Today is Part II of my debrief of the Texas Republican
Convention. Part I is here.
I thought I would do Legislative Priorities and Platform in
one post, but this has gotten ridiculously long. So I’m going to split it, and
cover Platform & Resolutions in a Part III. (I’m assuming you’ll thank me
later.) Most of it is written, so I should get Part III posted in a day or so.
Thank you for your patience. I’m still quicker at getting this out than RPT is.
The convention ended Saturday, June 13. After two other
editors did formatting and general edits, I spent all of Monday and Tuesday
after convention doing a careful edit. There was integrating those changes and
finishing indexing, and then a meeting between the Editorial Committee Chair,
the RPT Secretary, and the Platform Committee Chair to go over any edits that
needed approval—and to add the changes that were made on the floor of the
convention, which I believe added one plank and one resolution, plus some other
amendments to planks. I have not seen the final wording of those floor changes,
other than what I saw on screen at convention. I do not understand the delay
following convention to get those to the editors; a process changed after 2022,
apparently.
But as of today, as I begin writing on Thursday, June 25, no
updated version has been posted since the printed (and online) Permanent
Committee Report for either Platform, Rules, or Legislative Priorities.
So we do not yet know the results of the scantron voting. We
do not have a list of 8 Legislative Priorities, narrowed down from the 15
presented by the Permanent Committee. And we do not have the edited version of
the Platform, which should include those floor changes, and the final
numbering.
So all I can write about today is what we voted on, not what
the results are.
To see the version we saw for floor debate, you can go here (until they move it or change it).
I could also mention that this wasn’t that easy to find. I
tried the TexasGOP.org site; I found nothing but the 2024 versions there. I
couldn’t even find Convention information, other than on the calendar, telling
me that event had passed.
I tried looking up the convention, which is a separate site:
convention.TexasGOP.org. And all I could find were the schedules provided for
convention goers.
So I did another search and found these versions on the
“about” page of the convention website, and scrolled down and found the links I needed.
It shouldn’t be this hard, especially for somebody who has
been paying attention all along.
If you’d like to watch the floor debates, LP and Platform
happened on June 13. Floor debate for Chair election and Rules happened on June
12. And the Permanent Committees were on June 11. Temporary Committee of the
Whole for Platform was Jun 10. You can find several of the livestreams on
YouTube.
Legislative
Priorities
Legislative Priorities Committee was an addition not that
long ago. We added them as part of our Platform Report in our Senatorial
District 7 Convention in I think 2016 and 2018. And then Mark Ramsey, the 2018 State
Platform Chair, had persuaded RPT to add Legislative Priorities as a separate
committee, and was the first Chair of that committee in 2020.
The purpose of Platform is to guide mainly the Texas
Legislature (and also some direction to other state leaders and to the US
Congress) to know what the grassroots cares about.
The platform continues to be long, with lots of specific
details. As we get ignored, we add more details.
There’s so much there, in the RPT Platform, it seemed like a
good idea (I think it is) to tell the Legislature what is most important.
That’s what Legislative Priorities is intended to do. LPs are, then, an
extension to the Platform; in fact, each LP must relate to at least one plank
in the Platform. So there’s some communication between these two committees
during Convention Committee meetings.
To read the full article, FOLLOW LINK TO SUBSTACK.
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