Matt Krause (R- Tarrant County) gave a rousing speech yesterday, opposing the passage of SB 346, a House leadership bill designed to silence critics and privilege unions. The law passed, and represents one of the most forward examples of the Chicago politics Joe Straus and his team have tried to smuggle into Texas.
In his speech Krause cited a bad situation in California that led to same sex marriage opponent donors being harassed. This is in the wake of the anti-conservative IRS scandal, in which non-profit applications with conservative names were targeted for obstruction by the IRS.
Senate Bill 346 is just the Texas version of this national story, a story that Rush Limbaugh blasted over America’s airwaves, and which the politically-engaged are talking about everywhere.
At bottom, it is the Chicago way, politics bereft of honor and respect for the constitution, in which strong-arming is considered a virtue. It’s a style of government that has much in common with most of the governments in the history of the world, and much less in common with the American experiment. Joe Straus and his leadership team have made it their business to bring this kind of politics to Texas.
The good news is, Texas is proving to be made of stronger stuff than Illinois and California. Most of the Straus Team’s efforts have failed, but it isn’t for lack of trying.
Straus’s Team want to trample the constitution with SB 346, but they also want to create a water slush fund for cronies to buy land or provide services that they can sell to the state at huge prices. In search of ever higher taxes by which to create and expand government power, they have tried to use the Rainy Day Fund, but have been stuffed so far.
Newly-outed Team Straus member Phil King offered an amendment to a bill recently that would define emails sent by Tea Parties as political contributions, triggering reporting requirements with the Texas Ethics Commission and steep fines for non-compliance. This is responsive to a Speaker Straus directive from the 81st legislature, in which he commissioned investigation into adding blogs and other internet communications into the definition of political advertising.
The slowed growth of the powerful education bureaucracy from the 82nd Legislature being reversed despite the fact that the doomsday predictions about these “cuts” have proven themselves to be false propaganda.
Straus and his team of liberal Republicans have partnered with Democrats to run the Texas House. His Republicans are well to the left of a majority of voting Texans. They are also well to the left of the versions of themselves that campaign for public office every two years.
But perhaps even worse, they are trivializing and eroding rule of law in Texas, carrying out a legislative strategy that would make Texas a land ruled by men, not laws, slowly reversing the American experiment. It has been successfully done in pockets of our country, the really corrupt places like Chicago, where laws are just cute little obstacles for those in power to ignore. We’ve seen it in the White House for the past four years.
These politics have been harder to implement here, because Texas has been a state of fighters since before we were a Republic or a state. Texans will die for righteous causes – fighting for them is easy. It’s in our blood.
Texans today have much to fight. There is a breed of politicians that would not only make us a land of high taxes, hazardous overregulation, and an immoral legal code; they would make us corrupt. Good thing Texans fight back.