Texas is preparing to secede from the United States as the state’s Republican Party is set to vote over the measure soon.
According to Newsweek, Texas’ GOP executive committee is set to vote over the weekend on which ballot propositions voters will decide during the party’s primary elections in March 2024.
One measure would ask Republican voters, “Should the State of Texas reassert its status as an independent nation?”
The Texas Nationalist Movement, an organization that supports Texas’ independence from the U.S., said that the GOP has enough signatures to force residents to support secession.
Texas nationalists have been advocating for a vote on the state’s secession for years, even though there isn’t a clause in the Constitution allowing for state secession. After breaking away from Mexico in 1836, Texas remained an independent nation for nine years before joining the United States. It also broke away from the Union in 1861 and was readmitted in 1870, when the Civil War ended.
“In June of this year, our organization launched a petition campaign under the Texas Election Code 172.088. This section of the Election Code allows voters, by petition, to place a question on a party’s primary ballot. In short, by collecting 97,709 signatures and submitting them by the filing deadline on December 11, 2023, we could actually bypass the SREC’s ballot proposition process and compel the party to place the question on the ballot,” the letter read.
While the question would not be legally binding or indicate that Texas is truly seceding from the U.S., the Texas Nationalist Movement argued that the party, by including the question on the ballot, would not be “endorsing a specific outcome” but instead backing the principle that “[apply] perspectives within the party deserve consideration.”
“Placing the question on the ballot brings clarity. If, as our detractors say, this is a fringe issue that no one supports, then they should have no resistance to this question being asked of Republican voters,” the letter continued. “In fact, they should be some of its strongest supporters. If what they say is true, then the results will show that fact, and TEXIT will be a dead issue in the party for a generation.”
