State Rep. Lyle Larson wrote an opinion piece in the Dallas Morning News in a plea to bring back the good ol’ days when special interests passed crony laws without blowback and always fumbled the conservative legislation they were elected to pass.
The Wall Street Journal did a good job of putting Larson’s fable in perspective, pointing out that “dark money,” the devil term invented by the Texas ruling class for money spent by the accountability groups they want to intimidate, is less than 1% of overall election spending.
The lobby is resisting the change that an era of greater accountability will inevitably bring – an era of diminished legislative ability to give connected people gifts from the Texas treasury. The lobby is very slow in learning this isn’t the purpose of the Texas treasury, as they have always assumed.
The WSJ pointed out that the bill Larson is lobbying Governor Perry not to veto was passed out of the Senate, then recalled by two thirds of Senators when they realized what they had done. Speaker Straus then broke with the long-held practice of returning the bill to the Senate in such circumstances, and the House passed it with a coalition of Democrats and the Speaker’s liberal Republicans.
Fifty-one Republicans voted with Texans, in favor of government accountability, and against this attack on the first amendment from Larson, Straus, and the Texas ruling class.
If any government is going to show how to preserve the experiment of western government in the 21st Century, it is Texas. It is a good sign that there is so much support for government accountability in the Texas House and Senate.
– WSJ article
– Larson’s DMN lobby piece