The Politics of Anger

And a Myth Named Texas

“How can you look at the Texas legislature and still believe in intelligent design? – Kinky Friedman, Musician

I suppose it would be more accurate to call this posting an open letter to the starry-eyed outlanders who see a bright future in their moves to Texas. Austin and all of our major cities are topping lists for population growth and job opportunity and quality of life. If we had border patrol on the New Mexico line and the Sabine River in the east, we could still not stop the Northerners and Californians that are inbound daily in great numbers. But Texas is not Valhalla with a paycheck. And certain things need to be said.

Feel free to consider the following as articles of indictment.

First, Texas has always been about mythology. The stories that survive the passage of time tend to portray history with great simplicity. The Texas Rangers were good guys in white hats, not racist gunslingers, and everyone who came here had the same opportunities to succeed with hard work and perseverance. Patent nonsense, of course, but the cowboy looks good on his horse riding into the sunset, so we keep his memory and his myth alive.

There is even more delusion about Texas in the present. Elected officials, businesspeople, and political conmen want outsiders to believe they can come here and live as they chose, get fair treatment, regardless of their race, gender, or religion, and their tax burden will be easily managed, and education and housing will be affordable. These myths are more virulent than the ones that arose with the settling of the American West.

And they are dangerous.

The government of Texas is oppressive and intrudes into private lives. Conservatives who insist they want less government consistently contradict themselves by passing laws that violate rights to privacy and restrict freedoms as basic as the right to vote. No amount of economic activity will mitigate the dehumanizing effects of the radically conservative politics in Texas, and the latest session of the state’s legislature is the boldest example of meddling the state has seen in many, many years.

Let’s start with your daughter. What if she is raped, and ends up pregnant? Very few families would consider urging the young woman to carry that child to term. There has been enough trauma. Ending the pregnancy early will minimize the impact of the violence she has already endured. In Texas, however, it has just become illegal to have that abortion after a heartbeat is detected, which is usually about six weeks. If your daughter misses a menstrual cycle, there is probably another 2-4 weeks to determine if she has been impregnated, and under this new law that’s just too late to get an abortion.

Neither rape nor incest are offered as exceptions, only certain medical conditions of the mother provide reprieve. The law also leaves women isolated, more alone and stranded with problem pregnancies than might have ever seemed conceivable. Even if they turn to family or their closest of friends to seek help getting an abortion, they are exposing those loved ones to a lawsuit. The “heartbeat bill” signed by the governor of Texas makes it possible for abortion opponents to sue anyone who helped a woman end her pregnancy.

Under this new restriction, it’s easy to see an Uber driver getting sued for taking a woman to a hospital or a doctor’s office if she tells him she is going to get an abortion. People providing assistance can face fines of $10,000 plus the cost of legal fees. Logistically, it is even more of a nightmare. The person suing might be from a city hundreds of miles distant and the defendants will have the costs of traveling to that remote court of jurisdiction for hearings.

The organizations that have long supported a woman’s right to choose will certainly file legal challenges to the Texas regulation and it can be expected to wend its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the new conservative majority of justices cannot be relied upon to protect the settled law of Roe v. Wade. If the heartbeat nonsense is upheld, it will be certain to have dampening effects on the state’s economy. The negative publicity alone will hurt. 

The rhetoric, metronomically repeated by GOP drones, is that every life is worth protecting, even in the womb. The life of a criminal, however, can be handily disposed of. They simply can’t be redeemed and need to die. On the same day Governor Greg Abbott was signing the anti-abortion heartbeat bill and taking about the preciousness of all god’s children, the state of Texas was executing a black man. Quintin Jones got a lethal injection in Huntsville for beating his great aunt to death in an argument over money.

During a failed appeal, his attorneys argued Jones had suffered physical and sexual abuse beginning at age 12 and began drinking and taking drugs to deal with the pain. They wanted those circumstances to be considered in his guilt or innocence, and sentencing. The board of pardons and paroles, and the life-loving Texas governor, refused to grant any clemency to Jones even though his victim’s sister had begged his punishment be reduced and mercy be granted.  

No redemption was offered, perhaps, because Jones was not a child in the womb.

The child the conservatives claim to love while still fetal, in Texas, is on its own once it starts drawing the breath of life and begins walking in the world. If they are born into a family of limited income their health care will be inadequate because Texas conservatives have refused to expand Medicaid to improve access to doctors and hospitals for the disadvantaged. Never mind that $22 billion dollars of taxpayer money from Texas has gone into Medicaid and is being distributed to other states instead of coming home to help our poor. The insurance is, effectively, already paid in full and conservatives are saying no to having health care delivered to those in need.

What does that mean from a practical standpoint? Well, as late as 2019 the state of Texas ranked last in health care affordability and access. Refusing Medicaid has forced rural hospitals across the state to file for bankruptcy and close because there has not been enough revenue to continue operations, a situation that would change if Medicaid were expanded. A study by the Commonwealth Fund also places Texas at the absolute bottom in individuals 18 or older without health care.

Who are those uninsured people? The report shows that 20 percent of African American adults lack health care in Texas and the U.S. average is 14 percent. Among Hispanic adults, the fastest growing population segment in this state, fully one third is without insurance coverage. The raw numbers are as depressing to write as they are to read. One million children in Texas have no health insurance, and four million adults lack coverage, and when the Affordable Care Act was implemented nationally, the indicted Texas Attorney General filed a lawsuit to limit its adoption in the state. We can’t have a Democratic president helping the poor and the ill.

Is fixing this as simple as voting?  

That’s another problem. The Texas GOP also wants to make it harder for you to vote, which will increase the difficulty of changing onerous laws and getting rid of conservative office holders. In what is clearly a reaction to surging Democratic strength in urban areas, Republican lawmakers are cobbling together a series of restrictions on how and where you can cast your ballot on Election Day. When Harris County, led by youthful County Judge Lina Hidalgo, made an effort to get mail-in ballots to 2.5 million voters living in the Houston area, the Texas GOP was clearly stunned by the potential political impact of that strategy. Consequently, the Republican controlled legislature began drafting a bill that includes numerous constraints on the right to exercise our democracy’s most critical franchise.

The measure eliminates extended hours for voting, drop boxes, and drive-through operations that were established for citizen convenience, and a mail out restriction for ballots is also included. Right wing thinkers paid little heed to all the rural counties where voters 65 and older were sent mail-in ballots because they are automatically eligible to use that simple and easy method of voting. Those efforts did not receive much scrutiny because the age group leans frequently conservative, and as many voters as possible are needed from rural Texas if Republicans are to maintain political control of the state.

The sponsor of these attempts to throttle liberal and Democratic voters is Briscoe Cain, a Republican Trump supporter, who, at one point, said the law was designed to “preserve the purity of the ballot box,” which isn’t a phrase subject to much interpretation. A provision has been included by Cain that requires anyone offering assistance to a voter to disclose the need for such help, which means voting gets more challenging for new citizens who have English as a second language, or people with disabilities and those living in communities lacking resources that reach and inform voters.

The most cynical proposal by Republicans is language in a bill that will dramatically reduce polling places in locations that are populated largely by people of color in Democratically controlled urban districts. This, too, is a calculated political response to the increasing diversification of city populations and their tendencies to vote against the GOP. The linguistics are chosen to hide the purpose of the new regulations regarding apportionment of ballot box locations in the state’s five largest cities. Election clerks will be required to distribute polling places using a formula that relies on registered voters in the House Districts of those counties.

The results of these changes will be exactly as desired by Republicans, who see demographic population trends as an end to their political dominance. In fact, an analysis conducted by the Texas Tribune shows that out of the 24 house districts currently represented by Democrats in Harris County, 13 of them will see a reduction in polling places. Meanwhile, every district presently represented by a Republican house member will maintain its current number or get an increase in locations for casting ballots. That’s cheating in the light of day. Justification for dramatically altering the infrastructure of elections in Texas comes from the fraudulent claim by Republicans that voter fraud puts our democracy at risk. The sanctity of the Texas vote is so important to the state’s lawmakers they are writing laws to restrict it in the dead of night on a holiday weekend with no public testimony and more than sixteen state troopers in the Senate’s gallery.  

The endless exhortations for people to get out and vote from various interest groups are relatively valueless when the act is made more complicated and daunting for citizens. While Texas is constraining the right to vote, other states are expanding their vote-by-mail programs. Oregon, in fact, has voted by mail alone since 2000, which is also the case with five other states. Thirty-three states have simple mail-in ballots and the simplified approach is encouraged. The Republican controlled state legislature of Texas insists it only wants to make certain the ballot box is protected, and fraud is prevented, but there is no fraud, nor has there ever been much of it since LBJ stole his 1948 Democratic Senate Primary by stuffing Ballot Box 13 in Jim Wells County in South Texas. The U.S. and Texas had the most secure election in history in 2020 and cries of a stolen election by Trump supporters and Texas Republicans are patent bullshit to justify steps to reduce turnout. If it was fraudulent in Texas, the election results would indicate it was the GOP that did the cheating since they handily won majority control.

More voters might mean we get a representative government, and not one that attacks it citizens with predatory laws. Not much meanness fails when it comes before the deliberative conservative body governing Texas. Because transgender children aren’t coping with sufficient anxiety about what they are feeling, the state’s lawmakers decided to draw up measures targeting them for their biology. The GOP leadership wants to restrict what sports a transgender student can play and hopes to limit their health care access.

Those attempts failed when the clock ran out on maneuvers to pass the legislation in the Texas House, but the Lt. Governor wants a special session to reconsider ways we can cause more mental health problems for transgender youth. Dan Patrick, of course, was all excited the last time the Texas Senate met two years ago because he had launched pee-pee politics to keep children out of bathrooms that were not compliant with their biological sex. He’s even more jacked up this session because there is a proposal that will prohibit doctors and health care providers from performing any type of gender confirmation surgery or prescribing, supplying, or administering puberty blockers or hormone treatments to teenagers.

Our governor, too, is craven in the most imaginative of ways. I’ve already written at length on here about the absurdity of “Crazy Carry,” Texans’ new ability to just buy a gun and strap on some leather and wear their weapons anywhere. Imagine what can happen now at a little league game when dad gets pissed at the ump. Police were overwhelmingly against the change in weapons laws, but our governor hasn’t been this excited since he kicked homeless people out of their tents in downtown Austin.

Irony, arriving almost on cue, had Abbott praising the NRA and pledging to help them move to Texas on the same day that two police officers were shot dead by a man who didn’t want them in his front yard to retrieve a dog. How and where such an unstable human got a gun was not a question that was even posed, and with “permitless carry,” no questions will ever be asked of any other lunatic who buys a gun, until it’s too late and he is interrogated about why he killed all those people. No background checks required.

Abbott’s pettiness appeals to low intellect haters, and his party, and their vitriol is not rare in Texas state government. Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush appears, as a recent example, to have issued a financial punishment against Harris County with a decision on allocation of funds for Hurricane Harvey relief. Although Houston was the hardest hit by the storm in terms of property damage and loss of life, the General Land Office gave the city exactly zero dollars of the more than a billion sent to the state by the federal government. Smaller communities within Harris County that had applied for money for their recovery projects were almost all funded, but not Houston.

Young Bush, an unrepentant Trump supporter, in spite of the former president’s public insults of Bush’s father and mother, blamed the slight on project scoring matrices provided by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Of course, it’s only coincidental that Houston continues to increase its Democratic control and vote. Surely, there’s no linkage between the Houston vote and being denied funding? Bush has backfilled his mendacious decision by claiming he has just asked HUD to send $750 million directly to Houston, which is a clean way for the city to get relief money without him having to be accused of delivering it to a population that doesn’t adore Governor Greg Abbott and Donald Trump.

This should surprise no one since Bush this week tweeted a picture of himself talking politics on the phone with Trump, the man who had declared Bush’s mother to be a “Mexican illegal.” Worse things were said about George P.’s father during a debate when Trump described Jeb as “an embarrassment to his family” and that, “He’s a desperate person. He’s a sad and a pathetic person. He doesn’t even use his last name in his ad. He’s a sad person who has gone absolutely crazy. I mean, this guy is a nervous wreck.” Trump added the adjectives “liar” and “loser” to put a bit more oomph into his insults.

But George P. wants to get elected attorney general in a run against the current A.G. of the Texas GOP, so George P. will politically fellate a man whose insults about Bush’s parents would have prompted a lot of males to deck Trump with a roundhouse right.

These are the people who lead my state, and their political sins grow more egregious almost daily. Their final, hypocritical efforts in the currently concluding session of the legislature is to force loyalty and control thinking, and they are not being subtle. A bill to ban the teaching of “critical race theory” is headed for the governor’s desk but it is more about preventing Texas students from learning the truth about Texas and America, which is often ugly. Educators in public schools are about to be legally forced to teach “both sides” of history, as if there is something positive to learn about slavery, racism, and genocide of indigent peoples. Critical race theory is just a negative brand that has been attached to the word “facts.”

Finally, Texas is still trying to enforce loyalty with laws, a concept that has fortified everyone of history’s dictators. Even Democrats have crossed the aisle to support in big numbers a new measure called the “Star-Spangled Banner Protection Act,” which requires sporting venues, if they get any state money, to play the national anthem before the beginning of games. Protesting athletes kneeling before contests has shocked the sensibilities of our conservative culture in Texas in such a manner that our lawmakers missed the hilarity of banning the teaching of critical race theory. If students knew more, maybe we’d advance just a bit instead of recalling a past that doesn’t really exist and there might be a reduced need for social protest.

But hell, we already require public school students to stand and say the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag, unless their parents send a note demanding they be excused from the practice. Loyalty pledges to governments have a pretty distinct record of leading to often frightening outcomes. Plus, if those students were actually learning facts that are about to be banned by stopping the teaching of critical race theory, they’d probably be pretty disinclined to pledge allegiance to much of anything related to how our government works.

A Hail Caesar approach to governing is always doomed. Texas conservatives, while cheering the state’s growth and booming economy, are taking steps to undermine the achievements of the working class, entrepreneurs, and investors. We will begin to feel the economic and cultural effects of oppressive government as the word spreads and the light dims on the Lone Star. Just because you can’t see it yet, doesn’t mean it isn’t true:

Texas is a failed state.