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I have no idea what your background is so please don’t take this as any sort of slam at you, but my statement still stands.

I'm an amateur historian who has been discussing the Constitution on these threads for almost ten years now. A friendly disagreement about what the Constitution means is not a slam. Calling most Texans "pretty dumb" is a slam, however.

Please point me to a single Constitutional expert in this country who is on record as saying that Texas has rights under the Constitution denied to the other states.

If you will refer back to my earlier response, you will see that I did not take issue with your statement that Texas does not have rights denied to other states, although technically speaking it did have the right when it joined the Union to break into five states. No other state had such a stated right.

Since New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia reserved the right to resume their own governance in their ratification documents, does that mean they have rights that the other states do not have? If NY, RI, and VA have that right, then all states have it through the Doctrine of the Equality of States.

As far as I've been able to discover, those ratifications and their statements of what the Constitution meant were accepted and never repudiated at the time by the other ten states that formed the Union. If you know of any contemporary repudiation by the other ten, please let me know. I would appreciate it.

Those ratifications were not conditional. They were statements at the time of what the Constitution meant to the people who ratified it and in some cases helped write the Constitution. In other words, those ratification statements are about as clear a statement that we have of original intent concerning secession. Madison's objection to conditional ratifications dealt with withdrawing from the Union if certain amendments were not ratified within a certain time frame. The parts I cited from New York's ratification were not amendments; they were statements about what the Constitution meant. There was a separate list of proposed amendments that appeared after what I posted above. New York's proposed amendments did not include the statements I listed. New York had taken the words "on condition" that their proposed amendments be adopted out of their ratification document.

Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, two of the three authors of the Federalist Papers, voted for the New York ratification document containing the reassume governance statement. Jay, of course, was the first Chief Justice. What about the other author of the Federalist Papers, James Madison? Madison was on the committee that drafted the Virginia ratification document, along with future Chief Justice John Marshall and three other Federalists. Both voted for the Virginia ratification document. However, Madison is fairly inconsistent in his statements over time. In old age he argued against secession.

Or any main-stream Constitutional scholar who says that any state can leave the Union at will.

First let me tackle the "at will" portion of your statement. Madison and Marshall wrote (along with the three other Federalists) and voted for the Virginia ratification document that says governance could be resumed "whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression and that every power not granted thereby remains with them and at their will." [my bold] Why would those early states join an experimental form of government where a majority of states might take advantage of them and oppress them? This was discussed at the Virginia ratification convention.

Madison later argued against "at will" secession in his old age during the nullification crisis. The constitutional Union he helped create was about to come apart at that point. Here is what he said on that occasion, "The compact can only be dissolved by the consent of the other parties, or by usurpations or abuses of power justly having that effect." [my bold] In the Virginia ratification convention he had said [my bold and underlines], "That resolution declares that the powers granted by the proposed Constitution are the gift of the people, and may be resumed by them when perverted to their oppression, and every power not granted thereby remains with the people, and at their will. It adds, likewise, that no right, of any denomination, can be cancelled, abridged, restrained, or modified, by the general government, or any of its officers, except in those instances in which power is given by the Constitution for these purposes. There cannot be a more positive and unequivocal declaration of the principle of the adoption — that every thing not granted is reserved. This is obviously and self-evidently the case, without the declaration." During the convention, Marshall made a similar statement about things not granted.

Where in the Constitution were other states given the power to approve or block the secession of any other state? They weren't given that power, and I believe that the Constitution would not have been ratified by key states like Virginia and New York if the Constitution had granted that power to non-seceding states. The Civil War ultimately resolved the issue by force.

Now for the constitutional scholar part of your question. There is a discussion about secession and what people believed about it, at least prior to the Civil War, in the 2007 book, "The Politically Correct Guide to the Constitution," by Kevin R. C. Gutzman, J.D., Ph.D. He makes the same arguments that I and others have been making on these threads for years. Oops, he is one of those "dumb" Texans, or at least he got his law degree from the University of Texas. His Ph.D. in early American history came from the University of Virginia. Good book. I recommend it.