A Texas House committee will take public testimony on September 30 on what it would take to bring one or more New Mexico counties into Texas. It is the first hearing on a question that began in the New Mexico Legislature in January and reached the Texas House as a formal assignment in March.
The House Select Committee on Governmental Oversight, chaired by Rep. Cody Vasut of Angleton, meets at 10 a.m. in Room E2.026 of the Capitol Extension. Its notice charges members to study “the constitutional, statutory, fiscal, and economic implications of adding to Texas one or more contiguous counties of New Mexico,” to analyze the United States, Texas, and New Mexico constitutions along with federal and state law and court precedent, and to “identify and outline all procedural steps required at both the state and federal level necessary to admit territory currently part of New Mexico into Texas.”
The interim charge itself goes further. When Speaker Dustin Burrows issued it on March 26, he also directed the committee to recommend “drafts of any requisite legislation or resolutions to initiate the process.” Burrows created the 13-member committee the same day, by a proclamation giving it jurisdiction over the “designation of appropriate territorial jurisdictions for the state and local subdivisions.” Rep. Armando Walle, a Houston Democrat, is vice chair. Of the New Mexico charge, Vasut told Texas Scorecard in April: “It is serious. This is a real deal.”
The question started on the other side of the line. In January, New Mexico Reps. Randall Pettigrew and Jimmy Mason filed House Joint Resolution 10, a proposed amendment to the New Mexico Constitution that would have let three or more contiguous counties vote to leave the state. The counties at the center of it, Lea, Eddy, Chaves, and Otero, sit on the Texas border in the Permian Basin, and Pettigrew has said Lea and Eddy supply more than half of New Mexico’s general fund revenue. Burrows answered on X in February that Texas “would gladly welcome Lea County back to Texas, where it rightfully belongs.” HJR 10 died in committee in Santa Fe. Five weeks later it was on the Texas House’s interim agenda.
All four counties sit inside the boundary Texas claimed from 1836 until the Compromise of 1850, when Congress paid $10 million for roughly 98,300 square miles that now lie in five other states.
The hearing also takes up two other interim charges: the role of for-profit and nonprofit consultants in local prosecutors’ offices, and how local governments spend public money on outside contractors and nongovernmental organizations. The committee is accepting written comments online through the House public comment portal, and video will be posted on the House video site.
Vasut called the charge serious, and the notice reads that way. It asks a committee of the Texas House to set down, step by step, how territory now governed from Santa Fe could come to be governed from Austin, and to draft the legislation that would start it. The principle underneath it is the one the Texas Nationalist Movement is built on: the people who live in a place decide how it is governed. On September 30 the Texas House takes testimony on that principle in its own Capitol. This time the people asking live in New Mexico.
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