The GOP Mess In Texas

Texas Republicans held their annual state party convention last week, in which thousands of delegates from all over the state voted on the party's official platform. This being 2022 and Republicans being Republicans, the official Texas GOP platform is straight-up codified racism, fascism, and secession.

Meeting at their first in-person convention since 2018, Texas Republicans on Saturday acted on a raft of resolutions and proposed platform changes to move their party even further to the right. They approved measures declaring that President Joe Biden “was not legitimately elected” and rebuking Sen. John Cornyn for taking part in bipartisan gun talks. They also voted on a platform that declares homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle choice” and calls for Texas schoolchildren should be taught “to learn about the Humanity of the Preborn Child.”

The actions capped a convention that highlighted how adamantly opposed the party’s most active and vocal members are to compromising with Democrats or moderating on social positions, even as the state has grown more diverse and Republicans’ margins in statewide elections have shrunk slightly in recent years.

Votes on the platform were collected at the end of the party's three-day convention in which party activists moved to add multiple items to their official platform. As the convention closed, two separate sets of ballots — one allowing delegates to choose eight of 15 legislative priorities and another allowing delegates to vote on the 275 platform planks — were gathered. Those will now need to be tallied and certified in Austin, but it is rare for a plank to be rejected, according to party spokesman James Wesolek.

The convention reinforced the extent to which former President Donald J. Trump’s unfounded claims of a stolen election continue to resound among the party faithful — even though his claims have repeatedly been debunked, including by many of his own former aides, and after a week of televised hearings about the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The denunciation of Cornyn represented a remarkable rebuke to a Republican who has served in the Senate since 2002. The hall at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston filled with boos on Friday as he tried to explain the legislation, which would allow juvenile records to be incorporated into background checks for gun buyers younger than 21 and encourage “red flag” laws that would make it easier to remove guns from potentially dangerous people, along with more funding for school safety and mental health.

Meanwhile, the party platform vote on Saturday by roughly 5,100 convention delegates would argue that those under 21 are “most likely to need to defend themselves” and may need to quickly buy guns “in emergencies such as riots.” It also would say that red flag laws violate the due process rights of people who haven’t been convicted of a crime.

Around 9,600 delegates and alternates were eligible to attend; organizers said the turnout was healthy.

The new platform would call for: 

• Requiring Texas students “to learn about the Humanity of the Preborn Child,” including teaching that life begins at fertilization and requiring students to listen to live ultrasounds of gestating fetuses.
• Amending the Texas Constitution to remove the Legislature’s power “to regulate the wearing of arms, with a view to prevent crime.”
• Treating homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice,” language that was not included in the 2018 or 2020 party platforms.
• Deeming gender identity disorder “a genuine and extremely rare metal health condition,” requiring official documents to adhere to “biological gender,” and allowing civil penalties and monetary compensation to “de-transitioners” who have received gender-affirming surgery, which the platform calls a form of medical malpractice.
• Changing the U.S. Constitution to fix the number of Supreme Court justices at nine and to repeal the 16th Amendment of 1913, which created the federal income tax.
• Ensuring “freedom to travel,” by opposing Biden’s Clean Energy Plan and “California-style, anti-driver policies,” including efforts to turn traffic lanes over for use by pedestrians, cyclists and mass transit.
• Declaring “all businesses and jobs as essential and a fundamental right,” a response to COVID-19 mandates by Texas cities requiring customers to wear masks and limiting business hours.
• Abolishing the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, and guaranteeing the right to use alternatives to cash, including cryptocurrencies.

Not every far-right proposal was advanced. The party chair, Matt Rinaldi, ruled that a motion to defend the due process rights of those who rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and to “reject the narrative” that the riot was an insurrection was out of order, and could not be voted on.

Taken together, the new provisions would represent a shift even further rightward for the Republican Party of Texas, once known as the party of Presidents George Bush and his son George W. Bush. Land Commissioner George P. Bush, a grandson and nephew of the two presidents, was defeated handily last month in his race against Attorney General Ken Paxton, an arch-conservative who sued to challenge the 2020 election outcome and convinced voters that he was the truer Trump loyalist.

 

 

Sure, there's been whackoid platform planks in the past, the "reserve the right to secede" thing ends up in there every year it seems, but the  "Gay folks are deviants and trans folks are mentally ill" stuff is relatively new, and of course "Biden isn't president" is a huge red flag. And specifically, the platform is calling for a statewide referendum for secession to be put on the ballot in 2023.

This is once again a case of Republicans telling exactly how they will rule if given power, and telling us exactly who they will use that power against.

Pay attention.