Politics, Texas

'Don't Mess With Texas' Does Not Supersede The 'Supremacy Clause.'

Everything's bigger in Texas. Meaning a dumb lawyer is an even bigger dumb lawyer.

By  
on

Texas lawyers are so unbelievably stupid.

Not that every Texas lawyer is stupid. Quite the contrary. I’ve litigated cases in Texas and worked with some stellar lawyers. And how can you doubt the lawyering chops of Texas superlawyer Joe Jamail, who tried to fight with this dumb sumbitch of an opposing expert? It’s just that the lawyers in Texas that are stupid, are unbelievably stupid.

For example, Texas Governor and former Attorney General Greg Abbott.

Abbott just signed a law to create “The Texas Bullion Depository” (because nothing says safety like “Texas [Item] Depository“), which is exactly what you think it is: Texas wants to build a warehouse to store “its” gold.

You may be wondering why any state would even want to build a gold repository when the federal government already provides one so secure and so large that most American allies keep their reserves there as well. According to latter day Smaug, Gov. Abbott, the purpose is to “repatriate” $1 billion of Texas’s gold reserves — even though Texas is not, in fact, a foreign nation, and has nowhere near $1 billion in gold reserves.

But apparently, Gov. Abbott watched Die Hard 3 and is terrified that the most secure location on Earth could be fouled by Jeremy Irons and three dump trucks, and rather than invest taxpayer dollars in the comparatively more reasonable option of cloning Bruce Willis, he’ll waste millions building and maintaining a substandard gold repository. Which is doubly hilarious because Texas doesn’t actually have any gold in the Federal Reserve. In fact, the sum total of Texas gold investment appears to be around $500M that it spends almost $1 million per year in fees to keep with HSBC — even though the Federal Reserve would have charged only around $15K over the whole life of the investment for the same job.

Cagey spending. Hey, it beats funding public schools!

Sponsored

Though in fairness, as TPM reports, Gov. Abbott doesn’t believe that U.S. dollars are real money, so maybe it’s OK to waste them:

And the new depository will not just be a well-guarded warehouse for that bullion. The law Abbott signed calls for the creation of an electronic payments system that will allow gold, silver, platinum, palladium, and rhodium depositors to write checks against their accounts, making the depository into a bank – one that will create a metal-backed money supply intended to challenge the paper currency issued by the Federal Reserve – or “Yankee dollars” as one of the law’s top supporters calls them.

You say, “Yankee dollars,” I say, “the global reserve currency.”

Though this does bring us to the actual reason for the bill: a symbolic gesture to convince morons that Texas is an independent realm instead of a wasteful drain on U.S. tax dollars. Having their own money bin and currency system — writing checks based off stockpiled metals creates, for all intents and purposes, an independent, gold-backed currency — goes a long way toward fluffing the illusion that Texas holds sway over the rest of America. It’s also why the law includes this provision:

And in case the Fed or Obama wants to confiscate Texas’s gold, nice try Fed and Obama! In keeping with this suspicion of the Fed and Washington, the new law also explicitly declares that no “governmental or quasi-governmental authority other than an authority of [Texas]” will be allowed to confiscate or freeze an account inside the depository. Gold that’s entrusted to Texas will stay in Texas.

Sponsored

Nope. Not how it works. “Don’t Mess With Texas” does not supersede the “Supremacy Clause.”

Just like his predecessor’s flirtation with secession, or Abbott’s own fanning of the wingnut belief that a military training exercise was a prelude to invasion, building a gold repository and declaring it off-limits to federal law allows Texans to pretend they’re a sovereign nation.

Sorry Texas, play time ended in 1865.

With Eye on Fiscal Armageddon, Texas Set to ‘Repatriate’ Its Gold To New Texas Fort Knox [TPM]
Texas Gold Will Save Us All [Esquire]

Topics

, , , , , ,