Many Democrats treat the Empire of Texas as an alarming side show. Sure, the state executes the most people in the country; places bounties on those who smuggle pregnant people out of state to receive reproductive care; and uses migrants for target practice—but for many liberals the state is just a sick joke that can be disregarded until Ted Cruz shows up for a football game. Even now, as the state openly repudiates federal laws, the most common refrain from the “always-online” liberal community is “Good: give Texas back to Mexico.” 

That is not the right answer. First of all, Texas doesn’t want to leave, it wants to invade the rest of the United States and remake the country in its own Christofascist image. Moreover, as is typical with these “states’ rights” types, the definition of “freedom” envisaged by the white guys running Texas is one where they are the only ones forever free—and they are allowed to subjugate women and people of color in their grabbable areas. But most important, allowing a state like Texas to thumb its nose at human rights and federal authority does nothing but give aid and comfort to other would-be rebel states to do the same.

Texas is not a side show, it is ground zero in the battle to reassert state’s rights over individual rights and the federal government. And, with the help of Republican judges and a Democratic administration that still seems beholden to a rulebook Texas is eager to torch, Texas is more or less winning the first battle in this Civil War reenactment.  

The flashpoint for this crisis is, of course, the border. I have written before about the crossing at Eagle Pass, Texas, a place along the Rio Grande where it is popular for immigrants to make the crossing. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has erected a series of sadistic obstructions across this part of the river—including buoys ringed with razor wire and underwater traps—meant to maim and even drown people trying to swim across the river. Should people, and their children, survive Abbott’s gauntlet, Texas officials on the other side have been accused of pushing them back into the river, or denying the survivors medical aid or even water. 

In response to this murder-barrier, which is in clear violation of both federal law and international human rights laws, US Attorney General Merrick Garland… filed a lawsuit. Because when a rebel force erects a literal death trap on federal lands, the right answer is to use the slow and plodding legal process instead of sending, I don’t know, a Zumwalt-class naval destroyer into the river to clear the obstructions. The lawsuit is still pending while people drown, of course. 

Lawsuits do have some effect on restraining Texas’s actions. Governor Abbott recently admitted: “The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.” So, good job “murder laws,” way to make murderers think twice before murdering people. Nonetheless, Garland’s lawsuit did not compel Texas to tear down its medieval fortifications. 

Eventually, the Biden administration did send federal border patrol agents to Texas to monitor and provide humanitarian aid to the people Abbott would let die. In response, Abbott erected another razor wire fence, this time to keep the federal agents away from the river and prevent them from helping. 

Again, instead of cutting through the razor wire and arresting the people trying to obstruct the federal government, the Biden administration sued. I’m going to say this part really slowly for the MAGA “tourists”: preventing federal officials from carrying out their duties is a crime. 

The federal government has nearly unfettered authority to make national immigration policy, and even if you’ve watched too much Fox News to believe that, it certainly has total constitutional authority to patrol the nation’s borders. Lawyers for Texas argued, however, that the government’s authority does not extend to repurposing private dwellings to enact its policies, and that’s true. But putting up a fence to block access to an international waterway does not convert the Rio freaking Grande into a private dwelling. 

The Supreme Court heard this case on emergency appeal—and last week it ruled in favor of the Biden administration. But, shockingly, the vote was only 5-4, with justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh all dissenting without comment. (It might have been interesting if they did; we might have gotten the first judicial comment about the Third Amendment—which prohibits forcing private individuals to provide for federal troops—that anybody can remember.)