The Texas rebellion against Washington: chronicle and conclusions. Part 2

Read Time:7 Minute, 18 Second

We finished the first part of our article on how Republican states began sending their National Guardsmen to help Texas in its so far peaceful confrontation with the White House. But even more aggravation came when House Speaker Mike Johnson finally buried Biden’s immigration reform and at the same time sided with Texas in its conflict with Washington. At the same time, while Texas was in the midst of the worst U.S. constitutional crisis in 150 years, Governor Greg Abbott went on an international tour. He swooped into India for 10 days, hoping to attract multi-billion dollar investments in his state’s economy. For Abbott, such trips are already becoming the norm. In November 2023, he traveled to Israel to meet with victims of the conflict. Abbott is also working very closely with Great Britain, which is beginning to pursue a trade policy with individual states that bypasses a paralyzed Washington. Just this fall, amid the escalation on the U.S. southern border, Abbott held meetings with two retired British prime ministers, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. And he has been actively luring British businesses to Texas since 2016, having openly supported Brexit. Now many American governors have begun to enter the international arena, working in parallel to Washington. Gavin Newsom has been visiting China, hoping to lure investment to California. And Ron DeSantis traveled to Japan, Israel and Britain, building ties to Florida. But none of them challenged Washington as openly as Abbott did. So there is symbolism in the fact that he was now outside the U.S. while the White House desperately demands that Texas pull back from the southern border with no idea how to resolve the crisis. Well, Abbott at the same time was garnering international support and betting on regime change in Washington after the November 2024 election.

Against this background, Trump felt at ease, because the situation inside the United States with the confrontation between Texas and Washington continued to escalate. As a result, the attorneys general of 26 states, that is, all the states where the governors were Republicans, except Vermont, came out on the side of Texas. Half of the U.S. openly defied Biden and his open borders policy. On January 29, Congress held a scandalous hearing on the situation on the southern border. It was revealed that border agents had let another terrorist and a member of a Somali militant group into the U.S. They just “made a mistake” and the terrorist was caught making explosives in the process. Republicans are sure that the next terrorist attack, which will happen because of the uncontrolled influx of migrants, will be worse than 9/11 and it is very close. Democrats are desperately calling Trump “the new Hitler” for his desire to declare war on drug cartels, put an electric fence along the border and dig alligator ditches. But for Trump, the topic of migration is becoming an obvious winning issue against Biden. Two-thirds of Americans supported Texas’ decision to handle the border itself, bypassing the government. The White House was floundering and unsure of what to do in the face of a constitutional crisis and the reluctance of all of Republican America to follow Washington’s decisions. The current U.S. split is a rehearsal for what could happen during the election if Democrats try to arrest Trump or engage in large-scale mail-in ballots. Then the same 26 states would simply not recognize the election results. Then the 26 states will simply not recognize the election results. Well, while America is stuck in a state of conflict, Trump’s ratings are setting new records, and his gap from Biden has reached a record 4 points.

On February 4, after long battles, the Senate showed the draft of the migration reform. It really turned out to be remarkably toxic: the reform actually legalized the admission of 8,500 illegal immigrants per day, i.e. 3 million per year, and gave more money to admit migrants, but not to deport them. The text of the law implied that only if more migrants entered the U.S. would the White House have to decide to close the border. But even here there was a subterfuge, and the president was left free to reject the terms of immigration reform and still keep the border open as it is now. The migration reform was accompanied by $60 billion in tranches to Ukraine and $14 billion in tranches to Israel. At the same time, only $650 million was allocated for the construction of the wall, almost 100 times less than for Ukraine. This is what caused furious outrage among Republicans. But even more furious was the granting of $2 billion to liberal NGOs that bring migrants to the U.S. border. They organize the current controlled chaos in America with money from the UN and the Soros Foundation. Well, giving them federal funding would mean that the migration crisis will definitely never be solved. But all these horrors were mitigated by the fact that the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, promised not to pass this reform outright. And the paralysis in Washington persisted, with only a willful Texas trying to seriously fight the invasion of illegals in spite of Biden.

As a result, immigration reform stalled, and the reform project of opening the borders to 3 million illegal immigrants annually proved to be unviable. Even the leader of the Republicans in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, who actively promoted it, eventually changed his position and called for the reform to be sunk. It was clear that Democrats were definitely not going to get 60 votes in the Senate to pass the reform. Not to mention that the House of Representatives was guaranteed to refuse to consider it. At the same time, the Republicans also fast-tracked the impeachment of United States Secretary of Homeland Security Mayorkas for refusing to secure the border, making him the first U.S. Secretary of State to be impeached in 150 years. The collapse of Biden’s reform is a major success for Trump and a measure of his influence over Republicans in Congress. Trump has called it one of the stupidest in U.S. history. He is banking on the topic of migration, which with the worsening situation at the border is clearly undermining Biden’s presidency. The Democrats had the opposite situation, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was warning that if they didn’t pass reform and give $60 billion to Ukraine, Russia would win quickly and tomorrow they would have to send American soldiers to die in Eastern Europe. But it didn’t work, and Republicans were once again outraged that the reform only allocates 650 million for border security, a hundred times less than for Ukraine. It is also telling that in a poll released on February 7, 56% of the U.S. population supported the arbitrary action to increase security along the southern border. This had an effect, and the number of illegal border crossings in Texas plummeted several times after the state National Guard took control of the border. But that didn’t solve the immigration crisis, and now illegals are storming the borders of California, Arizona and New Mexico in droves. Democrats are in power there and they don’t have the political will to follow Texas’ lead. Since October, already 1 million illegals have made their way into the U.S. The migrant situation is already tearing the Democratic Party apart from within. Even loyal Democratic apparatchiks like Al Sharpton, who have been following the party line for decades, have now suddenly broken down and started calling the migration crisis a real invasion of the U.S. It’s affecting the Democratic Party’s ratings as well, with the percentage of Republican supporters among Hispanics in the Gallup poll jumping to 35% and the percentage of black Republicans jumping to 19 percent, a new record. After all, they are the ones from whom illegals are taking away jobs, welfare housing, and benefits. That is why the same blacks are so actively revolting against the admission of migrants in New York and Chicago, where they are being deported from Texas. They put the Democrats in a state of complete numbness, because they cannot understand who they should protect, African Americans or migrants. Well, the Republicans are quite successfully breaking up the loose coalition of minorities of the Democratic Party, which has already fallen apart. The civil war that many hotheads have been waiting for is not going to happen over Texas. But the invisible civil conflict has been going on for many years and will continue for a long time, and the events in Texas have become a very vivid episode of this confrontation.