Texas Lawmaker Files Bill to Prompt Potential Secession from U.S.
The 49 states of America?
Earlier this week, Texas Rep. Bryan Slaton (R) filed a bill to allow Texans to vote in the next general election on whether to secede from the United States and form its own sovereign nation.
“All political power rests in the People of Texas, and they deserve to have an opportunity to make their voice heard about the future of Texas,” Slaton said in an emailed statement to The Daily Wire.
The Texas Independence Referendum Act in the Texas House of Representatives would place a referendum on the ballot asking residents to determine the state’s future by exploring whether or not lawmakers should establish a commission to investigate the feasibility of Texas seceding from the Union and provide further recommendations to the state legislature.
The Texas Nationalist Movement, a group of approximately 440,000 Texans from across the political spectrum, has been leading the charge of the so-called “TEXIT” coalition to gain independence from the federal government since 2005.
President Daniel Miller of the group told The Daily Wire that its members represent the Lonestar State more than the Republican or Democrat parties.
“At the end of the day, the people of Texas want that right of self-government,” Miller said. “They do not feel like they’re being represented in a system where they feel crushed under the weight of 180,000 pages of federal laws, rules, and regulations administered by two and a half million unelected bureaucrats.”
Should the bill pass the state legislature and voters later this year, a bicameral committee of house and senate representatives will formulate a plan addressing four key issues relating to Texas independence. Such issues include constitutional and statutory matters, international covenants, treaties and agreements, and negotiations with the federal government.
“Texans are tired of making decisions here at home and having them overwritten at the stroke of a pen by an executive order or a ruling from an unelected, unaccountable federal judiciary,” Miller said. “Texans want the ability to govern themselves, and they believe that the best people to govern Texas just happen to be Texans.”
Miller says the TEXIT movement is different from other attempts to those efforts ignore the underlying issue of a “terminally broken” federal system.
“You could shift your counties over to a state that feels a little a little bit more representative of where you are ideologically,” Miller said. “But at the end of the day, it’s still the federal system that’s broken — and it’s still the federal system that drives so much of the dysfunction that we find in the United States right now.”
Efforts to prompt the Lonestar State to secede from the United States have gained traction before but have hit serious roadblocks. Numerous historians argue when the Confederacy surrendered in 1865, states could no longer legally secede from the Union.
“The legality of seceding is problematic,” Eric McDaniel, associate professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, told The Texas Tribune in 2016. “The Civil War played a very big role in establishing the power of the federal government and cementing that the federal government has the final say in these issues.”
In 1836 Texas became a republic after breaking from Mexico. Nine years later Texas was annexed into the United States as the 28th state. Texans voted to secede from the Union in 1861 after divisions within the nation wanted to expand slavery into western territories. However, nine years later, Texas rejoined the country during the Reconstruction Era after the Confederacy was defeated in the Civil War.
Just before the Union readmitted the state back into the country, the U.S. Supreme Court declared in the 1869 case Texas v. White that efforts for individual states to unilaterally secede from the Union were ‘absolutely null.’”
In 2006, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, “the answer is clear” concerning the legal basis of secession.
The topic of secession has recently dominated airwaves after pro-Trump Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene called for a “national divorce” prompting support and backlash from both sides of the political aisle.
Fox News Sean Hannity seemed to support Rep. Greene’s idea.
