Any Battleground Texas success will be the product of GOP sellout, a disturbing pattern of behavior voters are tiring of.
Sure, Battleground Texas is setting up their voter fraud and/or voter turnout operations, but mostly they are positioning themselves to take credit for the gains the Democratic Party will get if amnesty becomes law nationally.
This is the amnesty bill the GOP establishment is working for against their constituents. It’s a bill that will empower Democrats nationally, and change the game for the worse in Texas. It’s a bill some careerist ‘conservatives’ are trying to figure out how to be in favor of right now, wrongly thinking they have to be.
Really, as long as the Texas GOP bosses are trying to give up all of their advantages Battleground Texas has reason to be in Texas.
If you notice, the GOP establishment picks fights about policy during the session, when the lobby is on the front foot. When the action moves in district, they clam up about the future of policy in the GOP. Accusations suddenly stop that conservatives are extremists, the future of the party is self-evidently liberal, and principle is obstructionist. And this is because the GOP establishment candidates are busy pretending to be conviction conservatives now.
We call businesses incompetent who constantly tell the customer he is wrong, but it is a GOP establishment way of life.
A new favorite Texas establishment talking point is that the recipe written in the 90s that gave the GOP control of the state is being tampered with to the peril of GOP control. The recipe they refer to is 100% business, and by “business” they mean “business lobby”. A short definition of the business lobby is, businesses that rely on performance enhancing bills (PEBs) to make money.
What of this magical 90s GOP recipe? The GOP establishment isn’t honest enough to read people the real recipe from the 90s.
The real recipe is as follows: On paper, stand for free markets, a lean government, and traditional values to get elected (tort reform was featured in the free markets category and education bloat was worked into the traditional values category). Then, legislate entirely for the business lobby, putting on Kabuki Theater when voters need convincing that they care about the three things they claim to stand for.
Now the Texas GOP establishment is whining that, ever since the Tea Party woke up the conservative movement, this magical recipe is being tampered with.
The establishment should have some cheese to go with their whine. It is an immutable rule of life that nothing based on deception is built to last. Despite apparent intentions to the contrary, the designers of this 90s scam recipe built a temporary stopgap, not a lasting charter.
And sorry, the Reagan coalition moved the entire South into the GOP, not tort reform and education bloat.
The GOP has to get honest to stand a chance.
The problem with the GOP establishment is that their real agenda has always been serving the business lobby, with a moderate/liberal lean. This moderate/liberal lean is because they need the Democrats to get their PEBs (performance enhancing bills) passed, and Democrats always trade for liberalism.
In fact, most of these Texas establishment GOP politicians are conservatives by conviction, which is why they can sound good on the campaign trail. However, convictions are worth very little if they are not what you govern with. They govern as careerists, objective: PEBs.
Performance enhancing bills, PEBS, are also CEBs for legislators– “career enhancing bills”. Successfully managing one gets you pushed ahead in the party.
This implies something ugly but seemingly true – that the Texas GOP bosses run bait and switch operation.
They also underestimate the power of honesty. While the Democrats church up their bribes, they basically do for voters what they promise. They offer a bevy of bribes to people groups, some in the form of other people’s money, and others in the form of normalization of deviant behavior that Americans used to have the sense to suppress.
The GOP does seem to be catching on to the honesty thing a little bit. Disastrously, they’re choosing honesty along the lines of their lobby agenda instead of their vote-getting agenda. They’d like the party to go liberal on a host of issues, from fiscal responsibility to abortion to immigration and beyond.
How much sense does it make for them to come out of the closet with policies they have themselves judged too toxic to reveal for decades? The only people this strategy really serves is the designers of the old GOP recipe who will be obsolete if ever this approach ends. The strategy is suicidal for voters, donors, and GOP politicians.
For every issue, the GOP goes liberal on, they become twins with the Democrats, but not identical twins as they might hope. They become twins like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito in the movie Twins. Guess which twin the GOP is on, say, entitlements?
They want to go onto the enemy’s ground, where the enemy is entrenched at the top of a steep hill. The only open space on this field is at the bottom of the hill with the sun directly in their eyes. The establishment can’t encamp fast enough.
Ever since the Reagan coalition began the GOP has owned ground of its own, ground the American public loves. Pro-American fiscal policy, pro-American foreign policy, pro-American social policy. Americans instinctively know progressive fiscal, foreign, and social policy is corrosive to America.
This is all to say the GOP has the American market cornered on Americanism, which is a pretty darn solid foundation, but someone needs to convince the guys in charge of this.
There is a liberalizing movement in the GOP that threatens the future of Texas and the GOP in Texas. Texans should demand their politicians be up front about where they are in this struggle. Nobody is neutral.