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The Texas legislature finished up its business last week without getting to some pretty important legislation. Since the legislature only meets every two years, we may be in for a long wait on additional children’s health care and a few other pieces of business. Why would that be of concern, you ask? The only reason that the usually efficient legislature got bogged down is that Senate Republicans pulled a Tom DeLay power play to jam thru a piece of legislation they couldn’t ordinarily get passed because the rules would have given enough power to the minority Democrats to stop it. They jammed the bill thru by changing the rules because they could not get the bill thru any other way. The result of this tactic is the slowdown of the rest of the session once the bill came up on the calendar of The House. Democrats talked every bill to death even the ones that would have passed on a voice vote with no debate just to keep the bill from ever seeing the light of day.
What was this infamous bill? A Voter ID bill. Why would this be a problem in Texas? It isn’t but republicans see the tide is turning against them and their base is slowly being overcome by the Democratic base and they want to stem that tide if they can. The only way they can do it is to keep people from voting. The obvious tactics of trimming the voter registration lists the way that Jeb Bush did in Florida to get his brother elected in 2000 has been tried already. Folks are wise to that maneuver. They are also wise to the phony voter registration drives where they sign people up to vote but stamp their cards as GOP so they cannot vote in the Democratic primary. All that’s left is to subvert the on-going process in place to help wipe off long time voters that tend to lean Democratic.
The process as it stands allows for citizens to register by submitting the appropriate documentation, waiting 30 days for the local registrar to authenticate your documentation and then send you a voter’s registration card. This card is all you currently need to take to the polls. That’s not good enough for republicans. They are all hot and bothered about voter fraud even though there hasn’t been any substantial voter fraud since LBJ left the state. The Texas Secretary of State hasn’t prosecuted any cases of voter fraud where people have voted multiple times on election day or where bogus ballots were added to the mix.
He has gone after minority voters on specious and unfounded charges. After he was sued by the people he tried to intimidate, he was outed and backed down. It showed that his “prosecutions” were political witch hunts without a basis or foundation. Fast forward to the 2009 legislature: republicans, with no basis or foundation either, introduced a Voter ID Act that is as racist as the Secretary of State’s prosecutions. They insist on two forms of photo ID but still charge people to obtain that ID. That is nothing more than an old-fashioned poll tax which is unconstitutional. That little something never stopped the GOP from plunging ahead in their ever increasing attempts to fix elections and limit minority voters access to the polls.
Voter intimidation and suppression have become standard fare for republicans faced with their shrinking voter base. This is their last hurrah at maintaining control and they see the power slipping from their fingers despite everything they have tried. Texas republicans are barely holding on to power in the Legislature and the defeat of this bill could very well mark the end of their sad and tragic rule here in the Lone Star State. One can only hope.
Rick Perry could call the lege back into session to deal with hurricane relief and children’s health care but he’ll be playing with fire if he adds the racist Voter ID bill to the mix.
link: http://www.legis.state.tx.us/tlodocs/81R/billtext/html/SB00362H.htm
supporting link: http://www.alternet.org/politics/86737/voting_rights_
lawyers_defeat_texas%27_bogus_voter_fraud_prosecutions/
Rick Perry is filling the legacy of his predecessor George Walker Bush quite nicely, thank you very much. Recent republican elected officials are becoming quite famous for putting their foot in their mouth and then hopping around on one foot for a few weeks at a time. The latest example of this idiocy came at one of the Teabagger protests that came to pass on Tax Day last week.
Perry stood before the meager gathering and started his rant about how much he hated Washington. Now mind you, he hasn’t taken up this cause lightly or with insufficient reasoning. He is mad at Washington because there is a Democrat in the White House who isn’t trying to bankrupt the country by emptying out the Treasury by giving tax cuts to Rick Perry’s millionare friends and that pisses him off to no end. Rick Perry hates the fact that the money that comes to Texas from the recently passed stimulus plan has strings attached that are designed to help people in these tough times, not chuck them out in the street like Texas usually does. Rick Perry hates being told what to do, just like the Chimp that preceded him in the governor’s mansion. He made his dissatisfaction all too clear when he spoke to the assembled crowd.
In what he hoped was a veiled threat (but which turned out to be the material that made him out to be nothing more than a bigoted idiot and a national laughingstock) Rick Perry made a passing reference to Texas leaving the Union. Seceding. This is where the No Child Left Behind Act shows its flaws because there was a time that every school child knew that states cannot leave the Union once they join. We fought a hellacious war over that principle and the people who thought it was OK to leave lost that conflict. Nevertheless, the concept lives on in the demented minds of those few total idiots who don’t like the direction of the nation but do not have the political capital to push the idea past the talking stages.
Now Rick Perry did not advocate seceding immediately. He even praised the idea of Texas staying in the Union. So, I’m wondering, if he wasn’t looking at it down the road, why did he bring it up at all? Well, Perry is in the political fight of his life and what do rightwingers do when they have their backs against the wall? They return to their base and in this case it is the far rightwing fringe of voters who cling to the States’ Rights doctrine. You know these people, don’t you? This is the crowd that forgets that the Civil War decided once and for all that a state cannot secede and it does not have authority or preeminence over the federal government. The state does have some rights but telling the feds what to do and when to do it isn’t one of them.
These States Rights people are also the same folks that used that excuse as their main reason to maintain the slave society of the South. They used it again after the war to keep black folks “in their places” and keep the feds at bay. Reagan used it to signal the Kloset Klansmen that he was one of them and not a Hollywood actor when he ran for president. Rick Perry is signaling the bigoted base of the republican party (that no one likes to be reminded of but whom without they cannot win elections in the South) that he is one of them. He may have told the Teabagger crowd that he was just a good old boy looking out for Texas against the forces that would make Texas change how they do things but to the rest of us he’s signaling his intent to keep playing the politics of race and division and he’ll use States’ Rights to do that.
And all along I thought George Bush was our state’s biggest asshole.
Black & White and Cardinal Red All Over 