The Brief: Texans Respond To Brexit

by Madeline Conway and John Reynolds

The Big Conversation

Texans responded this weekend to the stunning news of the United Kingdom’s referendum vote in favor of leaving the European Union — some with worries about the shake up’s impact on the local economy, and others with renewed calls for state secession.

The Austin American-Statesman writes that the uncertainty surrounding the impact of the vote — known colloquially as “Brexit” — will reverberate in Central Texas through its impact on oil prices and currency values. The Houston Chronicle reports that experts are divided on the vote’s ultimate effect on oil, with some worrying that “impact of the vote would unsettle already testy financial markets and weaken the global economy, lowering demand for oil, and stalling crude’s recent climb from historic lows” and others expecting “the hit to oil prices to be temporary.”

The Guardian, meanwhile, reports that advocates for Texas secession watched the U.K.’s vote closely. Daniel Miller, the president of the Texas Nationalist Movement, told the British newspaper ahead of the referendum that he hoped a vote to leave could inspire Texans to support seceding from the United States.

Even Donald Trump weighed in on the secession question from Scotland, the Tribune’s Khorri Atkinson writes.

But as the Tribune’s Aneri Pattani notes, a “Texit” would not be legal.

The late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia put suggestions otherwise to rest in 2006, writing that, “The answer is clear. If there was any constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War, it is that there is no right to secede. (Hence, in the Pledge of Allegiance, ‘one Nation, indivisible.’)”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune.