impulse

When the speaker of the Texas House recently outlined his priorities for the next legislative session, he mentioned tax relief, the development of data centers and a notion that sent many eyebrows skyward.

Dustin Burrows, a Republican from Lubbock, directed the chamber’s governmental oversight committee to study the legal and economic implications of Texas absorbing one or more counties in eastern New Mexico.

The “conversation,” Burrows told the Dallas Morning News, “is ultimately about culture, opportunity and the right to choose a path that reflects the shared values of the Permian and Delaware basins,” a vast desert expanse awash in oil and natural gas.

Apparently, Texas lawmakers have time and money to burn.

The notion of the swaggering state swallowing a chunk of its resistant neighbor is completely far-fetched. Just four states have been carved from the territory of others: Kentucky, Maine, Vermont and West Virginia. And it’s been quite a spell since the last time that happened. West Virginia split off from Confederate Virginia in 1863.

Realistically, there is no end of hurdles — legal, political, practical — that would have to be surmounted for a partial Texas-New Mexico merger to occur. Both states would need to agree — New Mexico is a hard no — and Congress would also have to approve.

But the impulse to bust up, break away and move on is as old as America itself and, at the same time, as fresh as the latest provocation to pass the lips of the nation’s frothing commander-in-chief.

“Calexit,” the idea of California breaking away from the U.S. and becoming its own nation, took root during President Trump’s turbulent first reign and gained renewed support as soon as he returned to power. Texas toyed with the idea of secession when Barack Obama was president.

“The driver,” said Syracuse University professor Ryan Griffiths, an author and expert on secession, “is politics and polarization.”

The notion being if you don’t like it, then leave.

Or, at least, make noise about doing so.

Eastern New Mexico — dry, desolate — looks and feels very much like an appendage of West Texas. Its residents have long been estranged from the rest of their state and, especially, the Democratic leadership in Santa Fe, the state capital. That is not to say, however, the slightest inch of New Mexico territory will be going anywhere anytime soon.

Earlier this year, two Republican state lawmakers introduced a measure to give voters a say on whether they wanted their counties to break away — or, as one of the legislators put it, “Get the hell out of New Mexico.” The constitutional amendment died without a hearing.

When Burrows renewed talk of a takeover, Javier Martinez, speaker of the New Mexico House, responded without equivocation. “Over my dead body,” he said.

But the notion has garnered Burrows plenty of attention in the Lone Star State, a place with no lack of self-regard. And it certainly hasn’t hurt his standing with Texas’ arch-conservative Republican base, which has sometimes viewed Burrows with suspicion.

“People in Texas have a lot of fun with the idea that Texas … is entitled to secede and that maybe it can restore lost lands in New Mexico, Kansas, Colorado and beyond,” said Cal Jillson, a longtime student of Texas politics at Southern Methodist University. “It [appeals to] the conservative base, but also to everyone who loves to chuckle.”

Serious or not, secession — or independence, as some prefer to call it — has long been the dream of dissenters, of the discontented and those who feel put upon or politically unrepresented. America, after all, was birthed by divorcing itself from Britain and King George III.

For the longest time, residents in the ruddy north of blue California have agitated for a breakaway state called Jefferson. In recent years unhappy conservatives in eastern Oregon have spoken of splitting from their Democratic state and becoming a part of Republican Idaho. (Lawmakers in Boise passed a measure in 2023 inviting Oregon to the negotiating table; Oregon has so far declined to show.)

Since 2020, voters in 33 rural Illinois counties have voted to separate from their state and its Democratic leadership, a move welcomed in a measure passed by the Republican-run Indiana Legislature and signed by the state’s GOP governor, Mike Braun. (Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker dismissed the 2025 legislation as “a stunt.”)

Which, indeed, it appeared to be.

But Richard Kreitner said there is a certain logic behind secession movements, as governments from Washington to the statehouse are seen as increasingly unresponsive and dysfunctional.

“As people become more disenfranchised … more disillusioned from the political process, you’re going to start looking outside of the political process, the political structure, the constitutional structure, for a possible solution,” said Kreitner, who hosts a history podcast, “Think Back,” and has also written a book on secession. “If you’re going to do that in a country founded with a secessionist manifesto, the Declaration of Independence, at some point people are going to start thinking about that.”

Legitimate grievance grounded in serious concern is certainly worthy of attention. But exploiting that discontent to draw notice or score cheap political points — as Burrows seems to be doing in Texas — is something altogether different.

The chance of New Mexico ceding a part of itself to Texas is precisely zero, meaning the legislative study is less about “culture” and “opportunity” than the speaker and fellow Republicans evidently looking to troll their blue-state neighbor.

There are better, more productive ways for lawmakers to spend their time.

And their taxpayers’ dime.