30 States Petition Federal Government to Secede After Election

(FILE)

​UPDATE:

We've uncovered comments from conservative Justice Scalia talking about the idea of secession. You can read his thoughts on the issue here.

--

Liberals often like to compare President Barack Obama to former President Abraham Lincoln. The comparison is usually dismissed as laughably hagiographical, but judging by one unexpected bit of fallout from Tuesday's election, it could well end up being accurate in just one respect: Like Lincoln, Obama is facing requests by the citizens of numerous states to secede from the union.

However, unlike with Lincoln, these requests are peaceful, and highly unlikely to do anything at all except generate news headlines. A massive number of petitions are currently circulating on Change.org, a website designed to call for action by the federal government or by private institutions on particular causes, calling for particular states to be granted permission to secede.

Nor are they confined to the usual suspects (IE the Southern States). In actuality, the mix of states asking to secede is deeply bipartisan, ranging from the deeply red (Alabama and South Carolina) to the deeply blue (New York) to the swing (Pennsylvania). Nor are the states asking to secede in any way geographically clustered. Northern states (New York), Midwestern states (Michigan), Southern states (Alabama) and Western states (Nevada) have all filed petitions of their own. Most swing states this election cycle, with the exception of Ohio, have a petition of their own, and all of them have at least 1,000 signatures, with even some of the bluest states in the union easily keeping pace with their red counterparts.

Is this simply the product of a few thousand discontents in each individual state? Perhaps. But Texas' petition has over 40,000 signatures, well over the 25,000 necessary to reach the attention of the President. If this turns out to be more than the discontented murmurings of a single state, this story may get ugly.

Additionally, here is a list of all the states with petitions to secede on WhiteHouse.gov:

• Delaware
• California
• Ohio
• Nevada
• Pennsylvania
• Arizona
• Oklahoma
• Arkansas
• South Carolina
• Georgia
• Missouri
• Tennessee
• Michigan
• New York
• Colorado
• Oregon
• New Jersey
• North Dakota
• Montana
• Indiana
• Mississippi
• Kentucky
• Florida
• North Carolina
• Alabama
• Texas
• Louisiana

(H/T: Politico)