The Texas Republican Party’s convention and its revanchist official platform continue to impress us with their sheer insanity, as on top of the scorn heaped on elected members of Congress at the event and the batshit resolutions it produced like declaring “Homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice”, calling for a full national repeal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, rejecting “the certified results of the 2020 Presidential election, and we hold that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States,” they also apparently passed secession as an official policy goal, pending final certification of the delegates’ votes.
“Pursuant to Article 1, Section 1, of the Texas Constitution, the federal government has impaired our right of local self-government. Therefore, federally mandated legislation that infringes upon the 10th Amendment rights of Texas should be ignored, opposed, refused, and nullified. Texas retains the right to secede from the United States, and the Texas Legislature should be called upon to pass a referendum consistent thereto,” says the platform’s section on “State Sovereignty.” Under another section titled “State Governance,” the platform says the next session of the state legislature should pass a bill “requiring a referendum in the 2023 general election for the people of Texas to determine whether or not the State of Texas should reassert its status as an independent nation.”
While there has definitely been an increase in rumblings calling for a Texas breakaway in the last few years, most famously former state GOP chairmaniac Allen West suggesting secession in reaction to the Supreme Court rejecting Texas’s lawsuit trying to nullify Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin’s electoral votes for Biden in the 2020 election, this resolution is probably by far the most serious effort to make it actually happen since the last time Texas seceded in 1861. Indeed, of all the 18th and 19th century republics that existed prior to annexation and statehood by the US, Texas is the only one that lasted longer than a year or two and was officially recognized by the United States government. Probably a contributing factor to the Texas GOP’s ballsy assertion of “state sovereignty” and belief they can make it on their own.
Just don’t mind the fact that Republican-governed Texas can’t even fucking handle its own independent power grid, or really everything else about them that might fail to inspire confidence in their ability to function as an independent nation in the 21st century.