One has to feel sorry for David Dewhurst. Has any recent Texas politician ever suffered through a worse year? He lost a Senate race that he was heavily favored to win; his campaign account is missing hundreds of thousands of dollars, allegedly due to the actions of his own campaign manager; he put his future, to the extent that he has one, in the hands of Dan Patrick and Michael Quinn Sullivan; he compromised himself by announcing to one and all that he was going to sell out to the far right.

Dewhurst has been lieutenant governor for ten years, but what does he have to show for it? What monument solidifies his place in the political firmament? He is a decent man, but he is lacking in core beliefs and basic political skills. For example: No shrewd politician would announce that he is moving hard to the right (or to the left, for that matter). You don’t voluntarily put yourself in a box; you keep your options open. The right is not going to embrace him; they’re going to use him. They know he is still fundamentally an establishment politician.

Tagged: david dewhurst

From the Times:

The Tea Party might not be over, but it is increasingly clear that the election last month significantly weakened the once-surging movement, which nearly captured control of the through a potent combination of populism and fury.

Leading Congressional Republicans, though they remain far apart from President Obama, have embraced raising tax revenues in budget negotiations, repudiating a central tenet of the Tea Party. Even more telling, Tea Party activists in the middle of the country are skirting the fiscal showdown in Congress and turning to narrower issues, raising questions about whether the movement still represents a citizen groundswell to which attention must be paid.

Grass-roots leaders said this month that after losing any chance of repealing the national health care law, they would press states to “nullify” or ignore it. They also plan to focus on a two-decade-old United Nations resolution that they call a plot against property rights, and on “fraud” by local election boards that, some believe, let the Democrats steal the November vote.

But unlike the broader, galvanizing issues of health care and the size of the federal government that ignited the Tea Party, the new topics seem likely to bolster critics who portray the movement as a distraction to the Republican Party.

* * * *

Distractions indeed. When a movement starts focusing on nullification, United Nations resolutions, and “stolen” elections, it is finished. That is what has happened to the Tea Party. They have made themselves irrelevant by their own extremism, and by the kind of internal disputes that tore apart Freedom Works. The Tea Party will be able to disrupt Republican primaries with extremist candidates, and they will undermine the GOP’s ability to win seats–and this goes for Texas too–but they will not be able to impact legislation. They’re done.

Tagged: tea party

and all through the House, and Senate too, I want to wish my readers a joyous and safe holiday season. –pb

The justification for the legislation lies in a fact (or, rather, an assertion) that cannot be proven: a fetus can experience pain starting at twenty weeks. My source is an article that appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association for August 24/31 2005 under the headline “Fetal Pain: A Systematic Multidisciplinary Review of the Evidence.”

The bill, which has been proposed in California, Kentucky, Minnesota, Montana, New York, Oregon, and Virginia, as well as the U.S. Congress, requires physicians to inform women seeking abortions that the fetus feels pain and to offer fetal anesthesia at 20 or more weeks.

The Journal focused on “human studies related to fetal pain, anesthesia, and analgesia.” The articles included in the study focused on “fetuses of less than 30 weeks gestational age” or specifically addressed fetal pain perception or nociception. According to the article:

[P]ain perception requires conscious recognition or awareness of a noxious stimulus. Neither withdrawal reflexes nor hormonal stress responses to invasive procedures prove the existence of fetal pain, because they can be elicited by nonpainful stimuli and occur without conscious cortical processing.

Fetal awareness of noxious stimuli requires functional thalocortical connections. Thalamocortical fibers  begin appearing between 23 and 30 weeks’ gestational age, while electroencephaolography suggests the capacity for functional pain perception in preterm neonates probably does not exist before 29 or 30 weeks.

This is the conclusion reached in the article:

Evidence regarding the capacity for fetal pain is limited but indicates that fetal perception of pain is unlikely before the third trimester. Little or no evidence addresses the effectiveness of direct anesthetic or analgesic techniques. Similarly, limited or no data exist on the safety of such techniques for pregnant women in the context of abortion. Anesthetic techniques currently used during fetal surgery are not directly applicable to abortion procedures.

* * * *

Based upon the article that I quoted from, above, there is no scientific support for the proposition that a fetus can feel pain at 20 weeks.

I’ll state my position plainly. I don’t believe that the Second Amendment should be read as allowing Americans to own assault weapons. The Founding Fathers never envisioned the kind of arms that Americans possess today. Criminal gangs have more firepower than law enforcement.

That said, here is an excerpt from what Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker had to say about the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. I agree with every word of it.

[L]et’s state the plain facts one more time, so that they can’t be mistaken: Gun massacres have happened many times in many countries, and in every other country, gun laws have been tightened to reflect the tragedy and the tragic knowledge of its citizens afterward. In every other country, gun massacres have subsequently become rare. In America alone, gun massacres, most often of children, happen with hideous regularity, and they happen with hideous regularity because guns are hideously and regularly available.

The people who fight and lobby and legislate to make guns regularly available are complicit in the murder of those children. They have made a clear moral choice: that the comfort and emotional reassurance they take from the possession of guns, placed in the balance even against the routine murder of innocent children, is of supreme value. Whatever satisfaction gun owners take from their guns—we know for certain that there is no prudential value in them—is more important than children’s lives. Give them credit: life is making moral choices, and that’s a moral choice, clearly made.

The school board voted 5-1 to approve the measure, making Pflugerville the first district in the state to offer such benefits.

As many readers are no doubt aware, state senator Dan Patrick has asked attorney general Abbott to rule on whether domestic partner benefits are legal under the state’s 2005 constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to hear two cases involving the constitutionality of same-sex marriage will surely have an impact on Abbott’s decision. The most likely result is that this and other issues relating to same-sex marriage will be put on the back burner until the high Court has made a ruling on constitutionality of DOMA (and other issues involving the right of states to define marriage). In any event, I doubt that Senator Patrick will get the answer he wants.

Tagged: dan patrick, DOMA, greg abbott

Last week Michael Quinn Sullivan posted a story on the Empower Texans web site headlined “Toxic Joe.” The reference, of course, is to Joe Straus, the speaker of the House, whom Sullivan has tried to remove from power, with nothing to show for his efforts. The Sullivan-imposed nickname of “Toxic Joe” is full of irony, because if there were a poll of who is the most-toxic person in the Capitol, Sullivan would win, hands-down (and be proud of it).

Sullivan’s writing style relies heavily on inuendo. A typical example:

With the race for the leadership of the Texas House heating up, many are feigning surprise that incumbent moderate Joe Straus hasn’t released a list of supporters despite increasingly brittle claims of invincibility.

Of course, what Sullivan is trying to do here is to create an impression of weakness in the Straus camp — as if to say, Straus must not be doing well because he hasn’t released a list of supporters. Why would Straus do so? Why would the frontrunner reveal to his enemies the names of his supporters, so that Sullivan can rally the tea parties to excoriate those who support the speaker?

Sullivan goes on to say, allegedly quoting unnamed Straus supporters, that “Team Straus recognizes that the speaker is ‘toxic’ with the grassroots. That’s the word used in at least a dozen conversations over the last several weeks by a handful of Straus supporters trying to bring more lawmakers to their side.”

It’s no secret that some of the activists in the Republican party–tea parties, precinct chairs, county chairs, leaders of grass-roots organizations–are not Straus fans. But the activists can’t vote in a speaker’s race. What they have done in the past, and will probably try to do again, is try to bully weak-minded members into supporting David Simpson, who is Straus’s only announced challenger, now that Bryan Hughes has given up the ghost and endorsed Simpson.

Here is more innuendo from Sullivan’s article:

One incumbent legislator told a colleague that the speaker didn’t want his “many supporters” to feel heat from the grassroots during December.

It’s an interesting strategy, and a telling admission. They know voters have little confidence in Mr. Straus’ leadership, and yet are so beholden to appeasing the cronies Straus represents, they’re working to get others to betray their constituents!

Unfortunately for Sullivan — and Simpson — “voters” don’t matter. They can vote in primaries, they can vote in general elections, but not in speaker’s races. Try as he might, he can’t change the constitutional imperative that “the House of Representatives shall, when it first assembles, organize temporarily and proceed to the election of a speaker from its own members.” The constitution doesn’t mention “activists” or “voters.” Only 150 people can cast a vote in a speaker’s race and it will take 76 of them to stop Joe Straus from winning a third term. And Sullivan doesn’t have 76 votes. In fact, if Straus’s hold on the speakership is so slight, why hasn’t Sullivan produced the names of 76 members who won’t vote for Straus?

During the last legislative session, Mr. Simpson took to the floor of the House decrying Straus’ inconsistent application of House rules.

Since then, Mr. Simpson has spoken out against the Straus leadership team’s use of redistricting as a weapon of revenge against legislators.

Mr. Simpson knows a thing or two about beating powerful incumbents. He entered the legislature by defeating one of Joe Straus’ closest allies, Tommy Merritt. This year, the Straus Team had Merritt try to retake the seat, only to be easily defeated by Mr. Simpson.

The race is far from over, and the advantages an incumbent House Speaker wields are not inconsequential. Yet by having not released the names of his supporters and daily acknowledging his toxicity, the case gets stronger that Joe Straus has neither the popular appeal, nor even the internal support, to continue as Speaker.

Sadly, only two dozen of the 95 Republicans have scheduled the GOP Platform-required town hall meetings with their constituents to discuss leadership issues. Time is short, since these meetings are supposed to happen before the start of the legislative session in early January.

* * * *

Mr. Sullivan’s innuendo-heavy attack on Straus is cleverly worded to create the impression that Straus is in trouble. I don’t buy a bit of it. I repeat what I said in an earlier post: Neither Bryan Hughes nor David Simpson has the gravitas to be elected speaker of the House.

What is strange to me is that Mr. Sullivan keeps the pot boiling, knowing that he has lost. He knows that Mr. Simpson is too green and too untutored to be speaker. Yet he keeps up an attack on Straus that is doomed to fail. He has tried and tried to find a way that the activists can pressure Republican members to vote against Straus, but he has met with nothing but failure. I can only assume that Sullivan is playing to the gallery here — the gallery being his readers across the state who believe the innuendo-filled nonsense that Straus is on the ropes. The game is lost, Sullivan has no candidate for speaker, and he hasn’t made a dent in Straus’s support. The more he rails against Straus, the more he relegates himself to the status of paper tiger.

Finally, Sullivan is wrong when he says the race is far from over. As I write, it is December 11. Two weeks to Christmas, one week to New Year’s, and one week to the vote for speaker on January 8 — and the end of David Simpson’s quixotic race for speaker.

Tagged: David Simpson, Joe Straus, michael quinn sullivan

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to hear two cases involving same-sex marriage could provide yet another indication of how isolated Texas politics has become from the national mainstream. As James Carville pointed out on ABC’s “This Week” yesterday, Americans’ opinions on same-sex marriage have changed with astonishing rapidity — but not here. (George Will said that the opposition to gay marriage is “literally dying” — meaning that the opposition is increasingly limited to old people.)

Readers will recall that in 2004, Karl Rove got Republicans in key states to hold referenda on the issue in the expectation that they would boost GOP turnout and reelect George W. Bush. But Texas still wants to tell its citizens whom they can marry. We are behind the curve in social mores, and our politics tracks our society. A national Pew poll in October showed proponents of same-sex marriages outnumbered opponents by 49% to 40%. In 2008, just one election cycle ago, only 39% favored gay marriage and 52% were opposed. The rate of change is inexorable, but I fully expect our state officials to complain about judicial activism (and let’s not forget the Tenth Amendment) when the Supreme Court busts DOMA, both the state and federal versions, as it surely will.

A nineteenth century American humorist named Finley Peter Dunne wrote a book titled “Mr. Dooley in Peace & War” featuring the observations on American life of a fictional Irish barkeep named Mr. Dooley. Mr. Dooley’s lasting contribution to American politics is his commentary that  “the Supreme Court follows the election returns.” It is no coincidence that Maine and Maryland voted to legalize same-sex marriage on November 6, just a few days before the Supremes agreed to hear the cases on same-sex marriage.

As I point out in my column in the January issue of TEXAS MONTHLY, which will be available online a week from Wednesday, Democrats like to call their winning formula “COTA,” short for “coalition of the ascendant” — that is college-educated women, blacks, Latinos, gays, and young people  Nothing lasts forever in politics, but at the moment, Democrats are much closer to the demographic cutting edge than Republicans are.

Here is a paragraph from ScotusBlog by Neal Devins and Tara Grove on the Court’s decision to hear the two cases:

Windsor and Perry are likely to be two of the most important constitutional decisions in our lifetimes.  If (as we suspect), the Court reaches the merits of each case, we believe it will advance the cause of same-sex marriage by invalidating both DOMA and Proposition 8.  But, in our view, the Court’s jurisdictional rulings — on the power of a single chamber of Congress and private sponsors of ballot initiatives to defend federal and state measures — will also have important implications, informing the scope of the constitutional separation of powers at both the federal and state level.

I agree with the analysis. History does not move backward. Society is not going to block a union of consenting adults, regardless of sexual orientation. DOMA is another of the social issues that is killing Republicans. Government should get out of people’s private lives. Legislative bodies should not determine who should marry whom. What God has made, let no politician rent asunder.

Tagged: DOMA, gay marriage

Has the anti-Straus faction adopted a strategy of divide-and-conquer? That is, putting forth multiple candidates for speaker, which would muddy the waters and dilute the vote for Straus. The problem with this strategy is that neither David Simpson nor Bryan Hughes has demonstrated that he has the gravitas to be speaker. If indeed the opposition’s strategy is divide-and-conquer, it is hard to see who might be their leading candidate. Berman is gone, Chisum is gone, Wayne Christian is gone…maybe Phil King?

The recent selection of Myra Crownover as  chair of the Republican caucus is likely to be a temporary development. She is not interested in running for the post, preferring a subcommittee chairmanship on Appropriations. Two members who are likely to run for caucus chair are Jim Murphy and Brandon Creighton. In 2011, the leadership of the caucus was Larry Taylor and Kelly Hancock. They had little loyalty for Straus; during debate, they circled the podium like piranhas. As the policy director of the caucus, Hancock had great influence over how members voted; he was the de facto majority whip. The ascension to the Senate of Taylor and Hancock was the best thing that could happen for Straus.

That is how much Rick Perry has spent on recruiting companies to come to Texas–more than any other state in the country–according to the New York Times. Perry got a lot of attention for this story, but is it wasn’t the kind of attention that will benefit him politically. It reinforces his image as a big-government crony capitalist, a moniker first hung on him by Michele Bachmann. Using public money for private purposes is the kind of big-government action that tea party conservatives thoroughly dislike.

One might reasonably ask: What would $19 billion buy in state services? For one thing, it would could pump money into public education, which could fix the state’s perennial problem of ranking dead last in the number of adults who lack a high school diploma. It would underwrite research at the state’s major universities. It would allow the state to raise rates for health care providers, who have been squeezed in recent years, to the point where many will not take Medicaid patients. It would bail out hospitals that have to bear the burden of uncompensated care in their emergency rooms. It would go a long way toward funding the state’s water plan. It would allow the state to give teachers a pay raise. Texas has made scant progress in any of these areas during the Perry years.

The governor is entitled to have his priorities concerning state spending. But, for most of his governorship, he has had only one priority, which is enticing companies to move to Texas. Corporate subsidies are not the only reason for the job growth in Texas. In addition to companies moving here, the influx of population in the previous decade is another reason for growth. The surge in population has expanded the work force, allowing government and private employers to do more hiring.