Is there a realistic timeline for when this could happen?

The honest answer is that the timeline depends on the work, not on a fixed date, and we will not pretend to know a day certain. What we can say is concrete: the vote can only be created in a legislative session, the law sets a five-year planning window after a yes, and the pace is set by how fast Texans build the pressure to pass the bill. We will not fabricate a countdown.

The schedule is gated by the legislative calendar

The Texas Legislature meets in regular session for 140 days every other year, with special sessions in between only if the governor calls one. A referendum bill can realistically advance during one of those windows. So the timeline is not continuous. It moves in legislative sessions. The question is not "what day," it is "which session," and that depends on having the votes lined up before the session opens, because momentum has to be built ahead of time.

The one hard number the law gives

After a yes vote, the Referendum Act gives the Texas Independence Committee up to sixty months, five years, to deliver its strategy for becoming independent. That is the firmest planning marker in the whole process. It is an outer bound for getting the full transition right, not a prediction that everything takes five years. Many pieces move faster.

What the real precedents suggest

History offers a sane range rather than a single number. The Velvet Divorce split Czechoslovakia into two recognized countries in about six months. A trade settlement of the kind Texas would negotiate ran around eighteen months in that case. Brexit shows the slow end, dragged out for years by opponents who stayed in power. The spread tells you the timeline is real and achievable, and that the deciding factor is political will and discipline, not some law of physics.

The pace is in Texans' hands

This is the part worth sitting with. The single biggest variable is not Washington and not the calendar. It is how fast Texans organize. The bill passes when the pressure peaks. More than 633,000 are already on record, support polls around 60 percent, and the Republican Party of Texas has carried independence planks across multiple conventions. The faster that base grows and turns into pressure on the Legislature, the sooner the vote. Texans set the clock.

The bottom line

There is no honest fixed date, and we will not invent one. There is a realistic shape: pass the bill in a legislative session, win the vote, then up to five years to secure the result, with much moving faster. How soon it starts is up to how hard Texans push.