The Case for Texas Independence

A nation is a people, and by that measure Texas has always been one. For nearly ten years it also had a state of its own. The Republic of Texas kept an army and a navy, printed its own money, and posted ministers to Washington, London, and Paris, recognized by the United States, France, Britain, and the Netherlands. When Texas joined the Union in 1845, its people voted to give up that sovereignty. They were not conquered. Nobody marched them in.

Joining the Union changed Texas's status, not its character. Texans are still a people, on the same land, with a culture and an economy unlike any other state in the Union. The nation never dissolved. What Texas surrendered in 1845 was a state of its own, and what a nation surrenders, a nation can reclaim.

Thirty-one million people live in Texas. In the United States Senate they get two votes, the same two that Wyoming gets for its six hundred thousand. The rules that govern Texas energy, patrol the Texas border, and bind every Texas school and business are written more than a thousand miles away, by a Congress and a federal bureaucracy that will never face a Texas ballot.

That is not representation. It is administration from a distance. The people who live with a decision should be the ones who make it, and the ones who can undo it. A Texas run from Austin, by Texans who can hire and fire the people in charge, is not a radical proposition. It is the ordinary meaning of self-government, and Texas does not have it.

Washington owes thirty-seven trillion dollars and borrows more every day just to cover the interest on what it already owes. It has not run a surplus since 2001. It shuts itself down over its own gridlock, then borrows to reopen. Texas helps pay for all of it, and gets back less than it sends. Texan tax dollars subsidize a federal government that turns around and spends them fighting Texas in court, over the border, over energy, over the right of Texas to run its own affairs.

A family this deep in debt would have lost the house years ago. Texas is bound to the bill regardless, liable for its share and outvoted on nearly every decision that ran it up. Independence is how Texas stops co-signing a loan it never approved and will never see repaid.

Whether Texas could make it on its own is the question asked backward. Texas is already the eighth-largest economy on Earth, ahead of Canada, Russia, Italy, and South Korea. It produces more oil and gas than most countries, and more wind power than any state in the Union. The Port of Houston moves more tonnage than any port in America. Austin and Dallas keep drawing the companies that used to call California home.

Texas already carries more than its own weight. An independent Texas keeps the money it now ships to Washington, sets its own trade and tax policy, and answers to no capital but its own. The honest question was never whether Texas survives. It is how much faster it grows once nothing is holding it back.

The Texas Constitution does not hedge. Article 1, Section 2 holds that all political power is inherent in the people, and that they have at all times the inalienable right to alter, reform, or abolish their government in such manner as they may think expedient. That is the founding promise of Texas, written by Texans, and it makes no exception for independence.

The Texas Nationalist Movement is not asking anyone to declare anything. It is asking for a vote, a referendum where Texans decide for themselves, the way Scotland voted and the way the United Kingdom voted. The dominant party in Texas has already written that referendum into its platform, twice. More than 1.6 million Texans backed it in the last primary. The only people standing between Texas and that ballot are the ones afraid of how it would turn out.