Ted Cruz’s First Condition for Texas Independence Is Now on the Table

In October 2021, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz told a live audience at Texas A&M University what it would take for him to back Texas independence. A student asked during a taping of his podcast, Verdict, what would happen if Texas left the union. Cruz said he was not ready to give up on the country, then listed his conditions.

“If the Democrats end the filibuster, if they fundamentally destroy the country, if they pack the Supreme Court, if they make D.C. a state, if they federalize elections and massively expand voter fraud, there may come a point where it’s hopeless,” Cruz said. “If there comes a point where it’s hopeless, then I think we take NASA, we take the military, we take the oil.”

The first item on that list is now an open question in Washington. Democrats won control of the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, and Chuck Schumer, who expects to return as majority leader in January, would not say Wednesday whether he will try to abolish the legislative filibuster. He ignored the question twice when Fox News Digital asked it, and when it came up at his news conference he answered with something else: “The first thing we’ll do is reduce costs and work the legislative process,” Roll Call reported. Schumer led the same fight in 2022, when two Democratic senators, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, refused to change the rule. Going “nuclear” now would take 51 votes, and at least one Democrat has spoken up to keep the rule.

Texas’s incoming senator has already taken a side. “I believe the majority has the right to govern in this country, and the filibuster, which is not in the Constitution and is a Jim Crow relic, is leading to gridlock in our nation’s capital,” Sen.-elect James Talarico told NBC News before the election, according to Roll Call. Talarico defeated Attorney General Ken Paxton on Tuesday and will take the seat in January.

The rest of Cruz’s list would take new federal laws, and President Donald Trump holds the veto until January 2029. Schumer has said as much. “Will everything pass? Will Trump sign all of it into law? Knowing Trump’s and Republicans’ intransigence, of course not,” he said, according to Roll Call.

The Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM) published the clip of Cruz’s answer in 2021. He set the test himself, on camera, before a live audience in College Station. The first part of it will be decided by a vote of the Senate in Washington, and the senator Texans just elected has said which way he would cast his.