CARBONDALE – A Carbondale City Council member is advocating for the State of Illinois to peacefully secede from the United States.

Clare Killman, who was elected as Carbondale’s first transgendered City Council member in 2023, recently posted a video to her Facebook page calling for secession in order for Illinoisans to safeguard the interest of self-determination, to not become targets of a reorganized federal bureaucracy of sycophants and informants that will strip federal recognition and funding for the sake of our values and shared way of life and deny access to medical care so vital to Illinois and the region.

SIU Political Science Professor Tobin Grant says there is no way under the Constitution for a state to secede. Grant says the Civil War settled it and once a state, always a state. States do not have the right to secede from the country. Once a state joins the union, they remain there.

Grant says calls for states peacefully seceding arise every once in a while. Texas Republicans did this in 2016. It’s similar to the call to divide Illinois into two states. It makes a statement about the wide divide between people, but it is not based in reality according to Grant.