They would have 40 electoral college votes in 2024.
If they secede, that would also mean losing 2 Senators and 38 Representatives, changing the balance of power in the House and Senate.
Don’t threaten me with a good time!
Edit I also want to see Ted Cruz’s face when he learns he’s not a Senator anymore because Texas seceded.
If they secede, that would also mean losing 2 Senators and 38 Representatives, changing the balance of power in the House and Senate.
Losing 2 Senators, yes, but the loss of 38 Reps would be temporary. The size of Congress is permanently fixed by legislation to 435, and in the hypothetical case where a state simply goes poof, and 38 Representatives disappear, those seats would be reapportioned to other states after the next Census.
There is precedent for this, when Alaska and Hawaii were added as States, they were each given 1 Representative right away, temporarily increasing the size of Congress to 437, until 2 seats were removed in the next apportionment.
While there is no guarantee on where Texas’ seats would go – it would depend on the next Census after secession – it is plausible that the new seats would be from less conservative districts than their current makeup.
So nowhere in the article is it mentioned that the supposed “Texas right to secede” is actually bullshit, and a complete misunderstanding of the actual right that they have, which is to be broken up into five separate states.
Except even that is bullshit, because it was talking about the Texas Territory, which was larger than modern day Texas.
The constitution clearly says that;
New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.
So yes, Texas could request to be broken up, but congress still needs to okay it.
Now, as to the “right to secede”, that bullshit was settled with the Civil War, States do not have the right to secede, not even Texas.
Republicans like to pretend the Civil War never happened, and want a repeat, I guess.
That’s true, though to be fair most secessions are illegal and are settled by violence.
Counterpoint: The UK isn’t allowed to leave the EU. There’s no mechanism.
That’s not a counterpoint. The EU is not a country. The EU is an economic and financial understanding between many different countries in order to collaborate on things like currency, trade, tariffs etc. Even if the EU was a country which, I can’t stress this enough, it isn’t, the EU agreement has clear rules for leaving it. Unlike the US Constitution, which isn’t like the EU agreement in very many ways at all.
There’s a difference between having no official mechanism, and having the largest military in the world knock on your door to tell you that you can’t do something.
If Texas really truly tried to leave the United States, it would be war, and they would not win.
To clarify:
Even if an unambiguous majority of Texas would say “we’d like to turn Texas into an independent country”, you’d rather force them to stay by force of arms?
lol. Please 🙏
GOP would not win the presidency for 20 years at least
It would also reduce the number needed to win.
538 EC votes / 2 = 269. 50%+1 for the win so 270.
Texas drops out, so now it goes from 538 to 498. / 2 = 249. 50%+1=250 to win.
And suddenly 270towin.com needs a new CNAME.
Just playing around with what something like that might look like:
Yeah, Texas is a reliable GOP vote. Which means losing it would be a massive blow to GOP electoral chances.
Not all of us, just need more of y’all to move here and water down their vote. Problem is the germandering makes populated places less impacting than the uneducated rural areas.
OMFG I hope they do. They could no longer bus immigrants to other states and would have no other choice but to police their border with Mexico entirely on their own without any federal support. Fucking dumbasses.
A Texas independence would not only violate the Constitution, it would sink the GOP in the remaining states due to the loss of Texas’ electoral votes, thus ensuring a Republican president would never be elected again. This is the biggest reason Texas will never secede, regardless of the state’s conservative nativism.
I thought this about roe too. Conservatives are really into catching the tire and not knowing what to do afterwards nowadays…
I think part of the reason for this is that the old guard GOP that used Roe and similar issues as the “carrot on a stick” or car to chase, used to have the power to keep it from happening, so they could keep campaigning on it. But the “younger” GOP bought the BS for all those years and now they have the power to catch the car, not realizing it was always just a voter motivational tool, never a real plan. They just saw the old guard GOP as “swamp” that wasn’t doing what they campaigned on, and rode the Trump wave into power for themselves, and are there to catch all the carrots.
I’m always baffled by how people point out succession as illegal as if it’s expected or common otherwise that bits of a country can break away whenever they feel like it.
Would an independent Texas care if there was never a Republican president of a country they had left? Or would the see it as just rewards for those that those to stay there?
