Tag Archives: Texas Politics

You Can’t Ignore a Headline Like This

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The New York Times has posted an article under the headline “John Boehner, Ted Cruz and the One Finger Salute.”

Speaker John A. Boehner has had ample reason to give Senator Ted Cruz of Texas the stink eye, shall we say. Mr. Cruz has repeatedly encouraged House conservatives to push Mr. Boehner sharply, even untenably, to the right, and he helped orchestrate the government shutdown at the end of 2013, which Mr. Boehner tried mightily to prevent.

Mr. Boehner did not hide his displeasure at those junctures, but he has refrained from criticizing Mr. Cruz personally. Asked about him last fall, Mr. Boehner said they had not talked to Mr. Cruz since he was elected to the Senate in 2012.

Last week, however, at a closed fund-raiser — in Texas, no less — it seemed to some of the 40 people in attendance that Mr. Boehner made his feelings about Mr. Cruz quite clear.

During the event, in Midland, Mr. Boehner was asked by the chairman of the state’s Republican Party, Tom Mechler, for his thoughts on Mr. Cruz’s presidential campaign. Mr. Boehner chuckled and then raised a middle finger.

If at First You Don’t Succeed – Waste Some More Time and Money

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Rick Perry announced his candidacy for President today.  Just what we needed – another Presidential candidate with Texas roots.  The Wall Street Journal, Red’s favorite source on all things Rick Perry, speculates on his chances.

He faces a sizable challenge to separate himself from what looks to be a crowded field of GOP contenders in 2016—and overcome the impression he left with national voters during his initial campaign for president, when he raised a large war chest and briefly led the field before suffering a memory lapse in a debate in which he forgot one of the three federal agencies he proposed to eliminate.

Mr. Perry also faces a pending felony indictment related to a veto he issued as governor. He has denied wrongdoing, calling the prosecution a witch hunt by political opponents, and has filed a motion to dismiss the indictment that is pending before an Austin appellate court.

Mr. Perry has played down the headwinds he faces and emphasized the attributes he believes will help distinguish him in a crowded Republican field, including his military background (Sen. Lindsey Graham is the only other current candidate in the GOP field with a military record) and his long tenure as chief executive of a large state.

“I led the world’s 12th largest economy,” he said Thursday. “The question of every candidate will be this: When have you led?

Red never thought he would say it, but Greg Abbott is making him miss Rick Perry.

Rick Perry’s “Texas Miracle” Coming Under More Fire

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The Wall Street Journal seems fixated on debunking Rick Perry’s claim to have led the state through the Texas Miracle.  As Red has repeatedly pointed out, when big oil is up, Texas is up and vice versa.  We would all like to take credit for a robust economy, but sometimes it’s just location, location, location.  Still one has to wonder if the WSJ’s continually bagging on Perry’s signature accomplishment signals a tough road ahead for the former Governor.  And of course, the WSJ has to slip in the inconvenient fact that Perry remains under indictment.

As Mr. Perry prepares to announce an anticipated second run for president on Thursday, the “Texas Miracle” is looking less impressive amid falling oil prices that have led to thousands of job cuts in his home state. That has created an opening for challengers to say Mr. Perry’s jobs record was attributable more to good timing—namely the hydraulic-fracturing oil-and-gas boom—than to the business-friendly mix of low tax rates and light regulations that he has frequently cited.

Texas lost more than 25,000 jobs in March according to state figures, its first monthly net decline in more than four years, after adding nearly 458,000 jobs in 2014, more than any other state. It bounced back in April but still only added 1,200 new jobs, far below other large states.

Bring Your Textbooks, Notebook, LapTop, Pens and .38 Special

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The Texas Tribune reports that the conservative quest to have more guns on Texas campuses is still alive.  Despite repeated admonitions from university administrators across the board (except shamefully for John Sharp at Texas A&M), the Legislature is more interested in kowtowing to its extreme right wing than doing what is in the best interests of our state universities and their students.

Campus carry legislation lived to fight another day as a last-minute deal saved Senate Bill 11 just before a midnight deadline in the House to take initial votes on bills originating in the Senate.

The dramatic scene occurred close to 11:30 p.m. The House had just spent 30 minutes considering a point of order raised by San Antonio Democrat Trey Martinez Fischer. With about 100 filed amendments awaiting debate, many had already started writing the obituaries for the legislation that would require public colleges and universities to allow concealed handgun license holders to bring guns on campus.

 

Is the Hole Getting Deeper for AG Ken Paxton?

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Off the Kuff does an excellent job of detailing the latest from the continuing saga of possible criminal activity by Attorney General Ken Paxton – so Red doesn’t have to.   Meanwhile, it seems no one cares that the state’s top legal official may have engaged in felonious conduct when he referred his legal clients to a financial advisor for a referral fee that was not disclosed to those same clients.  For the first time some of the clients speak up about Paxton’s conduct – and as you might have guessed they are not happy that Paxton failed to fully inform them of the arrangement.

Quote for the Day

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I believe in a balanced budget.”

“I’m not in D.C., I can’t tell you about the federal budget.”

State Rep. Sylvester Turner (D-Houston) explaining his support for a bill that passed the Texas House calling for a constitutional convention to consider a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And then turning around and proclaiming ignorance when asked what taxes should be raised or which federal programs should be cut to make the balanced budget a reality.

And he wants to be Mayor of Houston?

Ethics Reform Not Interesting the Legislature

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Gov. Greg Abbott heavily emphasized ethics reform in his state of the state address in February.  The push for reform came in the wake of contracting scandals at the Texas Dept of Health and Human Services and revelations that former Gov. Rick Perry’s business development funds had created almost no new jobs in Texas.  Months later, the reality is that almost nothing is getting done to push ethics reform through the Legislature.  The Texas Tribune reports on the little that has been done and the heavy lifting that remains.

Right now, with no scandal raging in Texas, lawmakers have moved only a few ethics bills. One, House Bill 681, would take government pension benefits away from officeholders convicted of certain felonies like bribery, embezzlement and perjury.

Another, House Bill 1690, would take prosecutions of state officeholders away from the public integrity unit of the Travis County district attorney’s office. Republican legislators are convinced that the lawyers and juries in the state capital are biased against conservatives. And the current district attorney’s messy drunken driving arrest two years ago only added fuel to that fire. That bill is part of a deal to close House-Senate differences before the end of the session; its chance at passage is pretty good.

But the contract and income disclosures that Abbott wanted remain undone. Those would require lawmakers to reveal contracts and business relationships with government contractors that currently go undocumented. Lower limits on how much money lobbyists can spend on lawmakers without identifying those lawmakers is stuck. And the Legislature’s expected attempt to force political nonprofits to reveal the sources of their money — so-called dark money legislation — hasn’t moved. That would have been law two years ago without a veto from then-Gov. Rick Perry.

Other loose ends have been kicked around this session without threatening, so far, to become law:

• Prohibiting lawmakers and staff from lobbying for one or two years after they leave the state payroll

• Barring elected officeholders from working as lobbyists

• Requiring officeholders to file their required personal financial disclosures in searchable online form instead of on paper

• Requiring lawmakers to report pension and other income they currently don’t have to list

• Prohibiting lawyer/officeholders from accepting referral fees or requiring them to report the fees they do receive.

Some of those provisions are in Senate Bill 19, which is the most likely vessel for an ethics showdown. It could make it all the way to a negotiating room where senators and representatives can work out a compromise bill or, in the alternative, suffocate ethics legislation many of them privately disdain but feel they publicly have to support.

That bill’s bumpy ride tells the tale of ethics legislation this year. It was 14 pages long when it started. A Senate committee chewed up and spit out nine of those. The full Senate added enough amendments to bring the page count back to 18. It has some of the promised stuff in it, and some odd bits, like a provision that would require candidates to take drug tests. (Maybe they’ll discover something that enhances the performance of elected officials.) And SB 19 could accommodate near every proposal promoted as ethics reform, if enough lawmakers are willing.

Time is short. A House committee has the legislation now, and has until the end of the week to send it to the full House, which in turn has to act on it by May 26.

The Anti-Gay Crowd Aint Going Down Without a Fight

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Texas AG Ken Paxton will not give up easy and Red suspects neither will his Tea Party cohorts.  Marriage is only for straights and the Gays can feel whatever they want, but don’t try to walk down the aisle in Texas.  RawStory recounts Paxton’s recent interview on CNN.

“My job as attorney general and the job of the Legislature is to really follow the will of the people and enforce the laws that we have,” he remarked. “This is both in statute and in our constitution. So, that’s my job, and that’s the job of the Legislature.”

But the attorney general was not willing to say that the state would follow the Supreme Court if it decided to rule in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage later this year.

“Aren’t you saying that the gays and lesbians in your state are not as valued at heterosexuals because they can’t form into a union?” Camerota asked.

“All the Legislature has done in the past is try to reflect the values that have been in this state and this country for over two centuries,” Paxton insisted.

“What about homosexuals who fall in love? What should they do?” the CNN host pressed.

“They have — they can do whatever they want,” Paxton shrugged. “But the reality itself right now in Texas was defined by the people of Texas overwhelmingly as between a man and a woman. And that’s the law of Texas, it’s in our constitution, it’s in our statutes.”

“I mean, they can’t really do whatever they want as you’ve just said,” Camerota shot back. “Do you understand why gays in Texas would feel that is discriminating against them?”

“They can feel how they want,” Paxton replied. “The reality is the voters of Texas have passed the law as it is.”

Ten bucks says that even Tea Party crazed Texas would not vote the gay marriage ban into the Constitution today.

The Inmates are Running the GOP Asylum

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The embarrassing fallout from the Jade Helm 15 conspiracy theorists of the Texas Tea Party continues to mount.  The International Business Times reports that 32% of GOP primary voters nationwide actually believe that Jade Helm 15 is a secret plot of the federal government to take over Texas.

Hey morons, listen up!  In case you hadn’t noticed, the federal government already controls Texas and has for over 150 years now and has over 50,000 troops stationed here to boot.  We tried to secede once and it didn’t work.  And if the number is 32% nationwide, one can only imagine what it is in Texas since this is the nest.  What is troubling is that these are the people that have an outsized say in how this state is governed since winning the GOP primary is tantamount to election in any statewide office.  Unbelievable.

A conspiracy theory that the U.S. military is plotting to invade Texas and impose martial law has gained some traction among Republicans. A poll by Public Policy Polling released on Wednesday found that 32 percent of GOP primary voters nationwide believe that the federal government is in fact trying to take over Texas.

The conspiracy centers on an exercise the Department of Defense is planning to conduct, known as Jade Helm 15, across several Southwestern states including Texas. It’s not uncommon for the Pentagon to conduct practice missions with troops, but this one is large-scale and meant to simulate entering a hostile country.

Pointing to briefing documents the military had provided the public to explain the exercise, a group of conspiracy theorists began arguing that it wasn’t an exercise at all, but an excuse for the military to deploy troops in order to take over Texas, seize guns, arrest political opponents and impose martial law. The conspiracy theories gained more traction after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott vowed to send the Texas State Guard to monitor the U.S. military’s movements. And Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who is running for president, was criticized for further stoking the fire after he asked the Pentagon to clarify their intentions and said the concern was justified because no one trusts the administration.

But it didn’t appear to give Cruz a boost among those who believe the conspiracy theory. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was leading among the Texas-takeover believers, winning 23 percent of that constituency compared with Cruz’s 18 percent.  

Well, there is a silver lining.  At least Ted Cruz is not benefitting from pandering to these nut jobs.  One can only imagine the anguished looks of disappointment on the faces of these fools, when they realize that the jack-booted thugs of the federal government haven’t actually come to take away their women, children and most importantly guns.