No ‘Texit’ question, but Texas GOP voters to be asked about border, vouchers, foreign wars
AUSTIN — State GOP officials, while rejecting bids to put Texas secession to a vote, announced Thursday a set of rock-ribbed conservative ballot propositions for the March 5 Republican primary.
Four of the 13 propositions suggest different ways to crack down on illegal immigration, from ending instate tuition for people who entered the country without papers to having the state “use physical force to prevent illegal entry and trafficking.”
Others would require Congress to declare war before the Texas National Guard is sent to a foreign conflict, bar land sales to people or entities from China, Iran, North Korea and Russia, and restore Attorney General Ken Paxton’s ability to initiate vote fraud prosecutions. In 2021, the state Court of Criminal Appeals ruled Paxton does not have unilateral discretion to go after election-law violations but must do so only at the request of county prosecutors.
Although Democrats in the past have placed issue questions on their primary voters’ ballots, there are no plans to do so next year, said Texas Democratic Party spokeswoman Brigitte Bowen.
As they were two years ago, Republican voters will be asked in the 2024 primary about school vouchers.
Although the GOP ballot propositions are nonbinding polls of the opinions of about 2 million of the state’s more than 30 million people, Gov. Greg Abbott for months has cited how nearly 88% of primary voters statewide approved a pro-voucher ballot proposition in March 2022.
In that election, nearly 1.7 million of the 1.9 million people who voted in the GOP primary voiced support for Proposition 9.
The proposition read, “Texas parents and guardians should have the right to select schools, whether public or private, for their children, and the funding should follow the student.”
Next year, Proposition 11 will have identical language.
During this year’s regular legislative session and two special sessions, Abbott failed to persuade House lawmakers to pass a bill creating education savings accounts, which would publicly fund private school attendance for certain families.
The three-term Republican governor hasn’t said whether he will call another special session on voucherlike proposals before the March 5 primary election — though at times, he has hinted he would.
Earlier this month, the 64-member State Republican Executive Committee selected the 13 GOP ballot propositions.
The panel, whose members include some of the party’s most staunchly conservative activists, again decided to ask about eliminating property taxes and making sure COVID-19 vaccines aren’t forced on people.
New questions include one about whether the state should have a bullion depository for gold and silver and another about whether the Texas Constitution should be revised to require proof of citizenship when one registers to vote.
Not repeated were several from the 2022 primary’s list of 10 GOP propositions, including on critical race theory, gender-affirming care for minors and protecting human life “from fertilization to natural death.”
At their Dec. 2 meeting, however, executive committee members overwhelmingly rebuffed a request by the Texas Nationalist Movement that they add a question about whether Texas should secede from the Union.
The supporters of what they call “Texit” delivered petitions to the state GOP asking for a proposition about whether Texas should secede.
On Wednesday, however, state GOP chairman Matt Rinaldi said in an open letter that the Texas Nationalist Movement delivered the petitions the day after a Dec. 10 deadline, with the vast majority of the “purported 139,000 signatures” invalid because they were submitted electronically, not in the person’s own handwriting.
“For these reasons, the voter petitions delivered by the Texas Nationalist Movement on Dec. 11 are rejected as untimely and, even if they had been timely submitted, do not contain the required 97,709 valid signatures to place a matter on the 2024 Republican Primary ballot,” Rinaldi wrote.
Late Wednesday, the secession-backing group threatened to sue if Rinaldi didn’t reverse his decision.
“It is clear that the Republican Party of Texas is grasping for any tactic, no matter how ridiculous, to suppress the voices of Republican voters who merely want their voices heard on this fundamental issue of governance,” the Texas Nationalist Movement posted on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.
On Thursday, state GOP spokesman James Wesolek declined to respond, saying, “We do not comment on pending litigation.”
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