The sharpest objection in a North Texas Facebook thread this week was not a slogan. It was a legal argument, and it went like this. In Texas v. White, the Supreme Court said a state could leave the union only “through revolution, or through consent of the States.” Consent, the argument runs, means a constitutional amendment approved by two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states, which will never happen. Revolution means war. So Texas independence is impossible.
It sounds airtight. It rests on a premise the Texas Nationalist Movement rejects at the root: that the people of Texas need anyone’s permission to decide their own future.
The Texas Constitution answers it in its second section: “All political power is inherent in the people,” and the people of Texas “have at all times the inalienable right to alter, reform or abolish their government in such manner as they may think expedient.” That right is not on loan from Washington, and it is not held in trust by the other 49 states. The movement’s model referendum bill says so in plain terms: “The right of the people of Texas to decide this question is inherent and is not contingent on the consent of any other government. Any negotiation contemplated by this Act concerns the terms of an orderly separation, not the right of the people of Texas to make this decision.”
The right to decide belongs to Texans. What gets negotiated after they decide is the terms: federal property, military bases, debts and assets, and the earned benefits Texans have paid into for decades. Those are the practical questions that follow any separation. None of them is a vote on whether Texans are allowed to decide.
The sentence the objection leans on has a history. Chief Justice Salmon Chase wrote it in 1869 to prove that Texas could never leave, and in the same breath he conceded that the union could be undone. The line meant to lock the door admits there is a door. As the Texian Partisan has reported, the part of Texas v. White that actually bound anyone, its ruling on who owned a set of federal bonds, the Supreme Court itself overruled in 1885. What survives is the commentary.
The amendment argument has its own problem. Article V of the Constitution describes how to change the Constitution. It says nothing about a state leaving the union, and nowhere does the Constitution name who must approve such a departure. The movement does not propose an amendment, and no provision requires one. Its path runs through the Texas Legislature, which can put the question on the ballot, and through the people of Texas, who answer it.
Other free peoples have walked this road without asking their neighbors for permission to vote. When Canada’s Supreme Court was asked in 1998 what a clear vote for Quebec independence would mean, it answered that such a vote “would give rise to a reciprocal obligation on all parties to Confederation to negotiate constitutional changes to respond to that desire.” Britain voted in June 2016 to leave the European Union, negotiated the terms, and left in January 2020. In both cases the vote came first and set the terms of everything that followed.
As for revolution, the movement rejects it outright. Its path is a ballot, not a battle. The movement’s own answer to Texas v. White puts it simply: “A war settles who had the stronger army. It does not amend the Constitution.” Texas independence is to be decided by a peaceful vote of every eligible Texan and settled by negotiation.
The objection assumes that Texans must win permission before they can decide. They do not. The right to decide was never Washington’s to give.
Comments have moved. The real debate about Texas independence now happens with thousands of Texians in the app.
Get the TEXIAN app
