The White House's response to the secession petitions proudly boasts participation in the most insolent of all tyrannies. The White House should have to read Thomas Paine's "The Rights of Man". In particular:
"There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a [Congress], or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the "end of time." . . . The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. . . It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated. . . When man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with him; . . . he has no authority in directing who shall be its governors, or how its Government shall be organized. . . "