(NewsNation) — An advocacy group that supports the secession of Texas appears ready to take its fight to court after the state Republican Party rejected an initiative petition to put the issue on the 2024 ballot.
The Texas Nationalist Movement said Wednesday its board authorized the group “to take every possible legal action” against the Texas GOP to overturn the ruling. The group gave the party 24 hours to reconsider its decision, and President Daniel Miller said Friday on X that the group is “taking on the Texas GOP.”
In rejecting the initiative petition, Republican Party Chairman Matt Rinaldi said the signatures were not turned in the day before the deadline and that some 130,000 of 139,000 signatures were invalid because they were electronic, not handwritten.
Miller said in a response letter that the reasons for the rejection “stretch credibility.”
“The assertion that the statute requires petitions to be delivered a full day prior to the close of the filing window is unbelievable on its face, and the mere assertion is ridiculous on its face,” he wrote. “Further, the assertion that electronic signatures are invalid is contrary to the law passed by the 80th Legislature … that clearly states, ‘If a law requires a signature, an electronic signature satisfies the law.'”
In Texas, voters cannot directly change laws through initiatives or referendums. Therefore, the ballot measure “for the people of Texas to determine whether or not the State of Texas should reassert its status as an independent nation” would not be legally binding, Newsweek reported.
The Texas Nationalist Movement is pushing for a so-called “TEXIT” from the United States to create an independent nation.
“TEXIT means that Texans determine our own laws and not 2.5 million unelected bureaucrats in Washington,” the group states on its website.
Texas secessionists have been getting organized and feel “emboldened,” the Texas Tribune reported in November. While the movement for an independent Texas isn’t new, supporters say it has gained more traction recently.
Miller created the group in 2005, according to the Tribune.
“If Texas can’t make it as an independent nation, then who can?” he said in an Infowars interview posted on his X account Friday.
State Rep. Jared Patterson, a Republican, called the group and secessionists “traitors.”
“Being anti-American is not a Republican ideal,” he said on X this week.
It was unclear when the Texas Nationalist Movement might file a lawsuit.
