This post has been updated with news that Texas Republicans will indeed vote on whether Texas should secede from the United States at their convention, which starts Thursday.
When Texas Republicans assemble for their state convention Thursday, they will debate and vote on whether Texas should secede from the United States.
There’s almost no chance Texas Republicans will actually vote in favor of seceding, mind you — not least because most of the party wants nothing to do with this — but the fact we’re even mentioning secession and the Texas GOP convention in the same sentence suggests that the once-fringe movement has become a priority for at least some conservative grass-roots Texans.
To be sure, that seems to be a relatively small group. The Texas secession movement says 22 out of the 270 county GOP conventions passed some kind of independence resolution this spring. A party official said he'd be surprised if that were the case, and the Houston Chronicle was able to confirm only 10 counties. But 10 is a lot more than the one county that passed an independence resolution in 2012.
Texas Republicans say these independence resolutions are just a handful of tens of thousands various resolutions to be considered at their convention. But it does seem like the secession movement is growing, or at least organizing, and may have become too big for party officials to ignore. Sure enough, the Houston Chronicle reported that on Wednesday, a committee that decides what issues will appear at the convention voted "overwhelmingly" to put Texas secession up for debate.
"This is pretty big. This is really pretty huge," Tanya Robertson, a GOP official who has advocated for a secession vote told the Houston Chronicle.
Given secession is actually coming up for a vote among Texas Republican party insiders, here's a rundown of what you should know about it:
First, some history
Members of the San Antonio Living History Association commemorate the Texas independence battle at the Alamo. (Kin Man Hui/San Antonio Express-News via AP)
Let’s boil down Texas history in two paragraphs*:
In 1836, a scrappy Texas won its independence from Mexico in a bloody war (Remember the Alamo?). The newly minted Republic of Texas experimented with running itself as its own country before going broke and voting to join the United States.
In 1861, Texans voted to secede and join the Confederacy during the Civil War. When the war was over, the Supreme Court decided — in a case that involved none other than Texas, albeit on the non-secession side — that states can’t secede unilaterally and any attempt to do so will be “absolutely null.”
Here’s what modern-day secessionism looks like
As Texas’s earlier history makes clear, a variant of the Texas secession movement has refused to die. It has ebbed and flowed in Texas for the 150 years since. The modern secession movement revved up again in the 1990s under a controversial leader, Richard Lance McLaren, who took a more violent tack to get his point across — including kidnapping. He is currently serving a 99-year prison sentence related to that incident.
The Texas Nationalist Movement took over from there and has advocated a more political approach. It has attempted to get language advocating for secession on GOP primary ballots, and every four years, it’s tried to prod a skeptical and reluctant Texas Republican Party to debate secession at its state convention.
So far, things seem to be going according to plan
At a 2009 rally, then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) hinted at secession (albeit tongue in cheek; he later made clear he doesn’t support the idea). A subsequent 2009 Rasmussen poll found 1 in 3 Texans think their state has the right to secede, but if it were put to a vote, 75 percent of voters would decide to stay with the United States.
Tidbits here and there since Perry’s remark hint at a growing movement. After the 2012 presidential elections, the Texas Nationalist Movement reported that its membership had gone up 400 percent and its Web traffic was up 900 percent. Bumper stickers and signs advocating for secession began popping up in the state.
A 2012 WhiteHouse.gov petition to secede earned more than 125,000 signatures and a response from the White House. (The response: No.) Last year, the group held speaking tours to try to promote its cause and get a nonbinding resolution on the GOP primary ballot.
Today, the movement says it has advocates in most Texas counties and 200,000 members statewide (although those numbers are hard to verify and are just a small percentage of the state’s population of 26.9 million).
Which brings us to 2016, when at least 10 Republican county conventions — there are 254 counties in Texas, but some have two conventions — passed some kind of item expressing support for Texas independence or at least for debating it.
Despite Perry’s joke, most Texas Republican leaders want nothing to do with this
The reasons are fairly obvious, but we’ll spell them out anyway: Texas Republicans think that the secession movement is unrealistic and unconstitutional and that it opens them up to Democratic attacks that they’re wasting their time on extreme ideas instead of actually governing the state. (Republicans dominate the state: In the 2014 general election, Republicansswept all 15 statewide races on the ballot and maintained their 16-year winning streak. They also have firm control of both houses of the Texas legislature and all of the state’s governing boards.)
Texas Republican leaders would much rather ignore this pesky secession movement. But in recent years they’ve been forced to deal with it.
This fall, the group tried to get 75,000 signatures to get a secession-related resolution on March’s GOP primary ballot. It read: “If the federal government continues to disregard the constitution and the sovereignty of the State of Texas, the State of Texas should reassert its status as an independent nation.”
In December, the state party took matters into its own hands and voted down the idea. The movement doesn’t even have “Republican” in its name, one state party official said. Another said he was “sorry we are even having the conversation.”
In return, the secessionists immediately laid the blame at the party’s feet: They “are of the same mindset as the bureaucrats in Washington,” the group said.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) probably didn’t help quell the movement when he called for a convention of states this January. This is an idea that pops up among Republicans from time to time — Marco Rubio’s a fan — to help states regain some of the control from the federal government.
Lubbock County GOP chair Carl Tepper told the Houston Chronicle his county approved a resolution advocating for secession if such a convention fails to fix Texas’s problems with the federal government.
So what’s going to happen at the state party convention?
The Houston Chronicle’s Dylan Baddour wrote that the fact that at least 10 counties are coming to the state convention supporting independence resolutions makes it difficult for party leaders to sweep this under the rug. It’s possible there will be some kind of a vote on the floor.
But if it comes to that, party leaders will probably try to keep the vote as quiet and dispense with it as quickly as possible. It almost certainly won’t pass, and it almost certainly won’t become part of the party’s official platform.
Still, it’s impressive the secession movement has made it this far. Then again, it’s had 150-odd years to practice pitching this.
*There is SO Much more to Texas history than these two paragraphs, as many astute, Texas-loving readers have noted. (And I know well. I'm a Texan myself and am currently reading James A. Michener's historical fiction "Texas," which boils it down to a mere 1,322 pages.) The point is, I recognize cramming the state's major events into two paragraphs fails to capture a lot of important nuance -- like the fact that the United States didn't want Texas to join because it would add another slave state and/or start a war with Mexico, which still didn't recognize Texas as an independent country. It wasn't until James K. Polk won the presidency by campaigning in part on bringing Texas into the fold that Texas became part of the US.
It's also important to point out that Texas's post-Civil War reconstruction government, put in place by the Union, was essentially arguing in the Supreme Court in favor of staying in the Union (though the case was really about redeeming bonds). I've tried to make some of that more clear in the story, and if not, I hope I've made it clear down there. Thanks!
Source: The Washington Post
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