Texas Isn't Seceding, It's Turning Blue

Talk of Texas seceding continues to be a hot topic this week despite the fact that it will never happen. Well, that is, it will never happen again.

Kvatch at Ragebot!, has a list of concerns Texans should ponder a bit before packing their bags. My favorite is this one, "Water — You might want to start thinking about desalination because New Mexico and Oklahoma just damned up the Rio Grande and Red rivers." He also suggests the semolian as Texas's new currency.

Meanwhile, Chris Matthews, who continues to give crazy a platform, had arm-flapping maniac Tom DeLay on the show so he could delve into the minutae of the treaty that admitted Texas to the union in the first place while waiting out the longest period between indictment and trial in the history of the universe.

Of course, there's not really a lot of support in Texas for seceding, but since Perry brought it up, we should fully explore the meaning of such a maneuver. Nate Silver draws Rick Perry a picture. It's America without Texas. It's a Republican Party without two Republican Senators and a 20-12 advantage in the House. It's a picture of a Republican nominee in 2012 and subsequent elections without most of Texas's 55 electoral votes. All but six of those votes would be redistributed to 2008 blue states.

Having said all of this, I still think that Texas will become a blue state in about ten years, if not sooner. The demographics in that state are changing rapidly. The increasing Latino population and radical shifts in the views of young voters there will change that state. They're going to start by dumping Governor Perry, who doesn't even realize this week that he signed his political death warrant.