Hard truths, hard feelings complicate Texas voting rights

The ongoing clash between Texas Republicans, who have long run the show at the Texas State Capitol and will do whatever is required to retain the power and the privilege, and Texas Democrats, now concluding a quixotic mission to the U.S. Capitol to level the playing field in ways they can’t manage at the ballot box, has been described as a battle over voting rights. True. It’s also described in Texas as a rural-versus-urban struggle, highlighting differences bolstered by generations of politicking, gerrymandering and stereotyping on both sides; one existence sees itself as carrying on a sentimental, sometimes illusionary charge regarding tradition and down-home values, the other is swept up in the speculation, even excitement one sometimes finds in changing times that nonetheless seem to move us closer to the grand promises made in our nation’s founding documents.

Yet many of us know what this is really about.

The grim reality was reinforced for me the other day while reading an online update illustrated with a two-photograph panel: In the left photo: Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, white, 63, seemingly caught mid-sentence haranguing about Texas House Democrats who for a second time this year broke quorum, fled the grounds and suspended business in that chamber, shelving an “election integrity” bill in a state where 2020 elections were, to quote the Republican-run Secretary of State’s Office, “secure and smooth.” Abbott vows to call special session after special session till Democrats return, take their medicine and watch as Republicans pass election reforms complicating and restricting participatory democracy in Texas.

In the right panel of this diptych: Texas House Democrats, a sea of ethnic color defining today’s Texas, gathered for a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol. And just imagine the damning public relations disaster awaiting a state that prides itself on its neat and proper corporate profile and its strong reputation as a tourism mecca if and when these African Americans and Hispanics are returned to the Texas State Capitol in handcuffs by order of white men in the Texas leadership. Jordan Vonderhaar has shot a telling photo for Texas Tribune of a bunch of whites gathered around the House Speaker’s podium, pressing to strip absent Democrats of committee appointments.

For anyone who denies this is ultimately about race, I say: Look at the photographs.

Consider, too, last week’s testimony submitted before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties by three of the Democrats who fled the Texas State Capitol, including 82-year-old state Rep. Senfronia Thompson. An African American from Houston long of the Texas House of Representatives, she said imposing restrictions on citizen access to the polling place isn’t unusual in Texas; it qualifies as tradition in some minds: “For my grandparents to have a voice in their government, they saved pennies and nickels to afford a $1.50 poll tax. Even after saving their hard-earned money, the price that was imposed in an effort to restrict the access of voters of color to the ballot box was too high for both of them to vote. My grandmother voted, but my grandfather could not. A poll tax was not the only barrier my grandparents and many other people of color faced when attempting to exercise their right to vote. Although we still have issues with access to transportation and the ballot box today, it was even less accessible to my grandmother who lived in the suburbs of Houston. She was made to travel a great distance just to access a polling location designated for ‘colored only’ where she was allowed to cast her ballot.”

And there’s this from 48-year-old state Rep. Nicole Collier, an African-American attorney from Fort Worth, also testifying before the subcommittee on the need to nationalize guarantees to election access: “In the November 2020 general election, Texas saw the largest voter turnout in Texas since 1992 with 66.8% of eligible voters casting their ballot, including the highest turnout in 10 years of black, brown and Asian eligible voters. Too often we look for obvious signs of suppression when it comes to our freedom to vote such as poll taxes or literacy tests. However, suppression can also happen in subtle ways like when your polling location continues to change, or the hours the polls are open vary, long lines or harsh criminal penalties for people who make simple mistakes. All of that disrupts the voting process and makes it less likely for people to participate. Voting does not have to be hard, but it should be fair and free.”

State Rep. Diego Bernal, 44, a former San Antonio City Council member completing this trio of Texas House Democrats appearing before the subcommittee, reminded lawmakers of Hispanics’ growing influence in Texas, arguably worrying the Republican Party of Texas to the point of attempting to confound electoral access through repeated legislation: “This bill was filed, heard in committee and voted out in just a matter of days. More than 450 members of the public came to Austin, Texas, to testify in front of the House Select Committee on Constitutional Rights and Remedies regarding how this legislation would impact their lives: 407 individuals registered opposed, 65 registered in support and 12 registered neutral. Testimony resulted in a marathon hearing with witnesses waiting up to 23 hours to testify. Much like testimony heard about Senate Bill 7 [during the 180-day regular legislative session this spring], the vast majority of public testimony on House Bill 3 [filed during the July special session] focused on how this bill would make voting more difficult. Nonetheless, Republicans disregarded the witnesses, refused to accept any [House] Democrats’ amendments and voted the bill out of committee 9-5. This forced my colleagues and I to take action once again, utilizing the Texas House quorum rule to defeat the measure, which brings me before you today.” The legislation, he added, defies demographic realities: “Census data shows that the Hispanic and Latino community is the fastest-growing demographic in Texas. As such, we are a vitally important voting bloc and will decide the future of the state’s politics. Latinos are not a monolith. To reflect the diversity of our electorate, it is vital that we have a responsive elections system that can adjust to the needs of the community casting their ballots. More options, not less.”

Certainly after largely excusing and whitewashing an armed insurrection incited by a president of their own party falsely and maliciously claiming widespread electoral fraud for his loss in 2020, Republicans really should check themselves before attacking Texas House Democrats for recklessness. As Democratic House Subcommittee Chairman and constitutional scholar Jamie Raskin, 58, said of the Trump-inspired insurrectionists during last week’s hearing: “They had a complaint about voting, too. They came here to ‘Stop the Steal.’ They had been goaded by Donald Trump to come and try to put pressure, coercive pressure, on Vice President Mike Pence to reject Electoral College votes from Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania, to proclaim a power no vice president has ever exercised before and doesn’t exist in the Constitution. And Pence, to his great credit, refused to do it. And you know what? They trashed the place. And they injured and wounded 140 police officers. Now we have representatives from a major political party in Texas representing African Americans, Mexican Americans, white people, Native Americans who are coming forward to say that their voting rights are being subjected to a gauntlet, an obstacle course that was so precisely elucidated by Rep. Bernal who said this is just another dressed-up form of voter suppression.”

During the congressional hearing, one also got a sense of the outrage and defensiveness among Republicans, including Congressman Pete Sessions, 66, still smarting back home in Waco over a photo he posted on social media, then deleted, of himself posing with “Stop the Steal” protesters outside the U.S. Capitol a few days before 800 or so like-minded protesters stormed the building, overwhelmed Capitol police officers and drove lawmakers (including Sessions) into hiding. At one point, Sessions lambasted the Texas Democrats assembled before him and faulted the subcommittee hosting them for “allowing and coddling people who should be at work in the state of Texas, [doing] their constitutional duties, and yet we’re treating them as hometown heroes in Washington, D.C.” Of his own party, he declared defiantly: “We don’t go and accuse people of things just because we’re losing” – an astonishing statement given that Sessions and fellow Republicans have for months alleged widespread fraud, without evidence, in the hard-fought 2020 presidential election. (To quote Sessions on social media back on Nov. 19: "This election was conducted fraudulently. We have the evidence and will prove the case.") At another point during the hearing, obviously seeking to show that Texas lawmakers are progressive on race, Sessions, who is white, stressed how ballots in the state are even printed in multiple languages: “That’s not backwards. That’s pretty important!” Then Collier and Nina Perales of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund corrected Sessions: Texas offers voting in multiple languages because the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 and federal courts mandate it.

Sins of the here and now  

The latest struggle over voting rights confirms an article I read 30 or so years ago by a historian – the name is lost to me – who predicted that America’s Original Sin, demonstrated in that “peculiar institution” of slavery, then in Jim Crow laws and traditions rendering African Americans second-class citizens, would dog, bedevil and cripple America well into the 21st century. And anyone who knows the saga of the Texas Rangers knows of the horrific violence visited upon Hispanics in our state. Even now, much of the immigration fervor, while absolutely legitimate on one plane, is clearly driven by rabid racism on another. Such racism clearly spurred Texas’ poorly crafted voter ID law in 2011, partially based on wild-eyed claims that the illegal immigrants quietly slaving away in the blazing sun on Texans’ roofs and manicuring Texans’ lawns and working in Texas slaughterhouses and on highway construction speeding Texas’ prosperity would break from labors few U.S. citizens would condescend to do to risk exposure, arrest and deportation to vote on issues and candidates with little significance or meaning in their shadowy existences.

At the time I read this historian’s prediction about racism clouding American democracy and destiny well into the next century, I had the same opinion of many whites in Texas: that while there remained great room for improvement in racial equality in the 1990s, America was on the right track. There was landmark legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, plus important initiatives such as affirmative action. And whether police departments or school districts or newsrooms such as the two in which I worked for nearly 45 years, the momentum across much of America was to earnestly diversify opportunities and enable the marginalized.

Yet the scab of racism ever awaits some opportunistic demagogue playing to white paranoia to pick it off and set back our hard-won strides. In the current environment of ethnic and racial polarization, with both sides erupting at the slightest of sleights, measures such as Democratic U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s repeated bids to press for reparations addressing the lingering consequences of slavery and Jim Crow only aggravate escalating tensions. So do claims such as journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones’ contention in the controversial New York Times “1619 Project” that the American Revolution was fought to perpetuate slavery.

Plenty has been written on America’s unique struggle over equality, including national pride in the Declaration of Independence that in many minds today justifies the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness some citizens now pursue in defiant, selfish, knee-jerk fashion. It has been cited regularly, for instance, by Americans angrily refusing to protect their families and neighbors and classrooms and long-range commerce by bowing to temporarily mandated facial coverings during a deadly pandemic. This obstinacy and belligerence extends to our continuing unwillingness to completely live up to the rest of Thomas Jefferson’s noble passage – “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Certainly matters weren’t helped by the fact Americans launched their bid for independence amid duplicity. Even slaveholding Jefferson, cognizant of the incongruity in his freshly written (and freshly edited) words, noted that a long dismissive passage he included on the slave trade in a draft of the Declaration of Independence was removed entirely “in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia.” Troubled by this obvious hypocrisy well into his graying years, he gently acknowledged the failing in an 1814 letter to an admirer who pressed him to use his prestige and influence toward the abolition of the slaves in America. “No, this enterprise is for the young, for those who can follow it up and bear it through to its consummation,” the author of the Declaration of Independence replied. “It shall have all my prayers, and these are the only weapons of an old man.” So it came to pass in horrific ways even Jefferson probably never imagined. During the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Westerner Abraham Lincoln recognized, in the words of late great historian Pauline Maier, arguably our foremost expert on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, “that it was impossible to separate the Declaration’s condemnation of monarchy from a condemnation of slavery.” And in time, Lincoln’s own Gettysburg Address, delivered in a time of civil war threatening the viability of the Constitution itself and promising “a new birth of freedom,” became in Maier’s words “an American sacred text.” Part of President Lincoln’s new birth of freedom: Passage after his 1865 assassination of the 15th Amendment, proclaiming that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.”

Yet 151 years later our nation still wrestles with the issue of race that for so long seemed to make the Declaration of Independence the perfect lie. We’re fresh from a presidential administration that, in the words of former George W. Bush speechwriter and policy analyst Michael Gerson, aggravated such rifts and grievance: “One of the poisonous legacies of Donald Trump’s presidency has been to expand the boundaries of expressible prejudice. Through the explicit practice of white-identity politics, Trump has obviated the need for code words and dog whistles. Thus his strongest supporters during the Jan. 6 riot felt free to carry Confederate battle flags and wear ‘Camp Auschwitz’ sweatshirts without fear of reproof from their political allies. Many in the crowd surely didn’t consider themselves racists, but they were perfectly willing to make common cause with racists. In social effect, it is a distinction without a difference. The result has been an illuminating but horrifying clarity.”

Indeed, in the thick of conflict in Texas over racially charged allegations and counter-allegations regarding election laws, and practically on the eve of the Fourth of July, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and others pressured the Bullock Texas State History Museum to cancel (and at nearly the last minute) what promised to be a lively, thought-provoking discussion involving the newly released "Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth." The book highlights what many well versed in Texas history already knew: Much of Texas' dispute with Mexico in the 1830s was based on Anglo settlers' strong embrace of slavery and Mexico's aversion to it. Patrick took credit for the cancellation, insisting the Bullock museum was no place for "fact-free rewriting of TX history." One of the book's three authors (all white, by the way), Houston Chronicle columnist Chris Tomlinson, branded the museum "a propaganda outlet." One patron outraged at the museum’s cancellation of the event charged that it should be "governed by historians and facts, not politicians trying to score political points." Yet John Waynesque myths of Anglo heroism command strong tribal loyalty. A letter received at the Waco Tribune-Herald in the wake of this controversy came from a retired Baylor University physics professor who angrily lashed out at defenders of the three historians in familiar take-it-or-leave-it fashion: “It is obvious that some today prefer that Texas still be a part of Mexico. Thus, we true Texans draw a new line in the sand; it is down the middle of the Rio Grande River. Those who do not appreciate, respect and honor what the brave husbands, fathers and sons did at the Alamo, most paying the ultimate price, pack your bags, head south across the Rio Grande River and don't come back. Had it not been for them, we might all be living in Mexico.”

Such defensiveness tolerates very few missteps. I’m reminded of a conversation I had with an African-American woman who vigorously supported Democratic state treasurer and Lone Star wit Ann Richards after the Waco native and Baylor University graduate won election as Texas governor against gaffe-ridden West Texas businessman Clayton Williams in November 1990. I had casually expressed the hope that Richards as governor would bring competing interests together in her administration. I made the remark in reference to sparring Republicans, Democrats and independents. The supporter’s response: “Sure, but y’all are going to have to get in line behind the women, the blacks and the Mexicans.” I took this quip as half in jest, half-earnest. But in the racially tumultuous decades since then, I’ve often pondered it, appropriate though it may have been after decades of ugly racism in Texas, including all too recently at the polls. In the 1990s, white males encountering such a pointed, in-your-place remark about white men getting in line behind other constituents in mainstream society would have likely bowed to the sometimes useful conventions of political correctness and let the observation pass by except to possibly express astonishment or outrage or bemusement in the company of close friends and family. Thirty years later, however, the angry, diehard white-identity politics characterizing the Age of Trump has expanded if not shattered any boundaries of “expressible prejudice,” unleashing whites to openly claim “reverse racism” when similar remarks are directed against them or about them. And sparks are sure to fly when a prominent African-American journalist claims that the white Founding Fathers rebelled against the British crown primarily to safeguard the institution of slavery or when an African-American congresswoman from Texas repeatedly presses for reparations to make up for slavery and Jim Crow laws – a remedy that peeves many whites, some of whom had ancestors who fought in the U.S. Army against the forces of slavery and secession (as mine did), others who question the wisdom of being judged and penalized for the sins of the fathers. All of this tests the limits of democracy.

Only last month, the respected Pew Research Center reported survey findings suggesting some two-thirds of Republicans and Republican-inclined individuals believe voting is a privilege that can be limited if requirements are not met. By contrast, 67 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of the total surveyed said voting in elections is “a fundamental right for every adult U.S. citizen and should not be restricted in any way.” Interestingly, Pew reports, “black Americans are more likely than those in other racial and ethnic groups to see voting as a fundamental right, while white Americans are the least likely to say this.” Meanwhile, legal scholars and voting rights experts voice dismay at the U.S. Supreme Court’s July 1 dismantling of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, already hobbled by the high court’s gutting of the act’s critical pre-clearance provision in 2013 that once required states with a history of discrimination (such as Texas) to clear election changes with the U.S. Department of Justice or a three-judge panel in Washington, D.C. Section 2 was what the strongly conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit cited a few years ago in determining that the carelessly crafted Texas voter ID law was racially discriminatory. The appeals court thus correctly demanded fixes of the 2011 law, widening the range of documents one could show in order to vote in Texas.

Complicating matters

All of this brings us back to what promises to be a long, drawn-out battle over voting rights in Texas extending into late summer and well beyond, assuming federal courts are again swept into the conflict. As one who this year witnessed hours and hours of Texas House and Senate debate and testimony over election bills during both regular and special sessions, who has read each bill as it was laid out, then fine-tuned in committee, then amended after vigorous floor debate – and who has written more on voting rights than any other topic the past dozen years – I here offer some conclusions about what’s unfolding. Short version: Most proposals offered by Texas Republicans tightening election access, while disgraceful and self-serving in the broader context of American history, don’t strike me as sure-fire slam-dunks for voting-rights litigants (though given measures to stiffen penalties for possibly errant rank-and-file election officials, I'm astounded every self-respecting elections administrator and election judge in the state of Texas wasn't down at the State Capitol, reminding legislators of the great difficulty of enlisting election volunteers to work long hours amid everything from pandemic surges to short-tempered political warriors ready to take their frustration on anyone in sight.) Even so, Texas Democrats representing districts rich in minority constituencies are justified in their cynicism, frustration and anger. Add it all together and you have conflict begging for selfless leadership, piercing insight and plenty of magnanimity and patience. Don’t expect any in Texas.

For all the pandemic-inspired election irregularities in Texas in 2020, Republicans still did better in voter turnout, delivering Texas for President Trump with 52 percent of the vote (and 61 percent here in McLennan County). Yet Texas’ growing diversity has been troubling for the party, a consequence of some candidates and party officials regularly if sometimes subtly stereotyping people of color rather than trying to embrace and enlist them. Waco’s new congressman, Pete Sessions, moved to our mostly white congressional district after being defeated in 2018 by an African American (former Baylor University linebacker and voting rights litigator Colin Allred) in the more racially diverse, big-city district Sessions long represented. Sessions won 56 percent of the vote in Central Texas in 2020, 46 percent of the vote in his Dallas district in 2018.

When President Trump lost his re-election bid in 2020 and claimed without proof (assuming you’ve read some of the scores of court rulings handed down by Republican and Democratic jurists – and I have), Republican-led state legislatures began pressing legislation to complicate public access to the polls. Although Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes, author of some of the recent election bills in Texas, disputes the charge, many of us in the legislative peanut gallery see all this as something more than a bid to secure “election integrity.” The Texas legislation and that in other states collectively represent an attempt to soothe the wounded ego of a defeated, irascible, vengeful former president, an effort to reassure a virtual king in exile of undying loyalty and devotion, even if this means placing on the sacrificial altar certain elements guaranteeing a vibrant and healthy American democracy. Such bills also offer further protection to Texas Republican lawmakers’ own electoral prospects. Yet in committee discussions and floor debate, Sen. Hughes – an East Texas Republican and Baylor Law School graduate – has repeatedly stressed “election integrity” legislation is critical not because of the former president’s tirades over election fraud but because surveys indicate many doubt the reliability of our elections. Which may well amount to the same thing. As Trump noted in a July 3 speech in Sarasota, Florida, if one makes a false claim long enough, many Americans will come to believe it – and Trump was raising the specter of election fraud well before Election Day 2020, insisting it was the only way he could lose. And then he lost.

The legislation Hughes has carried since early spring has been changed often, but at least three things remained constant. Two of them: the banning of drive-thru and 24-hour voting initiatives introduced in heavily populated, ethnically diverse Harris County. The chief purpose then was to thin election lines during a pandemic packing Houston hospitals and local morgues. Yet these initiatives also proved especially popular with minorities. For instance, an analysis of Harris County early voting by the Texas Civil Rights Project showed 53 percent of those pursuing drive-thru voting were African American, Hispanic or Asian American. Yes, Hughes is correct that the offering of drive-thru and 24-hour voting in Harris County is unfair to voters in smaller counties without the resources and manpower to mount such options. Yet those smaller counties – granted, often with greater proportions of whites – have lesser populations that don’t particularly need such services. Hughes is also correct that voters from county to county benefit from a level playing field, though he ignores the fact that, again to cite Texas Civil Rights Project statistics and rationale, communities of color “tend to have less flexible work schedules,” owing at least in part to generations of segregation and marginalization in everything from education to job opportunities. Hughes is also correct that drive-thru voting becomes problematic when a vehicle carries more than one person. At a time when Democrats claim to be dedicated to protecting the privacy of the voting booth from newly empowered partisan poll watchers, a car with more than one occupant obviously threatens this same privacy unless everyone in the car besides the voter lumbers out. That said, Democratic Sen. Royce West also makes a legitimate point: Perhaps a drive-thru voting measure could consequently be limited to vehicles with one occupant – a suggestion not pursued by Hughes and other Republicans.

Hughes is also correct that the other key element of his voting bill – giving those aforementioned poll watchers greater autonomy in polling places – will ensure the public has more “eyes and ears” on an electoral process now under greater suspicion. Yet these are ultimately partisan eyes and partisan ears, dispatched by candidates and political parties, and without the relevant training required of long-suffering polling-place workers. This invites the sort of trouble we saw when a poll watcher disrupted voting in a Bellmead polling place sufficiently in spring 2019 that police were summoned. And, yes, race was an element in that instance. Hughes’ case in the Legislature isn’t helped by a video leaked this past April of an apparent Texas GOP official singling out minority-rich urban precincts on a Harris County map, insisting “this is where the fraud is occurring” and pressing for recruitment of an “army” of 10,000 poll watchers and workers to stem such fraud. Nor has Hughes instilled confidence by refusing to require of poll watchers the same training poll workers undergo, which begs the question of how poll watchers can truly know when election law is being violated. That said, Hughes did sign on to an anemic measure requiring that poll watchers take an oath: "I swear that I will not disrupt the voting process or harass voters in the discharge of my duties."

Republicans’ mixed messaging

This brings us to the perspective of the far more racially diverse Texas Democrats, whether toiling in the Texas Legislature or mingling with sympathetic sorts in Washington in what one could argue is a wrong-headed recourse without a realistic end game. Hughes, 52, white, Republican and almost evangelical in his demeanor, is unfailingly polite in his exchanges with Democratic colleagues. Yet for people of color who grew up in a state that only slowly came to grips with the integration of public schools and lunchroom counters, trust understandably lags behind. When Texas Democrats have won elections sufficiently to gain a quantifiable say in what Texas Senate legislation should reach the floor, Republicans such as Hughes and our own state senator, Brian Birdwell – who in his supposed “Christian values” represents the epitome of what’s happening to white evangelicalism today – have simply changed Senate rules, lowering the threshold of support such legislation needs to accommodate Texas Republicans’ shrinking majority. For instance, this past regular session they lowered it to five-ninths of the Senate. Skeptical Houston Democratic Sen. John Whitmire quipped: “I grew up in Whitney, Texas, and I’ll be darned if I remember us studying what five-ninths is.” Democratic Sen. Carol Alvarado, who is Hispanic, was similarly sarcastic when offered materials supporting the latest rule change ensuring Democrats couldn’t block legislation unless bipartisan in nature: “Thank you for this chart. I thought it was part of an eye chart we were going to take. As Sen. Whitmire said, I don’t remember learning about five-ninths. I don’t even know if that’s on a measuring cup. But we’ve gone from two-thirds to three-fifths to now five-ninths. What’s next? Where does it stop, this chipping away at the traditions of this deliberative body?”

Later, when dueling House and Senate versions of the election bill in the regular legislative session went to a conference committee to massage the two into one, Democrats were largely cut out of negotiations during which the bill somehow grew from 23 to 67 pages behind closed doors, including measures never discussed. These included a provision to curtail hours for the last Sunday of early voting in a way that would undermine the "souls-to-the-polls" initiative so popular among churchgoers in African-American communities who after services caravan to the polls. And when this mysteriously bloated legislation at last emerged from the shadows, Republican senators compounded matters, voting to shelve another rule that allowed sufficient time for all to at least inspect the bill, including those measures added without committee debate or public testimony. These included not only the provision curtailing “souls-to-the-polls” hours but another toxic measure making it easier for courts to throw out election returns. After angry and betrayed House Democrats walked out over Memorial Day weekend, ending the regular session, red-faced Republicans began backtracking, claiming these latter measures were last-minute mistakes committed by other hands.

Yet Democrats unfairly mischaracterize matters when they claim that all their suggestions have been ignored. For instance, while Senate Bill 1 and House Bill 3 in the special session are firm evidence of a representative democracy in fast decay, Republicans have made concessions. They’ve tried to reassure Democrats by not only scuttling the measure allowing courts to more easily overturn elections but even condemned the very idea; they’ve bowed to a Democratic priority to allow voters a chance to correct or "cure" mail-in ballot discrepancies; they’ve compromised to address Democratic reservations regarding partisan poll watchers, removing an explosive measure that would have allowed the latter to film certain polling-place activities – the latter surely an invitation to polling-place trouble given the lack of training required of poll watchers. As promised, Republicans scrapped the “souls-to-the-polls” early-voting measure (which would have almost certainly invited a humiliating defeat for Texas Republicans in the courts, given its obvious racism). The latest legislation even expands the requirement that employers allow employees time off from work to vote. This would extend that right from Election Day to anytime during early voting as well. (Some on the far right might even argue this is socialist in nature, a governmental imposition on capitalist endeavors.) And, whatever else, Texas Republicans haven’t forbid giving water to someone standing in a long election line, as Georgia Republicans amazingly codified this spring.

“At each stage of the process, the bill has changed,” Sen. Hughes told reporters during a July 21 press conference set up to do damage control after Texas House Democrats much-publicized exodus to Washington, D.C., to press for federal voting guarantees. “There was testimony in committee during regular session, testimony during special session, and amendments offered by Democrats and Republicans, and the bill has changed based on testimony from civil rights groups, disability rights groups. Everybody has input in this process. Now, most of the folks we heard from who were offended were offended by generalities they had read online or some characterization of the bills. When we talked about the provisions of the bill, there was not much to argue about. But, of course, we make changes to these bills as we hear from Texans all across the spectrum. And it’s always going to be that way.” East Texas Republican Rep. James White, a 57-year-old African-American who recalls being called “crazy for running in East Texas,” similarly argues against the “many misconceptions and myths regarding the election integrity legislation.” Among other things, House Bill 3 increases early voting hours weekdays from 8 to 9 hours and weekends from 5 hours to 12 hours on Saturdays and from 5 hours to 6 hours on Sundays. It codifies that seniors and the disabled may vote from their vehicles. “We have too many people wrapped up in political theatre and partisan soundbites that do a disservice to the average Texan,” White charges and, to a point, correctly.

Yet backroom shenanigans and indifference to voting initiatives that might help marginalized people of color become more involved in representative democracy surely undermine goodwill expressed through incremental legislative concessions and chamber collegiality. If Democratic lawmakers of color from Texas haven’t experienced racism themselves – pretty unlikely, given our history, politics and prejudicial mores – they are nonetheless informed by generations of racism experienced by their parents and grandparents. They’re even more defensive after four years of a president who infamously equated the white supremacists and neo-Nazis of the 2017 Charlottesville violence with civil rights protesters. Many are aghast at a party more and more complicit and unapologetic in the delusional, self-pitying notion of white victimhood, especially after all the hatred and suppression African Americans and Hispanics have endured through our state and national history. And they’re horrified at seeing hundreds of Trump supporters – more than 90 percent of them white – storm the U.S. Capitol to overturn a Democratic presidential election victory, a force driven by all the fury, hatred and evil intent of an old-fashioned mob set on an all-American lynching.

Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood

A few final moments from the first Texas special session and elsewhere involving “election integrity” underline the growing gulf between the two parties over race.

During a July 10 Senate State Affairs Committee hearing (over which Hughes and Birdwell presided), Democratic Sen. Borris Miles, a 55-year-old African-American lawmaker, pressed Jonathan White, chief of the Election Fraud Section of the Texas Attorney General's Office, about his decision to prosecute 62-year-old Hervis Rogers on illegal voting charges after Rogers famously stood in line for six hours to vote in the March 2020 “Super Tuesday” election. Rogers, an African American who lives in Houston, was three months shy of concluding his parole on felony burglary convictions in 1989 and 1995. Arrested on July 7, 2020 – more than a year after his alleged Super Tuesday offense but just in time for legislative fireworks over election reform in the Texas Legislature – Rogers now faces a return to prison for voting. Miles and fellow Democratic Sen. Royce West, whose African-American lineage includes a grandfather who reportedly witnessed the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, condemned the Texas Attorney General’s Office for racist intent in the case by seeking to prosecute Rogers in a neighboring, heavily white county rather than in his own racially diverse home county.

“Do you know why I feel really strange about this, Senator West, Senator Hughes?” Miles asked his colleagues during the Senate committee hearing. “They’re not prosecuting him in Harris County. They moved him to conservative Montgomery County [for prosecution]. That’s the kind of bias we have to deal with each and every day. That’s what the citizens – black, white, brown – most black and brown – have to deal with in the great state of Texas.”

Then Miles added: “You know, this guy thought he could vote. He was under the belief in his mind that he really could vote. Served his time. Got a nice job, nice family now, and he thought he could vote. Thought he was doing his civic duty, yet he’s violated his parole and he’s going back to prison. He just wanted to recognize his right to vote, Mr. Chairman. Yeah, we have laws in the state of Texas and he shouldn’t have been able to vote at this time. He had four months left. But there’s law and there’s the spirit of the law.”

White, drawing audible audience disapproval and skepticism with his evasiveness, worsened matters by explaining why his office pressed Rogers’ prosecution in another county: “We bring cases in places where we have existing cases and we have relationships with the district attorney’s office.”

Amid audience gasps, Sen. West, also an attorney, discouraged further explanation from White for his own good: “You know, when you’re in a hole, you better stop digging.”

Andre Segura, legal director of the ACLU of Texas, summed up in a statement the embarrassment all should feel in Rogers' arrest and subsequent bail of $100,000, which the nonprofit Bail Project covered: “It’s a relief that Mr. Rogers is no longer in jail. He should not have been arrested and charged in the first place, and certainly should not have been forced to languish in jail on an outrageously high bail amount. This prosecution demonstrates the danger to Texan citizens when even innocent mistakes in the voting process can be criminalized. Mr. Rogers received national praise for his commitment to casting a ballot, and we will continue to fight for justice for him and will push back against efforts to further restrict voting rights.”

Yet the scandal involving Hervis Rogers and the Texas Attorney General’s Office comes atop another racially charged case involving Crystal Mason, now 45 and also black, who voted in 2016, apparently unaware that because she was on supervised release from prison she couldn’t cast a provisional ballot. Two years later she was sentenced to five years in prison. No less than Donald B. Ayer, former deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice under President George H.W. Bush, said the Mason prosecution “lies far outside the bounds of any reasonable exercise of prosecutorial power and threatens the integrity of our democratic process and our electoral integrity as a nation.” Mason herself has smartly highlighted how differently blacks and whites are treated under voting laws, something Texas Democrats in Washington have shrewdly capitalized upon. In a Jan. 14 Fort Worth Star-Telegram column written in the aftermath of the Capitol insurrection, Mason questioned among other things why a white Republican Tarrant County justice of the peace caught forging signatures to get on the ballot for re-election in 2018 was given probation while she faced prison time.

"Then, there’s the case of former Republican U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, who had his corruption conviction reversed because the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals decided that a person must know that they have violated the election code,” Mason wrote. “That’s the right outcome, and the same should apply to people like me. Why was my case even prosecuted? Why was I not shown that same grace? My life and my family matter, too. But as Wednesday’s insurrection showed us — as well as the pandemic and the string of black lives lost to law enforcement well before George Floyd — there are glaring inequities in a number of systems, including healthcare, education, financial, policing and, in my case, the justice system. Those inequities remain unresolved today. Black people know we would never have been allowed to breach the Capitol’s barricade or sit at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk with our feet up. The response would have been violent."

More recently, Texas Democrats have inquired why one of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists set on impeding congressional certification of the 2020 election returns – 38-year-old white Florida crane operator Paul Hodgkins, photographed in the well of the U.S. Senate carrying a red Trump flag and wearing a Trump 2020 T-shirt after senators fled the chamber – was sentenced to just eight months for his actions, even though federal prosecutors pressed for 15 to 21 months in what was the first felony case stemming from Capitol Hill violence. For the record, the federal judge's leniency was based on the fact Hodgkins was remorseful, had no prior criminal record and didn't vandalize federal property, even though the judge acknowledged that Hodgkins’ presence helped enable the mob's success at stopping certification of 2020 Electoral College returns.

And there’s the anger and frustration clearly felt during a Texas House Select Committee on Constitutional Rights and Remedies hearing from Democratic state Rep. Thompson on the perils of further empowering partisan poll watchers in the polling place. In an exchange with the author of House Bill 3, Republican Rep. Andrew Murr, who is white (and who, to his credit, did vow he would “entertain language that sets forth training requirements for poll watchers”), Thompson drew on eight full decades of personal discrimination as an African-American – one whose single mother didn’t vote in Texas because of the state imposition of poll taxes and who herself grew up confronted with signs that read, “No Dogs. No Negros. No Mexicans,” and who in 1960 participated in lunch counter strikes at Madding's drug store in Houston between classes at historically black Texas Southern University – the campus where six decades later Hervis Rogers would gain national attention for standing in line for six hours to vote, only to learn later he had run afoul of state voting restrictions. I quote Sen. Thompson here at some length:

“Well, let me give you some information. I had a poll watcher come and stand behind me. And, normally, in an African-American area, and Hispanic areas, when they send poll watchers to our areas, they always send people who look like the Proud Boys into our communities. And they walk behind you and look just like they’re going to kick your rear end if you just move out of place. And they make you nervous. They make some people nervous. And this particular lady came and she stood behind me, and I politely turned around and asked her what did she want. And she looked at me and I looked at her and stood my ground because I didn’t think she needed to stand behind me while I cast my vote. No. 1, I could read. I didn’t need assistance by anyone, and I definitely didn’t need her to come stand near me. And what she was trying to do, and probably had been doing – I’m assuming from her conduct with me – she had been intimidating those African-American persons and those Hispanic persons in that precinct trying to cast their votes by the mere presence of her nationality, her ethnicity – Anglo and looking mean.”

Hours later, Senfronia Thompson helped lead Texas House Democrats out of Texas, bound for the national limelight, the high court of public opinion and further frustration in Washington, D.C.

Firing up the voters

On July 27, two days before Thompson and other Texas Democrats in D.C. testified before the House Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties on federal voter protections anything but guaranteed by the states and courts, strapping Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn, a 37-year-old black veteran of the force, testified under oath before the House select committee charged with investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Among other things, Dunn noted how mere mention of his own politics accented the racism and hatred driving a mostly white mob bent on overturning the presidential election and, failing that, lynching Vice President Mike Pence:

“More and more insurrectionists were pouring into the area near the Speaker’s Lobby near the Rotunda, some wearing MAGA hats and shirts that said ‘Trump 2020.’ I told them to just leave the Capitol. In response they yelled, ‘No, man, this is our house. President Trump invited us here. We’re here to stop the steal. Joe Biden is not the president. Nobody voted for Joe Biden.’ I’m a law enforcement officer and I do my best to keep politics out of my job, but in this circumstance I responded, ‘Well, I voted for Joe Biden. Does my vote not count? Am I nobody?’ That prompted a torrent of racial epithets. One woman in a pink MAGA shirt yelled, ‘You hear that, guys? This nigger voted for Joe Biden!’ And the crowd, perhaps 20 people, joined in screaming, ‘Boo, fucking nigger!’ No one had ever, ever called me a nigger while wearing the uniform of a Capitol police officer. In the days following the attempted insurrection, other black officers shared with me their own stories of racial abuse on January 6. One officer told me he had never in his entire 40 years of life been called a nigger to his face, and that streak ended on January 6. Another black officer told me he had been confronted by insurrectionists in the Capitol who told him, ‘Put your gun down and we’ll show you what kind of nigger you really are.’”

One final thought about Dunn and the other three officers testifying before the committee: Together – two whites, a black and a Latino who served his country in wartime abroad – these officers offered a more inspiring demographic portrait of America today than the insurrectionists of Jan. 6 rankled over what they claimed without proof was election fraud.   

The ultimate tragedy of the election conflict back in Austin is that no Republican leader has emerged with the political capital, wisdom and guts to bring the warring parties to the peace table. Political vilification and party idolatry has shifted into such high gears that society has few if any leaders left with the reputation or pull to rise above the fray and attempt fence-mending and constructive policy on race and voting rights. The governor of Texas, who at least had some standing and responsibility to do the right thing, opted instead to get to the right of three right-wing election challengers. This trio includes political commentator Chad Prather who, for his part, proposes Republicans “change the locks on [House Democrats’] offices, fire their staff, cancel their committee assignments, declare their seats vacant, arrest them for violating their oaths, prohibit them from ever holding public office, declare an emergency quorum and get on with business.” The governor’s own belligerence has only added to the discord and uncertainty. “Governor Abbott, you haven’t had one Democratic senator in your office,” Democratic Sen. Whitmire thundered at a July 21 press conference in Austin targeting the governor, who has also threatened the Democratic lawmakers with arrest – a gubernatorial vow taken amidst a border security briefing for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and crowdfunding antics to build President Trump’s border wall. “You’ve spent more time with the governor of Florida than you have with these honorable members of the Senate and the House.”

On the same day, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick seemed to suggest negotiations could continue on some measures in the Senate bill (excluding banning drive-thru and 24-hour voting, which state law never provided for in the first place). However, he said claims of racism leveled by Democratic lawmakers at Republicans helped no one. “It’s pretty tough to sit down and have a good discussion about a bill when you walk into the room accusing people of being something they’re not,” Patrick told reporters. “So if they would knock that off, that would be helpful, because I really haven’t heard that on other things.” Fair enough. But if Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan are truly earnest in wanting to negotiate meaningfully with Democrats and put out some of the fires fueled by misunderstanding if not outright racism, they can prove it by stepping wide of a bill mandating a third-party forensic audit of racially diverse Texas counties where Trump lost. This bill was filed by state Rep. Steve Toth, architect of the controversial critical race theory ban passed during the regular session and signed into law. Montgomery County Judge Mark Keough – briefly taking his gaze off the notoriety visited upon Hervis Rogers’ prosecution in Keough’s 84-percent white county – promptly championed Toth’s election audit bill. "Representative Toth’s proposed bill is timely and necessary with a view to exposing any instances of fraud during the 2020 election and reassuring Texas voters that their votes were accurately counted,” Judge Keough said. “I fully support passage of this bill and look forward to the results of the audit."

As for proposals in SB1 and HB3, most don’t appear definitively or obviously unconstitutional, however restrictive or cumbersome they might prove (though a provision to aggressively purge voter rolls threatens to send the state back to court if it bungles the job to the degree it did in 2019). Banning drive-thru and 24-hour voting and even empowering poll watchers are in keeping with age-old powers regarding the right of states to set electoral protocols so long as they don’t extend a right to whites denied to racial or ethnic minorities. What’s more, the Supreme Court of the United States is increasingly skeptical of protections once ensured by the Voting Rights Act. Read the high court’s majority rulings in Shelby County v. Holder and, more recently, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. In some rulings on election issues, one senses a weariness by some of the court's jurists in repeatedly dealing with such disputes. If Texas Democrats want to change electoral dynamics, complaining and pleading to U.S. Senate and House Democrats whose hold on those chambers is razor-thin is as fool-hardy and myopic as counting on the nation’s highest court, which Democrats lost for generations due to their questionable decision in 2013 to weaken the Senate filibuster rule regarding federal court nominations. Their only recourse is neither the courts nor Congress but demonstrating a sustained ability to rival Republicans’ success in turning out voters. And if their many constituents don’t see the wisdom of jumping through a few more admittedly irksome, even unfair electoral hoops to vote to safeguard their individual rights as well as American democracy, then their cause will neither command nor deserve sympathy.

Who’s running Texas while Republicans wage culture wars?

Late one Saturday afternoon in July, several hundred residents in the tree-shaded, mostly Anglo, comfortably Republican suburb of Woodway and the surrounding area lost power – and only weeks after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott proclaimed amid widespread anxieties over reliability of the state-run power grid that, yes, "everything that needed to be done was done to fix the power grid in Texas" during the spring legislative session. Then he lustily returned to incendiary cultural battles further dividing Texans, all to better position himself for a growing list of heady primary election challengers in 2022.

This must have left at least a few of his supporters conflicted that sweltering Saturday, including an aged white couple, one with a cane – Republicans, judging from past yard signs – sitting on a neighbor’s sun-shaded porch three doors down, waiting for the power to return. They got locked out of their own home when the electric garage door gave up the ghost. An African-American Democrat and retired federal employee, also without air conditioning, told me that she didn’t care if Texas leadership was Republican or Democrat. Main question for her: Are Texas leaders taking care of day-to-day basics?

From what some of us could see and feel for about an hour and a half that Saturday in Woodway, the answer was far from certain.

Meanwhile, Republican legislators were down at the State Capitol at Abbott’s command, not taking care of basics such as keeping our homes cooled but ignoring hundreds of Texans who came from across the state, overwhelmingly to protest legislation making it harder to vote. Other legislators have been tackling such “crises” as snuffing access to school sports teams for transgendered students and snuffing the teaching of institutional racism in American history. Senate Bill 3, for instance, would strip out a provision from another bill passed in May to at least teach that white supremacy is "morally wrong."

All this comes from a party that once claimed to believe in smaller government and less regulation, a party long ago founded on racial equality that righted – guess what? – more than two centuries of American institutional racism.

The mania to confirm our former president’s widely disproven claims of election fraud is clearly driving the “Election Integrity Protection Act” and symbolizes the recklessness of a state taking its eye off the ball during the high-stakes game of managing a bustling economy and strong residential growth and instead pursuing trumped-up crises. For instance, the election bill seems more intent on punishing the moms and pops who work polling places as well as county election officials who, dutifully working with the Texas secretary of state (a figure appointed by Abbott), by all accounts did their jobs well in 2020.

“In spite of all the circumstances, Texas had an election that was smooth and secure,” Keith Ingram, director of elections for the Republican-run Texas Secretary of State’s Office, reported to the Texas House Elections Committee way back on March 4. “Texans can be justifiably proud of the hard work and creativity shown by local county election officials.” Ingram went on to praise his own local elections administrator in Williamson County who, in an effort to make voting safe in the middle of a pandemic, reorganized polling places to keep citizens from bunching up and spreading COVID-19.

And Republican leaders’ thanks for a job well done by those who braved the coronavirus and worked in the trenches of democracy? Unleash newly empowered partisan poll watchers into the sanctity of the polling place (though, thankfully, without the video-making liberties state legislation this spring would have permitted) and threatening penalties for embattled polling-place workers and election officials who run afoul of increasingly complicated state laws. Oh, and Texas Secretary of State Ruth Hughs has resigned amid a lack of legislative support, possibly for doing her job too damn well.

Irony in all this: With the exception of the 2020 election, Texas remains one of the worst states for voter turnout.

Away from the distracting culture wars and efforts to complicate voting, some of us are now easing into a torrid summer that across the American West finds reservoir levels at near-record lows, mountain snowpack nearly gone and the risk of wildfires high. I won’t bring up climate change for fear of spurring apoplectic fits among any epiphany-averse readership, but all of our population growth and all of our business growth for which our state’s political leaders have long clamored is now here and daily testing our independently run power grid in ways unimagined.

And we're arguably not taking care to ensure it and we thrive in increasingly extreme weather events such as last February’s week-long freeze that plunged millions of Texans into darkness and bitter cold.

A June 3 Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation report co-written by five former Texas public utility commissioners warns that success or failure in future weather calamities pivot on diligent follow-ups, enforced deadlines and plugging worrisome regulatory gaps in the newly signed legislation supposedly addressing the winter power outrage that left twice as many dead as Hurricane Harvey’s flooding did in 2017. These regulatory gaps include recognizing "the true interconnectedness of the entire natural gas delivery infrastructure" to a degree the new law misses. The report recommends critical facilities have two days of backup power and that outages that are supposed to rotate in a crisis actually do so.

Titled “Never Again: How to Prevent Another Major Texas Electricity Failure,” the report suggests that, amidst Texas’ ongoing building boom (even with home prices now testing consumer limits), the state must pursue other ways to get ahead of the next extreme weather event: “Between leaky buildings, lack of electricity and poor public communications, over 100 Texans died of hypothermia or carbon monoxide poisoning during the February blackout. Texas must fix this by improving the energy efficiency of our buildings. Over half of Texas homes were built before the state adopted building energy codes with insulation requirements in 2001.”

No less than Republican state Sen. Bob Hall, among the most conservative members of the Legislature, was quoted in June as concluding that the grid's operating problems have not been fixed: "If I were a business right now, as desirable as Texas is, if I'm dependent on a steady supply of electricity, I'd be very concerned about coming here right now." Indeed, when Texas heat that month surprised many of us by reaching the triple digits of late summer, the oft-vilified Electric Reliability Council of Texas – reeling from unanticipated demand and scores of outages – pressed customers hard to up their thermostats to 82 degrees while sleeping. All of which understandably sparked cynicism in Texans of all political stripes after last winter’s massive power failure and Abbott’s springtime claims all was now well.

In the wake of June outages and ERCOT calls for conservation amid extreme temperatures and numerous plant maintenance emergencies in what one official called “an aging fleet” of energy infrastructure, ERCOT last week announced further steps to ensure power reliability, including purchasing more reserve power during uncertain weather and requiring power generators to provide more operational updates. And if ERCOT interim president Brad Jones’ 60 cited objectives (a third reportedly already met) seem a bit overwhelming, they at least convey the complexity involved in managing an efficient, cost-effective state power grid up to both daily demands and extreme weather events.

A just-issued report by the Austin-based University of Texas Energy Institute on the February freeze acknowledges this complexity: “The failure of the electricity and natural gas systems serving Texas before and during Winter Storm Uri in February 2021 had no single cause. While the 2021 storm did not set records for the lowest recorded temperatures in many parts of the state, it caused generation outages and a loss of electricity service to Texas customers several times more severe than winter events leading to electric service disruptions in December 1989 and February 2011.”

This in-depth, heavily footnoted report stresses that, despite political enemies of renewable power using the freeze crisis to gleefully pummel sources other than fossil fuel, power plants within each category of technologies – natural gas-fired power plants, coal-fired power plants, nuclear reactors, wind generation and solar generation facilities – failed to operate at expected electricity generation output levels. It also notes that power demand forecasts were too low and that failures specifically within the natural gas system – including the freezing of gas production, storage and distribution facilities – exacerbated overall electricity problems. It also highlights absolutely bewildering marketplace dynamics that yield what newly appointed Peter Lake, chairman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, last week described as a “crisis-based business model” that yields only real financial rewards “the closer you get to a crisis, which is obviously not good for our consumers.”

All of this is lost in the din of culture wars. Republicans’ bullying of Democrats, led by a governor striving to project toughness for political purposes, has backfired, obscuring far more urgent matters. Right or wrong (and I personally think wrong), House Democrats have again broken quorum, this time fleeing the state, leaving Republicans with the prospect of another failed election bill and another dashed legislative session. Abbott says Democrats should be blamed if they don’t return to address business such as property tax relief, but to a degree he bears significant blame for needlessly aggravating bad feelings to the point of yet another crisis. He clearly learned nothing from the springtime exodus of Democrats, including one rule in politics which sorts out political charlatans dedicated to their own ends from genuine leaders intent more often than not on producing definitive solutions addressing complicated societal and economic problems: Every stupid action begs an equally stupid reaction.

One thing’s sure: The 2021 legislative sessions stand in stark contrast to the 2019 session, during which all put aside petty politics and got down to the nuts and bolts of running the state of Texas, including bipartisan efforts to overhaul school finance. But the complexities of refiguring school finance and mounting fixes in energy generation don’t fire up the rank-and-file party activists that office-holders encounter at local party luncheons and state conventions. What sends activists’ blood pumping is a latter-day quasi-religious crusade against an unholy enemy, compromises be damned.

And pumped-up activists are what Abbott will need against a political flame-thrower such as Allen West, a rousing Christian nationalist and political challenger who last year seemed to take delight in bedeviling the governor over the latter’s pandemic measures. West not only blames Abbott and House Speaker Dade Phelan for actions he sees as precipitating two Democratic walkouts (including Phelan’s giving Democrats leadership positions) but also suggests Abbott has failed to protect the electric grid. To quote West’s pointed tweet Monday: “Have you forgotten those who died during the winter storm? I have not.”

Before Democrats fled Texas, testimony in the House Committee on Constitutional Rights and Remedies involving former Harris County prosecutor and Democratic Rep. Ann Johnson and Jonathan White, chief of election integrity in the Texas Attorney General’s Office, suggested that since 2005 there have been 534 successful prosecutions targeting 155 individuals for election fraud. Johnson calculated that of the more than 80 million ballots cast in Texas during that period, the number of prosecutions of specific offenses is .000622 percent – and, she charged for good effect, “you have a .002 percent chance of being struck by lightning.”

Meanwhile, June has broken heat records kept since 1895, yielding the hottest June in the United States. Nearly half of the country is experiencing some form of drought, though most of Texas has thus far been spared. A March 2020 report by the state climatologist at Texas A&M University forecasts warmer temperatures over longer periods of time in Texas. Interestingly, it also notes that trends in extreme cold are “much larger than trends in extreme heat.” No wonder we saw dour and discouraged looks on the faces of state senators, Republican and Democrat, interviewing ERCOT and PUCT officials last week.

“The concern I have here is that we seem to be trying to drive reliability with money as opposed to engineering in the process,” Sen. Hall worried at the close of the Senate Committee on Business and Commerce hearing, drawing on experience as an Air Force engineer employed in the Minuteman Missile System and later as a systems engineer in the aerospace industry. “When you say we have a reliable system, are you talking about operating in a benign environment? Or if you’re not talking about just reliability in a benign environment, what threats are you considering [to a reliable system]? Just like a tire blowing out, it could be just because it got old or it ran over something, and along the way there are lots of road hazards that we have to encounter. If all we’re talking about is money that operates in a benign environment, I don’t think we are on the right road there, that what we have to be looking at are the threats. We’ve got natural threats, we’ve got man-made threats, we’ve got things that will interrupt our power reliability – we have physical threats, we have cyber threats, we have solar, and we even have the possibility of nuclear [threats].”

Aware of the embarrassment summer can bring with a still hobbled, creaky power grid and criticism he failed to include further power grid reliability on the agenda of the 30-day special session now underway (apparently rendered moot by Democrats’ fleeing town), Abbott sought cover by dispatching a highly publicized, astonishingly short-sighted July 6 letter to the Public Utility Commission directing it and ERCOT to take “immediate actions to increase power generation capacity and ensure reliability of the Texas power grid” while penalizing renewable energy as part of the vibrant mix the power grid must draw upon. Sadly, Abbott appears to be mostly taking his strategies from Texas Republicans’ playbook of 2011, after another winter freeze crippled the state power grid. Legislators patched it up – insufficiently, we now know – while Republican legislators pursued red-meat issues such as voter ID to satisfy rank-and-file bloodlust. Abbott’s strategy now: Hope that Texas skirts the record drought baking the American West (so far so good) and that whatever rubber bands and bubblegum presently bind the power grid will hold long enough for Abbott to vanquish his three very determined right-wing primary foes come March 2022.

It’s a roll of the dice. If Abbott comes up short, he opens himself up to charges of incompetence and dereliction of duty from not only Citizen West but former state Rep. Don Huffines and right-wing political commentator Chad Prather. All seek to unseat Abbott as the party’s gubernatorial candidate in 2022. The problem in Abbott’s obvious gamble over power grid reliability is that if the dice come up wrong and power begins to go out across Texas this summer or even this winter, many of us will lose right along with the governor, even as some of us pay a steeper price. It’s also not so terrific for the so-called “Texas Miracle.” Continued success in maintaining this economic miracle means paying attention to sometimes mundane but critically important issues such as transportation, water, health care, education and, yes, energy reliability in weather of all kinds. Texas old-timers admittedly skeptical of such confounding concepts as climate change will nonetheless tell you that weather of all kinds comes pretty close to defining Texas past and present. 

Yet corporate sensibilities are gradually showing other expectations, and not only to strike a more positive and compassionate business profile but to demonstrate meaningful regard for the increasing diversity and challenging predicaments of employees and their families whose destiny is, after all, tied to economic success or failure. This means focusing on not only the quality of life that individual states offer but their respect for fundamental human rights — priorities that understandably relegated Texas to a very humbling fourth place in CNBC’s 2021 study of state competitiveness, released just last week. CNBC said Texas’ ebbing ranking reflected the study’s sharper focus on everything from inclusiveness to equity to health care. “While none of us should put too much stock in one media company’s analysis of our economic competitiveness, it’s hard to disagree with this assessment,” former Texas House Speaker Joe Straus wrote in a July 15 column for the Houston Chronicle. “Unfortunately, partisan political rancor and state government gridlock are starting to define Texas more and more to the rest of the world. With Democratic state legislators pledging to spend the next few weeks outside Texas in order to stop election reform legislation, and with Republican leaders talking about arresting the Democrats when they return, all sides seem to be digging in. It’s not clear how any of this ends, but it is clear that this state’s proud tradition of bipartisan governance is eroding. Ultimately, it’s the people of our state who suffer.” Straus, of course, symbolizes the politically tolerant, pro-business road not taken by Texas Republicans under the strong pull of the former president and a base enraptured by his demagoguery and deceit.

I’m reminded of a small billboard on Sun Valley Boulevard leading to a stretch of western McLennan County marked by an explosion in home-building presently testing city and county traffic strategies, building incentives and zoning standards: “Why Did You Move to Texas?” The sign reflects the paranoia and fear that long-established Texas conservatives have about California liberals, Colorado environmentalists and Southern Arizona naturalists moving in and bringing their subversive brand of politics with them and turning the state blue, even though my limited encounters with such newly settled residents (usually as a newspaperman during zoning battles involving ambitious developers here in Central Texas) finds most of them thus far prioritizing only two things: cost-per-square-footage here in Texas and similarly pulling up the drawbridge once they themselves are properly rooted and ensconced.

One thing’s sure: Power outages have a way of cutting down to size frivolous culture wars and stressing what’s really important in Texas: Comfortably surviving the elements.