Daniel Miller used this July 4th edition of Late Night Coffee Talk to push back on the question he gets most: how long until Texas is independent? There is no declaration to draft, he said, because Texas is already a self-governing nation that has only to revoke its membership, and no single person controls the clock. Article 1, Section 2 puts all political power in the people, so the people are the sole determinant of the timeline. The movement takes exactly as long as Texans collectively let it take, and everyone who runs hot one day and cold the next is setting that date by their own effort or lack of it.
The longest stretch went to why politics would actually function better in an independent Texas. Miller gave four reasons. Texas outside the union would bar foreign campaign money, killing the out-of-state checks that flooded the Abbott and Beto race and the roughly 12 million dollars Abbott took from one out-of-state donor on school choice. It would cap the career ladder at the state line, so officeholders answer to Texans instead of playing to Iowa caucuses and battleground-state polling. It would cut the federal money that, by the movement’s own count three sessions back, touched some 45 percent of bills filed and forces the Legislature to chase matching funds out of Texans’ pockets. And it would turn public attention from Washington to Austin, where dysfunction festers precisely because almost nobody can name Dustin Burrows as speaker.
On the Trump-era mood, Miller told a transplant from Wisconsin he had answered his own question: if it can all swing back in four years, nothing was actually fixed. Illegal-immigration numbers are low, but Texans are one midterm, one court ruling, one party switch away from the pendulum slamming back harder than under Obama or Biden. This is a breather, not a victory. He was just as blunt on property taxes, calling the session’s relief claims a shell game: the Legislature caps the rate while leaving appraisals untouched, so the bill rises anyway and the appraisal districts take the blame. Nothing substantial moves, he said, while Dan Patrick runs the Senate and Paul Bettencourt, whose business is negotiating appraisals down for a cut, holds power. The real fix is a Texas sovereign wealth fund that could retire property tax and eventually all taxation.
Questions answered in this episode
- How close is Texas to putting independence in front of the governor, and how long until we reach the finish line?
- Would a Republican-run Texas Legislature really be any less dysfunctional, or would we just trade one set of bad actors for another?
- Has Daniel ever considered a coalition government for an independent Texas?
- With Trump back in the White House and daily wins on the border and the economy, is enthusiasm for Texas self-governance fading, and should we hold steadfast anyway?
- Which decolonization of the 1960s and 70s does the Texian Partisan treaty-succession article refer to, and what does it have to do with Texas?
- Why does the governor keep emailing that this session delivered major property-tax relief when nothing actually changed on the bills we pay?
- Did the Texas Nationalist Movement still hold its Alamo memorial march on June 14th with the ICE protests underway in San Antonio?
- What does Daniel make of the federal “big beautiful bill”?
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