Three-Point Shots, Vol. 2, No. 12: September 27, 2024
The Speaker's race is heating up. Oh, and can Democrats elect one of their own to the Texas Supreme Court? And, fare thee well, J.D. Souther.
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. Comments are welcome and encouraged.
But first, your moment of Zen … The Latecomers entertain at Burger Night at the French Co. Grocer in Marathon.
Friday, September 27, 2024
1. Reactionary Republicans Coalesce Around a Speaker Candidate
You may recall that, in the wake of the unsuccessful attempt to impeach corrupt Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton at this time last year, Paxton and his allies declared a fatwa on House Speaker Dade Phelan, promising to defeat him at the ballot box in this spring’s primaries. That did not work out as they’d hoped, with Phelan winning his primary by a narrow 50.7%-49.3% margin.
(Speaker Dade Phelan presides over the Texas House last session.
Will he be back in the Speaker’s chair come January?)
The battle continues, though, as five Republicans and two Democrats have entered the race to become Speaker when the next session begins in January. The Speaker is chosen by the House membership. The Republicans are: Tom Oliverson, R-Cypress; Shelby Slawson, R-Stephenville; David Cook, R-Mansfield; James Frank, R-Wichita Falls; and John Smithee, R-Amarillo. The Democrats are Ana-María Rodríguez Ramos, D-Richardson, and Democratic caucus chair Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio.
The five Republicans bring a variety of experience, ideology and regional representation to their candidacies, but they all agree on two things: there should be no Democratic committee chairs, and no bill reflecting a Democratic priority should be brought to the floor until all the GOP priorities have passed.
This would be a radical change from how Speaker Phelan has presided and, for that matter, how his predecessors Joe Straus and Dennis Bonnen presided. Heck, even Tom Craddick, who in 2003 created the mold for a Republican Speaker after a 150-year drought, had Democratic chairs. And previous Democratic Speakers like Pete Laney and Gib Lewis also relied on leaders from both sides of the aisle.
To be fair, the current candidates are working under a burden. The state GOP has made purging Democratic chairs (and priorities) a priority for the next session, and the big state GOP funders are all on board with that. And the state GOP are all crazy.
Last week, a group of GOP House members met to select a champion to take on Phelan. They settled on Rep. David Cook , R-Mansfield, as their consensus candidate. (This was just a straw poll, with the entire Republican caucus due to meet after the elections.)
(Rep. David Cook, the man of the moment.)
So far, so good. Let’s look at the math. It takes 76 votes to elect a Speaker. There are 86 Republicans in the House and 63 Democrats (one seat is vacant). All the seats are in play this election. Let’s say the partisan balance remains the same in January: 86 R-64 D. (Both the Republicans and the Democrats believe they can pick up a few seats.) If the Republicans have 86 members and unify around a candidate, they will elect the next Speaker.
But we can imagine at least one Republican who will not vote for Cook: Phelan himself. And Phelan has some lieutenants/loyalists whose future would be very uncertain under a different Speaker: for instance, Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi, who chairs State Affairs, or Rep. Charlie Geren, R-Fort Worth, the Speaker Pro Tem. Neither of them appear on Cook’s list – yet. It’s possible to imagine that there are a dozen GOP House members who are loyal to Phelan.
And, of course, the 64 House Democrats will have little interest in supporting Cook’s “no Democratic chairs” candidacy. The caucus chair, Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, says there are “64 reasons why [Democrats] will be relevant” in choosing the next Speaker. Cook, or other candidates, may reach out to some of them to gauge their appetite for smaller perks – a vice chairmanship, a seat on Appropriations or State Affairs – but have to be careful; the spirit of the GOP platform is total intransigence towards Democrats. And the Democrats must be careful, too – their colleagues and the Democratic Party will punish their disloyalty. Ask Jaime Capelo.
Speaker’s races are unlike any other elections in Texas. There are only 150 voters, and the campaigning process is unusually private, although that has become less true as big donors and special interests have tried to muscle in. And this time around we have the embarrassing spectacle of Lite Guv Dan Patrick, having completely gelded the Senate, trying to tell the House what to do.
Speakers collect pledge cards from members, but nothing prohibits a member from pledging to multiple candidates. When a candidate think he has 76 reliable pledges (or some overwhelming number, like 60), he announces his good fortune and tries to get everyone else on board. This afternoon, Cook released a list of the 48 members he says support him, only two of whom insisted on being called “confidential.”
This is, as they say, a developing story …
2. And Now, For Something Completely Different: the Return of Robert Morrow
Speaking of Speaker races: some burned-out dumpster fires are best left alone, but in this case I will make an exception.
Robert Morrow had his 15 minutes of fame back in 2016, when he was elected by surprise to be the chair of the Travis County Republican Party. Morrow beat the incumbent largely on the platform of 1) being listed first on the ballot and 2) no one knowing who the incumbent was. To be fair, no one knew who Robert Morrow was, either. And, to be fair, it was the Republican Party, which in the Peoples’ Republic of Austin is not taken too seriously.
Among the cognoscenti, Morrow’s election was greeted with the horror you might expect if Voldemort was elected chair. News stories in both local and national newspapers highlighted his oddities, including conspiracy theories about LBJ’s role in the assassination of JFK. Per Wikipedia, he also called the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton an "angry bull dyke" and Republican former Governor Rick Perry "a rampaging bisexual adulterer." He believed that "much of the Bush family should be in jail."
He was, in other words, ahead of his time: a Trumpian farce at a time when the original was building his political empire. He supported Donald Trump for a while in 2016, but ended up voting for Gary Johnson that fall.
After a few months, the Travis County GOP managed to depose him as its chair. He recently ran for, and lost, a seat on the Eanes ISD school board.
He’s back in the news this week, having filed for Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives. He’s ineligible, of course. Article III, Section 9(b) of the Texas Constitution provides that “he House of Representatives shall, when it first assembles, organize temporarily, and thereupon proceed to the election of a Speaker from its own members.” (emphasis added) And Government Code Section 302.011(a) defines a "Speaker candidate" as “a member of or candidate for the house of representatives who has announced his candidacy for or who by his actions, words, or deeds seeks election to the office of speaker of the house of representatives.” In other words, only members of the House can be Speakers.
Alas, Robert Morrow’s gambit for greatness will fall short, once again. But he may provide a few interesting moments on his way down.
3. Democrats on the Texas Supreme Court?
Rob D’Amico, the editor of the Marfa-based Big Bend Sentinel (and friend of the Substack), has written an interesting piece this week, reporting on the effort to raise visibility and interest among Democratic voters for the three Texas Supreme Court seats up for election this fall.
To set the stage: Democrats have not won a seat on the Supreme Court (SCOTX) since the late 1990s. In that time, it has become a reliable advocate for Big Business and insurance companies against consumers, competitors and the general public.
The problem is, few Texan voters pay any attention to the SCOTX or Court of Criminal Appeals races, and just use their partisan affiliation as a proxy. In fact, I’ve used the Democrat-vs.-Republican voting percentages in these races as an estimate for the partisan breakdown of the entire state. And never been surprised.
But Gina Ortiz Jones and others think that the times, they are a-changing. Jones, who twice ran for Congress as a Democrat before becoming Under Secretary of the Air Force, has returned to Texas to start Find Out PAC, dedicated to defeating the three GOP SCOTX justices up for reelection this fall.
Her hole card: a SCOTX decision in May that upheld Texas’s abortion ban (euphemistically known as the “Human Life Protection Act”). Although Texas’s draconian laws allow an exception for a “medical emergency” endangering “the life of the mother,” they do not define those terms or give examples that might guide medical professionals in making those decisions. Since a doctor who gets crosswise with the law faces fines of at least $100,000, up to 99 years in prison, and revocation of their state medical licenses, the statute’s vagueness chills them from providing medical care, even under life-or-death circumstances.
The SCOTX ruled, predictably, that the existing statutes were sufficiently clear to tell healthcare providers how to proceed. The effect of the ruling was to close off any discussion of how to clarify the law (absent legislative intervention), and to sustain the law’s constitutionality.
Ortiz hopes that, if Texas voters can be made aware of the SCOTX decision, they will turn out the three SCOTX members who are up for re-election in November. (In a videoreleased on Twitter, the PAC derisively refers to them as “Jimmy, John, and Jane.”)
Hard experience has taught that voters simply do not understand or care about SCOTX races, but Jones and her PAC think they can break through. They claim that polls show that, if voters are informed of the Court’s anti-choice decisions, they will vote for a change.
They key, of course, is raising enough money and interest to motivate a critical mass of Texas voters. For what it’s worth, the headwinds may not be so daunting this time. Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has made reproductive freedom a core piece of her message. And Colin Allred may give Official Texas State A-hole Ted Cruz a tun for his money: CNN reports today that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is financially supporting Allred in his quest.
For the weekend …
I was saddened to hear of the passing this week of J.D. Souther. He was an exquisitely talented singer-songwriter who helped birth the Southern California musical juggernaut that dominated the 1970s, from Linda Ronstadt and Bonnie Raitt to Jackson Browne and the Eagles, for whom he wrote “Best of My Love” and “New Kid in Town.” I fell in love with his songwriting and his duets with the artists he’d written for. In the end, he was more famous as a songwriter – check out Rolling Stone’s list of his 12 essential songs.
My favorite is the heartbreaking “Prisoner in Disguise,” a song he wrote for and sang with Linda Ronstadt. Give it a listen.
" He was, in other words, ahead of his time: a Trumpian farce..." Got my first good laugh this morning, and all before turning on the TV for the Sunday parade of news shows. Many thanks.
My favorite parts:
"And the state GOP are all crazy."
and
I LOL'd at this line about Morrow, after pointing out his bat-shit craziness:
"He was, in other words, ahead of his time"