The more I read about Texas’s next probable lieutenant governor, the more concerned I become over our state’s future.
Dan Patrick is likely to be elected to the No. 2 position among all Texas politicians on Nov. 4. He’s the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor. He’s a state senator from Houston who’s running against his colleague, Democratic state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte of San Antonio.
Mother Jones has assembled a glossary of some of the more outrageous things Patrick has said and done during his time in the Senate.
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OK, before we go any further, I’ll concede that Mother Jones is not friendly toward Patrick or those who agree with his world view.
But some of this stuff is utterly mind-blowing.
He talks about immigrants bringing “Third World diseases” into the United States; he walked out of a Senate invocation that was being delivered by a Muslim cleric; he once joked, in 1992, that Asian-American broadcast journalist Connie Chung’s show “Eye to Eye” should be called “Slanted Eye to Eye”; he once declared “there is no such thing as separation of church and state.”
Mother Jones lists other bizarre statements that have flown out of Patrick’s mouth over the years.
He comes from a radio background, which I suppose says plenty about how a guy with a machine-gun mouth occasionally lets the rhetorical bullets fly with abandon.
Some folks find him entertaining, I suppose. I prefer someone who is more thoughtful.
If he wins — and it’s looking as though he will — he’s going to turn the Texas Senate, over which the lieutenant governor presides, into a much-less collegial body. Patrick has all but guaranteed that by vowing to do away with the two-thirds rule — which requires at least 21 senators to support a bill before it goes to a vote; the idea is to promote bipartisan support for legislation. He’s also suggested he’ll appoint only Republicans to committee chairmanships, doing away with the custom that lieutenant governors of both parties have followed of appointing members of the minority party to lead Senate committees.
Texas’s legislative branch of government — at least one half-half of it — is likely to become a hostile work environment for those who don’t like the way it’s going to be run.