2024-01-29 00:55:02
We are tired of the capital’s bureaucrats taking our taxpayers’ money. We want to make our own laws, be an independent country that begins and ends at our borders and become the sole owners of our lives and our destiny.
The manifesto, which Carles Puigdemont or any Catalan or Basque independentist could sign with his eyes closed from the first to the last word, presides over the website of the Texas Nationalist Movement. And we could add a new proclamation that seems strangely familiar to us these days: we want the transfers of powers over immigration to control the entry of immigrants regardless of what is decided in the country as a whole.
For now, the TNM has managed to include in the public debate the term “Texit”, a play on words similar to Brexit or the unborn Greek Grexit that longs for Texas to leave the Union, something absolutely unthinkable in a country so proud of itself. same as the United States.
Should Texan independence activists really be taken seriously or is it just a tantrum from a state in the deep American West that feels abandoned by the capital? Although there are no reliable polls, the promoters of this movement assure that popular support has gone from 20% to 80% in a few years, which currently supports independence “to some extent,” according to the Texas Tribune.
At the moment, they have already collected 620,000 signatures to “make Texas independent again”, a not inconsiderable figure.
Glorious past, “independent” leader and a legend
Like any self-respecting nationalist movement, Texit has a glorious past (a short-lived nine-year independence), legends (a line drawn in the sand) and, of course, an “independent” hero who became a martyr for the cause in the famous Battle of the Alamo.
Indeed, to find the roots of Texan pride, one must go back to the cinematic battle of the Alamo in 1836, a two-week siege that pitted the Mexican army against a group of rebellious Texan soldiers who dreamed of an independent Texas.
According to legend, the colonel in command of the troops and today the hero-martyr of Texan nationalism, William Barret Travis, gathered his men before the battle, drew his sword and drew a line in the sand urging those who were ready to defend the fort. All who remained, Travis included, died, but were avenged in the subsequent Battle of San Jacinto that ended the revolutionary movement.
From that year on, Texas would become an independent country (not recognized by Mexico) until 1945 when it decided to join the United States.
The leader of the Texas nationalist movement
The current leader of the Texas nationalist movement, Daniel Miller, clings to these epic stories, telling how on Saturday, August 24, 1996, in the lobby of a hotel in the Texas city of Tyler, he had the revelation that his current state of Texas had to follow the same path, look for its hero (for example, himself), its line in the sand and its Alamo.
A battle then began on several fronts, with conferences, campaigns, collecting signatures and the failed attempt, for the moment, to request an independence referendum. It is a long-distance race, in light rain, for the “texiters”, who are recognized by their Texan hat, their high boots and their extremely critical speech towards Washington bureaucrats.
One of the drivers of Texit, as almost always in these cases, is money. The Movement maintains that each year between $103,000 and $160,000 of Texas taxpayers are diverted to Washington.
But the separatist fuse has been rekindled a little more these days due to a bitter controversy unleashed around immigration, after the United States Supreme Court ordered the dismantling of the barbed wire barrier that the governor of Texas had erected, Greg Abbot, along the border with Mexico to contain immigration.
The measure has inflamed the Texas governor and an important part of the population, especially the most conservative, who feel that decisions on immigration are made by wealthy officials thousands of miles away who do not have to deal with this issue. And, of course, it has been taken advantage of by Donald Trump, who could not pass up the opportunity to finish such a ball bouncing in the area in the middle of the election campaign.
“Texas barbed wire is an effective deterrent to curbing the illegal border crossings that President Biden encourages with his policies. I will continue to defend Texas’ constitutional authority to secure the border and prevent the Biden administration from destroying our property “Abbott said.
“All Americans must support the common sense measures adopted by the Texas authorities to protect the security and sovereignty of Texas and the American people,” said Trump, who has even asked neighboring states to deploy troops to the Texas border. to stop the “invasion” of immigrants.
“The federal system is broken and Texans are paying the price. It makes more sense for Texans to govern Texas,” Miller explained in a recent Newsweek interview in which he blamed the federal government for rising gas and food prices. , along with the increase in the national debt.
The currency of an independent Texas
What would an independent Texas be like? The TNM roadmap includes the dollar as the national currency, to give way in the medium term to a monetary union with Washington that would include its own currency. In addition, according to Miller, Texas would not be required to pay a portion of the debt “accumulated by the federal system.”
Once independent, Texas would be constituted as a “unitary nation-state”, which would then be subdivided into smaller provinces. Of course, it would have an independent army among other things to have its own army and, of course, control its own barbed wire on the Mexican border.
The path to independence, however, does not seem easy, among other things because the Supreme Court already ruled in 1869, precisely with a Texan lawsuit, that leaving the Union is unconstitutional. Texas nationalists are not so clear, and say they have found a loophole: “Article 1, section 10 of the United States Constitution lists all actions that are prohibited to the states. Withdrawal is not on that list. Therefore, under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, the lack of an explicit constitutional prohibition means that it is a right reserved to the states and the people,” explains Miller.
And, political scientist and lawyer Matt Qvortrup, who has studied independence movements around the world, told Newswek, Texas is “probably the only place in the United States that has that sense of identity” typically associated with an independent state.
For a referendum to take place, the academic argued that “a political change probably within the Republican Party” would be necessary, followed by a legal battle that could well end up in the Supreme Court. Qvortrup admitted that this would be very difficult, but added: “100 years ago I think there were about 35 countries in the world. Now there are 195. In reality, it is not completely impossible to see how countries could be established.”
Before co-founding the TNM in 2005, its leader Daniel Miller spent two years studying secessionist movements around the world, including those in Scotland, Catalonia and Quebec. And he came to the same conclusion as the independentists of these territories. “Texas is a nation without a state,” he has stated on numerous occasions. It has a culture, a history and a different philosophy of life. “It is a nation in every sense of the word.”
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