During the past several legislative
session, some friends from the local Tea Party and I have done some citizen
lobbying at the local state representatives’ and senator’s offices. In Texas
the legislature meets January to June every odd year, so there’s a session
coming up. I’m in the process of gathering the ideas we’d like them to
be thinking about. And since some of the bill numbers will start being assigned
in about a month, I’m drafting a heads-up letter, to let them know what issues
we hope they’ll support. This is only a draft so far; I’ll be asking for
feedback from the Tea Party, to see if I’m missing anything crucial, or to see
if the issues I include resonate with others. Anyway, here’s the communication:
_______________________________________________________________
Dear Legislator,
It’s time to start thinking about
the upcoming Texas legislative session, and I know you’re already working on
legislation.
During the past several sessions,
those of us in the Cypress Texas Tea Party have been following bills, and
letting you know what our interests are. I expect we’ll be visiting your local
office during the session, as in the past, and talk with your staff. But this
year we thought we would start early and let you know the issues important to
us—even before there are bill numbers to attach to them.
Right now, this is my assessment
and opinion, as the legislative liaison for our Tea Party. Some of our members
may differ or have additional/other priorities, which we’ll share with you in
our later visits.
Principles of Cypress Texas Tea Party
·
We support the US Constitution and conservative
principles in the Texas Constitution.
·
We support low taxes and limited government
spending and oppose ever having a state income tax.
·
We support handling each issue at the most local
authority possible—with individual and family decisions as the default
authority.
·
We support asserting 10th Amendment
states’ rights against usurpation by federal government.
o
We particularly oppose allowing national health
care to be imposed on the people of Texas.
·
We support parental rights in the education and
upbringing of their children, including local control over spending and
curriculum in public schools.
·
We do not as a group endorse candidates, but we
provide a platform for sharing information so our members can make informed
decisions; individual members may endorse, work for, or become candidates.
These have been our principles
since we began in 2010. Issues and policies may change, but we expect to
continue to encourage you to work toward freedom, prosperity, and civilization
here in Texas.
I’ll present the specific issues
we’re interested in under several categories.
State and Citizen Rights Preservation.
Our individual and state rights
have been infringed upon by an intrusion and controlling federal government, in
direct contrast to guarantees in the US Constitution. There should be several
levels of effort toward returning to freedom. First is asserting the 9th and
10th Amendments. If a law or regulation oversteps the bounds
of the enumerated powers of the federal government, it is up to the states to
stand up against the unjust law. Texas is one of the few states large enough
and powerful enough to take such a stand.
Among issues that fall into this
category are:
·
The Affordable Care Act
·
Refusal to protect the border/Refusal to
enforce immigration laws
·
Enforced acceptance of Middle Eastern refugees
without adequate vetting
·
Anything related to education coming from the
federal government
An additional effort toward
freedom is a Convention of the States. We appreciate that Governor Abbott is
leading in this multi-state effort with The Texas Plan. As Governor Abbott
explains, “The Texas Plan is not so much a vision to alter the Constitution as
it is a call to restore the rule of our current one.”
Within the plan, the Governor
says, “The Constitution itself is not broken. What is broken is our nation’s
willingness to obey the Constitution.” So the purpose of a Convention of the
States is to adjust course back to the Constitution. We encourage you to help
this idea make it through the legislature this session, so that Texas will be
ready to lead other states in this effort.
The most drastic approach to
federal tyranny is what we might call Texit—a withdrawal from the United
States because the contract of the Constitution has been broken. As in a
marriage, the United States are intended to be indivisible, but also as with a
marriage there are terms to the covenant that must be kept.
When this issue came up in our senatorial
district platform committee, I recommended that we modify the language with an
if/then-type statement:
Texas Independence Again! – Should the federal government fail to abide
by the 10th Amendment and the rest of the United States Constitution, Texas
should hold a referendum asking the people of Texas to decide on whether or not
the State of Texas should reassert its status as an independent nation.
It is the first time this proposal
has appeared in the state GOP platform. And at the time we worked on it in the
senatorial district, our Senator Ted Cruz was still a strong contender to be
our presidential candidate. But the modified language did not remain in the
state platform. While the presidential outcome is still unknown, it is highly
likely that the Constitution will be ignored, the Supreme Court will fail to
uphold the Constitution, and infringements against our freedoms will intensify
during the next administration. It may be time to take this idea seriously, and
allow the people of Texas to make such a crucial decision.
Immigration and Homeland Security
We appreciate legal immigration.
Nevertheless, we still care about border security and illegal
immigration, and we’re against sanctuary cities. As mentioned above, we’re
concerned about being forced to accept refugees
who haven’t been vetted—and we do not trust the federal government to do
adequate vetting. We appreciate Governor Abbott’s strong stance on this issue.
One infrastructure concern we’d
like you to address is hardening the electric grid. Texas
has its own independent grid, so, regardless of the federal government’s lack
of action on this vulnerability, Texas can protect its own grid. Costs are
relatively low for reaching the minimum levels needed to protect the grid from
an electromagnetic pulse (EMT) from either a solar flare or an atmospheric
nuclear bomb detonation. Failure to prepare could lead to dire results. I wrote
about this here: http://sphericalmodel.blogspot.com/2016/05/hardening-grid.html. If you need more
information to take on this issue with knowledge, there’s a short book by Frank
Gaffney, published by the Center for Security Policy, called Guilty Knowledge: What the US Government Knows about the Vulnerability of the Electric Grid, But Refuses to Fix. For updates and more information, try
their website SecureTheGrid.com.
Marriage and Religion Protection
In this category, the federal
government and the Supreme Court have far overstepped their powers by
redefining what a marriage is—and enforcing that new definition on all the
states. They have further attempted to infringe on our religious freedoms, and
even to make that claim that asserting religious freedom rights
as guaranteed in the First Amendment is simply a cover for bigotry. That false
narrative must be resisted!
We have previously passed a Pastor
Protection Act. We need similar protection for individual citizens and
private organizations, so that Texans will not be coerced by a
tyrannical government to act against their religious beliefs. We also need to
reassert the state of Texas’s right to define marriage without federal
interference.
An additional concern this
legislative session will be protection against the administration’s attempts to
force all public buildings and schools to allow biological males to use women’s
restrooms
and locker rooms. This misguided attempt to accommodate the extremely
small demographic of transgenders creates an opportunity for sexual predators,
and disallows women and girls from expressing their discomfort without
accusations of bigotry. Texas needs to stand strong against this federal
overreach.
Education/Parental Rights
We’re in favor, once again, of the
Texas
Parental Rights Restoration Act. This is to protect fit parents from
the risk of losing custody of their children. This often occurs when extended
family, such as grandparents, sue for court-imposed visitation or custody,
often because they disagree with the grandchildren being homeschooled or being
raised in a religion the grandparents disapprove of. Again, these are fit
parents, losing custody of their children, or being drained of their income—at times
in excess of $1 million—to defend themselves in one case after another. Every
time such a case has reached the Texas Supreme Court, the parents have won. But
lower courts have continued to allow this injustice to continue.
It is a basic principle that
parents have the right and responsibility to see to the care, education, and upbringing
of their own children. Only when parents are unfit should this right be
questioned.
We will also support, once again,
UIL participation by homeschoolers and other private schoolers, referred to as
the Tim
Tebow Bill the past couple of sessions. UIL was originated in 1913, when
most students in Texas were homeschooled or privately schooled. Six decades
later the rules changed to deprive non-public school students from participating.
We believe participation for all students should be restored.
There’s a new issue this year that
we hope you will support: Educational Savings Accounts. This
is a way of incorporating competition and free-market principles in education.
Without spending additional money per student, more options open up, and competition
may bring on more options and lower costs. Power is placed in the hands of the
parents, to design the education that works best for their child, and money
stays with the child, so unspent funds can be used the next year or eventually for
college. This is already being done in Arizona and other states with surprising
success. The Heritage Society and The Friedman Foundation for Educational
Choice have been studying this issue and recommending how best to implement
this for the most students in Texas. I wrote about this issue here: http://sphericalmodel.blogspot.com/2016/05/a-parents-job.html
Life
The Courts have interfered, yet
again, with Texas’s efforts to protect life of both mothers and the unborn, by
preventing Texas from requiring clinics from meeting basic surgical center
standards. That is unfortunate. But the part of HB2 that prohibited abortion
after 20 weeks, when unborn babies are known to experience pain, was upheld.
We believe it would be beneficial
to also prohibit abortions that dismember the fetus. Such abortions not
only cause additional pain to the fetus, they also cause greater risk, from
puncture, or from failure to fully extract all part of the fetus, leading to
infection. Such laws have been enacted and upheld elsewhere, and are a logical
next step for Texas.
Free and Fair Elections
The Courts have interfered with
Texas’s Voter ID Law. It may be possible to retry this effort by
addressing whatever failure the Courts claim the law had. We must be able to
prevent voter fraud, and some form of photo ID is still a logical and fair step
toward that end.
We are against efforts to implement
online voting, or any other type of voting that may encourage voter
fraud. We are in favor of better safeguards for elderly who vote by
mail, to prevent operatives from voting for people who have no say in
their vote, or who are coerced or unduly influenced.
We discourage efforts toward a
return to paper ballots, which are much more easily compromised by
fraud. We encourage requirements to purge voter rolls of those who have
moved or died, or who are fraudulently registered.
We encourage efforts to improve
security of the ballot, and training of poll workers and poll watchers, so that
Texas may be exemplary in voter integrity.
Thank you so much for all the work
you do. We look forward to meeting with you during the upcoming legislative
session.
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