Opinion | Nikki Haley Has Got Secession All Wrong

If nothing else, it is historically fitting that a former governor of South Carolina would endorse the notion that a state can leave the American union of its own accord.

During an interview on Wednesday with “The Breakfast Club,” a morning radio show, Nikki Haley affirmed a state’s right to secede, in the context of the current standoff between Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and the federal border patrol. “If that whole state says, ‘We don’t want to be part of America anymore,’ I mean, that’s their decision to make,” Haley said. “Let’s talk about what’s reality. Texas isn’t going to secede,” she added.

Later, when asked if she really agrees with the idea that states have a right to secede, Haley said that “states have the right to make the decisions that their people want to make.”

None of this is new for Haley. When asked, during her 2010 campaign for governor, if states had the right to leave the union, she said yes, “I think that they do. I mean, the Constitution says that.”

The problem for Haley, then and now, is that the Constitution does not say that. And if there is a right to secede, as a previous generation of South Carolinians learned the hard way, you won’t find it in our founding documents.

Secession, like its cousin nullification, rests on a mistaken conception of the American union. You see it in the opening lines of Governor Abbott’s news release rejecting the Supreme Court’s ruling that he could not keep federal agents from removing razor wire placed at the border with Mexico. “The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States,” Abbott wrote last week. “The Executive Branch of the United States has a constitutional duty to enforce federal laws protecting States, including immigration laws on the books right now.”