It is time to let Texans vote on independence.

How to do it

1. Open the portal, check the acknowledgement box, and fill in your contact information. comments.house.texas.gov/home?c=c075
2. Register as Self, with your occupation. Do not list the Texas Nationalist Movement as your organization. TNM files its own testimony. You are filing as a Texan, and a record of individual Texans carries more weight than one organization filing the same thing over and over.
3. Under the agenda items, pick the Texas and New Mexico boundary item. It is one of three at this hearing.
4. Write your comment in the box. About 3,000 characters, and you cannot attach a file.
5. Submit. Your name and your city publish alongside what you wrote.

What to say

• Texas voted its way into this union in 1845, by 7,664 to 430. Nearly 32 million Texans live here now, and none of us has been asked whether to stay.
• This committee is willing to hold a hearing on whether 156,000 New Mexicans should get to vote on which government they answer to.
• Ask it for the same hearing, and the same vote, for Texas.

Use your own words. Say what county you live in. A record full of one pasted paragraph gets read as one comment.

Why it matters

For years the hard part was never the argument. It was getting the subject into the room at all.

Wednesday it is in the room. Whatever that committee concludes about New Mexico, the Texas House will have spent a morning on whether a people gets to choose the government it answers to. The right to decide was never Washington's to give, and it is not Santa Fe's or Austin's either. It belongs to the people who live here.

Every comment filed Wednesday is sitting in a Texas House file when the Legislature comes back.

In person

Going to Austin instead? The hearing is Wednesday at nine in the morning, in room E2.026 of the Capitol Extension. Witness registration is on site only, at the kiosks on levels 1 and 2, and it closes at noon. Register On the boundary item. You will be testifying under oath, and the item is one of three on the agenda, so plan on a long day.

You can watch it at house.texas.gov/video-audio.