Texas Republicans have decided they won't vote to push for an official party resolution calling for secession, but it was certainly the topic of a lot of discussion.

And look at the cynical reasons they wanted the vote:

Tanya Robertson, the SREC member who introduced the proposal, argued at the executive committee meeting in Austin that the measure would have been "harmless," allowing voters to register an "opinion only." She also suggested the ballot language would have helped "get out the vote" among some Texas Republicans who have been sitting out recent elections.

"The goal of these is to take a thermometer of how Texans feels about an issue, and what better issue for Texans to do that with?" she asked.

I'm going to hazard a guess here. The Texas Republicans who elected Greg Abbott and Ted Cruz aren't the ones sitting out elections. It's far more likely that the ones sitting out are those few Texans at home wondering what the hell happened to the Republican Party they've known all their lives.

Democrats were ready for them to do it.

Calling it "unpatriotic," the Texas Democratic Party had seized on the secession debate as evidence that the state GOP was falling victim to extremists in its own ranks.

"Every hardworking Texan should be worried that fringe issues are now the hot topic in the same party that controls state government," Crystal Kay Perkins, the executive director of the Texas Democratic Party, said in a statement after the vote Saturday.

Juanita Jean summed it up:

I was really disappointed that it failed on the floor. I want those sumbitches to secede. Hell, I’ll even give them Waco and include a huuuuge wall around it with no way out.The referendum was worded …

“If the federal government continues to disregard the constitution and the sovereignty of the State of Texas, the State of Texas should reassert its status as an independent nation.”

They could have shortened it by stating, “Yes, we still have a black President.”