If I was judging an idiocy contest, I’d be hard pressed to choose a winner from the current entrants. Is it the daft lust among many Texans to see Texas secede from the union, or is it the batshit belief shared by MAGA nuts that Taylor Swift is spearheading some kind of deep state psyop conspiracy?
Sorry to disappoint, I’m picking Texas over Tay Tay. At least for today.
Texas secession rhetoric flares up periodically without ever going away, sort of like psoriasis. It’s grist for weak minds, typically triggered by a right-wing grievance about some perceived injustice originating in big bad Washington D.C.
It happened in 2009, early in the “tea party” movement, when then-Gov. Rick Perry said that we have a “great union,” but “if Washington continues to thumb its nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that.” (In a poll that year, 33 percent of Texans said that secession was a legal option, and 18 percent wanted to do it.) Secession talk spiked again in January 2021 when Texas crafted a crackpot lawsuit alleging with no evidence that Joe Biden’s victory was illegitimate. And now we’re hearing it again – fed by something called the Texas Nationalist Movement – because Gov. Greg Abbot is fighting with the feds over control of the border.
Just for the record, the Constitution and Supreme Court rulings make it clear that the feds control all our borders. But Abbott the other day declared, in a dog whistle to secessionists, that ‘the federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States” by “refusing” to enforce immigration measures at the border. The key word was compact, which was invoked by seven seceding states (including Texas) on the eve of the Civil War. The so-called compact theory, long consigned to history’s dustbin, purports to argue that state supremacy trumps federal policy.
Texas secessionists are all excited about Abbott’s warning, despite not knowing or caring that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled way back in 1869 that when Texas joined the union “she entered into an indissoluble relation…The act which consummated her admission into the union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final.”
In other words, the Texas secessionists – who tried and failed to put secession on the 2024 Republican primary ballot – are just a stupid sideshow. Which is a shame, really, because if Texas got gone, the GOP would lose a red state with 40 electoral votes. Which is probably the last thing secessionists would want, assuming they’re capable of teasing out the consequences. Thinking things through, as it were.
Speaking of not thinking things through…
I saw a priceless comment the other day. It appeared on the Facebook page of a group called Texas Patriots for Secession, and it’s what inspired me to write this particular column:
“If we secede, do we still get our Social Security monthly checks?”
Nope! Sorry, dummy.
See, here’s the way life works: Social Security is a federal program for citizens of the union. Secessionists would fall outside of U.S. law. A secessionist government would have to come up with its own means of helping retirees and disabled people.
And all that money Texas gets from the big bad federal government – namely, the roughly $70 billion that it gets from D.C. every single year (third highest total of all 50 states) for local law enforcement, for farm aid, for disaster cleanups and much more? Say goodbye to that, too.
Fun fact: Texas has typically shelled out around $30,000 a month to Washington lobbyists whose job is to scarf up federal funds and send it down to the Lone Star state. If it were to secede, there’d be no need for such lobbyists anymore.
Another fun fact: One of the most tiresome hypocrisies is the tendency of red states to fume about “liberal” Washington while raking in every last Washington buck. Of the top 20 most federally-dependent states, 15 typically vote Republican. And Texas is classic; in early 2021, shortly after Texas Republicans concocted that lawsuit to challenge Biden’s victory, they quickly pivoted and begged Biden to send federal aid when the state’s crappy power grid was imperiled by severe winter weather. Gov. Abbott happily said, “I thank President Biden.” I guess that so-called “compact” looks swell when reality happens.
But if Texas were ever to make good on their periodic threats to leave, I’d have just one request:
Leave us Austin.