The Texas lawsuit against four other states concerning voting procedures, rejected just hours ago by SCOTUS, was, in reality, a publicity platform hosting a number of stunts – and not just for a desperate Texas AG who has the FBI on his tail, or GOP members of Congress trying to pacify a thuggish base. This one may be more serious than it first appears:
The GOP’s desperate attempt to have the Supreme Court overturn the results of the presidential election has attracted powerful support from … states that have yet to come into being, according to a Thursday court filing.
The “states” of New California and New Nevada filed an amicus brief in support of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s attempt to have the Supreme Court block states that voted for Joe Biden from casting their electoral votes for the president-elect.
Sounds like a joke, doesn’t it?
For now, New Nevada and New California are represented by Pahrump, Nevada attorney Robert E. Thomas, III.
From his erstwhile capital of Pahrump, Thomas has been nurturing the fledging state of New Nevada since the 2018 midterms.
According to Thomas’s website for the “New Nevada” State Movement, he began to assemble insurrectionists after being angry about GOP losses in the 2018 midterms.
The movement’s slogan is “What Would You Change, If You Could Do It Over Again?,” a reference to the state slogan as well as being a potential descriptor for the kinds of thoughts in which introspection among the plaintiffs could result.
Armed with that slogan and his website, Thomas has been fighting for nearly two years to divorce Nevada’s rural counties from Las Vegas, leaving the gambling mecca (home to a Trump hotel and top GOP fundraiser Steve Wynn) to wither on the vine as the state’s bucolic heartland presumably unites under the banner of New Nevada.
New polities are often started by angry people – after all, that’s the definition of a revolutionary.
So it appears Thomas found a short-lived but high profile platform for advertising what he thinks can be a paradise, if only they can break away from the sins of the big city.
Can he succeed? Hard to say. Without a doubt, he’ll be hearing from people who surveyed the amicus briefs of the ill-fated Texas lawsuit and found in his filing references that rings their bells. The problems, though, pertain to how many respond: if not enough, then he won’t have the population to try to split either state, and, if too much, he’ll have those damn cities popping up, and stable cities will attract liberals, and, oh, there goes the whole deal.
But I think it’s more interesting than most folks would consider. If Nevada split, that’d make for four Senators representing a remarkably small number of people; meanwhile, for decades I’ve been hearing of proposals to split California into four regions, and given how blue California is currently, you have to wonder if that would result in a net gain – and possibly a large one – for the left side of the political spectrum.
It does stir the imagination, doesn’t it?
