Will Texas Republicans Ever Fight for Limited Government?

Sometimes when I look around at what Republicans are doing, I don’t really know what to do with myself.

Just think about how Republicans were in charge of the U.S. Senate and House and the White House for two years of the first two years of President Trump’s term. What did they accomplish? Not much.

Then, what about the last, what is it now, 17 years of Republicans being in charge of all Texas government; the Texas Senate, the Texas House, the Texas Supreme Court, the governor’s office, all the state agencies? I mean, it is all Republicans running the state yet the accomplishments that have taken place are just not where they ought to be. And you have to ask yourself why.

I think we can find a partial answer to this in an article I ran across the other day about the threatened veto by President Trump on the defense bill. He has said he’s going to veto the defense appropriations bill unless Congress puts a provision in it taking away the liability shield from all these high tech companies, such as Facebook and Twitter, that have been seeking to undermine our elections, laws, and democracy.

They lobbied for this provision in law because they said they were going to be neutral providers of content. They were just going to be platforms that people could use and put out whatever information they wanted to.

Well, we all know how that has turned out. You can’t look at any tweet from President Trump today that doesn’t come with warnings. And now it seems like they might actually start taking steps to ban his account if he leaves the White House in January. It is clear as can be that Twitter, Facebook and similar platforms certainly aren’t neutral platforms anymore. They’re publishers just like the Washington Post and the New York Times and the Dallas Morning News. And none of those companies have similar liability shields and neither should Twitter and company.

In the article I was reading, Rep. Mac Thornberry, the ranking Republican member on the House Armed Services Committee, said that if the president actually vetoes the bill, they can and will override it. Here is what Rep. Thornberry had to say about this.

So I’m feeling pretty good. Um, and, uh, I, I, and I’ll, I’ll repeat other than a couple of senators running for president, which we all need to take with a grain of salt. Uh, I don’t know of anybody who’s saying, yeah, this is the time and the way to deal with liability of social media companies. I just, I, that’s pretty hard case to make a lot of people think something needs to be done, but there’s dozens of proposals on what to do. And, uh, I don’t, again, I don’t know much of anybody who says this is the right time in place.

Did you read that? Rep. Thornberry says that he doesn’t know of anybody who thinks that this is the right time and the right place to deal with this issue. I can’t tell you how many times in my 30 plus years of working around politics, mostly in the Texas Legislature, that I’ve heard Republicans say, now is not the time to deal with this, now is not the place to deal with this; there’s a better time and a better place. Unfortunately, most of the time when they say that the right time and the right place never seems to come up

For instance, let’s go back to those first two years of the Trump presidency. What was the number one goal on most grassroots Republicans’ minds? The repeal of Obamacare. After all, the U.S. House of Representatives had voted numerous times to eliminate Obamacare. So with Obama gone and Trump in office, all the Senate and the House had to do was basically the same thing they’d done before.

But what did they do? They wouldn’t pass the bill. Why not? Well, it wasn’t time to pass it because they could actually do it. The repeal could actually happen. It turns out that they actually had never been very interested in repealing Obamacare. That all the previous efforts had been political attempts to get votes.

With Trump in office, they had to come up with another excuse for not repealing it. So they said that they could not repeal it unless there was a replacement already passed. Well, funny thing, none of them could agree on a replacement. And rather than pass a repeal, which would force them to come up with a replacement, they did nothing. And of course they still haven’t done anything. Well, except expose their deceit.

We saw this recently when a number of Republicans in Congress were horrified when the state of Texas filed a lawsuit against the United States of America seeking to eliminate Obamacare through the courts. When Texas was successful in the district court, everybody went crazy. It’s pretty obvious that for many Republicans, there’s never really a good time to do the right thing if it is unpopular with the establishment and the left (and it almost always is). Not because now it’s not the right time, but because they really don’t want to do these things.

We can see the same thing in Texas. As I pointed out, Republicans have been in charge of the Texas Legislature and the Texas Supreme Court and the executive branch since 2003. During that time–despite some wins, they have missed many opportunities to fight for liberty. I think their biggest failure has been the massive increase in spending since 2003. In that first session, after the Texas Legislature was taken over by Republicans, spending was $124 billion for the biennium. Today, it has risen to $248 billion. It’s gone up 109%, more than doubled.

Of course, a lot of us conservatives would have thought that government spending was too much back in 2003. And there was no reason to increase it at all. But even if you think, well, maybe they should accommodate for some growth, like population growth plus inflation, that’s only gone up 82% since 2003. So spending growth in Texas has outpaced population growth plus inflation. It’s also outpaced a lot of taxpayer’s ability to pay their taxes. Republicans just won’t shut it down.

And that’s true even for recent years. Let’s look at, for instance, since 2015, when Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick took office. They have increased spending in that short period of time by $50 billion. That’s a about 3.4% each year during their tenure. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but, again, it’s $50 billion that you don’t have because they took it from you.

Also, it is more than the annual increases in gross domestic product, 2.8%. And inflation, 1.4%. And population growth, 1.5%. And inflation and population growth combined. They just won’t stop spending our money. Last session was a great example of that. The change from what the Texas Legislature appropriated in 2017 to what it appropriated in 2019 was 24%, or about 11.5% annually. They just keep spending.

Of course, it’s not just spending that is the problem. It’s really all areas of government where not a lot is getting accomplished. There are some wins over the years, like some pro-life wins, and we have to be grateful for that. But there has been nothing like should have occurred with Republicans running all branches of government.

The 2017 regular session that started out so promising ended in almost total failure. Then there was the special session, where a list of about 20 important grassroots issues were proposed, and only one of them passed; municipal annexation reform, which eliminated the ability of larger cities and larger counties from annex in new areas without getting the approval of voters in the new area. Other than that, the only thing that came out of it was more education spinning.

That brings us to 2019. And what we saw again, was more of the same thing, right? We should have been prepared for 2019 as conservatives because after the close call for some folks in the 2018 elections, Republicans decided the best way to beat Democrats in the 2020 elections was to spend more money! And particularly more money on education. And that’s what we got in 2019.

Well, it turns out if you look at the 2020 elections, it turns out the best way to keep Republicans in office is to do the kinds of things that President Trump was doing fight against the insiders rather than become like them.

Which brings us to 2021. One of the very top failed priority bills in 2019, prohibiting taxpayer funded lobbying, is back on the agenda. There should be nothing controversial about this bill. What else could make more sense than telling local governments that they can’t take citizens’ money to hire high powered Austin lobbyists who will then come into the Capitol and lobby against taxpayers? It makes perfect sense if you live in a rational world, but unfortunately it’s not really a rational world inside the Texas Capitol bubble.

A couple of weeks ago the Senate State Affairs Committee held a hearing on taxpayer funded lobbying to prepare for 2021. But already during that hearing, one of the senators talked about compromising on the bill before the legislative session has even started. We are three weeks or so away from session and members are starting to talk about compromising by saying maybe we don’t have to apply this bill to the small counties. We can just do it to the big counties and the big cities. Well, that approach actually worked with the annexation reform because in 2017, we did get a bill with that in it. And then in 2019, we were able to come back and abolish annexation without permission for all the state of Texas. So maybe that’s the best way to go about it, maybe, but we really shouldn’t be negotiating against ourselves before the Legislature has even started.

On top of that, it doesn’t look like the Texas House is going to change and become a body where Texans can get conservative bills passed. If we get anything good through the Texas House in 2021, it’s not going to be because we have conservative leadership over there.

So as Texas Republicans, we really ought to start asking ourselves if now is not the time to pass some of these great reforms, when will it be? When will our elected officials start doing what we sent them up here to do?

If not 2021, maybe we can look to 2022. Perhaps the 2022 elections may bring new leadership among Texas Republicans. People who are willing to stand up and say now is the time and now is the place to fight for liberty.