It Just Might Work: Letting Texas secede

by Brian Clarey

Just days after the Supreme Court agreed that same-sex couples have the right to get married anywhere in the United States, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that county clerks in all 254 counties could refuse to perform these unions if they feel their “religious freedoms” are violated by the action.

Sound familiar?

But unlike North Carolina, where magistrates are afforded that same policy — for now — Texas seems to be inching towards liberating itself wholly from the activist judges, pointy-headed liberals, corrupt Federal Reserve and uppity city folk commonly demonized by the far right.

Earlier this month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott created a Texas Gold Depository, a Fort Knox-like entity designed to hold all the gold in Texas. Abbott says he’ll “repatriate” $1 billion in gold bullion from a bank in New York that rightfully belongs to the Lone Star State.

Last month, Abbott and Sen. Ted Cruz put the entire state — 30 million people — on high alert, convinced that President Obama was planning a military takeover of Texas utilizing a network of secret tunnels dug underneath closed Walmarts.

This is not a joke. They even mobilized the Texas State Guard.

Word on the street is that Texas is looking to once again become its own republic, something they’ve been talking about there since 1835, when it became the 28^th state.

And it’s starting to look like a pretty good idea to just go ahead and let them do it.

It’s huge, with about the same population as Saudi Arabia, and a strong economy based on energy and cattle that generates about $1.65 trillion a year. So it could definitely survive out there on its own. There are great swaths of undeveloped land, enough gun owners to create a national defense, a sovereign culture based on belt buckles and trucks, and a population that’s even more homogenously obnoxious than people from New York.

The removal of Texas’ voters from the US rolls will cause a huge drop — the loss 4.5 million registered Republicans would certainly have a toll on national elections. The country of Texas should attract even more GOP faithful, which might even tip the scales towards sanity in the rest of the nation, while we could witness the foibles of a true right-wing sovereign state from a relatively safe distance.

And it would keep Rick Perry from running for president.

It would be a shame to lose Austin, but on the plus side, they’d take the Dallas Cowboys with them. That’s a trade I can live with.