinions from citizens, and promised to release an official response when the number of signers of an individual petition reached a certain threshold. The bar was first set at 5,000 signatories, but was quickly raised to 25,000.

As of mid-afternoon White House time on Tuesday, the petition for Texas had handily passed that threshold, garnering well over 77,000 signatories. No other state except Louisiana (29,000) had reached the magic 25K, but individual state petitions from Florida (23,000), Georgia (22,000), Alabama (21,500), and Tennessee (20,000) were rapidly closing in.

Five states have two petitions – including one from the state of Ohio and one from the "Republic of Ohio" – and Georgia leads with three that together have attracted over 33,000 signers.

A few counter-secession petitions have been started as well, including one that calls for deportation of signers of secessionist petitions, and another that suggests they should be stripped of their citizenship and exiled.

The language of many of the petitions are identical or nearly so, suggesting either a coordinated effort or, at minimum, a series of cut-and-paste follow-ons by different individuals in different states. A common theme is a quote from the second paragraph of the 1776 Declaration of Independence:

... 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 ...

That Declaration was aimed at "the present King of Great Britain" – George III at the time. The current deluge of We the People petitions, on the other hand, are aimed at an American citizen (no matter what Donald Trump says) who is the duly elected president of the republic.

We look forward to reading the Obama administration's response to the petitions that successfully pass the 25,000-signer threshold. However, considering what happened the last time states decided to secede from the Union, we doubt the response will be an accomodating one. ®