(Dobbs) The Supreme Court, The Texas GOP. Part Of A Pattern
They're running roughshod over long-established rights and settled law.
The Supreme Court in Washington is off and running. It is running far to the Right with a Republican-appointed majority of six (two of whom wouldn’t be there if Mitch McConnell hadn’t cheated President Obama out of one appointment and unscrupulously fast-tracked another in the waning days of Trump).
So is the Republican Party in Texas, off and running, and I don’t mean just a collection of Republicans off the street, nor even some unofficial gathering of Republicans who inhabit the warped world of Donald Trump. After its weekend convention in Houston, I’m talking about the Republican Party of Texas. The official Republican Party of Texas.
They’re both off and running roughshod over long-established rights and settled law. They’re both running our nation into the ground. And signs are, they’re not finished.
The latest from the Court? Endorsing the erosion of the separation of church and state, releasing its ruling today permitting taxpayer money to fund religious schools. Ultimately what this can lead to is, taxpayer money, our money, being used— and some critics consider it inevitable— to subsidize discrimination if some schools choose against students of whom they don’t approve.
Next up? Abortion. If Justice Alito’s draft opinion about Roe v. Wade, leaked in early May, becomes reality, it will be legal no longer in wide swaths of America. We shall find out soon.
And yet the Court is no match for the Texas GOP. Just when you think these people can’t drive our democracy deeper into the ground, they come up with a spine-chilling platform that further corrodes the social and electoral progress of the last 60 years or more.
Just look at what was posted yesterday on the party’s website: “We reject the certified results of the 2020 Presidential election, and we hold that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States.”
“Acting” president Joseph Robinette Biden! This is sixteen months after he lawfully was elected to the Oval Office.
It passed with the overwhelming endorsement of more than 5,000 Republican delegates in Houston to make this insanity official, despite the conclusions from more than 60 courts— some with Trump-appointed judges— that the 2020 vote was valid, and despite the declarations of election officers across America— many of them Republicans, some of whom actually testified today to this very judgment in the January 6th Committee hearing— that the election was legitimate.
If you need specifics, one of them was Ruth Hughs, the Republican-appointed Texas Secretary of State in 2020, who described the election as “smooth and secure.” She is not the Secretary of State any more.
But wait, there’s more. “We’ve made election integrity a top priority,” the party says, “to ensure Texas never goes the way of Pennsylvania, Georgia, or Arizona.” It was Arizona, in case you’ve forgotten, where in an ill-begotten effort to reverse the results of the election, the Republican legislature wasted more than $5-million on a recount in Arizona’s biggest county by a company called “Cyber Ninjas” that eventually had to concede that Joe Biden got 99 more votes than the original tallies showed, while Trump got 261 less.
But still, the Republican Party of Texas doesn’t let facts get in the way.
The party chairman says, “We refuse to let Democrats rig the elections in 2022 or 2024.” So does that explain why Governor Abbott last year joined other anti-democratic states in manipulating laws to make it harder for traditionally Democratic constituencies to vote? Who’s rigging whom?
Anyway, Texas did not go the way of Arizona and those other states. Trump won there in 2020. So did senior Senator John Cornyn, although the party has gone so far Right that Cornyn himself is out of favor now, because he has the gall to be the Republicans’ chief Senate negotiator to find some level of bipartisan agreement (albeit transparently impotent) on gun reform. He was booed by the delegates and berated in their platform: “Whereas all gun control is a violation of the Second Amendment and our God-given rights”— yes, they now hang guns on God-given rights— “we reject the so-called ‘bipartisan gun agreement,’ and we rebuke [Sen.] John Cornyn (R-Texas).”
Interestingly, a convention delegate from Ft. Worth, saying she was embarrassed when Cornyn was booed, was quoted explaining, “I don’t believe that booing is polite.” But apparently it is not impolite to reject the election of President Biden, putting her and her party in league with the mob of insurrectionists of January 6th.
Of course condemning Cornyn might come as no surprise when you learn that the delegates in Texas also codified this: “Repeal and/or nullify… the Gun Control Act of 1968.” If you’re wondering, that’s the one that makes it illegal for a felon to buy a gun. Evidently in a state where the Republican legislature last year already made it legal in public places to pack a handgun in a holster, whether out-in-the-open or concealed, the sky’s the limit.
They also voted to protect “the sanctity of human life, created in the image of God.” But of course they’re talking about abortion. For the 19 children gunned down last month in the Texas city of Uvalde who also were “created in the image of God,” the sanctity of human life seems to take a back seat to the sanctity of firearms.
All told, there are 270 positions in the official party platform, and all point away from the strides of the 21st Century.
One says, homosexuality is “an abnormal lifestyle choice”— they even banned the gay group “Log Cabin Republicans” from setting up a booth.
Another says, transgender people suffer from "a genuine and extremely rare mental health condition.” One delegate, embracing a return to the lawless days of the Texas Territory, shouted at a GOP congressman who has not gotten onboard with the Big Lie about the election, "Dan Crenshaw is a traitor. He needs to be hung for treason!”
The platform even floats the far-fetched fantasy of secession: ”Texas retains the right to secede from the United States, and the Texas Legislature should be called upon to pass a referendum consistent thereto.”
Some of us might say, “If only you Republicans secede, be our guest. And take Ted Cruz with you.”
But this is the Republican Party of Texas today. The scary thing is, it’s not an anomaly any more. It’s not a one-off. Others aren’t far behind. Whole state party machines have drunk the Kool-Aid. And not just a small sip.
We are dealing with a metastasizing pattern— in courts and in legislatures, in the states and in the nation’s capital— to upend honest elections, to upend traditional rights, to upend protections we have come to take for granted. Interracial marriage, same-sex marriage, legal contraceptives, which books are allowed in libraries, which lessons are allowed in schools. If some aren’t safe, none is.
These aren’t just theoretical fears any more. Fanatical calls to restrict rights in every one of those areas have come from the far Right.
We used to think we could protect ourselves by waving the Constitution. Now we have to wave our ballots on election day, to protect what’s left. To try to, anyway.
A Driving Storm of Dust and Hail
Greg Dobbs: "They’re running roughshod over long-established rights and settled law."
Roughshod:
1: shod with shoes armed with points or calks
<a roughshod horse>
2: marked by inhumanity or tyranny
<roughshod condemnation proceedings>
<roughshod reign>
The Texas Republican Party is now a morass of frenzied spleen. And what is spleen? "Latent malevolence or spite: violent feelings of anger or spite especially when suddenly and explosively released." And guess who lit the fuse?
The problem, as I see it, is that none of this will ever go away. On the contrary, it will continue to metastasize, and very quickly. Dark though it is, I can't help thinking of Plato's Republic, Book VI, 496:
"One who has joined this small company and tasted happiness that is their portion; who has watched the frenzy of the multitude and seen that there is no soundness in the conduct of public life, nowhere an ally at whose side a champion of justice could hope to escape destruction; but that, like a man fallen among wild beasts, if he should refuse to take part in their misdeeds and could not hold out alone against the fury of all, he would be destined, before he could be of any service to his country or his friends, to perish, having done no good to himself or to anyone else—one who has weighed all this keeps quiet and goes his own way, like the traveler who takes shelter under a wall from a driving storm of dust and hail; and seeing lawlessness spreading on all sides, is content if he can keep his hands clean from iniquity while his life lasts, and when the end comes take his departure, with good hopes, in serenity and peace."
--Plato, The Republic, trans. F. M. Cornford, Book VI, 496
Thank you, Mr. Dobbs.
is it true that delegates spent the weekend sining Cher's hit, "IF I Can Turn Back Time."....only w. tX updated lyrics...SEE, I CAN TURN BACK TIME