Daniel Miller speaks about how and why Texas should leave the United States of America during the “Rally Against Censorship” held Jan. 26 at the Lone Star Convention & Expo Center in Conroe.
Jason Fochtman/Staff photographer
Beaumont Enterprise
Cayla Harris, Austin Bureau
Daniel Miller wants Texas to leave the United States. And he believes a majority of Texans want the same thing.
Miller, the president of the pro-secession Texas Nationalist Movement, says his organization has gathered more than the roughly 98,000 signatures needed to place the question on the GOP primary ballot next spring. He’ll hand them into the Texas Republican Party by the Monday deadline — and from there, party leaders must verify signatures and decide whether to place the nonbinding question on the March 5 ballot.
If they try not to, Miller said, he’s prepared to go to court.
“Let the people of Texas have their say,” he said in an interview. “If no one believes in it, then you get to shut me up.”
Miller, a freelance technology consultant from Southeast Texas, has been the face of the state secessionist movement, better known as “TEXIT,” for decades. He believes Texas would be better off economically and socially if it were an independent nation. He says there’s a legal basis for secession, though it’s untested, and frames the issue as a matter of grassroots political power.
Adding the question to the GOP primary ballot would not actually dictate that the state should secede or make that an official position of the state party. It would serve instead as a poll of where Republican voters stand on the issue.
Legal experts and historians have long said that secession is both an unpopular and unconstitutional idea. Politicians, and even some of the most conservative members of the Republican Party, have balked at the effort, characterizing it as a fringe movement that works against the goals of bettering Texas and the United States.
At a meeting in Austin last weekend, the Texas GOP’s 64-member executive board overwhelmingly rejected the Texas Nationalist Movement’s request to add the referendum to the ballot outright. Members of the group showed up in person to ask executive committee members for their support, arguing also that posing the question to voters could greatly increase turnout in the primary election.
“Call me cynical, but I’m not dumb,” said Rolando Garcia, a Houston-area member of the GOP’s executive committee. He questioned whether the group gathered enough valid signatures and suggested its effort to simply get the committee to put it on the ballot raised serious doubts.
“They want (a majority of the executive board) to do what they could not get enough signatures to do, because it’s easier to bring 20 people to a meeting and lobby a body of 60 people than it is to actually collect 97,000 signatures,” he said.
Garcia warned that placing such a question on the ballot would tell Texas GOP voters that the state party is not paying attention to issues they actually care about, like crime and border security.
“It’s not a matter that this will pass or that there’s any danger of Texas actually seceding, at least not in the near future,” he said. “The danger is by even having this on the ballot, we become the party of secession, and I would urge this body: do not give a tiny, small movement the legitimacy that it could not earn through actual support.”
Still, the Texas GOP platform, which was approved at the party’s convention last year, encourages the state Legislature to approve a general ballot referendum “to determine whether or not the State of Texas should reassert its status as an independent nation.” The platform also states that Texas “retains the right to secede from the United States.”
James Wesolek, a spokesman for the Texas GOP, declined to answer questions about the signature verification process on Tuesday because the party had not yet received the petitions.
Miller, who also ran an unsuccessful campaign for lieutenant governor last year, said there is growing support for the TEXIT movement, even if some people “don’t want to acknowledge that this is happening.” (Miller came second in the six-person GOP race for lieutenant governor, earning just 6.9 percent of the vote.)
His organization publicly lists the number of volunteers and other allies it has online “just to give everyone an idea of the level of support that we got,” Miller said. Its website on Wednesday said the group has about 3,000 volunteers and more than 600,000 registered supporters. As of mid-July, the group’s PAC reported roughly $6,000 in its coffers.
He said those volunteers have been working around the clock to collect signatures both in person and online. The Texas Nationalist Movement also launched a petition effort to place the secession question on the Democratic primary ballot, which came “very close,” Miller said.
The organization would have needed about 54,000 signatures to get on the Democratic ballot. He wouldn’t say how many they’d gathered.
“It’s important for folks to understand that this is not a Republican issue only — this is a Texas issue, and both parties almost got to have their say in it,” he said.
Miller said he already has retained an attorney to help his organization if the Texas GOP tries to block the question “on some technicality.”
“We’re ready to go fight for it,” he said.