Three-Point Shots, Vol. 1, No. 15: Texas Off the Rails

Hooray! We survived the 4th of July as a nation. In Texas, though, democracy and good government are still backsliding.

         Welcome to another edition of Three-Point Shots, a part of my Life Its Ownself Substack page. If you enjoy reading it, please 1) hit the Like button, 2) subscribe to the Life Its Ownself, and 3) share it with others in the link below. Also, comments welcome and encouraged.

         But first, your Moment of Zen … I hope everyone had a happy and pleasant 4^th of July. I spent much of the day driving through the titular land of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men novel (and the Coen Brothers’ multi-award winning movie). Heading west from Del Rio, I crossed the Pecos River Highway Bridge, stopping at the beautiful scenic overlook. I took this panoramic shot of the bridge and the Pecos River canyon as the river empties into Lake Amistad:

(Panoramic view of the Pecos River as it crosses under the Highway Bridge and empties into Lake Amistad on the Rio Grande. Photo: DeeceX)

         Between the Pecos and Langtry is what I consider the real “no country for old men” – as endless, desolate, and inhospitable as I can imagine:

(West Texas desert under a pitiless sky. Photo: DeeceX)

(No country for old men. Mexico’s Sierra Madre Mountains in the distance. Photo: DeeceX)

         The country is barbarous, inspiring awe and trepidation. Cars pass once every 10 minutes, if that often. 18-wheelers roar westward, trying to make good time to El Paso and points beyond. This is not a place where you want your vehicle to break down.

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         More and more, Texas is becoming no place for old, or young, men and, God forbid, not for women, or minorities, or LGBTQ+ people. Texas has become a laboratory for shortsightedness and cruelty as state policy. Here are three examples of those values at work.

1.    Texas Ranks at the Bottom of All States for Healthcare: You’re Not Surprised, Are You?

         The Commonwealth Fund released its annual rankings of state healthcare delivery systems and outcomes last week. To no one’s surprise, Texas ranks at or near the bottom in almost all categories measured.

(Graphic: Dallas Morning News)

         I gotta tell ya, when you’re winning a race to the bottom against Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, there’s bound to be room for improvement.    

         Marin Wolf at the Dallas Morning News wrote a couple good analyses of the data here and here. Or read the whole report here.  

2.     Texas is Fabricating “Abortion Complication” Data

         A 35-year-old woman presents at an emergency room with shortness of breath and dizziness. The E.R. doctors diagnose her with a pulmonary embolism. As part of her medical history, they ask if she’s ever had an abortion. WTF?

         If the woman did have an abortion, even it if was years before, the doctor may nevertheless report the embolism as an “abortion complication” under a state law that requires doctors and hospitals to report a wide variety of health conditions as abortion complications if the patient had an abortion at any time in the past. The doctor can exercise his or her judgment that the current embolism has nothing to do with the abortion, but that could expose the doctor to a civil penalty of $500 a day. A doctor or health facility that fails to report three separate “abortion complications” can have its license revoked.

         What would be the purpose of such a law? In a challenge to a similar law in Idaho, Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest and the Hawaiian Islands said this:

Because the data gathered by the Act suffers from numerous methodological flaws, [cite], the Act will poison the existing abundant research on the safety of abortion and will only serve to confuse women seeking abortion with “data” that improperly inflates the procedure’s health risk.

         In other words, the purpose of the law is to deliberately overstate the health risks of abortions by corrupting the safety and efficacy data. But who would do such a thing?

         In this case, the answer is Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion group that, among other things, drafted and helped pass the Texas and Idaho laws that bollixed health care reporting related to abortions. AUL provided model legislation, complete with policy background and talking points. The Texas bill passed during a special session in 2017; the Idaho bill passed the next spring.

         AUL is one of what I like to call the “ghosts in the machine,” ideological organizations whose jobs is to help right-wing (and left-wing, but not as extensively) legislators with model legislation to help achieve the organizations’ policy goals. I will write more about those in the near future; their impact on Texas public policymaking cannot be overstated.

3.    Johnny Bryant: It’s Even Worse Than It Looks

         Oldtimers (among whom I reluctantly include myself) remember John Bryant as a progressive member of the Texas House from 1974 to 1982, then a US Congressman from 1982 to 1997. In 1996, he ran for US Senate, losing in the primary to Victor Morales, who rode around Texas in a pickup truck but eventually lost to GOP nominee Phil Gramm. Bryant took a 20+-year break from elective office, then won back his old House seat in 2022.

         Bryant sat down with Texas Monthly after the session to reflect on the changes in the 40 years since he’d been in the House. His conversation reminded me of an article earlier in the session about how Texas Democrats suffer from Stockholm Syndrome.  

TM: So when you say there is a lack of Democratic opposition, can you elaborate a little bit on that? What does that look like on the day-to-day? Republicans control the place, and they have for a long time. What’s lacking? 

JB: Well, basically, the Democrats have lost their muscle memory of being a governing majority. And so what’s lacking is a sense of what it was like to win and be in government. So they have, over twenty years, adapted to trying to work around the edges. And hopefully by virtue of having a smile and a shoeshine every day, they can slip a few bills through. So the whole objective has grown to be: How can I pass bills despite my minority status? Well, they don’t oppose the Speaker, they don’t nominate a Democratic Speaker, they don’t really fight a war; they fight little battles. It’s okay [from the Republican point of view] for Democrats to fight against individual issues, which the Republicans expect us to do, and they like that we do it, because it energizes their base. 

         Now, some of my readers will say, “Tough! The GOP has taken over the political and policy levers of state government the old-fashioned way: by articulating a superior vision of how things should be that wins elections.” But in another part of the conversation, Bryant hints at the larger problem:

We’ve been reading in the paper now, ever since the final weeks of the regular session and throughout the special session, an argument about the best way to provide property tax relief. It’s an argument between the Republican governor, the Republican lieutenant governor, and the Republican Speaker. The Democrats are not even in the conversation. There is no Democratic bill out there that says, “Here is our position.” There is no Democratic voice saying, “Here’s a better alternative,” or “These guys are wrong or they’re missing an opportunity to do even better.”

         Bryant and a group of Democratic legislators tried to address that yesterday with a proposal that would spend $20 billion to buy down property taxes, with $3.8 billion of that dedicated to renters, who have been completely ignored in Republican tax cut proposals.

         Of course, all the proposals assume that at least half of Texas’s unprecedented $32 billion surplus this biennium should be spent on property tax relief. What about expanding Medicaid to ameliorate the dismal Texas health outcomes mentioned above? What about an investment to buy down higher education tuition rates, especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to block the Biden Administration’s student loan forgiveness plan? As long as alternatives like these aren’t even on the table, Texans will continue to suffer from policy myopia.

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         Read and subscribe … From time to time, I suggest reading materials I think will make you smarter. I select them because they make me smarter. Here are four suggestions:

         Jim Moore’s Texas To The World is a terrific tapenade of tales (some tall), timely reporting and thoughtful analysis. Jim has covered Texas from a huisache-covered ranch outside of Laredo to the rarified halls of the Texas Capitol, and relates both his deep love and constant exasperation with his adopted state in his elegant writing.  Well worth a read.

         I’ve long thought Melissa Del Bosque did the best reporting about the Texas border, covering it not from an office building in Dallas, Austin, or even El Paso, but in the refugee camps and detention centers where the stories are actually happening. She now writes and produces The Border Chronicle, and I cannot recommend it highly enough if you’re interested in la frontera.

         How Jessica Valenti produces her superb Abortion, Every Day, every day is a mystery to me. She covers all 50 states and the federal government. She reports on legislatures, courts and administrative bodies like the FDA. And she keeps producing in spite of the almost-unrelenting bad news she’s reporting.

         Please read all these Substacks and support them if you can.

         On a lighter note, the Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri has just published US History: Important American Documents (I Made Up),the kind of documentary tour de force that would get a legitimate historian stripped of her credentials almost instantly. Great summertime reading, if you’re not embarrassed by bursting into laughter at Barton Springs or Padre Island.

         Read on!