Line in the Sand Day: Crossing It Daily, and the Texas House That Cannot Get Out of Its Own Way

Daniel Miller opened this Late Night Coffee Talk on March 5, the day Travis is said to have drawn his line in the sand at the Alamo, and treated it as the most defining date on the Texian calendar. The line, he argued, is the cleanest binary choice a person ever gets: stay and do your duty, or go over the wall. He set Moses Rose, the man who slipped out, against the defenders honored at the chapel. A charity headstone in Louisiana against the cry of “remember the Alamo” carried across the field at San Jacinto. Independence, he told supporters, is not a once-a-year commitment. You cross that line every morning, or you quietly desert, the way a full 60 percent of the Texian army did before victory.

The heaviest stretch was the Texas Legislature, which Miller called as dysfunctional as he has ever seen it, worse than the Straus years. He explained why the TNM is not pouring everything into the independence referendum bill this session. Burning all the oxygen on a referendum that dies in the House accomplishes nothing, he said, when the better play is advancing the state-sovereignty bills that can actually pass and move Texas closer to functional self-government. He put the gap at ten to twenty more sound House members, pointed to the school-choice meltdown as proof the chamber cannot function, and said attention is already shifting to the next election cycle.

The rest ranged across Trump’s on-camera line that Greenland has a right to determine its own future, Doug Ford’s threat to cut power to a million and a half Americans, and the puzzle of why people fight for independence only to surrender it again. Miller kept circling that last point, from Alberta wanting US statehood to Scotland and Catalonia tethering their independence to the EU. Win your sovereignty, he argued, and the last thing you do is hand it to a new master.

Questions answered in this episode

• Are you looking forward to a day when federal politicians like Al Green no longer have any relevance to Texas?
• Should an independent Republic of Texas drop US-citizenship requirements and instead require the president, vice president, and lawmakers to be natural-born Texans with longer residency?
• Can the TNM produce a short clip of Trump’s Greenland self-determination comments for the online response team to share?
• After Ontario threatened to shut off power to a million and a half Americans, will Texans finally understand why we should not tie into the US national grid?
• Which is worse right now, the dysfunction of the federal House or the Texas House, and why is the referendum bill not the TNM’s whole focus this session?
• What are the chances of the TNM hosting an X Space with a few Texians?
• Why are non-Texans so opposed to Texas becoming its own country when they do not even live here?
• Is Kirkpatrick Sale right that any population over five million is too large for real representative government, and should big states be broken into smaller independent ones?
• If the US is already too big to govern well, why would anyone want to add Greenland, Canada, or Alberta to it?
• Who paid Greg Abbott to push school choice so hard, and why is he not that passionate about Texas independence?
• What is your opinion of the other, smaller Texas independence groups?