If any state can secede, it's Texas

By last Friday, three days after the re-election of President Obama, a curious phenomenon was already taking place on the "We the People" website, which the Obama White House set up in 2011 as an easy way for Americans to petition the executive branch for the redress of grievances. Disgruntled individuals in various states -- generously taking it upon themselves to speak for the rest of their states' populations -- were announcing their desire to secede from the union and formally requesting permission from the federal government to do so.

As of earlier this week, petitioners in more than 30 states had expressed interest in severing ties. According to "We the People," any petitions that earn 25,000 signatures within 30 days of their original posting will automatically receive an official response from the White House -- which, if and when it comes, is almost certain to resemble the kind of "official response" routinely dispensed by powerful corporations that feel compelled to acknowledge customer dissatisfaction, but who can afford not to offer any form of actual recompense. ("Thank you for your interest in seceding from the United States of America. We appreciate and share your concern about the fragile state of our union. Unfortunately, at this time ...")

It's unclear just how many of the state petitioners will be able to meet the signature threshold. But one state will enjoy an advantage over the others -- Texas, which has always prided itself on doing things its own way.

But it's not my home state's vaunted independent streak that gives it a leg up: Thanks to a strange quirk of its original annexation agreement, Texas may actually be in a slightly better position than any of the other 49 states to back up its tough-guy talk.

Just four days after a Texan known only as "Micah H" petitioned the U.S. government to allow his home state to secede peacefully, his petition had received more than three times the number of signatures necessary to merit an official reply from the White House. (Sympathetic signatories were jumping onto his bandwagon at the rate of about 2,000 per hour this week.) This remarkable outpouring of support -- no other state has even come close to matching Texas' number of signatures -- coupled with a statement made late last week by one Texas GOP official who likened Obama voters to "maggots" and called for an "amicable divorce" between Texas and the United States, prompted Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, to weigh in. In an e-mail to a Dallas Morning News reporter this week, the governor's press secretary affirmed for anyone who might be wondering that her boss "believes in the greatness of our Union and [that] nothing should be done to change it."

Those soothing words are a far cry from ones Gov. Perry uttered back in 2009, at a Tea Party rally in Austin. Perry, already trafficking in the bellicose anti-Washington language that would earn him his brief moment as the GOP's presidential front-runner, answered a reporter's question about the notion of state sovereignty with all the menacing subtlety of a Lone Star loan shark. "We've got a great union," he said. "There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that?"

Nice country you got there. Be a real shame if something happened to it.

That simply isn't true. Texas' so-called "right" to secede is no more than an emboldening myth, the boastful residue of the decade it spent as a sovereign nation before joining America. Nevertheless, over the last century and half, this myth has proven harder to kill than a mound of East Texas fire ants. As recently as 2009, the pollster Rasmussen Reports noted that nearly one-third of Texans believed their state could unilaterally split off from the United States if it chose to do so.

But while it may not enjoy any such right, Texas can claim to be holding an unusual ace up its sleeve. Should it ever be played, it could end up altering the face of the U.S. map even more significantly than secession would. And were it to be played deftly, that ace could even set the stage for the very secession scenario that Micah H. and his separatist compatriots envision.

A few years ago, while conducting research for a novel about Lone Star politics, I discovered a clause in the state's 1845 annexation agreement that's well-known to any state historian, though less well-known to the average Texan. Buried beneath boring details about how the republic's resources were to be transferred to Washington is language stipulating that "[n]ew States, of convenient size, not exceeding four in number, in addition to said State of Texas, and having sufficient population, may hereafter, by the consent of said State, be formed out of the territory thereof, which shall be entitled to admission under the provisions of the federal constitution."

Put plainly, Texas agreed to join the union in 1845 on the condition that it be allowed to split itself into as many as five separate states whenever it wanted to, and contingent only on the approval of its own state legislature. For more than 150 years, this right to divide -- unilaterally, which is to say without the approval of the U.S. Congress -- has been packed away in the state's legislative attic, like a forgotten family heirloom.

Could Texas secessionists use the division clause in pursuit of their separatist goals? It would certainly be worth a shot. Naturally, it took the Machiavellian political mind of Texan Tom DeLay -- the former House majority leader currently out on bail while appealing a 2011 money-laundering conviction -- to put the pieces of a tenable scheme together. The day after Perry blew his secessionist dog whistle to that reporter back in 2009, DeLay went on MSNBC's "Hardball" to cheerfully defend his governor's remarks. When host Chris Matthews insisted (correctly) that unilateral secession was illegal and couldn't take place, DeLay stopped his maniacal grinning for a moment and cited the division clause.

Referring to the language of the joint resolution, he said, "If we invoke it, the United States Senate would kick us out ... because they're not going to allow 10 [sic] new Texas senators into the Senate. That's how you secede."

A nutty idea? Sure. An un-American idea? Definitely. But for flag-waving patriots who have suddenly found themselves transformed into America-bashing cynics, it must seem like an idea whose time has finally, if sadly, come.