A group of Texans pushing for the state to secede and create its own country held their first major field operation this weekend, canvassing 31 cities across the state in an attempt to gather enough signatures to place the secession question on the 2016 primary ballot.
The Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM) has about 90 more days to get the 75,000 signatures needed to put the issue up for vote during the March 2016 primary.
"What we are seeing, over and over, is this complete disconnect between the people of Texas, what they want, and what is going on in Washington, D.C.," TNM President Daniel Miller told Reuters. "The people of Texas don't have anything against the United States, they are just tired of being governed by bureaucrats we didn't elect pushing programs we don't want."
Miller compared the Texas secessionist movement to Scotland's failed attempt to leave the United Kingdom last year, as well as Catalonia, which hopes to vote to become independent from Spain this year.
"We are living in the era of the right of political self-determination," Miller added.
Most legal experts say it would be unconstitutional for Texas to secede from the nation through a primary vote, but that isn't likely to stop the historically independent spirit of Texas.
"Everyone can agree on the fact that we should have the right to vote on the issue," James Franklin, the Midland representative of the Texas Nationalist Movement, told NewsWest9.
Texas and Hawaii are the only two U.S. states that were once internationally recognized sovereign nations, according to Reuters.
Franklin continued: "Number one, we would be a lot better off. Texas is the 12th largest economy in the world right now. If we weren't sending all of our taxes to Washington D.C., where they are wasting them, we would be better off."
The state's $1.4 trillion per year economy is about the size of South Korea's, according to Reuters.
The Internet was ablaze with speculation that Texas was eyeing independence after the state's governor, Greg Abbot, signed a bill in June to repatriate $1 billion worth of gold currently stored in an underground Manhattan vault. The law would also create a state gold bullion depository, which, according to one Texas lawmaker, will also be integrated with the decentralized cryptocurrency Bitcoin, as HNGN previously reported.
Supporters of secession movements sometimes point to the Declaration of Independence itself as giving people the right to secede from a government that no longer protects their unalienable rights.
"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness," the declaration says.
However, T. Gerald Treece, a professor at South Texas Collage of Law in Houston and an expert on Constitutional Law, told Reuters that an old promise made during the Civil War could prevent the state from going anywhere.
"When Texas and the other Southern states were re-admitted, each of them made a solemn promise that they would never leave the Union again," Treece said, adding that there is at least one legislative option that he is aware of. "You have to have the Texas Legislature initiate a request, and then you have to have the U.S. Congress approve it, and then it could happen.
