Tag Archives: Texas GOP

local news

Battle set for Texas Senate District 31

A conversation I had this week with a friend and former colleague informed me of a battle for political power that is developing in the Texas Panhandle.

It involves Texas Senate District 31, which has been occupied since 2004 by Kel Seliger of Amarillo; Seliger is not seeking re-election this year, leaving the seat vacant for the next person to emerge from an expected tough battle.

I am biased, to be sure, but I hope the seat remains in the hands of a Texas Panhandle politician. Seliger served as Amarillo mayor before moving to the Senate; his predecessor, Teel Bivins also hailed from Amarillo; as did the fellow who preceded Bivins, Bill Sarpalius.

Kevin Sparks of Midland has declared his candidacy for the seat. I am looking for good things, though, to come from Tim Reid, a retired FBI agent who returned to Amarillo after retiring from the federal government.

Reid is no stranger to local political office. He served on the Canyon school district board before being transferred by the FBI to a new station back east.

Reid is appealing for a major reason: He is not aligned with Empower Texans, the far-right conservative political action committee that has targeted Seliger for years. It has recruited candidates to run against Seliger, who in turn has spoken ill of the individuals who run the PAC. Empower Texans has endorsed Sparks to succeed Seliger. Reid is running as the anti-Empower Texans candidate. He would have my vote … if I lived in Amarillo.

I am casually acquainted with Reid. He served on the Canyon school board for a time after I arrived in the Panhandle in early 1995 to run the opinion pages of the Amarillo Globe-News. Still, since he is running as a traditional Republican in a district populated more and more by the wacko wing of the GOP, I want to offer him a good word as he seeks to hold the seat for the Panhandle.

The Panhandle already has a nut job representing it in Congress in the person of Ronny Jackson. It doesn’t need another far-right fruitcake representing it in the Texas Senate.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news, State news

Governor’s race presents conundrum

The upcoming Republican Party primary race for Texas governor presents a serious conundrum for GOP voters.

They will get to choose from among three top-tier candidates, two of whom are nut jobs.

We have the governor, Greg Abbott; challenging him are former Texas GOP chairman Allen West and former state senator Don Huffines. I won’t vote in the GOP primary this March, but I do have a thought or two I want to share.

Abbott is being challenged on the right by West and Huffines. Those two clowns don’t believe Abbott is conservative enough. West is the former one-term Florida congressman who moved to Texas because his political career in Florida was shot; Huffines is another far right-winger who says we need to ban all immigration into Texas.

Then we have Abbott, the guy who is fighting with the Biden administration over mask mandates.

I believe Abbott will survive this primary challenge, chiefly because West and Huffines are going to carve up the nut-job vote, paving the way for Abbott to skate to the party nomination.

It reminds me of the Texas Senate District 31 race in 2018 that enabled Sen. Kel Seliger of Amarillo to win his party’s nomination in a three-man race. His foes that year were former Midland mayor Mike Canon and Amarillo businessman Victor Leal. Both men sought to outflank Seliger on the far right. Seliger ran as a true-blue,  mainstream Texas conservative and won the primary fight with 50.4 percent of the vote; no runoff was needed.

Canon and Leal split the goofball vote in that year’s Senate GOP primary.

I see the same thing happening this year in the GOP primary for governor.

Texas politics is really weird, indeed.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news, political news, State news

Texas’s newest residents get stiffed

Texas is going to get two more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Why? Because our state grew significantly during the past 10 years.

The population boom was fueled by more African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians flocking to the state. The word is that these folks generally vote Democratic. So, it was believed that the state’s changing demography was going to make the state more, um, divided politically.

Well, the Legislature took care of that by gerrymandering the new congressional and legislative districts to ensure that the Republican Party maintains its chokehold on power.

The Legislature takes command of the redistricting effort every decade. The 2020 census shows the state achieving additional power in Congress with those two new seats. However, Republicans are big winners, given the way the Legislature reconfigured all those boundaries.

Collin County, where I now reside, was turned into an even heavier GOP-friendly place; Collin County voted narrowly for Donald Trump in 2020, but would have voted significantly more for the ex-POTUS had the new borders been in effect.

I am scratching my noodle on this one. Is this the way “representative democracy” is supposed to work?

I think not.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

State news

Texas Democrats take another gut punch

Ryan Guillen no longer is a Democrat, having switched party affiliation to Republican.

That’s a big deal? You betcha. Especially  when the party-switcher is a longtime Democratic legislator from South Texas who told his former party leaders that the Democratic Party has abandoned him; so he is becoming a Republican.

This is grim news for Texas Democratic Party officials who keep telling the world about how the tide in Texas is turning from Republican Red to Democratic Blue. But … is it?

RealClearPolitics reports: While Guillen is a state lawmaker whose switch won’t impact which party holds power in Washington, there’s one sign that this may not be an isolated example: At least nine congressional House Democrats have  announced they are not seeking reelection next year. More are expected to follow.

As for the impact on the state’s political fortunes, Guillen’s switcheroo seems to portend something ominous for a party that contends the changing Texas demography suggests that Democrats are on the rise and Republicans are sinking.

I am not so sure about that. Just yet anyway.

Guillen is a Texas Latino who believes the Democratic Party has taken him for granted along with those who share his ethnicity.

Texas Party Switcher Is Latest Ominous Sign for Democrats | RealClearPolitics

I used to call the Golden Triangle home. The Triangle is in deep Southeast Texas, where Democrats until the early 1990s continued to occupy virtually every county elected office in sight. That began changing about the time I moved from Beaumont to the other corner of the state, in Republican-heavy Amarillo.

Republicans now occupy every statewide office in Texas and a heavy majority of the local offices as well. Dallas County, next door to us in our new home in Collin County, remains a heavily Democratic bastion.

So, if Democrats intend to regain any semblance of influence in Texas, they need to heed the admonition of one of its veteran former legislative representatives: stop taking your core constituency for granted.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

State news

Fruitcake ratio unworthy of boast

Texas is a big state, with lots of people who call it home and lots of politicians elected to leadership positions.

Thus, it stands to reason that Texas would be home to an inordinate number of assorted fruitcakes, goofballs, nut jobs and, dare I say it, dangerous zealots.

State Sen. Bob Hall recently joined the High Plains Blogger nut job “honor roll,” with statements criticizing the vaccines available to inoculate us against the COVID-19 killer virus.

He is far from alone. My goodness, we have loons making national headlines daily with their preposterous statements.

Sadly, almost all of ’em are Republicans. Ye gads, man!

U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert of Tyler is my unofficial captain of the goofball squad. He is a “birther” who continues to question whether Barack Obama was qualified to seek and to serve as president of the U.S. Former Texas GOP chair Allen West is a close second in the running. He once called Democrats “communists.” Then we have Sen. Ted Cruz, the lunatic who continually inserts his foot in his mouth while proclaiming his intention to block every single initiative that comes from President Biden or Democrats in Congress.

I’ll stop with those three. The state’s roster of nut cases is too voluminous to continue. You’ll get my drift.

We love living in Texas. My wife and I established a good life here when we ventured from Oregon in 1984. Our sons have acclimated themselves well (I believe) to Texas culture; indeed, they both came of age here.

We have watched the state make a dramatic transition from a mostly Democratic state to a solidly Republican one during our time here. I don’t begrudge the rise of the GOP per se. What I do begrudge is the surrender of mainstream conservatism to the goofiness that prevails in so many quarters here.

I always presumed Texas pols were smarter than to be snookered by the cult leader who seized control of the GOP in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.

Silly me. What in the world was I thinking?

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

State news

Abbott pushed rightward

Don Huffines is taking credit he might — or might not — deserve in his effort to unseat fellow Republican Greg Abbott from the Texas governor’s office.

I tend to believe that he deserves at least part of the credit he is taking.

You see, Huffines is running in the Texas GOP primary next year against Abbott. He’s been hectoring Abbott over policy matters. Abbott is responding by, hmm, marching to the cadence that Huffines is calling.

The Texas Tribune reports: Abbott’s decision Monday to prohibit private businesses from requiring COVID-19 vaccines for employees marked a stark reversal for the governor — and came after Huffines hounded him over it. Abbott justified the reversal as necessary pushback against the federal government, but Huffines declared victory — and it is far from the only issue where he contends he has pushed Abbott to the right.

Gov. Greg Abbott’s rightward push tracks challenge from Don Huffines | The Texas Tribune

Indeed, Abbott has disappointed me ever since he got elected governor in 2014. I knew him as Texas attorney general and before that when he served on the state Supreme Court. He swilled the right-wing Kool-Aid when he took office as governor.

But now he has tilted even farther rightward as he faces a primary challenge from Huffines as well as from former Texas GOP chair Allen West, who’s a radical right-winger.

Is Huffines driving Abbott toward the cliff on the rightward edge? Yeah, more than likely.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

State news

Legislature stiffs voters ‘of color’

Well, here we go.

Texas will gain two congressional seats as a result of the 2020 census. Who drove the state’s stunning population increase? Black and Latino residents, that’s who.

Are they going to reap any of the political reward for choosing to make Texas their home? Oh, no. The Texas Senate has hammered out a congressional redistricting map that does a fine job of protecting Republican (and overwhelmingly white) incumbents. There isn’t likely to be any majority African-American or Latino districts when all is finished.

That’s representative democracy at among its worst.

To be fair, it is important to note the bipartisan nature of this exercise that occurs every decade when they take the census. Democrats did the same thing to protect their own when they ran things in Austin. Now it’s Republicans’ turn. They have perfected gerrymandering, turning it into an art form.

However, it is galling to me to watch the Legislature stiff the ethnic and racial minorities who came to Texas voluntarily, to make it their home and for them to be denied any sort of political reward.

The Texas Tribune reports: In anticipation of federal challenges to the map, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican who presides over the Senate, said in a statement Friday that the proposal approved by the chamber was “legal and fair” and represented a “commitment to making sure every Texan’s voice is heard in Washington, D.C.”

Texas Senate approves new congressional map protecting GOP incumbents | The Texas Tribune

Actually, Lt. Gov. Patrick, “every Texan’s voice” is not going to be heard equally when all is done.

He should just get ready for the lawsuits that are sure to follow.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

State news

Catch your breath, Texas Democrats

(Bob Daemmrich/Pool Photo via AP)

Texas Democrats no doubt are having trouble catching their breath over recent polling news regarding the state’s top Republican: Gov. Greg Abbott.

I word of caution: Don’t get ahead of yourselves.

Recent Texas Tribune polling shows significant slippage among Texas independents regarding the governor. Abbott now trails film star Matthew McConaughey by 9%. Then there’s former El Paso congressman Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat who is sounding more and more like a Texas candidate for governor; O’Rourke is within spitting distance of Abbott … pollwise.

I am going to shake my head on all of this.

I also shall stipulate that I hope Abbott can be beaten next year when we elect the vast bulk of our state’s constitutional officeholders. Abbott is one of them. I am profoundly angry at the way he has governed since he first was elected in 2014.

He is tacking to the hard right. Abbott is facing Republican primary foes, such as former Texas GOP chair Allen West, the one-term Florida congressman who moved to Texas to further his political aspirations. We have former state Sen. Don Huffines, too, in the GOP primary contest.

I don’t know whether Matthew McConaughey will run as a Democrat or a Republican. He is being coy about his political orientation. Indeed, he is bobbing and weaving on plenty of specific issues as well.

As for the heavy breathing among Democrats that Abbott is on the ropes, it is way too premature to start ringing the death knell on the governor’s political career.

Texas is to this day a heavily Republican state, no matter the demographic changes that are turning this state into more of a political battleground. Let us not forget that GOP voters in Texas are capable of electing some serious losers to serious public offices.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news

Roe v. Wade far from ‘settled’

If you thought the landmark Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the United States had become “settled law,” you had better think again.

The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision is now under a full frontal assault by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature. Texas now has a law on the books that prohibits a woman from obtaining an abortion as early as six weeks into her pregnancy.

President Biden calls the law “unconstitutional.” The current Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 to let the law take effect even though it is being contested by multiple lawsuits.

One of the four dissenting justices, Stephen Breyer, calls the SCOTUS decision “very, very, very wrong.”

The Texas Tribune reports: The Texas law is novel for incentivizing private citizens to police abortions. It empowers anyone living in the state of Texas to sue an abortion provider or anyone else they suspect is “aiding and abetting” abortions after the six-week mark. Those opposing the law say this may be far-ranging and could include the abortion provider or anyone who provided transportation to a woman, or counseled or referred a woman for an abortion.

Stephen Breyer calls Supreme Court decision on Texas abortion law ‘wrong’ | The Texas Tribune

There’s a fascinating bit of irony at play here. Conservatives proclaim proudly that they oppose what they call “judicial activism.” They say they dislike court decisions that go beyond the Constitution’s strict adherence to original intent.

From my perch in North Texas, it appears that most of the court’s conservatives — except for Chief Justice John Roberts, who sided with the liberal wing — are engaging in a raw form of judicial activism by dismissing the lawsuits and declaring that a law that is being challenged should take effect.

Wouldn’t a “conservative” court just let the litigation play out and stay out of the way?

Settled law? Not when you have a group of judicial activists on the nation’s highest court.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

crime news, State news

Eliminate rape? Umm … how?

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott officially has lost his ever-lovin’ mind.

He has signed a bill that bans abortion in Texas virtually across the board. It says women cannot terminate a pregnancy after the sixth week when most women — as I understand it — don’t even know they’re pregnant.

The new law also does not exempt women who have become pregnant as a result of rape or incest. Abbott’s response to a question from a reporter about that?

He said he is going to “eliminate all rape in Texas.” What? Huh? How in the world does he propose to do that?

No law ever written has deterred a madman from attacking a woman, forcing himself on her and impregnating her. No law can ever prevent rape from occurring. None! What in the world is Gov. Abbott saying here?

Do not misunderstand me on a key point: There are few things in the world I would want more than to see an end to violent sexual assault … such as rape and incest. However, it cannot be legislated. It cannot be mandated just because a governor, or a legislature, or Congress or the president declares his or her intention to “eliminate” it.

Women will continue to be raped. Some of them will conceive children as a result of that dastardly act. Now, under Texas law, they will have to carry that pregnancy to full term and these women will have to give birth to someone who came into their lives as the result of a violent crime.

Someone will have to explain the humanity of that law to me. Anyone? I’m all ears.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com