And I Thought They Couldn't Get Anymore Ridiculous.

[Solitary]

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/secede-%E2%80%98republic%E2%80%99-claims-texas-never-joined-us/ar-AA9yzL9?ocid=U147DHP

HOUSTON â€" The Republic of Texas is unlike any other volunteer, nonprofit organization in what used to be the Republic of Texas.

Its monthly meetings are called joint sessions of congress. Members have minted their own silver and gold currency and carry ID cards warning police officers they are diplomatic representatives of the nation of Texas. Its vice president, a retired telephone company worker, sent a letter in 2011 to the governor of Oklahoma, informing her that she faced indictment because her state’s counties and territories were “trespassing inside the geographical boundaries” of its nation.

Such letters have failed to convince the authorities of the group’s novel belief â€" that Texas never legally became part of the United States and remains a separate nation. As a result of that belief, the group claims it had a duty to form a government, with a state department and with a court system run in part by a chiropractor in the Houston suburb of Katy.

Members say their government is neither a mock system nor a prank, but a legitimate authority with executive, legislative and judicial branches. They spend their time sitting through eight-hour congressional meetings and debating legislation. (The letter to Oklahoma officials refers to Senate Bill No.1102-1201.) Still, officials who receive one of the group’s many letters typically “just throw it in the trash can,” acknowledged the Republic’s president, John Jarnecke, 72.

Until last month.

The group’s Valentine’s Day meeting in Bryan had barely started at a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall â€" each woman in the audience had been handed a rose â€" when several local, state and federal law enforcement officials burst through the door. No one was arrested in the raid, which included F.B.I. agents, but dozens of the group’s supporters were detained. Some were fingerprinted, and cellphones and briefcases were confiscated from others.

The authorities said the raid was part of an investigation into a batch of letters the Republic of Texas had sent to a judge and a lawyer in Kerrville, Tex., but the group’s leaders said that officials had overreacted with a show of force and that the letters were lawful.
Members have minted their own silver and gold currency and carry ID cards warning police officers they are diplomatic representatives of the nation of Texas. © Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times Members have minted their own silver and gold currency and carry ID cards warning police officers they are diplomatic representatives of the nation of Texas.

The Republic had ordered the judge in Kerrville to appear at the V.F.W. hall for a “court hearing” involving his role in the pending foreclosure of a member’s home. Two letters to the judge ordered him to present “proof of his authority for executing his claimed powers involving a foreign entity” and warned him that copies might be provided to the United Nations. The lawyer was sent a “subpoena.”

[SGOS]

This might be wacko, but I'd hesitate to call it novel.  Montana may have got there first, well before Texas at least.  Back around the late 1980s or early 1990s, a group of ten or so visionaries identifying themselves as the Montana Freemen decided to break away.  Well, OK from Montana, not necessarily the US.  They printed their own money, formed their own government, issued warrants for the arrests of local officials, and purchased 1 million dollars worth of weaponry from some mentally challenged arms dealer, who took their check for $1,000,000, issued on the their own bank, which unfortunately didn't actually own any money to cover the check.

Then they holed up on a compound on a guy's ranch on the prairie east of the mountains and had a Mexican standoff with the FBI.  Neither they or the FBI wanted to start a gun fight, because the FBI was currently in hot water with the public for shooting either the wife or the child of a guy in another standoff at a white supremacist compound in Northern Idaho.

Eventually, the Montana Freemen lost their enthusiasm for self governance and let the FBI come and arrest them, and went peacefully off to jail.  It was big news during the standoff which went on for weeks, and then just kind of fizzled to anti-climax.

While this was going on, and because of a lot of other unrelated issues, conservatives throughout the West were making the claim that Bill Clinton had declared a War on the West, which more or less focused attention on some rather odd issues like not letting states take over Federal lands.

Yep, we live in a real rootin' tootin' country of home spun buckaroos that yearn for a return to the open range, where independent men take the law into their own hands, and tame the wilderness one more time.

[stromboli]

So the U S government agrees and declares Texas as independent, promptly disallowing any say in our national elections or any of the multiple benefits of citizenry- social security, medicare and so on. see how long that holds up.

[Munch]

Texas is such a strange void of a place. Its like it comes from another area of the world, but it sits in a country that doesn't in anyway share its beliefs and values. Its like someone took a skin graph from someones ass and put it on their face.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

I'm thinking that the feds ought to allocate space for them, let them have their way, but the caveat being that if they step one foot on any other US soil they be arrested as alien enemy combatants and if they try to fly over US airspace they'll be shot down and any survivors shot as spies..