The lack of a functioning two party system in the state seems to be a recipe for corruption.
We discuss Texas' tendency towards one party rule in GOVT 2306.
We discuss Texas' tendency towards one party rule in GOVT 2306.
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Republicans who’ve been behaving themselves might be wigging out about the escapades of some of their top statewide officials, but they’re not talking about it.
And the Democrats, who ought to be having a hoedown right now, can’t seem to find anyone with sufficient gravitas to make the opposition’s voters hesitate.
The presidential race is different from the state races because it’s competitive. National politics remains hypersensitive to slights and gaffes; Texas politics — especially in general elections — seems numb to those things.
Elsewhere, there’s a Hillary Clinton for every Trump, and the slightest error can put a national figure on the broiler. In Texas, where the partisan competition is almost imaginary, a conservative officeholder can get into all kinds of political trouble without threat from the other party.
Pushback is useful even when it falls short. Trump wasn’t exactly toppled when U.S. Rep.Filemon Vela, D-Brownsville, told him to "take your border wall and shove it up your ass." But it bought people a moment to sort out their thoughts about Trump’s big fence.
That’s something. It’s what checks and balances are meant to do — to freeze things, if only for a second, for a reconsideration of whether an idea or action is really a good idea.
Talking about the troubles of confederates is so repellant to people in the civics business that they prefer ignorance over having to express their own views.
This is not a Republican malady; it’s politics.
Democratic officeholders in the 1980s were pretty damned quiet when Speaker Billy Clayton and Attorney General Jim Mattox were indicted. Both were eventually acquitted, too. Clayton won another term as speaker. Mattox won another term as the state’s top lawyer. Sometimes, these things pass.
The Texas Democratic Party’s convention lands at a moment when the state’s Republicans are feverishly manufacturing topics for the opposition party to talk about.
In that interim period between full Democratic control of Texas and the full Republican control we have now, there was an opposition party making noise at every turn. Ask Democrat Garry Mauro, who as land commissioner was accused of running Bill Clinton’s Texas campaign out of his state offices, or Kay Bailey Hutchison, who was accused of handling too much of what should have been done in her campaign through her office of state treasurer.
Mauro was never indicted. Hutchison was acquitted. But both were scorched by opponents in the other party throughout their ordeals. Mauro, whose party was waning, went on to lose a lopsided 1998 governor’s race against George W. Bush. Hutchison, whose party was waxing, won a special election and then three full terms in the U.S. Senate.
It’s not that the bellowing from their political enemies did them in — it’s that it constrained their behavior. You keep your mitts off the cookie jar when the folks are watching, but what if they’re not around?
Right now, for Republican Texas officeholders, the folks are not around.
