“Don’t mess with us, Texas. You just might get what you want.”

I like this idea.

[Maybe] the solution is simply to give Texas and other secessionist-conservatives what they really want: free passage to the land of all their conservative fantasies. Send them all off with gratis one-way tickets (I’m happy to earmark some of my socialist tax dollars for the effort) to a country with: a small federal government with limited power and meager influence over the private lives of its citizens; extremely weak trade unions routinely sabotaged by the federal government (i.e., a “pro-business environment”); negligible income tax; few immigrants, legal or otherwise; a dominant Christian population, accounting for some 70 percent of the people; no mandatory health insurance or concept of universal health care; a strong social taboo surrounding homosexuality and a constitution that already states, “All individuals have the right to marry a person of their choice of the opposite sex”; and a gun culture so ubiquitous that you can find automatic weaponry displayed openly on the streets of its capital city and in many households.

Sound like a Texan secessionist’s dream? Well, it’s no dream. This country already exists. It’s called the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Don’t mess with us, Texas. You just might get what you want.

The New Republic: Go Ahead and Secede, Texas. We Dare You.

Texas becomes a semiautonomous territory (with no electoral votes) and Puerto Rico becomes a full state. No need to create a new flag with 51 stars.

Let’s do this.

November 14, 2012