The Texas Crisis–From “A State of Treason”
The United States of America had just endured its most serious constitutional crisis since 1860, precipitated by the unconstitutional actions of a newly elected president against Texas and the newly formed Tea Party.
President Tyrell Johnson was the first minority president elected in U.S. history, and the country believed he would be a healing and transformational president. Instead, his administration would go down as one of the most corrupt, divisive and inept ever to set foot in the White House.
Wielding the full power of the Executive Branch, President Johnson’s Department of Justice and his attorney general, Jamail Tibbs, conducted unconstitutional operations against all his political opponents. Those actions would have made even Richard Nixon blush.
At the epicenter of the conflict were the grass-roots constitutional literalists, mostly located in the South, but especially in Texas. Identified as the Tea Party, they were designated political enemies by the administration.
An Islamic jihadist, whose sister was killed in a bombing raid by U.S. forces on a hardened nuclear facility in Iran, attempted to assassinate the president. Secret Service agents killed the would-be assassin, a master’s student at Southern Methodist University, during the attempt. When they raided his apartment, agents found his laptop and discovered his master’s thesis, which focused on the Tea Party.
The administration purposely kept the assassin’s ties to Islam and Iran from the public but trumpeted his supposed ties and activism in the Tea Party. The administration fostered the notion that the assassin’s attempt on the president was racially motivated and played into the talking points used to try to discredit Johnson’s political opponents in the Tea Party.
President Johnson, keenly astute to political opportunities, swiftly seized on public sentiment and launched raids on Tea Party offices, individuals and donors, mostly without warrants, using the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to classify these groups as terrorists with no habeas corpus protections. Under the careful orchestration of the attorney general, the FBI, Homeland Security and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) jointly carried out operations that resulted in several unnecessary citizen deaths in Texas.
TV cameras captured a Waco-style raid by the ATF, showing a large Homeland Security tank slamming through the wall of a house owned by Houston resident Chuck Dixon, who was the president and founder of a large and successful Tea Party group. His wife and child were terrorized, and Dixon was arrested and transported to Ellington Field Air Force Base, where he was held incommunicado and interrogated for several days.
The level of outrage by the average Texan was vocal and intense. Texas Governor Brent Cooper, a staunch political opponent of the president, ordered the Texas Rangers to find Dixon and rescue him. Under the command of legendary Texas Ranger Pops Younger, the Rangers and the Texas State Guard found Dixon and rescued him. During the operation, Younger arrested the participating federal agents and a federal agent was wounded, infuriating the president and attorney general. Not to be outdone, the attorney general issued federal arrest warrants for Younger, the participating Texas Guard and, unbelievably, Governor Cooper!
The Texas Crisis, which had been simmering, was about to escalate and boil over.
A Justice Department prosecutor, who had become aware of the real identity and motives of President Johnson’s would-be assassin, was able to secretly remove documents proving the man’s real motives and get them to Governor Cooper. Several days later, the whistleblower and his wife died in a suspicious car accident in the Georgetown district of Washington, D.C.
Governor Cooper called for Congress to impeach President Johnson and remove Attorney General Tibbs but Congress, controlled by establishment Republicans, could not muster the courage or the votes necessary to support impeachment. An enraged Tibbs schemed with the president and cabinet members to put an end to the Texas Crisis by ordering a commando-style operation to arrest the governor and embarrass the state leadership of Texas. The attorney general became obsessed with the idea of the world seeing the brazen Texas governor doing a perp walk in handcuffs.
Special Forces sent into Austin, Texas by the administration to make the arrests and seize the capitol building and the Department of Public Safety created a global incident as federal agents failed; a Blackhawk helicopter was destroyed and Pops Younger and his Texas Rangers outmaneuvered the feds. In the operation, federal agents and U.S. Army Rangers were killed.
The sentiment of average Texans took on a more virulent hatred toward the administration, while the mass media painted the narrative of a state government out of control. The loss of federal agents and Army Rangers during the operation inflamed public sentiment in the media and on the U.S. Northeast and West coasts against Texas and its stubborn stance against the administration. How dared a sitting state governor demand the impeachment of a president, especially the first minority to hold the highest office in the country!
The media and politicians downplayed the demand as coming from a few irrational extremists, but soon the entire world was glued to the high-stakes chess match taking place between Austin and Washington.
Pops Younger advised the governor and top state officials to move to a remote west Texas location, the Swingin’ T Ranch, in anticipation of the administration’s next move. Secretary of State Annabelle Bartlett, her eye on the next Democratic presidential primary nomination, seized the opportunity to insert herself into the fray, attempting to be the hero who brokered a settlement in the crisis. She traveled to Austin to meet with the governor, unbeknown to the president.
But the attorney general learned of the secret location housing the governor and his officials. Consumed by the immense satisfaction he would receive by arresting the governor, he sent a full military and Homeland Security unit into Texas to capture them. With permission from Mexico, the raid was launched south of the Rio Grande. Adding insult to injury, the Tibbs dubbed the mission “Operation Santa Anna” after the Mexican dictator who sacked the Alamo and marched into Texas, only to be defeated later by General Sam Houston’s army at San Jacinto.
Five Homeland Security choppers left Mexican airspace for the Swingin’ T Ranch, but the raid went horribly awry. Governor Cooper and his wife Lyndsey were killed in the raid, along with several state officials, Texas state troopers and federal agents. The Texas Air National Guard downed two choppers as they attempted to escape back to Mexico and engaged the Mexican air force over both Texas and Mexican airspace, escalating an internal American constitutional crisis into an international incident.
More skirmishes at Texas borders between the Texas Guard and militia troops heightened the stakes even more. Upon orders from the administration to launch a full military operation into Texas, several generals on the Joint Chiefs of Staff refused and were arrested as they left a meeting at the White House.
When the bodies of the governor and his wife were flown to Austin for a state funeral, Pops Younger ripped off the American flags draping their caskets and replaced them with Lone Star flags. The scene was played repeatedly on world TV networks. As the new governor, Alvin “Smitty” Brahman, was sworn in, Texas became more defiant than ever as Brahman promised to call an emergency session of the state legislature for a special election to put an immediate referendum to the voters for independence. He repeated Governor Cooper’s demand for the impeachment of the president and his attorney general, but Congress remained impotent.
The president declared martial law in Texas, going so far as to shut down the federal background check system so Texans could not purchase guns. Governor Brahman responded with an executive order lifting federal background checks in the state.
Even the United Nations recognized the growing conflict and scheduled an emergency Security Council meeting.
The president announced that any referendum on independence would be both seditious and illegal, announcing that the entire state of Texas was in “A State of Treason!”
“The Deep State”—(noun) A body or group of people involved in the secret manipulation and control of government policy.