Why Texas Seceding (Again) Would Be Incredibly Stupid

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten

Just like believing that tax cuts for the rich will magically trickle down wealth to poor people, that Iran will voluntarily give up its nuclear ambitions if America “shows strength,” or that more guns everywhere will reduce gun violence, Texan secession can be tossed into the bin of Republicans’ absurdly dumb ideas.

Here’s a non-exclusive handful of reasons why:

1. If Texas became a foreign country, any Texan business that would want to stay American would leave, and Delaware would be an inviting place to go, as it has some of the most advantageous incorporation laws similar to Texas. This would lead to a crippling economic recession in Texas as its exiting corporations and businesses would likely take their employees with them, or cause a huge spike in Texan unemployment. The Texan government would then be on the hook for the surge in unemployment benefits (if it wanted to avoid catastrophic hunger, poverty, and homelessness) at the same time that the large number of Texans emigrating to America would collapse the Texan housing market. You couldn’t even guess what cascade of possible economic failures would follow that double-whammy.

2. Texan secession would be a giant betrayal of all the conservatives remaining in America. The 38 dependable Texan electoral votes would evaporate from the Republican Party’s calculus in American elections, and the GOP would have a considerably more difficult time winning the White House. Republicans have already lost seven of the previous eight presidential popular votes, and technicality victories in the Electoral College are increasingly Republicans’ only hope to control the executive branch. That hope would all but extinguish without Texas, particularly if a large influx of liberal citizens leave Texas for neighboring Southern states and turn Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana into swing states.

American Republicans would also lose the two Texan senators, and quite a handful of representatives since the highly populated blue states would now make up a bigger proportion of the populace after all the conservative Texans lose their US citizenship. This might complicate Texas’s foreign policy and international trade because its giant neighbor trading partner, the United States, would suddenly turn much more left wing. Perhaps…