Out of Lege Counsel: The TEXIT Bill Moves and Paxton Takes the Mic

Daniel Miller slides in just under the wire for the midweek coffee talk, no tie, and leads with the news supporters have been waiting weeks to hear. The Texas Independence Referendum Act is finally back from the legislative council, and it came out unchanged. The draft anyone can download from the site is the exact text that went in, which makes Daniel wonder aloud why it sat so long if no one was hunting for a reason to gut it. The bill can now be filed by any legislator who chooses to. He refuses to name a sponsor and explains why: this session the movement is playing smart rather than hard, and naming names before support is locked in would only hand opponents an opening to derail it. The real question, he says, is whether you want a Texas vote in 2023 or in 2025. Speed and impatience are what kill it.

The second beat is the lawsuit. Attorney General Ken Paxton went on the Jenna Ellis radio show and, in his own words, described the TNM’s case against Meta and why his office filed an amicus brief. The suit leans on HB20, the state’s anti-social-media-censorship law, and treats the platforms as common carriers barred from viewpoint discrimination. Daniel notes the case also reopens Texas v. White, and he is glad to relitigate it. He answers a viewer worried about being deplatformed by Google or YouTube: search rankings are hard to fight, but the infrastructure is covered, and plans B through Z exist. He expects the next big censorship suit to land on Google over YouTube.

Daniel previews the Rally Against Censorship in Conroe, an event booted from two venues that ballooned once Kyle Rittenhouse joined the speaker list alongside Defiance Press publisher David Thomas Roberts. He ties free speech directly to self-government, and he mentions a New York Times interview that was supposed to be about the rally but turned into an hour on TEXIT, plus a podcast he just taped with Allen West. He closes by walking through the site’s revamped legislature tool, which maps supporters to their state senator and representative, tracks the bill’s status live, and lets people log the responses they get back.