Convention Debrief—Platform and Resolutions

This is Part III of my debriefing of the Republican Party of Texas Convention, which ran Monday, June 13, through Saturday, June 18. (Part I was on the editing adventure; Part II was on Rules and Legislative Priorities.)

Finally I’m getting to Platform, plus Resolutions, which probably require some explaining. 

Platform Committee taking a vote, screenshot from here.
The middle section, with Chairman Matt Patrick in the center, is upper left;
right side is upper right; left side is below. I am handling the file, seated next to the Chair.

Just a word, first. If you’ve been looking online for the final version, it is not there yet. I have not yet received the end-of-convention file from RPT, which handled it during floor debate. In the meantime, we’ve worked on taking care of editing issues, noticing repeated titles in different sections, and creating an index. Maybe we’ll get the file tomorrow. My hope is to get it completed and turned in by Friday so I can enjoy a nice holiday weekend. I’m not sure why I didn’t get the file right away. The person handling the file got sick, so we pushed our deadline back a week. But I really just need it sent as an attachment, so it shouldn’t require much work on their part.

They may want to delay until they get the scantron done. That’s the counting of the up-or-down votes on each plank. The machine was delivered to them last Friday; it was the wrong machine. The replacement should come on Tuesday (tomorrow), so they should be able to set it up and do the counting on Wednesday. Again, I don’t need that information before I do my editing. If a plank, or planks, gets under 50% approval, then deleting that plank is a very simple matter. But it has never happened. In fact, I don’t think there’s ever been a plank that got under 2/3 approval. But getting a higher approval (90% or higher) is used to convince the legislators to support an issue.

 

Resolutions

The platform gets created out of resolutions that get set to state from district and county conventions, which got them from precinct conventions. A resolution has a format, typically with explanations of reasoning with each paragraph worded, “Whereas….” Then comes the statement part, often worded as “Therefore, be it resolved that….” When it comes to writing the platform, we take the wording in the “be it resolved statement” and reword it as a platform plank—something like, “We urge the Legislature to…” or “We support…” or “We proclaim that….” The Whereas statements might get referred to on rare occasions for clarity. But our process would be simpler if submissions came in closer to platform wording, which some of them do. My senatorial district sends them all in as platform wording.

But there is another type of resolution that is not part of the platform. These resolutions are statements proclaimed by the body. I didn’t understand about these different resolutions until I became a precinct chair, and we started dealing with resolutions as part of our quarterly meetings. In those cases, the Harris County Republican Party Executive Committee, made up of precinct chairs and officers, would vote on acceptance and wording of such proposed resolutions. Those that were accepted by the body would be posted on the website, and sent to the appropriate people, such as officeholders and media.

Some years at the state convention there are no such resolutions for the Platform & Resolutions Committee to deal with. Last time there was one, and it did not pass. This year there are two; both passed. And they have gotten some media attention, which might have been a goal of some people. But the media—even thorough media like The Epoch Times—has misunderstood. The resolutions are not part of our platform, but they are part of the Platform & Resolutions Committee Report. They show up below the platform in the report. And they become, if approved, statements made by the body of delegates.

Both resolutions came up late in the process, on the day of Permanent Committee, if I’m remembering right. They are considered separately from the sections of the platform, and are required to be handled in floor debate.

The first one proclaims that election fraud changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. It’s bold to say so, but it’s a fact, provable if we would ever get a court to look at the evidence (the movie 2000 Mules was shown in various discussion sessions during convention week), and the majority of the delegates hold this view.

As with all platform planks and resolutions, this does not have the force of law. It is a statement; that is all.  But a very loud majority felt like it was worth saying.

The second one was a response to the Senate vote that week on gun control, signed onto by Texas’s Senator John Cornyn and a number of others. They were called out and condemned for going against the Constitution and the will of the people of Texas.

 

Platform

I talked about our process in the first post. Today is finally about platform content—which I did not affect, other than as a delegate. Editors are there to facilitate the work of the Committee, not to influence it. I had my chance to do that at the senatorial district level.

The sections still relate broadly to Senate committees in the Texas Legislature, but order was changed somewhat this year. Rather than the sections being alphabetical, they’re laid out in ways that seem to flow logically. Constitutional Issues is the first section after Preamble & Principles, since it states overriding purposes. Business then flows into Finance, which deals with funding, so Education follows and then Health & Human Services. Then we get into governing, local on up to national, with Criminal & Civil Justice, State Affairs, Government & Election Integrity, and finally National Defense and Foreign Affairs.

The names of the last two were changed. Election Integrity was always in Government, but parts of it were also in State Affairs; now they’re together. Government used to contain Foreign Affairs, but that seemed like a more logical fit with National Defense.

All of this is to say, if you’re trying to track the changes from the previous platform, good luck with that. After subcommittees do their work, the Committee of the Whole is creating a whole new document, to be used for the next two years.

There are seldom changes to the Preamble and Principles. Two years ago we added a single word: “equally.” But this year there is a sentence added within the Preamble: “We recognize that human nature is immutable.” I believe this is referring to attempts to change gender or some other characteristic we’re born with. There was a suggested amendment about repudiating socialism and asserting national sovereignty, but it failed. Those ideas, however, show up elsewhere in the document.

Parents’ Rights

Parental rights, as you saw from Legislative Priorities, was a big issue this year. It comes up in Constitutional Issues, subsection Citizen Rights, and again in Education, subsection Parents’ Rights, with several planks. The one in Constitutional Issues was amended on the floor to add language about transparency and a Parental Rights Amendment to the state constitution. That issue was covered and detailed in one of the Education planks. But I guess it doesn’t hurt to say it in more than one place. I’d just like the floor to know, that issue was not neglected by the Committee.

 

Convention of States

One of the contended issues was Article V Convention of States. Texas passed the call for an Article V convention several years ago. But that hasn’t stopped opposition from trying to get rid of it every year. They did that last year during Temporary Committee, and it had to be brought back during Permanent Committee. This year it was there at the end of subcommittee, but got struck during Temporary Committee of the Whole. I missed that debate, doing other duties across the hall. But it was first order of business for Permanent Committee on Thursday, and it got reinstated with slightly different wording, asking the Legislature to extend the call.

Important public testimony came from the Chair of Legislative Priorities, who pointed out that COS was one of the 15 priorities of that committee, and it would be more than awkward to have a legislative priority that was struck from the platform.

One committee member, Tom Glass, had voted to strike in Temporary Committee, but changed his mind the next day. He had been thinking, since we’ve passed the legislation, it didn’t still need to be in our platform. But because there is a time-sensitive sunset clause, we need it in the platform to make sure it doesn’t disappear. He did, however, amend to keep only the last sentence, which related to that clause.

Bill Ely, the committee member from my SD, and another board member of our local Tea Party with me, is a COS champion. He gave an excellent speech in the Permanent Committee, bringing in data from the resolutions across the state, which he had studied after setting up our spreadsheet for us. I wanted to link to that here (it cues up here), but the sound cuts out almost as he starts, I was disappointed to find. Anyway, he rebutted some of the previous night’s testimony, which claimed a majority of senatorial districts were opposed to a Convention of States. Bill showed that wasn’t accurate. Even in those districts that put forth resolutions against an Article V COS, most of those districts also put forth resolutions in favor. And there were many districts who sent resolutions in favor that did not also have resolutions opposing. So if you look at the state overall, and the resolutions overall, the picture is quite different from what convinced the committee to strike the plank the night before.

The plank is back in, in shortened form, preserving what is necessary.

 

School Choice

There’s a moment here to talk about how important testimony can be. As we saw at our SD level, and as we prepared documents for the state platform, people are pretty upset with our schools. Parents want choice, transparency, and removal of anything that even hints at indoctrination. In the Education subcommittee, the room was cavernous. It was supposed to be divided but hadn’t been, so another committee got moved. What was left was bigger than the room we used for Committee of the Whole. People were lined up out the door for testimony. They took four hours of testimony, which placed them getting their work done and turned in to me around midnight, several hours later than scheduled. But it was important that the people got heard.

There is an ongoing split in the school choice world. A small but vocal minority of homeschoolers (homeschoolers as a whole are a small minority; this is a much smaller sub-minority) fear school choice, because they fear government might step in and regulate them. While I understand their arguments, I do not agree with them. We have to be vigilant against government intrusion regardless of what choices are offered to people who feel stuck in public schools. Fear of some nebulous possibility is no reason to deprive all those families trapped in the public school monopoly. If we introduce choice, we get the possibility of improvement.

This small minority is vocally active. They took part in the subcommittee debate, but they were outnumbered there with so much other testimony, much of it about breaking that monopoly somehow. But in testimony for permanent committee, where there is limited time for each section, they managed to fill all the slots, probably six or so individuals.

As they had hoped, they gave the impression that there was a huge outcry against the phrase “and the funding should follow the student,” claiming that isn’t possible without strings attached. Even if that were so—it is not—it wouldn’t attach strings to them if they’re not taking the money, so they’re really just interfering with other people’s decisions. Anyway, a committee member did bring up such an amendment. Subcommittee Chair Will Lutz spoke strongly against taking those words out. I looked forward to relistening to his speech in the livestream. It is here. He reminded people of the testimony they’d received from across the state. And he reminded them that every year school choice planks get watered down in committee, and then when the body of delegates see it, they put the strong school choice language back in—with loud acclamation. We should follow what the people in the state are telling us.

screenshot from here

I took a look at the starting document for education, which contains all the education resolutions from the 31 senatorial districts in the state. In addition to resolutions with wording in favor of school choice, there were 31 resolutions specifically stating that the money needs to follow the child. There were I think three resolutions in opposition to funding following the child. Chairman Lutz was right.

There were a couple of other speeches for and against the amendment. There was a committee member who homeschools, who spoke out well in favor of the money following the child.

And there was another committee member who pointed out that, when he got a GI bill, he could use it for education at a religious seminary, and the government had no say in that. They couldn’t tell him where he could study or what he could study; they could only insist that the money was spent on education. I appreciate that comparison. It’s how I’ve been seeing it. That is the freedom we want to give parents. Since the very next plank reiterates that government will not be allowed to regulate curriculum for homeschoolers or private schoolers, that ought to do. Again, we’re not writing law; we’re telling the legislature what we want and saying, “You figure it out.”

The amendment failed. But it was a close call—because of those final testimonies. It would have been such a sad day for all those who testified in subcommittee, if those final voices had gotten the last word.

 

Homosexuality and Gender Issues

There was an amendment that has gotten undue attention. A sentence was added at the beginning of the Homosexuality plank: “Homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice.” The rest was about not granting special legal entitlements or special status based on homosexual behavior or other LGBTQ identification. I was satisfied with the plank the way it was. The new language states basic fact, but it did cause an uproar on the committee, where we had one committee member who is a gay man—unknown to most of us, because he didn’t press for those issues and was overall pretty conservative and helpful. (I had suspected, because I'd heard him give reports from Log Cabin Republicans before.) So he felt personally hurt. I don’t believe that was the intention. You can hear the discussion starting here. If the purpose had been intended to provoke while being factual, it could have been, “Homosexuality is a perversion of normal human sexual reproduction,” perhaps. It wasn’t that inflammatory. But it did draw attention that the original might not have. And you can decide whether that is a good thing or not.

screenshot from here

 

Election Integrity

Election Integrity was a huge issue. There’s debate about whether paper ballots ought to be the solution or not. I believe they are not; there’s a “long and glorious tradition[i]” of voter fraud using paper, well established before machines were brought into the picture. That aside, there was a lot of agreement that we need better and stronger election integrity laws. We got what people are calling an A-Z plank, with bullet points covering most of the alphabet.  That was amended with one addition during floor debate that is probably also useful. Now we just need the legislature to go at it.

 

And that, actually, is what we need to do for the whole platform. Set it before the legislators, get their attention, remind them of the platform—which their constituents support. Train their staff to recognize the platform and refer to it continually. So, the platform, in tandem with Legislative Priorities, is kind of a blueprint for the Legislature. To quote my friend Terri again, “This is what we want done. Get busy. You figure it out.”

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[i] Princess Bride reference.

Convention Debrief—Rules and Priorities

This is Part II of my debriefing of the Republican Party of Texas Convention, which ran Monday through Saturday of last week, June 13-18. (Part I here) I’ll deal briefly with floor debate and final outcomes for the party Rules and Legislative Priorities, and then it looks like it will take an additional post, so I can spend more time on the Platform, from my inside view as editor.

Rules

The Rules Committee is a special breed, dealing with arcane things that would take me quite a steep learning curve to fully understand. These are the rules the Republican Party of Texas and its sub-entities (local county and district bodies) will follow during the next biennium. I’m not sure of their process—how the ideas for change get from the grassroots to them. There were a few changes submitted as resolutions to the Platform Committee, and we passed them along to Rules a day or two into convention week. They must also have their own submission process, but I don’t know what it is. So I’m picking up the narrative at the point of floor debate. You can view their Permanent Rules Committee discussion here, and their floor debate from Friday here, and from Saturday here. 

The Rules Committee Report discussion was supposed to be completed during the General Session on Friday, and we did do some business then. But, as I mentioned, the printed copies of the reports had not been delivered. They had been posted on the RPT website, but in that convention hall of some 10,000 people, most of us just got an error message. So we could only read what was on the big screen; we couldn’t look through the document to make comparisons or get a larger context.

The main discussion that day was about removing references to the TEC (Texas Election Code) from the document. This doesn’t mean RPT won’t abide by election law; it simply declares the RPT to be its own sovereign entity. This means the Texas Legislature, including its Democrat members, cannot determine rules for the RPT. There was a floor amendment trying to put the TEC language back in, but it failed.

Mark Ramsey speaks against an amendment
during Friday's floor discussion on Rules.
I snapped the photo from my seat a few rows away.

This change proposed by the Rules Committee was explained to me by Mark Ramsey as the most important decision we would be making at Convention. Among other things, like how we elect our Party Chair, it makes it possible for the Party to decide to have a closed primary. That means people would choose their party affiliation when they register to vote, and that will be the party whose primary they can vote in. Currently Texas is an open primary state; you declare your party on the day you vote in the primary. It allows for shenanigans, such as purposely voting in the opponent’s primary to affect who you want your opposing candidates to be.

When Mark Ramsey spoke from the floor during the limited debate, he didn’t mention that detail. I asked him later if there was some strategic reason for that. No, he told me; he just didn’t think of it while speaking extemporaneously in front of all those people. But he did convince the body of delegates, along with other testimony, to accept the Committee version and reject the minority report that was trying to change things back. So that was sufficient. (Mark's testimony and the one before him here.)

It was shortly after that that we postponed the rest of deliberation until Saturday, when we hoped the printed copies would be available.

So, when we took up Rules in the Saturday General Session, Mark Ramsey called the question on Rules—meaning that, with the exception of the Minority Report, which we were required to consider, there would be no other debate on Rules, that the previous day’s debate would suffice. The move passed, and we proceeded with the Minority Report, which was about Rule 44—Censure Process and Penalties. It seems to me that Rules talk about this Rule 44 every convention, so I think it is frequently refined. I believe the purpose is to maintain integrity and to hold elected officials accountable to uphold the Party Principles (a list of 10 core beliefs at the beginning of the Platform).

The Minority Report was an attempt to add more teeth to the censure process. But it did it in a way that was probably not legal and would open up the Party to legal liability. It failed.

 

Legislative Priorities

Legislative Priorities is a relatively new innovation to the convention, begun officially in 2018. It has a similar purpose to the Platform—to let the Legislature know what we want them to accomplish. The Platform is broad and detailed; the Legislative Priorities are a way to say, “If you can’t get anything else accomplished, at least get these things done.” That year I think we had to narrow the list down to five. In 2020 we narrowed it down to 8. But there was a new process: the LP Committee narrowed the hundreds of submissions from around the state down to 15 or 16 (we had 15 this year). And then the body votes on their priorities.

Floor debate was on accepting the wording. Each priority has a title and a short statement, very similar to Platform planks. Here are the 15 priorities presented by the LP Committee (the brief summaries here are mine):

·        Protect Our Elections (strengthening election integrity, requiring citizenship verification, limiting mail-in ballots, shorten early voting).

·        Ban Democrat Chairs (in an attempt to get more of our legislation to pass out of committee for a floor vote).

·        Abolish Abortion in Texas (granting preborn children the right to life and equal protection of the laws).

·        Eliminate Property Tax (to end the practice of people losing their homes, because on their fixed income they can no longer afford the tax—as though they do not own their property).

·        Stop Sexualizing Texas Kids (getting rid of sexualizing material in schools, which have been exempted from following obscenity laws under the guise of education).

·        Protect the Electric Grid (protection from weather and manmade or natural disturbances—which we should be able to accomplish, because Texas has its own grid).

·        Ban Gender Modification of Children (related to the transgender movement, specifically for children).

·        Secure the Border and Protect Texans (several ways of securing the border and stopping illegal alien magnets, such as taxpayer-funded services and subsidies).

·        Parental Rights and Educational Freedom (parents want to regain rightful control over the education of their children).

·        Protect Medical Freedom (in response to so much government overreach during the pandemic).

·        Defend Our Gun Rights (constant vigilance required, such as against red flag laws and gun-free zones).

·        Ban Taxpayer-Funded Lobbying (much of this relates to school districts using tax money to hire lobbyists who work against the will of the people and in favor of unions and administrators).

·        Stop Executive Overreach (another response to the pandemic response, which suspended laws and impacted religious freedom and business freedom).

·        Convention of States (the call for COS passed several years ago, but needs to be extended so it doesn’t sunset while waiting for enough other states to join the movement—more on this below, in the Platform).

·        Save Women’s Sports (another response to transgenderism; we passed legislation on public schools last session, but not for collegiate athletics).

The order above is the ranking order provided by the LP Committee. The delegates (about 5,000 participated) marked 8 of these on their ballots. The scoring came out Wednesday. I don’t yet have rankings, but these are the 8 final Legislative Priorities: 

·        Protect our Elections

·        Abolish Abortion

·        Stop Sexualizing Texas Kids

·        Ban Democrat Chairs

·        Ban Gender Modification of Children

·        Secure the Border & Protect Texans

·        Parental Rights & Educational Freedom

·        Defend our Gun Rights

Here’s a little color commentary on the process and on the RPT Chair, Matt Rinaldi, who has the very difficult job of maintaining order during all the complicated Roberts-Rules-of-Order conversation among several thousand people at a time.

During Legislative Priorities, there was debate on a proposed amendment at one point that was taking time and was probably unnecessary, considering that Legislative Priorities are merely a statement of the issue, not law cut in stone. A friend of mine, Terri Leo Wilson, who won her runoff race to become the candidate for the Texas House in her new district, HD 23 (after moving away from here, where she was our SREC person up until two years ago) called a point of information. That’s a question to the Chair to clarify something rather than to make a motion or offer debate. 

Terri Leo Wilson calls for a point of information.
screenshot from here

What she said was,

We are currently working on Legislative Priorities. We are not crafting words for the Platform. We are not making laws. We are saying, “Protect our elections, Legislature; you figure it out.” “Ban Democrat chairs; you figure it out.” “Abolish abortion in Texas; you figure it out.” We are not wordsmithing. We are just telling the Legislature, “Get busy. This is what we want done.”

So, that wasn’t a point of information; that was a statement. But it was actually a helpful reminder. The Chair, Matt Rinaldi, did not interrupt her. He let her finish. Then he said, “That’s not a proper point of information, but we’re counting that as a speech against.” And he did this cute smile that he has, no annoyance, just enjoyment, that makes him well suited for the high-pressure position as public face of the Party.

RPT Chair Matt Rinaldi
screenshot from here

Rinaldi was elected by the SREC after Allen West stepped down to run for Governor. I wasn’t very familiar with him. On Monday I was with the Platform Committee Chair in our large committee room, and he came in wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, and looking so young I thought he was just one of the RPT staffers. The Chair was talking to him about logistical things we were lacking, and he agreed to see to them. The Chair told me who he was after he left. Really? The state party chair looks like a young staffer? Up on the big screen, in a suit, he looks appropriately serious. But even there he’s more casual than some of his predecessors, and he does seem to have a very pleasant personality.

The only time I saw things a bit out of control were during Platform discussion. People kept asking questions about how to fill out the scantron sheets—the way we vote up or down on each plank. It would have been less distracting to hand them out after debate concluded; also, the doors weren’t closed and a quorum called. But ta number of senatorial districts had handed them out, so others went ahead and passed them out. Many people haven’t filled out a scantron since school exams, so they wanted to know, do you put your name on it? Is there a code for your district? Does that go to the left or the right? Do you fill in zeros for the blanks you don’t use? Does True and False equate to “Yes, keep this plank” and “No, do not keep this plank”? These questions kept popping up in the middle of debate on various amendments, and it was getting annoying, especially when the same questions got asked more than once. Handing them out probably allowed more people to vote the scantron than would have waited all the way till the end. But, lesson learned for next time: explain how to use them as soon as you pass them out, whether that’s at the beginning, middle, or end.

I had originally intended to complete the whole debrief today. I’ve written and outlined a few portions already about the Platform. But there’s too much, on top of Rules and LPs, for one post. So this debrief will have a Part III just on the Platform, coming in the next post.

Convention Debrief—The Editing

Debriefing last week’s convention is going to take a couple of posts. That’s the Republican Party of Texas Convention—probably the biggest political gathering in the nation, or maybe anywhere. I think we had around 8,900 delegates. 

This first post is about my participation as editor of the platform—I know; not that interesting to everybody. But it’s what I experienced, and it’ll do me good to debrief. In the next post I’ll cover a few details about the Rules and Legislative Priorities reports, and then a fair amount about the content of this year’s state platform. So come back for that content.

 

That's me, at the 2022 Republican Party of Texas Convention
at the George R. Brown Convention Center.

I spent day and night caught up in convention things this past week, quite literally. Editing the platform involves a lot of late-night work. We take the document as it is at the end of subcommittee meetings, clean out all the unused resolutions and keep only the words the subcommittee wants. Then we review that with the subcommittee chairs, to make sure we haven't lost any of their wording, and to get approval for any word edits we make. That version then goes online (except for the Government section, which had some formatting issues we couldn’t wade through at 3:00 AM Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. We got it ready just in the nick of time for that section to come up in Temporary Committee of the Whole, toward Wednesday evening.

The same process happens after the Temporary Committee of the Whole, getting their report ready for the Permanent Platform Committee on Thursday.

In case you don’t understand the temporary and permanent process, we’ll go through that quickly. The committees that do most of the work are appointed people, representing each of the state senatorial districts. They get time to look over the files ahead of the convention, and then they start their meetings on Monday of convention week. This is true for other committees as well, mainly Rules and Legislative Priorities. But my experience is with the Platform & Resolutions Committee. Delegates are welcome to come and observe and testify on those first three days, but most delegates arrive at convention on Thursday.

The platform is divided into a Preamble & Principles page, which changes very little from year to year. (An added paragraph this year was probably the biggest change I’ve ever seen in it.) The other nine sections relate generally to state senate committees, so the ideas can get aimed to the right places to get legislation passed. Of these nine, five meet as subcommittees on Monday, and the other four meet on Tuesday. The 31 committee members are divided up, so they’re on one committee each day.

Their starting point is to look at the planks of the previous platform. And they get all the resolutions submitted from around the state placed nearby to help them make decisions about what they want this year’s platform to say (over 3500 resolutions; placing those kept a team of us volunteer editors busy for over a month). They can strike a plank, keep it as is, or amend it. And they can add additional planks, if the resolutions add ideas that seem to require their own plank.

The system, you can see, tends to grow the platform each year. This year the Committee Chairman gave a directive to shorten the platform—each section by 10% or more. They did—sort of. The committees did their part by making fewer planks. We went from 337 planks to 275 (I believe that will be the final count, after floor debate, where two planks were added.) But a word count and page count of the document shows the platform actually grew—again—despite having fewer planks. Many ideas were combined into larger planks with multiple bullet points. That is probably helpful in the long run. But it didn’t shorten the platform.

The Temporary Committee of the Whole goes over the subcommittee reports, now put together into a full platform document, during their meeting on Wednesday. They take more testimony (testimony was given in every one of the subcommittees earlier), and they propose any additional changes. Their work (after our all-night editing and their morning review) becomes the starting document for the Permanent Committee.

Permanent committees—again, for Rules, Legislative Priorities, Platform, and Nominations (and maybe Credentials, although I’m uncertain about them) get elected in the Senatorial District Caucus, which is one of the first things to happen after most delegates arrive on Thursday. Usually these Permanent Committee members end up being the same people who did the work all week—the Temporary Committee members. But sometimes there will be some changeouts.

I don’t believe there were any changes among Platform Committee members this year, but last convention I think we had two or three. In Legislative Priorities I know there was a changeout in my district, because the man on Temporary Committee had a number of other responsibilities once all the delegates arrived at the convention, so he amicably asked for another person to be nominated for the Permanent Committee. A changeout, then, can be for a benign reason, or because a district didn’t like the work of their Temporary Committee appointee.

This is the view from my seat next to the Committee Chair.
It was standing room only during public testimony during the 
Permanent Platform Committee meeting on Thursday, June 16, 2022.

The Permanent Platform Committee will take testimony again, and go through each section to discuss any last-minute changes. They also go through additional resolutions submitted by delegates that day.

This meeting was supposed to start at 2:00 PM on Thursday. But SD (senatorial district) caucuses weren’t all done by then. And one of the late ones was being held in our meeting room. So it was closer to 4:00 PM when we got underway. We were scheduled to go until 11:00 PM, a necessary deadline to get the document to the printer, to make it available to delegates by 8:00 AM Friday.

Drama came for me because of this deadline. I had tried to do all the necessary preparations, so that our post-committee edit and formatting would be brief, maybe an hour or an hour and a half. Experience helps. Back in 2018, my first year editing, we had to change from Google Docs—the preferred format of RPT, who was controlling the file that year—to Word, in order to provide both plank numbers and line numbers. That took some intense—and imperfect—work to accomplish the tasks between the end of the meeting at midnight and the 2:00 AM deadline. So I did a lot of things ahead of time this year—including using Word the whole time to avoid formatting issues. At least that was the intention, but we had some editors use Google in subcommittees for reasons we had to compromise on in a pinch. And that led to us all learning some new tricks for overcoming the formatting problems that brought.

Anyway, I was assuming I probably had a 2:00 AM deadline, but it was fine with me if they got done at 11:00 or before, and I would be done earlier than expected.

Then, at 8:01 PM, an RPT staffer came in to let us know, “Oh, by the way, you have until 9:15 PM to get the file turned in for the printer.” No compromise. No explanation for the change from expectation. We hadn’t taken a dinner break yet. (Well, I had; I changed out with another editor to get some fuel in me around 6:30.) And we still had a third of the platform to go through, plus amendments proposed by committee members.

We ended the committee at 8:45, with two sections completely untouched by the Permanent Committee. And those resolutions lined up to be handled—didn’t get handled.

The moment the meeting adjourned, I started the clean-up—removing strikeouts, notes, and highlighting, keeping the approved language.

I had been expecting a chance to go through the copyediting that I needed approval on. Those are changes bigger than commas or spelling (which I simply authorize), but are wording changes I think are acceptable but ought to be looked at. So the “track changes” were still in the document. The Committee Chair did a blanket approval, so one click accepted all those changes. (There was a miss or two, places where we’d done an actual strikethrough, rather than allowing “track changes” to do it. We’ve caught those now in our errata.)

Then, with an editor on each side of me, we did the formatting—which, at this point mainly involved adding plank numbers—only on planks, not on any extra paragraphs in a plank, so you have to pay careful attention—and on deleting extra line spacing that is used for working in committees but not needed for printing. And we try to catch any other things out of place. We faced a few formatting issues, and dispatched with them pretty quickly. No time for an additional careful edit. This is about 40 pages. It should not have been physically possible to meet the deadline. But we did.

I was anxious to see it printed the next day. I missed the morning SD Caucus, when we elect our SREC (State Republican Executive Committee) representatives, and the SDs vote for state party chair (unopposed this year) and vice chair (which had 3 candidates). That started at 8:00 AM, and I hadn’t slept more than a few hours a night all week. So we (my husband and I; he is also a delegate) aimed for the afternoon general session.

After a number of speeches—including, just as we walked in, the booing of Senator Cornyn, who signed onto gun control legislation last week—the Rules Committee presented their report. But their printed report wasn’t available.

It didn’t dawn on me right away. They faced the same deadline change in the middle of deliberations that we had. I wasn’t sure the reports were being printed together, and maybe they decided to blow off that stupid deadline and finish their work. But I soon learned—the printer failed to deliver. After the deadline change. After stopping deliberation so that several hours of important, planned and paced-for work was jettisoned.

And it turned out, most convention goers couldn’t get their copy of the Rules Report on the internet, because of system overload. My husband got it on his phone, but I just got an error message on mine. They conducted some of the business, but the delegates were frustrated at not being able to see more than what was on the big jumbo screen. So the remainder of Rules discussion was postponed until Saturday.

So the biggest drama for me was that impossible deadline—which we met—followed by the breach of contract by the printer. I don’t know where to place fault at this point. But I’m thinking there will be some combination of RPT staff firing and/or lawsuit for breach of contract.

OK. Now I’ve let off a little steam, and given a peek behind-the-scenes.

The editorial team has been growing. There were just two of us in 2018, the first year there was an editorial team, and we only did copyediting. There were four of us in 2020, and I led, because I was the only one with experience from 2018. I was asked to come and lead again this year. And we had a great team. I don’t have an exact count, because we got some early help from people who had to drop out, and then we had an extra or two join last minute. Some only did secretarial duties (keeping minutes, managing and recording testimonies), and most did all duties. All were a joy to work with. So hard working. And skilled. Two of this year’s team were on the 2020 team. And now we’ll have quite a lot of experience going forward. We're all thinking of ways to improve the process.

I was surprised at how excited people were to do this, and to learn from me and the others around them. They thank me as if I gave them a great privilege, instead of causing them to do hard labor for zero pay. I even had someone come up and ask me, “How do you get to do what you do?” You get invited, or found. You let it be known you’re willing. But I’m surprised we somehow made typing and staying up all night at our computers look fun. For me it is fun. And exhausting. The intense focus is something my brain enjoys doing. But, does that look like something a young person wants to get the chance to do?

Anyway, there are some weird people like us out there. And several on the team have said they want to be called again next time. Just to work with them again, the late nights and tight deadlines would be worth it.

What did all that typing and editing and formatting produce? I’ll talk about that in Part II.

 

Two Movies You Couldn't Make Again

This is going to be a bit of a movie review, or just commentary. Probably no spoilers. Both are documentaries. Both could probably not be made again.

 

What Is a Woman?

This documentary, by Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire, is worth seeing. He’s dealing with the transgender question by asking the absolutely fundamental question, “What is a woman?” It ought to be simple enough. But in our day, the obviously simple answer is fraught with danger. If you say the basic truth, you’ll be labeled a heinous bigot.

So Matt Walsh covers the country, and the globe, asking this question. He asks it at the annual Woman’s March, wearing a sandwich board sign. He of course gets heckled and ousted, but doesn’t get an answer. He asks it on the streets; I think he’s in Hollywood. People on the street obviously know what a woman is but act like it’s a tough question they can’t answer.

Matt Walsh talking to people on the street in Hollywood
in the film What Is a Woman?

He asks a series of therapists and transgender people (some of the therapists are transgender people as well). They attempt answers, but these are circular. A woman is what a person says it is. But what is it they say they are? A woman. But what is that? It’s whatever they say it means.

You get the picture. Walsh goes through these interviews basically deadpan. He doesn’t indicate an agenda. And this interests me. I wondered how he got these people to talk to him. If they’re going to be angry at him just for asking basic questions, or indicating that he’s trying to get to a truthful definition, why would they submit to his questions?

During some of the interviews and podcasts he’s done since the movie came out last week, he has been giving some behind-the-scenes info. Here’s the thing: they didn’t know who he was.

I’ve been following his blog and podcast for over a decade, since before he was at The Blaze, and long before he joined The Daily Wire crew. He has a sizable following and is fairly well known. To our side. He’s a social conservative opining mainly on social issues. These opinions are essentially unknown to the people he interviewed. They’re aware there’s opposition. But as one therapist (a doctor who performs permanent mutilating surgery on minors) dismisses such opposition as “dinosaurs.” They’re relics of an ancient bone heap of some past generation.

It did not occur to them to look him up. If a person with film crew was coming to ask basic questions—and he submitted the questions to them ahead of time—then it must be an opportunity to declare their message, they seem to assume.

Matt Walsh's bestselling children's book
image found here

Their lack of awareness astounds me. Granted, Matt Walsh had gotten a significant amount of notoriety during the previous year of filming. So most of the interviews were done before he had an infamous encounter asking a trans person to define “what is a woman” on the Dr. Phil show this past February.  And it was before he published a best-selling children’s book, Johnny the Walrus, illustrating the absurdity of letting children decide what they are, with the story of a child who imagines himself to be a walrus. And I guess it is even before he temporarily moved to Loudon County, Virginia, to speak for one minute at a school board meeting. 

Still, like I said, I’ve been following him for over a decade. And his media footprint isn’t invisible for anyone with a search engine.

I think today he could no longer make the movie. He wouldn’t get those people to even respond to his requests, let alone sit in a room with him to answer questions.

A very fun part of the movie was when he goes to Kenya to ask the question of Masai tribesmen, through an interpreter. They thought he was crazy. Everyone knows what a woman is. And if you think you can change from man to woman, they think there’s something wrong with you both for thinking it’s possible and for wanting it to be possible.

Walsh has said in interviews that this part was most painful to his pride. He had to let them think maybe he agreed with these ideas, or at least that he thought they were questions to ask seriously, which meant he left them thinking he was such an idiot—and that people in the US were wacky, and that they’d never want to go there.

I can see he needed to not tell them beforehand, in order to get their honest answers. But I would have thought he’d disabuse them of these misconceptions after the interview. He says he didn’t. To this day they think he’s a crazy American who doesn’t know a man can’t become a woman.

Matt Walsh speaks with Masai tribesmen to ask them,
"What is a woman?" screenshot from here

The point of that adventure was to see if, as is claimed, sex is just a Western social construct. The Masai are about as non-Western as he could find. So, if they know how a man and woman are different, it is not because they have been fed this “social construct” by Western traditions.

The documentary is well done. And Matt Walsh is perhaps the singular person who could ask the question in the way he does.

There’s more to the movie, including the ramifications of society going the way of this war against basic truth. The attempts to hack and prevent this successful film from being seen is evidence the opposition knows the power this movie might have.

You can stream the movie at https://www.dailywire.com/videos/what-is-a-woman and probably some other streaming sources.

Here are some of the movie premiere discussions:

·        “Daily Wire Backstage: What is a Woman? PREMIERE” June 1, 2022. 

·        “What surprised Matt Walsh the most when filming 'What is a Woman' | Will Cain Podcast” June 8, 2022. 

·        “Matt Walsh Revisits His What Is A Woman Interview With Dr. Forcier” June 3, 2022. 

·        “Trans YouTuber Responds To What Is A Woman Trailer” Matt Walsh, May 23, 2022. 

 

2000 Mules

I’ve talked about this movie by Dinesh D’Souza a bit already (here and here). One description of the theater experience was, there was a smattering of clapping afterward, but mostly there was stunned silence. People didn’t immediately get up and leave. They were thinking something like, “Wow! It really happened. What do we do now?” That's still an open questions.

There was an interesting interview Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips did with Roman Balmakov on Facts Matter, for EpochTV. Phillips, who does not seem inclined to overstatement, says what they revealed in the movie is just the beginning. There is game changing information coming out soon. In an interview Phillips did with Patriot Patel, he places the release of this information at about six weeks out, or around mid-July.

Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips talk about 2000 Mules
screenshot from here

I’ve been trying to imagine what this bombshell might be. I’m assuming it’s something that can be shown through data analysis, since that’s what he specializes in. He says it isn’t something that can be turned into a movie. It’s something he can clearly explain in a couple of minutes. But there’s six more weeks of getting ready to lay that out? I don’t know what details have to be checked and rechecked. Some of it has to do with getting the information out. He said he’d be bringing news outlets, such as Patriot Patel, together to lay out the explanation. I presume those outlets won’t include the various censoring media.

So I’m curious.

This is another movie that might not be made at another time. The perpetrators know how they were tracked this time. So will they use burner phones? Will they avoid the multiple drop boxes per mule that they encouraged this time? That was to avoid the sudden overload in a single drop box, which would cause suspicion. If all the nearby drop boxes got, say, around 100 ballots in a day, and this one drop box got 1300, that would be an anomaly.

There’s also the fact that, while video surveillance of the drop boxes is required by law, most did not do it. Video coinciding with geotracking is enough evidence for an indictment. So—do you just “accidentally” fail to provide video? Seems likely.

True the Vote noticed mules during the Georgia runoff using latex gloves—after a case where the perpetrators were caught because of fingerprints on the ballots. So they change their method based on what was done to catch them in the past.

Back in May, I had something weird happen on my phone. I asked this question in a group, but didn’t find anyone who had experienced something similar. Anyway, here’s what I posted:

Sincere question, not sure who to ask: This past Friday I went to the internet on my phone, which I do less frequently than most. A notification popped up—which disappeared before I could figure out how to get a screenshot—telling me, as I recall, that my security agreement was changing. Companies I go to online would no longer be able to track me or purchase my tracking data.

Normally I’d say that’s a good thing. I already opt out of tracking wherever I notice that I can. But this was the week 2000 Mules came out. In that documentary, True the Vote (from here in Houston) used tracking data, available for purchase by companies, and/or used by law enforcement, to identify phone tracking data showing people who went from one mail-in ballot drop box to another, when it is illegal to drop off another person’s ballot.

So, was this announcement a normal phone update? Or was it a response to the knowledge that tracking data can locate illegal voting? And if it’s the latter, does that mean we won’t have the same means of tracking this form of illegal voting in November?

Maybe it was normal, and I’m being a bit paranoid. But the timing of it, just days after the movie premiered, seems odd. And I wonder if it could mean there’s movement to stop mules from being tracked the next time around.

You can find the movie and ways to stream it at https://2000mules.com/.

Here are a few extra videos related to this movie:

·        “EXCLUSIVE: Ballot Mules Funded by Obama-Linked NGOs Pouring Billions Into ‘Local Insurgencies’” June 3, 2022. 

o   Watch the full version on EpochTV May 13, 2022

·        “Patel Patriot Interviews Gregg Phillips” May 28, 2022. 

·        “2000 Mules: Why I Changed My Mind About the2020 Election | Dinesh D’Souza | POLITICS" The Rubin Report, June 5, 2022

·        “FILM REVIEW 2000 Donkeys by Delish” Mr. Reagan podcast, May 9, 2022. 

The People Really Mean It: No More Tyranny

I’m back. I didn’t really stop writing this blog. For the past month I’ve been inundated with work on the state platform. Got subcommittee files sent out last night. So today I vacuumed, which I hadn’t done for some weeks, so that we were practically swimming in dog hair. And I did some grocery shopping and other things I’ve put off.

I’m a little bit compulsive about details, things like formatting and consistency. But much of this long effort just has to do with the overwhelming amount of work—done by me and other volunteer/unpaid editors. This is the first year we’ve done the file preparation; in past years RPT staff did it. But we hadn’t been satisfied (some senatorial districts—mine included—had not been included, so that was a serious problem). We now have better ideas for process, for next time. Ways that I thought were going to be done this time, since we had done it at our district level, but I guess what was in my head did not coincide with others. Anyway, it takes a lot of tedious work, regardless of process. But we do have plans for a better process in the future.

There were more than 3500 resolutions that came in from the 31 senatorial districts across Texas. There were duplicates of many of them; several SDs submitted the exact same wording. And there were additional near duplicates, where just some of the wording was different. And there were many more resolutions of the same ideas but that were expressed in different wording. And here and there are unique ideas, also worth noticing.

We have a huge platform—over 330 planks, before adding more this year. People are very concerned about ideas they’ve worked on in the past being lost, so they insist that we start with the previous platform. If no resolutions come in related to a particular plank, that doesn’t mean it goes away; it means it probably didn’t generate strong concerns this year. It may not even get talked about. So it stays. And the issues garnering attention this year get added. Most of the time, the committees don’t disagree with what was put in the platform the year before—unless it’s an idea that still stirs up emotion—so they leave those ideas alone. So, alas, it will probably always be long.

What has gotten my notice this year are the themes. And these are repeated from what I saw at our district convention.

The people of Texas are against tyranny. They’ve seen too much of it—from the federal government and state and local. The platform is a way to express that. The ideas come up from precinct conventions to district and county conventions, and now on up to the state convention.

Some of the resolutions are minutely specific and detailed. Some just express a broad sentiment in a sentence.

Two years ago we were already expressing concern about pandemic response being used as an excuse for tyranny. There’s even more on that this year. But that concern has broadened—because the government overreach, attempting to control our lives, is even greater, with more invasive tentacles.

We do not want tyranny in our healthcare choices. We also do not want tyranny in our media—social media, news media, entertainment. We think more open discussion is better. And we’re really sick of truth being labeled “disinformation” by people who are lying to us. And, by the way, we don’t want the government surveilling us and keeping that data—just in case they can come up with probable cause someday.

Parents have the inherent right to the
care and upbringing of their children. That's
Mr. Spherical Model doing that job with
two of our now-grown kids.

A huge part of the pushback this year is related to families. It goes way beyond school choice, which is becoming a main Republican theme that legislators better listen to. But it’s bigger than that. Parents have the inherent right to the care and upbringing of their children. Parents—and taxpayers in general—aren’t going to tolerate sexualized and racialized indoctrination of our children.

If this were not a real issue, if this were something that is just a rumor with no real life examples, we would not be hearing the uproar from across the state.

Think about numbers. Most people do not attend a precinct convention, let along write a resolution to put forward at one. So that person who writes the resolution probably represents several hundred people in his or her precinct who feel the same way but aren’t involved. Maybe they don’t know how to get involved or express that idea.

So this person writes a resolution on a topic of concern—like Social Emotional Learning, and anything under that umbrella, being taught in our schools. We get similar resolutions on the same topic from maybe dozens of local precincts, meaning it’s widespread here. It means several thousand people have the same concern.

And then you get together at a district convention and find out tens of thousands of people have the same concern. You can extrapolate at the state level, when the same idea comes up in maybe 20 out of the 31 districts, that there are hundreds of thousands of people with the same concern, probably millions.

People want sex out of the schools. Let’s just remove sex ed entirely, since the public schools have already proven they can’t be trusted—and because that’s not the basic function of schools. We want NO LGBT-plus-any-other-letters-or-symbols agenda being foisted on young people. Parents resent schools doing sneaky things like leaving parents out of the information loop, or telling kids not to tell their parents about something.

When schools fail to meet the needs of families, the parents feel stuck. They want school choice. Here we are paying taxpayer money, and it goes to this failing monopoly—actually preventing parents from getting the kind of education their children need. We want our legislators to hear this: we want the money to follow the child WITHOUT government strings attached.

Related to that is the horror people feel about permanently mutilating minors for the sake of “affirming” a confusion that most of them will grow out of.

First and Second Amendments

People care about their First Amendment rights—religion and speech mentioned mostly. And people care about their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. What part of “shall not be infringed” does the government not understand?

During the 2018 convention season—it was May—there was a school shooting in Texas, in Santa Fe. As a result, people were concerned about the same type of conversation going on now, following the Uvalde school shooting. The pro-tyranny crowd tries to use such tragedies to gain power. Pro-freedom Texans want to make sure the over-emotional “we’ve got to do something” crowd that gets all the media attention doesn’t take away our rights.

Do we or do we not have a God-given, inherent right to defend ourselves? Texans know we do. And none of the hue and cry gives us a reason for law-abiding citizens to stop defending themselves against the criminals/crazies. It’s not the guns that are evil; it is those who wield those weapons in the perpetration of crime that are evil. Taking away the means for good people to defend themselves from such evil does not make anyone safer. In fact, we argue that it makes us less safe. Schools are targeted because they lack defenses.

And, no, we can’t wait for government officials to show up after a crime is underway to protect us. In Uvalde, we still can’t understand all that happened. But we know the shooter was inside the school for most of an hour, continuing to kill, before an official came in and took him down while other officers waited safely in the hallway. An armed teacher might have made a huge difference. An armed security officer actually on campus and doing his job might have helped.

We can’t trust elected officials to respect our right to self-defense. So there’s a lot being voiced on that in the platform resolutions. And, I should mention, the resolutions were turned in weeks before the Uvalde shooting. But, because of the tyrannists going for our guns, these resolutions should get attention in platform committees.

Can you think of other ways the government has been overreaching? They’re probably mentioned here.

The detentions related to January 6^th come up a few times. Detention of citizens without charges is wrong on so many levels.

Election integrity is a huge issue. I’ll be writing more about 2000 Mules soon—you and everyone you know should definitely watch it. Catherine Engelbrecht is from here. True the Vote started here in Harris County. We’ve been paying attention to these issues longer than most—but still come up against the same wall of frustration. “Here’s the evidence. Do the prosecution.” And nothing happens. So the cry comes up, through the platform, to the legislature to do something about it.

People have many ideas and specifics they’re offering that they think will help. People are concerned about the machines that do the counting and think paper ballots might help (there are arguments against that as well, because there’s a long history of cheating with paper ballots). People are calling for forensic audits—which are expensive but probably necessary if we’re ever going to regain trust in our election system. People want voter rolls cleaned up—and they don’t want some outside company, like the ERIC system [Electronic Registration Information Center], meddling in the process.

Here’s a pretty good general list, from one resolution:

New Election Law Bills:  The New Election Law Bills provide:

a.     Voter Registration database with restricted input/output access.

b.     Limit voting to precinct or adjacent precinct only voting.

c.      Paper Ballots that are sequentially numbered, hand marked, & watermarked.

d.     Paper Poll Books for voters to sign.

e.     Basic Optical Scanner/Vote Counter only to tally vote results.

f.       Printed Vote Result Tapes – Early Voting and Election Day.

g.     Limited Early Voting with no gap between Early Voting and Election Day.

h.     Hand Counts are allowed at the judges' discretion.

i.       No wireless, Lan, cellular, or computers in voting sites.

j.       Third party verification and audit.

k.      Unique identifiable seals on ballot boxes.

l.       Vote results delivered to central count on paper.

m.    Vote results tabulated from paper record with calculator.

n.     Chain of custody from start to finish.

o.     Unofficial results called into SoS and media.

p.     Poll watcher protection: Standing to sue, and ability to use video surveillance.

q.     Lawsuits can be filed in adjacent counties.

What all this tells me is, the people mean business. They’re waking up. They’re taking action in ways they believe are both effective and civilized. I hope the next legislative session responds. But I don’t place my trust there. When a large group of people are declaring their love of God and family, and are doing all they know to do to make things right in a world gone very wrong—that is when we can expect to see God step in to protect us in ways that are miraculous.

Good people of Texas standing together
might be able to do some good in the world.
This is a University of Texas class photo, found online in 2015,
link no longer active.

There may be more appalling things before that end comes, as the opposition ripens in iniquity. But that end will come. When it does, I will be very glad to be on the side of freedom, family, and truth—on God’s side. He can win His battles without us; but we cannot win these battles without Him.