They do this all the time. Maybe Biden should call their bluff, execute his powers as Commander in Chief, and order the National Guard in Texas to turn on State Police.
Yeah, heading into the 2018 midterm Trump tried to create a border crisis. It didn’t work. This is their election trick, create a lot of smoke, rile up the base, think that it will rile everyone else up.
I mean let’s look at the core aspect of Abbott’s argument from his statement.
That is why the Framers included both Article IV, § 4, which promises that the federal government “shall protect each [State] against invasion,” and Article I, § 10, Clause 3, which acknowledges “the States’ sovereign interest in protecting their borders.” Arizona v. United States, 567 U.S. 387, 419 (2012) (Scalia, J., dissenting).
Right out the gate, Abbott is based his ideology on a dissenting opinion. That is, the NON-MAJORITY finding of the court in Arizona v. United States. In fact, Arizona v. United States indicated explicitly that enforcement of the border was the sole privilege of the Federal Government. So right out the gate Abbott is literally using a case that ruled the opposite of the determination he indicated in his statement.
Additionally, Art. I, § 10, C. 3 of the Constitution.
No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.
Historically this was used for Native American invasions of property and so the key factor in cases around this is “will not admit of delay”. Texas is not burning. No historical read of this section of the Constitution supports immigrants coming into the Nation. By definition as we have it thus far, Texas is not being invaded. Additionally, Scalia’s conceptualization of this section, no other Justice has joined in on that understanding. So outside of the opinion of a single justice, a Governor just saying “I’m being invaded! I get to invalidate federal law!” nobody else has ever indicated this is the way it should be read.
With Art. I, § 10, C. 3, you can say “I’m being invaded!” But you still have to follow the law. You can fight invaders and maintain the law of this land, they are not mutually exclusive things, no matter how hard Abbott or Scalia wishes it to be otherwise.
And finally, the Art. IV, § 4 argument.
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.
Again, no court would uphold that Texas is being invaded. But Abbott is adamant about Biden “isn’t enforcing…” And the thing is, Governors do not get to legally make that determination. What laws are and are not being enforced by a President is the sole prerogative of the Executive branch. (Wayte v. United States)
The Governor of Texas cannot just unilaterally make a determination that the President isn’t XYZing. That’s what the court system is for and distinctly the thing that Abbott has lost. If the Governor felt that the President was not holding up their end, they have every right under Article III of the Constitution to take it up there. Which that’s what Abbott did and lost. Also, why when he was questioned if his defiance would be upheld by SCOTUS, he merely indicated that he felt the 5th Circuit would uphold it. Meaning, he knows that SCOTUS will overturn any determination the Governor is making on this front.
And with all of that, his core argument has nothing. It’s easy to pick apart. Now here’s the thing, Gov. Abbott is not stupid in the legal sense. He’s quite aware that his determination is unfounded. He’s banking on stirring the pot enough to make either Biden do something so that can be plastered all over the place or getting the issue fresh into his base’s minds.
And like I said, this is exactly what they did 2018 and lost. Abbott is just trying to get under everyone’s skin and he seems determined to spend as much of Texan taxpayers’ money in litigation to do that one thing.
Again, no court would uphold that Texas is being invaded.
Which is good because if we classify border-crossing migrants as “invaders” then not only does that mean really bad things for them, it means Abbott was funneling invaders further inside our borders by paying to bus them to denver or fly them to chicago or whatever else.
It’s pretty clear he didn’t think the treasonous implications of this particular initiative through very well.
Great analysis. I genuinely think Abbott is also trying to make as much work available to conservative lawyers as possible, like a jobs program for assholes.
I do hope to come across more of your commentary analysis on Lemmy! Thanks for the informative insights.
I’m in favor of calling the bluff, but leave it peaceful:
- Army bases remain US army bases and the national guard remains US. Texas must raise its own military without any US military equipment. Existing US servicemen must resign if they wish to join the Texas military, and will be treated as foreign army – they must leave US bases.
- Any companies headquartered in Texas will be considered foreign companies and subject to all relevant taxes and laws. Employees will be considered employed by foreign companies. Any subsidizes and other credits to these companies are forfeit.
- Employees of the state government will be considered foreign state agents.
- Trade deals must be negotiated with the US. Any US facilities providing goods and services, like water or energy, will now charge a fair market rate.
- Texas must renegotiate trade with other countries.
- For the first five years, Texas and the US must allow people to freely move out of or into Texas. If any Texas resident wishes to live as a US citizen, Texas must pay for their relocation.
- After that, or if they choose to renounce US citizenship, Texans are considered foreigners and will be treated as illegal immigrants if they enter the US without proper documentation.
- Texas universities lose all US accreditation. Current Students may transfer to a US university at no cost, and have their existing credits recognized. Texas will pay for any moves. New students from Texas will be considered foreign students and applicants for admissions and tuition at US universities.
- Any attack on US people or property or facilities will be seen as an act of war.
- Texas senators and house representatives are expelled from Congress.
They’ll be crying and begging to rejoin the US within a month. They’ll be a fourth world hell scape within a year if they don’t.
So, basically brexit then.
TexBrex; like texmex but worse.
Obviously Texit
Clearly a better name but it didn’t work for the texmex angle.
Yeah I felt TExit was pretty obvious since… I mean it’s like 1 letter away. But is it too obvious?
BBQ fish and chips?
Texit.
I have to say TexBrex is better
Disagree, but I respect your opinion. Can we include TexMix somehow?
This is basically what happened at the beginning of the civil war except the south had much better terms, and the confederates decided to attack a US army base because they’re assholes and that’s what assholes do. They would absolutely do the same again.
The power dynamic has shifted so much that it would be a 1000x speedrun if they did it again.
And honestly? Let them. Maybe we can do reconstruction properly this time.
The US civil war isn’t what civil wars look like in the modern context. There was a boarder and most of the North was safe. That’s not what modern civil wars look like. They look like Serbia.
You have to go to work and on your way to work there’s someone who’s been sniping people for months. The cops won’t do anything because “let’s go Brandon” or some shit, the mayor no longer has control over the police, and you still have to go to work because you still have to pay for food. So you duck and weave between cars with rotting drivers to get in to your office and you hope you don’t get killed today.
Modern civil wars have no borders. They look like mass shootings, car attacks, snipers, bombings, and other random terrorism. Or they look like the Syrian civil war, with 30 different groups all fighting each other aligning with each other sometimes and fighting others, for decades, sometimes aligned with the government and sometimes against it.
The key thing about Texas is that they have a ton of oil. Even assuming a normal war, the US military lives off oil. If it was quick they could probably do it without dipping in to strategic reserves, but what would happen to the oil infrastructure at the start of the war? Damaging that supply could impact the US ability to wage war, so that’s not a risk they’re going to take.
If anything comes of this beyond Republicans using it to pump up their base, I’ll be surprised.
I mean a right wing group opened fire on a electric substation that was barely over a year ago, and we kinda just moved on. We are already somehow in the slow burn of a civil war and there has been several incidents stopped before more destruction could be done.
A modern civil war in America looks like what is happening currently in America. We just don’t have a lot of big flashy things happening.
You know other than the record shattering mass murders that occurs at schools and other public places.
Could it get worse? Absolutely. Will it? Who knows. Maybe we do go back to lining up on the borders and shooting each other too.
Right, they opened fire on a couple of substations and no one got hurt.
School shootings are bad but affect a very tiny percentage of the population, really.
It would absolutely get way, way, way worse, and just like what the other person said.
They look like Serbia if you’re not a superpower. Rest assured leadership would get hit with drone strikes simultaneously and the war likely wouldn’t even start.
The only way a civil war in this country stands a chance is if it’s by surprise and given that these people can’t it won’t shut the fuck up that send unlikely.
There are no leaders. It’s just a campaign of stochastic terrorism until everything collapses.
Doesn’t matter if they actually lead or if they’re figureheads, seeing them rapidly disassembled is the main point.
No, they’re doing it now. This is what it looks like to carry out a war by stochastic terrorism. They just keep saying the conspiracy theory shit and doing these stunts and saying, “Our people just need to take matters in to their own hands!” And people carry out random attacks against things with playable deniability that they’re leading it.
No one is drone striking Tucker Carlson, and they won’t, no matter how many people he kills, how many synagogue or mosque attacks he’s responsible for, because he can always just say, “oh, free speech. I didn’t plan that. It’s just a coincidence that every time there’s a mass shootings the person follows my Twitter.”
Read up on the Rwandan genocide. This is what they did. They ramped up dehumanizing rehetoric until people hacked their neighbors apart with machetes and locked buildings full of people and set them on fire. It was normal people carrying out the atrocities, but there was enough of a direct connection to end up in the international criminal court. We’re in the early stages of the same type of conflict, except we have more guns here.
There’s no one to drone strike because every time this happens it’s “another lone wolf.”
Let’s not forget the $53,000,000,000 they would instantly lose from federal funding
There is still the matter of the Constitution saying that states can’t do that.
Let the Republican controlled supreme court rule it illegal.
Since when have Replicunts given a shit about the constitution? They treat it like they treat the bible. Twist it into fitting their narrative and ignore the parts that don’t.
Texas immediately becomes the newest Narco-State, gets it’s own CIA coup and Democrats refuse to make them a state again, forcing them to be a territory.
Its* own CIA.
Some country bumpkin is going to show up with a KIA coupe and all his buddies will shout “yeehaw” at their victory.
Go ahead. Seceded states don’t get electoral votes.
Or federal funding.
they will be pretty lit after the federals decide to pay it a visit tho
As someone who actually lives here, I would be very hard pressed to find someone who actually thinks secession is a good idea. It has been years since I’ve met someone who didn’t consider it anything more than a joke or bit of (false) trivia.
Be aware that Lemmy is a pretty radically legt place. It isn’t where to go if you want nuanced takes on stupid conservative talking points.
Why would anyone want nuanced takes on stupid conservative talking points? They’re not worth listening to because they’re not grounded in reality or knowledge of how the world works.
You can’t have a functional democracy if you don’t listen to the other side. That’s literally the problem we have right now, a bunch of boomers who scream socialism when you try to feed their starving children or get people access to medical care.
I don’t think anyone would disagree with your point, but the other side is literally daring the U.S. military to kill them right now and emitting lout screeching noises. I can’t blame anyone for avoiding engagement.
A vocal minority of cockwaffles are daring the federal government to assert its authority.
I’m sure the proportion of conservatives who support this is disappointingly high, but it is not all, or even most (around here). Even if they do support this political fuckery, the transition to a shooting war is not a small leap.
Civil war it is then. (they will start it though)
So you want dictatorship. That way there is no opposing side and as long as you agree, everything is good.
I think most rational people would like an opposition party who brings good ideas with solid justification to the table. A group of professional politicians who argue in good faith, working for the betterment of their electorate. People who can at least be respected by the international community, willing to tackle the real problems facing the world as a whole.
If we’re talking about dictatorship perhaps it’s worth scrutinising the people arguing for total immunity for the president. It’s especially worth an in-depth look at the relationships they form with leaders of other nations and the principles they share.
Rural Texas can be pretty crazy. Cities and the immediate surrounding areas are pretty normal and liberal.
I say this all the time, but that’s everywhere in the US. When I first moved to Pennsylvania, a friend told me that it was Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, with Alabama in between. Then, later, we moved to Minnesota, and it was the same thing: The Cities, a couple of outliers like Duluth and the college towns, but MAGA signs everywhere else.
If the electoral college didn’t make elections so unfair, politics in the US would be more sane, and more liberal.
Yeah, stopped at a gas station out in the middle of nowhere in west Texas, and the old woman at the cash register wouldn’t ring up me and my GF because my GF was black. In 2020. A friend almost got in a fight at a bar out in the middle of nowhere in Texas because he had a UT bumper sticker on his truck, and they didn’t like “liberals” there.
But, the cities are pretty normal. Have seen police cars painted with rainbows for pride month. A church down the road from me flies a pride flag, etc.
wouldn’t ring up me and my GF because my GF was black.
Holy shit, that’s insane. Did you get free gas? It’s not like you were going to put it back. Also, do you txink she’d have rung up a black couple? Did she object to the mixed couple part? Wild, man.
If the electoral college didn’t make elections so unfair, politics in the US would be more sane, and more liberal.
If we ever end up actually having a civil war, it’ll be over this.
The majority will be tired of the minorities bs, and they’ll insist on a change.
The minority will insist that in never changes, because they would lose their power if it did, and are unwilling to lose the culture war.
And unstoppable force and an immovable object type scenario.
Cities and the immediate surrounding areas are pretty normal and liberal.
I’m not so sure about that.
Comparing Austin to Houston (for example) you’ll see two quite different mindsets / philosophies going on. And Dallas/Fort Worth seems even different from the two other cities.
former texan… man, they really want it, even if it seems bonzo crazy, they’ll try to get it. I’m really pushing fam down there to get out before it gets worse. The GOP doesn’t care about winning by the rules, as evinced by Abbot and Paxton’s disregard for laws they don’t like and recent fights with the - checks notes - yeah the supreme court…
I can’t and won’t put anything past the texas conservatives / GOP anywhere at this point, if they have the opportunity to wreck things they will - they don’t think consequences through and don’t care about patriotism in a sense that most people do. I’d should refer to them as Texas Nationalists.
While this is true, your elected officials are acting as if it’s really on the table. You may not be able to find a Texan who says they want secession, but it’s not hard to find one who would vote for it.
As a Texan who wants nothing to do with these absolute fucking morons, but whose life is directly impacted by their asinine whims: please don’t encourage them. I can’t afford to leave yet.
They can, and should, be fertilizer. 🌻🌻🌻
I’m in the same situation. People seem to forget that just under half of the 30 million people here aren’t conservative and don’t want anything to with this
Always nice to know people are looking out for us, right?
Essentially telling a madman with hostages “yeah, do it, pussy. Bet you won’t,” just to see him reap the consequences, but conveniently forgetting state-wide consequences don’t only affect the people you want them to affect.
Here’s hoping it just turns out like the last time these jerkoffs talked about secession. Maybe, if we’re lucky, we can finally get rid of Abbott. If we’re really lucky, maybe his replacement won’t be as psychotic, either!
Set Texas adrift and you’ll see some real invaders from the south.
That would be the ‘finding out’ part.
Oh man, the cartels would love to hit that from behind.
Unfortunately I think we have too much federal infrastructure in Texas to make it that simple.
NASA is one thing that comes to mind. (Houston would have a pretty big problem then)
And the US would have no obligation to help unless they decide to sign a defence treaty.
It’s like brexit all over again, but even more stupid.
Probably the best example of irony you’ll ever see: Texas becomes SAFER when illegal immigration increases. Sauce: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2014704117
Gonna be hard to get that FEMA money Texas needs every few years once they secede.
I checked the reaction in r/conservative, and everyone there was supporting Texas on this smh
When weren’t they enemies of the USA?
To the surprise of exactly nobody.
Party of law and order /s
They’re all in there talking about upholding the constitution when the SCOTUS ruled against them, defending America while accomplishing nothing with their silly razorwire which has had no impact on immigration, calling the US Government Traitors as they themselves actively commit treason.
There is no end to the Irony. They even parrot the line about standing with Abbot even though Abbot can’t hardly stand from his wheelchair.
Aside from the jab on Abbot’s mobility i agree.
Then again, you pay me 18k per month I’ll sit in a wheelchair too.
They do realize that without Texas, the United States will probably never have Republican leadership again for decades at least, right? So if they don’t live in Texas, they are kind of screwing themselves.
So they can return to their rightful owner Mexico…right? Right…? 🥺🥺🥺
Biden has immunity. He should just order seal team 6 to execute Texas political leadership.
let them fight it in court for years
Floridian here. I prefer the execution idea - it’s a better use of tax dollars than paying for lawyers (GOP donors, of course) to argue on behalf of deeply flawed state executives.
I’m ready to beat the conservatives in Civil War 2, tbh. It sounds easier to deal with them now than watch the slow decline of the USA.
A second civil war would look nothing like the last one.
It’d look more like the Troubles in Ireland; with lots of terrorist attacks rather than well-defined battles. It would be neighbor-on-neighbor violence. A bunch of small paramilitaries running around ganking everyone else.
Republicans overestimate their own size. They’re not the 46.8% of Voters who voted Trump in 2020, they are a fraction of the 22.09% of total Americans. They will be crushed by the overwhelming nonpartisan majority in the case of open warfare.
While my heart sinks for the effected families, there has never been an easier time to uproot your life and leave Texas, Florida, or anywhere else. I myself have been planning to leave North Dakota for several years now.
Guess the point I’m trying to make is that any civil war that breaks out in the us is going to be a fucking bloodbath. There won’t be territory, or battle lines to get on the right side of (or just away from). There won’t be any where for civilians to go. Every city will be engulfed in insanity.
Nobody wins. It doesn’t matter who comes out in control, there will be no winners. Only death, destruction.
It’ll be chaos, and then it’ll be martial law. When there are no clean sides, no obvious distinction or front lines, entire cities/regions become internment camps. Everyone is suspect. Anyone could be one of them.
Scenes like this;
Persons with last names starting from CH to DO have the next 2 hours to do their weekly shopping, anyone without correct identification, displayed on their chest, is subject to arrest and indefinite imprisonment. Resistance will not be tolerated, try, defy and it’ll be the last time. Don’t be a hero, citizen, c’mon, keep the line moving. No talking to those not in your party. Don’t wander off the yellow line or the autosentries will turn you into a hazy pink mist. BRRRRAPP
If America balkanizes (cuz if we split, it won’t be into 2 it’ll be into several) there will never be peace in North America in any of our lifetimes. Those who are chomping the bit for it might do well to remember that of all the multipronged wars in history I don’t think there’s been a single one that was won by any of the original starting factions. So whomever is around at the beginning, that side, all those sides, have already lost. We just don’t know what terror will be birthed from their corpses that finally takes over.
Exactly.
But I also don’t think they have the resources to maintain martial law everywhere.
Nobody wins
War monguls will. And they’re American, too!
I realize I’m the asshole for saying this, but we will have culled weakness from the herd by engaging with the traitors in combat, and the suffering there as a result very well may be lower than the suffering incurred by letting them continue their insanity for decades to come before they inevitably die off due to generational progress.
The real question is basically whether the pain is endured by us all or only their less fortunate targets. I am not afraid to share the suffering.
Wow, you actually said that.
Imagine if more people stood up against the Nazis in the same manner. Do you think the Germans’ slow cascade into madness was a better alternative than war in the streets?
Because the Nazis totally just started with a civil war. If that’s what had happened, Nazis Germany would have collapsed in on itself, and not been able to do what they did. a hypothetical second US civil war is not even close to the same thing.
Ok bye.
No, not “bye”.
Ok, leave!
Don’t want to be part of the Union? Fine. Get the fuck out.
Yeah but like leave America, not Texas. That’s ours. Leave to Russia or some other authoritarian shit hole.
Yeah, that was implicit.
The marketing for the Civil War movie is getting out of control.
