And then there's Texas.
While press reports indicate most Electoral College votes across the nation proved placid affairs, my decades of newspaper experience covering the Republican Party of Texas and the partisan activists who increasingly set its rancorous tone and chart its destructive course left me absolutely confident they would again prove ugly outliers. Anyone who knows some of these party activists through their participation in legislative committee hearings, their resolutions and hijinks during state and county conventions and their behavior during party meetings just knows they're going to do something to aggravate matters. And for lots of reasons: Because they can't quite get over the fact Texas was once a republic and should still be one. Because they equate patriotism with increasingly right-wing, undemocratic radicalism. Because, thanks to the Lone Star/John Waynesque, taller-than-reality persona of feisty independence, swaggering arrogance and country-fried wisdom, they assume privileges that other states in their view lack. Their unhelpful contributions to a bitterly divided nation contending with a pandemic crisis and now a cyber-attack by the Russians on our national security infrastructure bring to mind British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s 1944 wartime radio address observations about “the little folk who exist in every country and who frolic alongside the juggernaut car of war to see what fun or notoriety they can extract from the proceedings.”
Opportunists and grandstanders in party ranks, social media, talk radio and cable TV have over the decades capitalized (in both senses of the word) on Republican presidential candidate and incendiary pundit Pat Buchanan's "pitchfork brigade" of the 1990s; the briefly (oh-so-briefly) nonpartisan tea-party movement of 2009 and beyond that demanded Republicans never compromise and always fight and obstruct and impede, even if this means problems never get solved and future generations must suffer; and the unapologetic Trumpist populism of xenophobia, isolationism, authoritarianism and deceit of present day. Amidst this bunch, vaccination is viewed with cynicism bordering on Deep State conspiracy, even though the alternative yields sickness, contamination and agonizing death; latter-day climate change is dismissed as a completely natural turn of events or a hoax concocted of falsified or misinterpreted data, meaning that Republicans need not worry about addressing rising coastal waters, punishing droughts and increasingly violent storms; immigrants are stereotyped as raping, murdering hordes seeking to change our way of life and vote in our elections, even if statistics support none of this and the Texas economy desperately needs immigrants, legal and otherwise, to do jobs many U.S. citizens will not stoop to do; saving the lives of the innocent unborn is embraced as a sacred cause, even as those Americans born into poverty and despair are viewed with utter indifference, even contempt; unrestrained federal spending is viewed as a threat to our progeny, except when it's a Republican presidential administration doing the unrestrained spending (and tax-cutting); gun rights demand the steady relaxing of regulations while voting rights warrant increasing regulation and hardship and scrutiny, especially for people who don't quite look like us; and secession is viewed as a worthy and constitutional option if the federal government and now other states don’t mind and heed and respect Texas Republicans — a traitorous passion lately pressed by the newly elected chairman of the Republican Party of Texas and cleverly labeled “Texit” in politically correct deference to what some Britons seek to do.
Many of these rank-and-file Republican activists — not all but way too many of them — offer strutting studies in proud eccentricity and stunning self-delusion, conjuring the type of anxiety and dread you feel in throwing a party for the gang at work when you know this means inviting the workplace braggart who almost certainly will attend and swagger and bellow and insult before finally defecating in the punch bowl.
And so Monday instead of simply fulfilling their constitutional duties and casting our state's 38 Electoral College votes for President Trump's re-election, they did something none of these electors would ever tolerate another state's electors doing without great fits of outrage and protest and indignation: They passed a resolution telling legislators in four battleground states how to conduct their electoral affairs to ensure Trump's victory, even though certified election results and Electoral College tallies demand otherwise. And if the legislatures of those states — Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — failed to pick electors to supplant those duly charged with voting for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, then Republicans in their congressional delegations must object sufficiently to those tallies on Jan. 6 to keep the votes of "unconstitutionally appointed electors" from counting.
In short, Texas electors resolved to continue the quixotic fight Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton waged in his five-day lawsuit this month, seeking to invalidate the votes of millions of voters in other U.S. states, all tainted (Paxton claimed) by election irregularities and executive actions, even though Paxton sidestepped the fact his state's own governor and supreme court are guilty of the very same things. Coming atop dozens of other unsuccessful lawsuits choking state and federal courts on President Trump's behalf, the Paxton suit is astounding in its audacity. However, President Trump was pleased and Paxton, under indictment for state securities fraud and under federal investigation for bribery and abuse of office to help a campaign donor, clearly raised his profile with Trump supporters in Texas and beyond. All of which may aid him personally in the future.
The Supreme Court of the United States quickly declined to consider the Paxton case, a decision that speaks volumes about the suit and possibly General Paxton’s repute given that the high court in some minds might ordinarily be predisposed to help the Trump rebellion: It after all has a 6-3 conservative majority, complete with three justices appointed by none other than President Trump. Three things the court might well be telling Paxton and those who support one state's pressing a federal court to invalidate the votes of other states: First, the suit is completely contrary to the principles of federalism in which Republican lawmakers have insisted their federal court appointments be steeped; second, it violates an ironclad constitutional agreement the Founders made to allow the individual states to manage their own elections; third, Texas' standing to sue because of its concern over the balance of power in the U.S. Senate (and the vice president who can break tie votes) is too off the wall for even this court to seriously contemplate.
Demonstrating the tendency of most activists when the limelight beckons, the Texas electors made clear they were spoiling for a fight and ready to rumble. Angry with the high court's unanimous decision a few days earlier, most applauded elector Mark Ramsey's resolution obligingly charting the next steps for state and federal lawmakers in other states, even though concerns were properly raised as to whether passing resolutions in an Electoral College meeting exceeded their constitutional authority. Matters quickly spiraled downward as they debated whether the resolution should at the very outset condemn the Supreme Court for "moral cowardice" as proposed. For instance, elector Matt Patrick bolstered his arguments for keeping the insult in place with a heady mix of hearsay several times over and social-media rumormongering. He spoke:
"I'd like to leave the words in there. I wish I could give you a specific citation for this, but I didn't make note of it because it is something I read this morning and I didn't know we would be presenting this amendment yet. There's a report available online that was written by someone who is a current staffer for one of the Supreme Court justices. I will describe the report that I read and you can make of it what you will. He said the justices, as they always do, went into a closed room to discuss cases they are taking or to debate. There's no phones, no computers, no nothing. No one else is in the room except for the nine justices. It’s typically very civil. They usually don't hear a sound, they just debate what they're doing. When the Texas case was brought up, he said he heard screaming through the walls as [Chief] Justice [John] Roberts and the other liberal justices were insisting that this case not be taken up. The reason, the words heard through the wall when Justice [Clarence] Thomas and Justice [Samuel] Alito were citing Bush v. Gore, from Justice Roberts were, 'I don't give a ---- about that case! I don't want to hear about it! At that time we didn't have riots!' So what he was saying was that he was afraid of what would happen if they did the right thing. And I'm sorry, but that is moral cowardice. And we in the [State Republican Executive Committee] — I am an SREC member — we put those words in very specifically because the charge of the Supreme Court is to ultimately be our final arbitrator, our final line of defense for right and wrong. And they did not do their duty. So I think we should leave those words in because I want to send a strong message to them."
Frisco attorney and elector Jim Pikl, who according to Texas Monthly just a few weeks ago tweeted that conservatives will never win unless they "cheat" as Democrats do, now cautioned against vehemence in maligning high justices in the resolution at hand:
"I've been a constitutional appellate civil rights lawyer for 35 years, been in front of the United States Supreme Court nine times. Sending a message like this to a body of legislators or judicial officers is not going to get the attention you want it to get. Nobody knows what happened in that conference room on purpose. 'Hearing yelling' is triple hearsay or quadruple hearsay about what was going on in that room — you cannot make your decision on that basis. You just can't do it. This body, if it passes a resolution, and I'm not even sure it can, it needs to be the resolution of this body, not infected by what five other people maybe someday someplace said about what was happening at the Supreme Court. We either adopt the words 'moral cowardice' — which are not legal terms, by the way, they're emotional terms — or we take those words out. The decision from the Supreme Court was very short — you can read it, it's one page— just said: 'We rejected it because [Texas doesn't] have standing,' That's a legal concept. I think there's just a few people in this room that understand what 'standing' is better than I do. It's a standing issue, it's a legal issue, it's not a moral issue. Plus I think there were a lot of reasons why [the justices] did it the way they did it, which might actually be favorable to us. So I would not put inflammatory language in any kind of resolution leaving this room that’s going out to a body of judicial or legislative officers across the state because it makes us look childish, impertinent and angry. And that is not the signal the great state of Texas should send."
In the end, the amendment to amend the resolution striking "moral cowardice" was adopted 29 to 9 with one absent (which adds up to more than 38 electors, but, heck, who cares?) and so the newly amended resolution was adopted 34-4. Ramsey showed hostility at fellow elector David Bruegel's repeated concern that passing resolutions in an Electoral College setting is not authorized by the U.S. Constitution or state law: "Deliberative bodies can go almost anywhere they want to go, provided there is not some prohibition against it. There's no prohibition against this badly needed resolution. America has been termed a shining light on a hill. When other countries have faced massive election fraud, the end result more often than not has been a collapse of their rights, a collapse of their government, a collapse of their economies and an inevitable slide towards tyranny."
If context matters (and it always does), then a few more notes serve to show how Texas Republicans are willing to place the rights and even the lives of others in peril to subvert the Constitution and ensure Trump another four years in power. The day after Texas electors concluded their duties, an ex-captain of the Houston Police Department was arrested in connection with an Oct. 19 incident in which he reportedly ran off the road and assaulted an air-conditioning repairman driving a vehicle supposedly crammed full of hundreds of thousands of bogus ballots. Turns out the ex-cop was part of an investigative squad hired by the Texas-based Liberty Center for God and Country, whose CEO is Republican activist Steve Hotze. He's the God-fearin’ guy who joined Republican Party of Texas chairman Allen West and Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller in suing Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for the latter's executive order expanding early voting in Texas to "implement health protocols to conduct elections safely and to protect election workers and voters." Hotze is also the self-styled patriot who sought to invalidate the ballots of some 127,000 Harris County voters because they used a drive-through voting venue during early voting — a lawsuit ultimately rejected by the rigorously conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. Not surprisingly, Hotze has described the allegations against his gun-brandishing investigator “bogus,” though authorities in Harris County obviously see it differently. “He crossed the line from dirty politics to commission of a violent crime and we are lucky no one was killed,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said last week of the errant ex-lawman. “His alleged investigation was backward from the start — first alleging a crime had occurred and then trying to prove it happened.” Former Capt. Mark Aguirre, 63, now stands charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, a second-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Old-fashioned justice suggests Hotze also deserves criminal charges in all of this, but such is the fortune of the wealthy and the privileged who regularly soar untarnished and unaccountable above the misdeeds and carnage they so often set into motion.
Incidentally, the air-conditioning repairman's truck was filled with ... air-conditioning parts and tools. And so another Trumpian conspiracy without evidence goes up in smoke.
One final note as we witness the Republican Party’s steady mutation into a seditious and violent force in America with the full complicity of the 126 U.S. House Republicans who backed the Paxton suit this month: A day after the Texas electors met, voted, condemned the high court and advised others to pursue treasonous or at the very least subversive ends, Steve Vladeck, the insightful Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas School of Law, responded to an elected county official who, upon reading Vladeck’s critical analysis of the Dec. 7 Ken Paxton lawsuit (upon which Texas electors drew inspiration), castigated him for not keeping a scholarly open mind about election allegations. Vladeck wrote a wonderful response that in its entirety probably won't get the exposure it deserves. Still, a powerful excerpt is appropriate. After again explaining the embarrassing flaws and truck-sized holes in the Paxton lawsuit, Vladeck went on to the broader issue at hand, one to which the Texas electors and many others in Texas and beyond seem oblivious.
"As for your broader claim of fraud and other improprieties, well, I just don't think I'm going to convince you that you're wrong. But let me just point out that the Trump campaign has had every possible opportunity to actually prove these claims in court — in Georgia, in Wisconsin, in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, in Arizona and in Nevada. As a lawyer and an elected official, I would hope that you'd appreciate the difference between allegations and proof — and the significance of the fact that the campaign has been unable to substantiate any of these claims in court. Would you really have the election results undone because of unproven allegations? Who should be the arbiter of such things if not the highest courts in each state? Instead, the real argument, at the end of the day, is not that there was widespread fraud; it was that the states — including, I should point out, our own state of Texas, in which Gov. Abbott unilaterally extended early voting — tried to make it easier and safer for lawful, registered voters to cast their ballots in the middle of an unprecedented pandemic."
None of which will pierce the tightly coiled, fanciful narratives to which those Republican Party activists making up Texas electors subscribe. Having relished another satisfying "Alamo moment," they have for the moment retired unscathed from the field of battle, their duty done and more.
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