Despite a White House rejection, supporters of a petition signed by more than 100,000 people continue to forge ahead with a petition allowing Texas to secede from the U.S.
Supporters of the petition, the Texas Nationalist Movement, met with Republican leaders last week,
The New York Times reports. The group wants Texas to sever its federal ties and become an independent nation, the newspaper reports.
The officials included Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst.
Note: Should Obama's Gun Ban Be Approved? Vote Here Now in Urgent Poll
The Texas Nationalist Movement also rallied on the steps of the state Capitol on the first day of the legislative session and visited lawmakers seeking support for a referendum on the secession issue.
The group’s president, Daniel Miller, met with Dewhurst for about an hour.
“We had a lengthy discussion about the U.S. Constitution, the Texas Constitution and the future of Texas,” Miller told the Times. “He was cordial and engaging on the issues with which we are concerned.”
A spokesman for the lieutenant governor, Matt Hirsch, said that Miller was among several constituents who met with Dewhurst on the first day of the session — but that as a proud veteran, Dewhurst believed in preserving and protecting the Union.
The Obama administration rejected secession petitions from residents of Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and five other states, the Times reports. The Texas petition, with 125,746 signatures, said that withdrawal was “practically feasible” since the state had a balanced budget, according to the paper.
The director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, Jon Carson, wrote the Texas group, saying that free and open debate was good for democracy — and cited some of the legal arguments against secession, including an 1869 Supreme Court ruling that found that individual states did not have a right to secede.
“Our founding fathers established the Constitution of the United States ‘in order to form a more perfect union’ through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government,” Carson wrote, according to the paper. “They enshrined in that document the right to change our national government through the power of the ballot — a right that generations of Americans have fought to secure for all. But they did not provide a right to walk away from it.”
Note: Should Obama's Gun Ban Be Approved? Vote Here Now in Urgent Poll
© 2013 Newsmax. All rights reserved.