Conservative Partying, Part III: Platform & Resolutions

This is the third of three posts reporting on the Texas State Republican Convention, held in Houston June 8-13. Part I covers festivities, election of officers, and Rule Committee. Part II covers Legislative Priorities.

This post we’ll cover Platform & Resolutions Committee, from the perspective of an editor, which you’re probably not going to get anywhere else (not that the world is clamoring for such a perspective). Anyway, I’m afraid it’s still long, but it’s all in this post anyway. No more splitting into parts.

As I was reporting some arcane detail to my husband, with great enthusiasm, he commented that I sure am passionate about this. And that’s true. I love the words and the ideas—a whole lot more than the politicking. Anyway, here we go.

The Platform Is Conservative

Let me start with something positive. I had a conversation with one of the Committee members, someone for whom this is not her first rodeo either. And she asked me my impression of how the platform is doing. I don’t remember the exact wording of her question, but I was happy to report that, from my viewpoint, our platform is getting more conservative over time, and the grassroots are getting more unified.

To read the full article, FOLLOW LINK TO SUBSTACK.

Conservative Partying, Part II: Legislative Priorities and (part of) Platform

 

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.