Tag Archives: Rick Perry

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GOP differs on immigration? Imagine that

This is about the least-surprising political news of the week: Congressional Republicans meeting this week at an annual retreat are displaying sharp differences over how, or even whether, to move ahead with immigration reform.

Here’s a word to the wise: Do it for the sake of your party’s survival, if not for the sake of millions of de facto Americans who have been living in the shadows, many of them since they were children brought here illegally by their parents.

House GOP split over forging ahead on immigration this year

House Speaker John Boehner is beginning to make sense these days and is pushing back against the hard-line tea party wing of his GOP House caucus. He wants to reform the nation’s immigration policies, which already have been approved in the Senate, but have been stalled in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives.

Others within his caucus want to move immigration forward as well, but as usual they’re being stymied by the radical right wing that believes giving a “pathway to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants is tantamount to granting amnesty to lawbreakers.

These clowns ought to listen to the likes of border state governors, such as, say, Republican Rick Perry of Texas. He’s as conservative as most of the tea party wing in the House, but he understands better than they do that those who are brought here as children, have grown as Americans and know the United States as their country deserve a chance to work their way toward citizenship.

I’m hoping the speaker will continue to push back against the wacko wing of his House caucus. Immigration reform is a must for the nation. Whether it helps the Republicans is of little concern to me. I just want to bring 11 million American residents out of the shadows.

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Let’s take care when talking about hardship

My sincere hope for the budding Texas campaign for governor is that the major parties’ presumptive nominees put to rest questions about personal histories.

Presumptive Democratic nominee Wendy Davis is having to answer questions about some fuzziness in her story, about the timing of her failed marriages. Her campaign is now going on the attack, accusing Republican foes of sexism by criticizing the success of a female candidate.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2014/01/21/264579414/critics-seize-on-blurry-details-in-wendy-davis-story

This counter-attack launched against presumptive Republican nominee Greg Abbott can go too far.

Abbott is the state’s attorney general, a former trial court judge and a former state Supreme Court justice. He, too, has endured some hardship in his life.

Back when he was in his mid-20s, Abbott took a break from preparing for his bar exam and went jogging. A tree fell on him, breaking his back — and confining him to a wheelchair, where he’s been ever since.

Abbott also has had to overcome considerable difficulty to achieve the heights he has reached.

With that in mind, the Davis campaign will need to be careful about how it portrays the criticisms against her and how it characterizes the attorney general’s life story.

It’s one key reason why Davis needs to set the record straight once and for all and do it early so we can focus instead on the issues that ought to decide this first campaign — since 2002 — for Texas governor that does not include Rick Perry.

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Can Sen. Ted Cruz make fun of himself? We’ll see

Ted Cruz has a pretty cool speaking gig on the horizon and it’s likely to test the man’s ability to make fun of himself.

The junior U.S. senator from Texas has been selected as the headline Republican speaker at the annual Gridiron Club dinner.

http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-on-the-potomac/2013/12/this-time-maybe-the-cat-in-the-hat/

It’s an annual event that draws media and political elites from Washington, D.C. together to poke a little fun at each other — and at themselves.

Cruz landed in Washington with a serious boom — not just a bang — this past January after winning the Senate seat in November 2012. He established himself immediately as the tea party wing of his party’s go-to guy on all manner of policy issues. He’s hogged TV time, made Senate floor speeches — including his infamous 21 1/2-hour faux filibuster over the Affordable Care Act — and managed to inflame feelings among his fellow Republicans, not to mention among Democrats.

I’ll hand it to Cruz, though. He’s an entertaining guy. As the blog post notes, he’ll follow in the steps of some recent folks who’ve brought the house down: Gov. Rick Perry in 2012 and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal this year.

The best part of all these speeches is when the speakers make fun of themselves, as Presidents Obama and George W. Bush have done over the years.

It’ll be interesting to see if Sen. Cruz has been given that self-deprecation gene that makes these events such fun to watch.

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Aggies join the campus presidency tumult

Just when I thought that Texas A&M University had avoided the kind of administrative warfare that has dogged the folks at the University of Texas-Austin, there go the Aggies in getting mixed up in a tussle over who should be the next president of the system’s flagship campus.

http://www.texastribune.org/2013/12/14/hussey-named-interim-president-texas-m-university/

The A&M System Board of Regents has unanimously named Mark Hussey to be the interim president of A&M-College Station, succeeding R. Bowen Loftin, who will leave soon to become chancellor of the University of Missouri.

It turns out Hussey was favored by Texas A&M Chancellor John Sharp. Another prominent Aggie, Gov. Rick Perry, wanted an old pal, Guy Dietrich, to get the interim president job.

Sharp’s guy won out. Too bad for the governor.

This kind of dispute is troublesome. We’ve been witnessing the hassles occurring at UT-Austin with President Bill Powers’s fight with some of the UT System regents. Gov. Perry has gotten mixed up in that kerfuffle as well. The regents keep meddling in Powers’s administrative duties. Perry, strangely enough, hasn’t done a thing to get them to back off, given that Powers was hired to do the heavy administrative lifting at the Austin campus.

I’m now officially concerned that Hussey could be undermined by Perry-Dietrich loyalists as he seeks to run the College Station campus during its transition from the Loftin era to whomever will get the permanent job.

It also might signal a rift between Sharp and Perry, one-time political rivals who have made peace in recent years. Sharp lost the lieutenant governor’s race to Perry in 1998 by a narrow margin. It was reported then that bad blood brewed between the two former Aggies dating back to when they served in the Legislature together.

I hope it’s all a mirage, that the two men are bigger than to let old hostility resurface.

The Texas A&M University System deserves better — as does the UT System — than to let politics get in the way of effective university administration.

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Immigration reform gets big boost

The overwhelming approval this week of the bipartisan budget deal signals a big win for U.S. House Speaker John Boehner.

The question now becomes whether he is feeling his Wheaties enough to push through some other legislation that needs to be enacted — such as immigration reform.

http://thehill.com/homenews/house/193034-does-boehner-victory-pave-the-way-for-immigration

The 332-94 House vote approving a budget deal that forestalls a government shutdown has been described as Boehner’s win over the tea party wing of his Republican Party. The tea party clowns also have been yammering against any effort to reform the nation’s immigration laws.

Boehner, until right about now, has been listening to the tea party crowd and saying things like the House won’t act on immigration this year, or maybe even next year. The budget victory now sends other signals that Boehner — who many believe wants to do an immigration deal — might be willing to step on a few more tea party toes.

Go for it, Mr. Speaker.

The nation needs desperately to give the 11 million or so undocumented immigrants living here a chance to come out of the shadows. Do they deserve a complete amnesty? No. They do deserve a chance to become citizens if that’s their desire. President Obama wants to enable those who were brought here as young children a chance to wipe the slate clean, given that they’ve grown up as Americans and know nothing other than life in this country.

The president has an unlikely ally in that effort in the form of GOP Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who also happens to be a tea party darling and who might run for president himself in 2016. Perry, though, governs a state with a large illegal immigrant population and he understands the complexities of the issue and knows how hard it is to round ’em all up and send ’em back the country of their birth.

So, I’m hoping Boehner can decide that the tea party wing of his party isn’t quite so fearsome and he can move immigration reform through the House of Representatives. If nothing else, he can help head off the designation that this Congress has earned for being so unproductive.

No one wants the “do-nothing” label hung around their neck, correct Mr. Speaker?

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Keep braggin’ on Texas, governor

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is proud of his state and is unafraid to say so.

Economically, if not politically, I have to agree that Texas has outshone much of the rest of the nation. Does the governor deserve credit for the successes? Partly, yes.

http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2013/11/rick-perry-texas-wins/

Perry recently got a glowing report on his state from Arthur Laffer, the godfather of supply-side economics, who says the state’s low-tax, business-friendly and low-regulation environment has helped businesses prosper while other states have languished in recent years.

Fair point.

What’s not accurate is for Laffer to say that Perry “is the person who is responsible for the Texas miracle.” Texas government is full of individuals who believe they deserve credit as well. The governor isn’t a one-man job-creation machine.

Still, for the governor to boast at a Texas Public Policy Foundation event in Austin is totally appropriate. It reminds, conversely, of how crass it has been for the governor to take that message into other states’ territory on these highly publicized and — in my view — questionable job-poaching excursions. He’s gone to places like California, Illinois and New York to declare to business executives that they should relocate to Texas, a move that would deprive other states of economic benefit.

Perry has been met with derision by governors of those states. Of course, it’s a highly partisan effort, given that all the states mentioned here are governed by Democrats — as opposed to Republicans, such as Perry.

Indeed, Texas’s economic success is well-known around the world. The governor can brag all he wants about how well the state is doing. I promise, the word will get out.

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Soon-to-be-ex-Gov. Perry reintroduces himself

Here he comes again, the man formerly known as Gov. Goodhair is returning to the national stage.

Rick Perry is about one year away from the end of his interminable tenure as Texas governor. He is not about to disappear. He won’t be heading back to Paint Creek to write poetry or learn how to paint. He’s coming back to the national stage … or so it seems.

Texas Tribune’s Ross Ramsey has written a fabulous analysis of Perry’s latest effort to rebrand himself, possibly setting himself up for another run for the Republican nomination for president in 2016.

http://www.texastribune.org/2013/11/18/and-now-reintroducing-governor-texas/

Ramsey cautions skeptics — such as myself — to avoid dismissing Perry’s effort at rebranding. Ramsey writes: “Joke all you want, but watch: The governor is pretty good at this sort of maneuver. He was a Democrat who loaned his time to Al Gore’s 1988 presidential campaign, when the Republican nominee was a Texan named George H.W. Bush. Two years later, as a Republican, Perry ambushed the state’s popular agriculture commissioner, Jim Hightower, a Democrat, in a statewide race that set him on his current political trajectory.”

Ramsey is a smart fellow who’s covered Texas politics like a blanket perhaps since The Flood. He knows Perry better than most journalists.

I still have trouble buying into the notion, though, that the governor who flamed out so miserably before the 2012 GOP presidential primary campaign really go started can re-tool himself sufficiently to make voters forget all the gaffes, goofs and guffaws he produced.

His “oops” moment will go down in history as a classic. Perry’s loose talk of secession in 2009 won’t play well in Yankee territory, which as a national candidate for president he will need. Remember when he accused of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke of committing a “treasonous act” by printing all that money?

This is just a sample of the kinds of issues his foes — even those within his own Republican Party — will be more than happy to throw back at him.

I’ve long thought of Perry as more than a guy with good hair. He has tremendous instincts when it comes to Texas politics. He knows his native state well and knows the people who live here.

Still, the late columnist Molly Ivins’s apt Gov. Goodhair moniker does seem to fit, which explains, according to Ross Ramsey, why Perry has donned black-framed eyeglasses in recent public appearances.

Get ready, America. You’re about to get a lot more of Rick Perry than ever before.

I’ll paraphrase comments I heard during Perry’s first run for president in 2012 that came from devoted Texas Panhandle Republicans. They were pulling for Perry to win the White House “just to get him out of Texas.”

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Persistent Perry keeps talking about jobs

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is nothing if not persistent.

He’s just authorized another national political ad that touts the job creation that’s occurred in Texas on his interminable watch as governor.

According to the Texas Tribune: “In a new ad for Americans for Economic Freedom, an organization aimed at helping Rick Perry champion Texas’ economic model, the governor and possible presidential contender talks about national job creation strategies.”

Interesting, eh?

Job growth in Texas has been largely a private-sector phenomenon. Gov. Perry has helped champion a business climate that is conducive to employers wanting to come here. I applaud that.

It fascinates me that Republicans such as Perry are quick to take credit for job creation while dismissing job growth that occurs on Democrats’ watch. I shall single out the dismissive attitudes the GOP has assumed regarding job growth during the Obama administration. The Labor Department this week announced that 204,000 jobs were created in October and it revised upward by 60,000 the number of jobs created during the previous two months.

Those jobs also are result of mostly private-sector activity.

Texas’s relatively good health is well-known around the world. Gov. Perry has reason to be proud of the state’s economic growth. Does he deserve the credit for jobs being created outside of government?

He thinks he does.

I’m wondering now if he’s ever going to give credit to the guys in the other party for the successes they, too, have enjoyed.

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Impeach Perry? You must be joking

Texas Monthly blogger and columnist Paul Burka poses an interesting — but still ludicrous — question about Gov. Rick Perry.

Has the governor become too entangled in the University of Texas-Austin power struggle to have committed an impeachable offense?

http://www.texasmonthly.com/burka-blog/perry-and-impeachment

What an amazing thing to wonder about the state of politics in this, of all the 50 states.

Burka’s blog post listed a couple of areas where Perry may have crossed the line into meddling in UT-Austin administrative affairs. Perry, let us remember, is a diehard Texas A&M Aggie — not that it should have anything to do with how he runs his office. However, in this world where conspiracy theories abound in all sorts of places, I suppose one could make the leap that Aggie Perry is trying to muck up the works at the hated UT.

The reality, though, is that Rick Perry never would be impeached in this state, which loves Republicans. Perry is one of them. Both houses of the Texas Legislature, which is where impeachment would originate, comprises supermajorities of Republican members.

What’s more, Perry is nearing the end of his tenure as governor. He’s not running for re-election to his umpteenth term next year. Instead, he’s bowing to likely prepare for yet another — and probably futile — bid for the presidency of the United States.

Impeachment in the cards? Hardly.

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Prop 6 looks like a water winner for state

Texas’ Legislature was kind to voters this election year by giving us “only” nine amendments to the Texas Constitution to consider.

One of them is of huge importance to the Panhandle. It’s Proposition 6, the “water amendment.”

I plan to vote for it.

http://www.texastribune.org/2013/10/22/guest-column-vote-yes-prop-6-we-need-water/

Gov. Rick Perry’s column attached here tells us that the amendment would allow the state to tap into its Rainy Day Fund — which is a rather ironic twist, if you think about it — to develop water resources for the state.

Perry writes: “Our booming economy, rapidly growing population and the drought that has plagued most of the state for years are combining to stress our ability to meet our water demands. If we do nothing to address these needs, we place at risk the health and well-being of future generations.”

The Rainy Day Fund, Perry and other supporters note, won’t be imperiled. There will remain plenty of money left in the fund to use for other “emergencies.” By my way of thinking, I believe the state’s water shortage constitutes an emergency, particularly in regions of the state that have so little of it. That means the Panhandle.

Perry adds, “Because of our economic strength, the Rainy Day Fund has reached historic highs. Even with a one-time transfer of funds to address our water needs, we’ll still have an estimated $8.3 billion in reserve.”

Debra Medina, the tea party darling who ran for governor in 2010, opposes it. Her essay is attached here:

http://www.texastribune.org/2013/10/22/guest-column-vote-no-prop-6/

Of the two, Perry’s makes more sense. Proposition 6 is a reasonable approach to spending money the state has on hand to fend off actual emergencies.

A world without water? That constitutes a dire circumstance.