Another example of your excellent journalism, Monica. It makes me wonder if friends like to kick back with you because you always have fascinating stories to tell.

I get that Texas secession is a culture war issue, so practical considerations aren’t important to the people who want to leave the Union. But say Texas did secede. I wonder if they’d be concerned that the state’s annual revenue would drop by 20%. That’s just the money Texas gets from the Federal government for social safety net programs, the payroll for the numerous Federal military bases, capital spending for those bases, among many other things.

What about those bases? The U.S. government maintains plenty on foreign soil. But what if we decided we don’t need them? That we can take advantage of underutilized and mothballed bases on U.S. soil? It would punch a huge hole in the Country of Texas budget if they had to compensate the Federal government for the lost bases. And a huge hole in the Texas economy if we closed them - and, if Texas didn’t pay for them, blew them up and plowed them under.

Last, I wonder how Texas would govern itself. They wouldn’t adopt the U.S. Constitution; the culture warriors hate its civil rights protections. Would they cherry-pick the parts they like? And leave out those they don’t? Such as that pesky 13th Amendment? They might say it’s not needed: it’s silly to think slavery could ever come back, so who needs a 13th to outlaw it?