Nancy Gibbs? latest TIME column uses recent comments from Texas Gov. Rick Perry as the hook for a discussion about the possibility of states seceding from the United States:
Who wants a union, founded on high ideals of liberty and justice for all, to be maintained only by force of arms or weight of law? I wouldn’t make it easy for a state to unfasten itself; we should require that a two-thirds majority of voters agree. But a Zogby poll last summer found that 1 in 5 Americans thinks states and regions should have the right to leave, which means that the revolutionary DNA of 234 years ago still persists in our bloodstream. Maybe every couple of hundred years, the country should have the debate, just to keep our muscles warm.
Later Gibbs adds:
America is now a multicultural quilt of 300 million people spread across cities and suburbs and forests and prairies; when it is compared with the colonial world of our forebears, it is harder to judge whether what unites us is greater than what divides us ? or agree on just how much power we want to cede to Washington so it can fight pirates and build highways and cure cancer, and how much we prefer to keep for ourselves.
It?s too bad that Gibbs does not suggest that the ?multicultural quilt? serves as a reason ? in and of itself ? for limiting government to those core functions for which it?s suited. The less power we cede to Washington, the less likelihood we have of manufacturing disputes among those 300 million people.
