Republican presidential primary candidate Nikki Haley said Wednesday that Texas could secede from the United States if its people chose to.
While the former South Carolina governor called such a wish unlikely, she said in a radio podcast interview that she still believes in states’ rights.
“If Texas decides they want to do that, they can do that,” Ms. Haley said on Charlamagne tha God’s show ”The Breakfast Club.”
“If that whole state says, ’We don’t want to be part of America anymore,’ I mean, that’s their decision to make,” Ms. Haley said before hurrying on.
“Let’s talk about what’s reality. Texas isn’t going to secede,” she said.
When Ms. Haley was running for governor of South Carolina, the state whose 1860 secession over the election of anti-slavery President Abraham Lincoln precipitated the establishment of the Confederacy and the Civil War, she said that secession was a right in principle.
She doubled down on that view Wednesday, when the hosts pressed her about her earlier answer on Texas.
“States have the right to make the decisions that their people want to make,” she said. “I believe in state’s rights, I believe that everything should be as close to the people to decide.”
The U.S. Constitution has no formal mechanism for secession of its constituent parts (some national constitutions do) and the legitimacy of secession was decided by the Union victory in the Civil War.
Last month, Ms. Haley created a news cycle’s worth of controversy about her view of history by not mentioning slavery among the causes of the Civil War, though she backtracked on those comments within a day.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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