Questions answered.

NHEXIT is the process of New Hampshire leaving the union and becoming a self-governing nation. Independence is the destination. NHEXIT is the road, and the road is a vote.

The right of a people to govern themselves is inherent. It came before the Constitution, it is not something Washington hands out, and it is not Washington's to take back. New Hampshire was exercising it at Exeter in January 1776.

This state wrote that down and never took it back. Part First, Article 10 of the New Hampshire Constitution holds that when the ends of government are perverted and public liberty manifestly endangered, “the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government.” It calls the opposite doctrine, submission to arbitrary power, “absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.” Most state constitutions say somewhere that the people may alter or abolish their government. New Hampshire's goes on to call the opposite doctrine, submission to arbitrary power, absurd and slavish, and it titles the article the Right of Revolution. Every officeholder in Concord swears an oath to that document.

Nothing forbids it. There is no clause and no statute barring a state from leaving. Article I, Section 10 is the list of things states may not do, and it is a specific list: no treaties, no coining money, no troops, no import duties without Congress. Leaving is not on it. The Tenth Amendment reserves what was never handed over. The silence is the answer, and the burden sits with anyone claiming a prohibition to produce one.

What they produce is Texas v. White. It was an 1869 dispute over bonds. Texas had received $5 million in federal bonds under the Compromise of 1850, its Confederate government sold some during the war, and afterwards the Reconstruction government sued to get them back. The only question the court had to settle was whether Texas could bring the suit at all.

A court's holding is the narrowest reasoning it needs to decide the case in front of it, and only the holding binds anyone. The rest is dictum. Chase's line about an indestructible union was not needed to work out who owned the bonds, so it is dictum, and it has never been reaffirmed as a holding by any court in the century and a half since. The one part of that case that was a real holding, the rule about the bonds themselves, the Supreme Court overruled sixteen years later in Morgan v. United States.

Then there is the judge. Salmon P. Chase had been Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury, the man who built the machine that financed the war, before he was the Chief Justice who ruled the union it preserved could never be left. And what that court was looking at was a break by force of arms, not a ballot. Even Chase allowed the union could be reconsidered “through revolution or through consent of the States”. A strange thing to write about something permanent.

There is no law against it. One old opinion, built on a bond case, undercut by a later ruling, and contradicted by the judge who wrote it. The barrier is not constitutional. It is political, and political problems have political solutions. In New Hampshire that solution is a vote.

One thing before anything else: a vote of the people of New Hampshire. Until that has happened there is nothing to negotiate and nobody to negotiate on behalf of. Everything downstream, every question about currency, borders, federal assets, or treaties, is a question for negotiators who do not yet have a mandate.

The principle is real, and it is not a way of ducking the questions. They have answers, most of them dull, and what changes and what does not goes through them one at a time with the sources attached.

So the near-term work is narrow and unglamorous. Get a referendum authorized through the General Court. Everything else waits on that.

It went down 323 to 13, and what that records is what 336 representatives thought on one morning in March 2022, before a single one of them had been asked about it by a constituent.

Rep. Michael Sylvia filed CACR 32 with no organization behind him, no petition, no roster of colleagues who had committed in advance, and no mail from home. It still went to committee, the public still turned out to testify, and on 10 March 2022 it was debated in open session and every member put their name to a recorded vote. No other state legislature had debated it on the floor in more than a century and a half.

What that vote produced is a list. Four hundred people, each documented, each representing a few thousand neighbors, most of them still reachable. Thirteen of them already voted to let the question go to the people. Nobody has yet found out what that vote looks like after a session of constituent mail, because nobody has ever sent any.

It can be filed again, and it will be. The full record of that day, the roll call, and what was said on the floor are on the CACR 32 page.

More than a poll can tell you. We commissioned the University of New Hampshire Survey Center to ask in April 2025, and the answer moved threefold depending on the sentence.

Asked whether they would support New Hampshire peacefully seceding and governing itself as a separate country, twelve percent said yes. Asked whether they would support New Hampshire holding a vote on declaring independence, twenty-one percent. Asked whether they would want New Hampshire to join the United States if it were not already a member, thirty-four percent said no.

Same people, same afternoon, same subject. Nobody changed their mind between those questions, because the questions were not the same question. Polling does that to a constitutional issue. A vote is the only instrument that answers honestly. Read the poll.

Census figures put 82,855 New Hampshire residents working in Massachusetts. Another 38,897 Massachusetts residents come the other way to work here. About a hundred and twenty thousand people cross that line to earn a living.

Britain and Ireland have run this exact arrangement since 1922. The Common Travel Area gives citizens of both countries the right to live, travel, work and study in either one, with access to social benefits, healthcare and housing supports, and no routine passport controls between them. It survived partition, thirty years of violence in Northern Ireland, and Brexit. The Irish government states that it does not depend on EU membership at all.

Two governments kept that border open for a century because the people on both sides needed it open. Massachusetts needs those 38,897 workers as much as New Hampshire needs the 82,855. Nobody would be negotiating from weakness.

The longer answer, with the sources, is on what changes and what does not.

Social Security is not a benefit of residency. It is money you paid in, and Washington already sends it across borders every month as a matter of routine. The federal government's own guidance says it plainly: “If you earned Social Security benefits, you can visit or live in most foreign countries and still receive payments.”

Where a working life straddles two systems, the machinery for that exists as well. The United States holds social security agreements, called totalization agreements, with about thirty governments. They let a worker combine credits earned under both systems and stop anyone paying twice for the same coverage. The first, with Italy, entered into force in 1978.

The sums are large. Social Security Administration payments made up $8.0 billion, or 53.9 percent, of all federal money directed to New Hampshire in federal fiscal year 2024. That makes it the first item in any negotiation, and the one with the most precedent already attached to it.

New Hampshire has no individual income tax on wages and no state sales tax. The interest and dividends tax, the last individual income tax standing, was repealed effective 1 January 2025. The state funds itself mainly through property tax and business taxes.

This site used to say independence protects that arrangement. That was overstated and it has been corrected. Concord sets New Hampshire's tax structure and always has. A General Court could pass an income tax next session, in the union or out of it, and nothing about the federal relationship would prevent it.

What separation would change is the other side of the ledger. Federal income tax would stop being collected here, and the things Washington currently pays for here would have to be paid for in Concord or not done. Granite Staters pay $22.9 billion a year, federal and state together. Running every government function inside New Hampshire costs $13.8 billion.

Independence moves the decision about tax to Concord. It does not by itself raise or lower anybody's bill. The full ledger is on whether New Hampshire can pay for itself, and the analysis behind it is a downloadable PDF.

Because of how this state is built. New Hampshire seats 400 representatives, the largest state legislative body in the United States, alongside a 24-member Senate, and pays them $200 for a two-year term. Districts are tiny and the people in them are reachable.

In most states, moving a legislature means moving a party. In New Hampshire it means moving a few thousand neighbors at a time, four hundred times. Slow, and a job ordinary people can actually do.

No, and it cannot afford to be. A referendum needs a majority of New Hampshire, not a majority of one party's primary electorate. Self-government is not a left or right proposition and the moment it is treated as one, the arithmetic stops working.

Sign the petition so we know you exist and can tell you which House district you live in. After that, talk to the person who holds your seat. They are not a distant figure. In New Hampshire they are frequently someone you can reach in an afternoon.