It’s likely to take me a number of blog posts to debrief the
whole thing. Today I’ll focus on the overhanging issue: Houston’s Mayor Sylvester
Turner invoked the Force Majeur clause of the contract five days before the
start of convention—that was Wednesday, July 8th. A week prior to
that he had given his “final” word that he would not interfere with the
convention because of the pandemic.
There were multiple efforts put into preparing the intended
location, the George R. Brown Convention Center (owned by the city, run for the
city by an entity called Houston First) to meet any and all guidelines for safe
meeting. These included using larger spaces with chairs spread out, larger rooms
for caucus meetings and committee meetings, temperature scanners at each entrance.
There’s no competition for space right now, and that convention center encompasses
1.8 million square feet indoors, and can accommodate 55,000 people. The typical
state GOP convention is around 9,000-10,000 people. It’s typically the largest
GOP gathering in the country, even bigger than the national convention. But
last time we held the state GOP convention in Houston we shared the space with
two or three other conventions.
The convention was originally supposed to take place in May,
but it was rescheduled because of the pandemic. City businesses were glad to
host, since their usual business clients have been curtailed. The full convention
was rescheduled to July 16-18, but committee work actually gets underway on the
Monday before.
When Mayor Turner broke the contract just 5 days before
committees were to meet, the State Republican Executive Committee (SREC) which
is made up of a man and woman from each of the 31 state senatorial districts,
met in an online meeting to decide how to proceed. The two options were in
person nearby the original plan, or online. A combination is not possible, according
to Roberts Rules of Order, because it isn’t possible to know whom to
recognize and in what order.
The Marriott Marquis, a large hotel across the street from
the convention center, offered to accommodate as needed, so the official
meeting would happen on the sidewalk in front of the convention center, as required
in the rules, and then temporarily adjourn and reconvene in the hotel. That is
the option the SREC chose, in a 40-20 vote. People recognize the value of
meeting in person.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party of Texas (RPT) lawsuit
against Mayor Turner went forward quickly. On Thursday, a local democratic
judge ruled against the RPT, who then appealed directly to the state supreme
court for a quick ruling. Those justices met over the weekend and gave their
ruling Monday morning.
It was while I was driving downtown Monday morning that I
heard on the news that the ruling had gone against the RPT. The committees,
already set and able to meet in person, went ahead with the downtown plan, but
it meant that on Thursday, once the official convention gaveled in, everything
would move to online.
There was one non-negotiable deadline: Monday, July 21st,
by the end of the day, the names of those elected as delegates and alternates
to the national convention, plus those elected to be electors (the ones who
physically vote in the electoral college in December) had to be turned in. If
nothing else happened, we could recover, but law required that business to be completed.
There was also a state party chair race, vice chair race, plus
election of permanent committee members and State Republican Executive
Committee (SREC) races.
It took much of Saturday to accomplish the essentials. Late
in the evening permanent committee members got elected. So, we had to be poised
and ready all day, but the meetings the committees were to have held did not take
place that day.
The Platform Committee Meeting took place Sunday at 9:00 AM,
with a tight deadline—originally one hour, but we ended up taking until past
noon, with many complaints about not enough testimony time, or time to change
anything after the testimony. Maybe I’ll talk more about that another day.
We got through the Legislative Priorities report in a Sunday
afternoon general session, but not the Rules or Platform reports. There was an
effort to try to reschedule the rest of the business to another time and place.
That discussion took up more than an hour that could have been spent
accomplishing business. And the proposal included a request to develop a
committee from among the body to come up with a plan. Suggestions were open,
electronically. They came in and didn’t stop. There were more than 5,000
suggestions the last time I heard it announced. This was a DDOS attack (denial
of service). It’s a purposeful disturbance. A hack. And DDOS attacks explain
much of the difficulty of Friday through Monday with credentialed delegates
being unable to get electronic credentials to join meetings and have voting
rights.
People were patient much longer than in an in-person
convention, probably because they were in their kitchens and living rooms with
creature comforts available—albeit little sleep. But the fact is, Mayor Turner
indeed deprived people of rights. My senatorial district didn’t manage to
convene for its final caucus until Monday morning—after the state party chair
and vice chair races were a done deal.
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| US District Judge Lynn N. Hughes ruled July 17, 2020, in Hotze v. Abbott image from here |
While the Texas Supreme Court ruled against the RPT’s
lawsuit, there was an additional personal lawsuit filed in federal court from
individual delegates who can show harm caused to them. RPT has since joined in
that suit. But it went to Federal District Judge Lynn R. Hughes, who ruled
against Mayor Turner on Friday, July 17th. The case is Hotze v.
Abbott (because it was Governor Abbott’s limited lockdown order GA-29,
supplementing GA-28, which led to the Force Majeur). The 7-page ruling is a
thing of beauty to read.
Son Political Sphere tells me it’s more of a great
op-ed, but legally it isn’t likely to stand up on appeal. Nevertheless, I want
to pull out a couple of points.
One is about standards. This relates to letters from Dr.
David Persse, director of Houston’s Emergency Medical Service, who served as the
Mayor’s chosen medical “expert.” Judge Hughes writes:
In court, high standards restrict technical data offered in
evidence. That kind of opinion testimony must have rigorous science applied to
precise data in a recognized method. Persse’s letter abounds with emotion and
assumptions. His letter uses the phrase “clear and present danger.”
…He presented no dispassionate analysis; he only recast odd pieces
of what is in the papers.
I’ve been looking at numbers. The horrendous spike in cases,
the way the press talks about it, you’d think bodies were lined up in the
street. In reality, the 7-day rolling average for Harris County, where Houston
is located, a population of over 4 million, reached 12 and hovered there for
about a week, but was lower than that by a couple of deaths per day when Mayor
Turner broke the contract. That is a total of 12 per day. The total for the
county to date (as of today) is 560. That’s a lot of people. But New York city has had 18,800, with an additional 4,624 probable COVID-19 deaths that weren’t
verified by testing. Their population is 8.3 million, roughly double Harris County. Their number of
deaths is 34-42 times the number of deaths in Harris County.
Let me say that another way, for each death to date in
Harris County over the entire time since the disease caused its first death in
Texas, 34-42 people died in New York City. From first death to today (so, not counting
the many zero death days prior to that first Texas death on May 18th,
that’s 128 days, an average of 4 per day in Harris County. Regrettable, painful
to those experiencing the loss, but not an all-out emergency.
Getting data is still a challenge. The Houston Chronicle
had been providing daily deaths in Texas, so I could continue to chart that. The paper used to show deaths in the Houston region, including surrounding counties. They
stopped doing that on June 23rd and started emphasizing new cases by
county, not 8 counties together, plus positive test rate and hospitalizations.
But no county death info. So I started going daily to the county public health site. I don’t know how to get anything there but the current day’s data, so I
have taken a snapshot every day to build up some data to draw a picture from.
Daily deaths in Texas, over the entire length of the
pandemic, shows there has indeed been a recent rise (7-day rolling average):
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| Deaths in Texas, rolling average, as of July 21, 2020 |
Starting when I began charting the data, daily deaths in Harris County, starting June 24th,
look like this:
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| Deaths in Harris County, rolling average, as of July 21, 2020 |
It's not an exponential curve. It's not a reason for panic. Or for cancelling contracts.
Out of curiosity, I look at data for my zip code. We have a
population of a little over 37,000. So far we have had 3 deaths. I couldn’t
pinpoint on which days each of those were reported, but I do know we had had 2 by June
10th, and we had had 3 by June 25th, when I started
looking daily. So we have gone essentially a month or more since the last COVID death
in my zip code. The 7-day rolling average is a flat line.
I’m here, alive, to let you know that those several hundred
of us who met for committee meetings downtown: it has been a week, and so far
we have a spike of—wait for it—zero. Zero cases. So zero deaths.
The next point in the lawsuit is about what qualifies as
essential. The ruling says,
The meeting is not a classic-car show nor a quilting
exhibition. The Texas Election Code requires it—and requires it now. This
convention is the source of a party’s officers for the next two years and
delegates to this year’s presidential convention among other administration.
The governor’s orders frequently use the word essential
to specify exclusions from the full impact of the limits. In GA-29 [Governor
Abbott’s order], for example, the rules do not apply to election-related
gatherings nor the mask rule to someone giving a speech. Department and grocery
stores are open and excluded as essential. The individual stores in some cases
will exceed the few thousand delegates expected at the convention. It exceeds
their essentialness, because critically it is a single event—not repeated every
day.
And he adds that our founders did what they did because of
arbitrary government. Further down he notes that the Texas Attorney General
wrote a letter May 29, 2020, instructing “the secretary of state that political
conventions are excluded from the strictures of the executive orders.” That
seems pretty clear.
Then the judge describes the mayor’s actions the way a
prosecutor might. After the Republican Party of Texas had already agreed to all
the precautions, the mayor piled on:
The contractor was told [by the mayor] to require a cluster
of additional precautions. The Party agreed. Frustrated, four hours after he
imposed conditions that he thought would cause the Party to abandon its plans,
Turner told the contractor to cancel the event. The city doctor furnished
defective smoke-screen letters.
The contractual clause allowing First to cancel the use of
the building says exactly what First and the mayor say it does. What it does
not mean is that the cancellation may be based on reasons extrinsic to the
virus rules and, instead, be based on raw political sabotage.
As for fear of risk to the city, he says,
Allowing the Republican Party to meet its responsibilities does
not cost the city. All it has to do is stop interfering. Comparable numbers of
people will patronize many places as the Party meets. Its contribution to viral
risk is no more than another large grocery store.
In case anyone missed the mayor’s intent, the judge says,
Sylvester Turner worked to get First to cancel the license to
the Republican Party after 18-odd months of preparation and cooperation under
the guise of public safety based off twisted readings of the governor’s orders.
I don’t know how this will all play out. But one thing is
very clear: Democrats are underhanded and untrustworthy, and they’ll go to
great ends to thwart the will of good, America-loving citizens.
We cannot let such people win their war in what they see as
a right to rule over us.
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