Why do you believe the system can't be fixed from the inside?

Because the problem is not a flaw in the system that the system would let you repair. The problem is the system working exactly as the people who benefit from it intend. You cannot fix something from the inside when the inside is the thing that is broken, and when it is designed to protect itself from the very fix you are proposing.

The structure is built to outvote Texas, by design

Start with the arithmetic, because it is not an accident. Texas holds 38 of 435 seats in the U.S. House and 2 of 100 in the Senate. The system runs on majorities assembled from everywhere else, which means Texas is structurally outnumbered no matter how it votes. Fixing that from the inside would require the majority to vote away its own majority. Systems do not do that. The people who hold the power are the people you would need permission from to take it back, and they have every reason to say no.

The bureaucracy is built to survive reform

Beneath the elected layer sits a permanent one that no election touches. Roughly 2.5 million unelected federal employees, more than 400 agencies, and over a million individual regulatory restrictions do not change when the voters do. This machinery outlasts every administration and absorbs every reform. You can change the people at the top and leave the structure that actually governs untouched, which is precisely what reform has done.

Reform has been tried, hard, and it was beaten

This is not theory, it is recent history. Reform movements have come to Washington from both the right and the left promising to shrink or remake the federal apparatus, and the apparatus has outlasted every one of them, absorbing the staff and the energy and carrying on. The system does not just resist reform passively. It has the permanence, the budget, and the legal inertia to wait any reformer out. An institution that durable is not one you fix by asking it nicely.

Every fix runs through the thing being fixed

The deeper trap is procedural. Every reform offered inside the federal system has to be approved by the federal system. More money flows to Washington, more dependence on Washington, more power concentrated in Washington, all in the name of limiting Washington. It is asking the fire to put itself out, and the fire will take the fuel and grow. Even the Constitution's clearest limit on federal power, the Tenth Amendment, already sits in the text and has not restrained anything. The words are already there. Washington reads them to mean their opposite.

Independence does not need the system's permission

This is the whole reason independence works where reform does not. Reform asks the broken thing to repair itself, and it can refuse, and it does. Independence does not go through Washington at all. It runs through the Texas Legislature and a vote of the people of Texas, which is the one decision the federal system does not get a veto over. You stop trying to fix a machine designed to resist you, and you build a new one accountable to the people it serves.

The bottom line

The system cannot be fixed from the inside because it is built to outvote Texas, staffed to outlast reform, and proven willing to fight back. Independence is the answer that does not ask the problem for permission to solve it.