Two Sets of Law, One Sovereignty: Sharia Courts, Federal Preemption, and 20 Years of the TNM

Daniel Miller marked the Texas Nationalist Movement’s 20th anniversary on this Late Night Coffee Talk, recorded the week of November 17, the day the organization was founded back in 2005. He had spent the runup digging through two decades of archives, and he pointed viewers to his anniversary piece on the Texian Partisan that traces the arc from a room with half a dozen people to where the movement stands now. His answer to the people who say the TNM has not accomplished anything: they are not paying attention.

The longest stretch of the night went to Sharia courts, prompted by Greg Abbott’s declaration that there will be no Sharia law in Texas and the questions piling up around Epic City. Miller’s argument was not the one most viewers expected. He walked back to the Republic of Texas movement’s common-law courts in 1996, the fraudulent-lien fight with Attorney General Dan Morales, and the 1997 laws that came out of it, then made the uncomfortable point: Texas already tolerates parallel religious arbitration, from Catholic canonical courts to Jewish religious courts, and these systems are federally protected by preemption. That is the trap. Abbott and the state’s lawyers are one step from blowing their own legs off precisely because Texas participates in the federal system and has almost no sovereignty on the matter. Miller’s bottom line was unambiguous: two or more parallel sets of law under one polity is anathema to Texas nationalism, and you should be suspicious of anyone who wants it.

From there he answered the donor-state question by pointing out Texas overpays between 103 and 160 billion dollars a year into the federal system, and the only way to flip that is to elect the kind of leaders who wreck a state’s economy until Washington has to send money back. He worked through politics of scale, drawing on the late Dr. Thomas Naylor of the Second Vermont Republic and his book Downsizing the USA, to explain why Texas is not too big to govern but the federal House of Representatives plainly is. And he reframed immigration as an infrastructure problem: growth in housing, jobs, and services has to meet or exceed population growth, and unrestricted migration only stops straining native Texans once Texas controls its own border as a self-governing nation.

Questions answered in this episode

• After Texit, will Texas be governed under the Texas Constitution or under Sharia law?
• What was the hardest moment in the first five years, and did you ever seriously think about giving up?
• How do you deal with people who join the movement and then disappear the moment things get hard?
• If you could go back and tell the 2005 version of yourself one thing about where the movement would be in 2025, what would it be?
• How could Texas become a state that takes more money out of the federal government than it pays in?
• With nearly 70 mosques in the DFW area, how much of a hindrance is that to the TNM?
• Is Texas too big to function as an independent republic?
• What will be Texas’s single greatest advantage as an independent nation?
• What was your biggest strategic mistake in the early years?