The Short Answer Is Fear

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks working through resolutions from the precincts in our senatorial district and creating amendments and additions intended for the state platform. I headed the Education subcommittee in my SD, so much of my attention was there.

Rep. Tom Oliverson dropped in to speak at our SD7 Convention
on Saturday, a couple of days after announcing his intention to
seek the House Speaker position. (Wish I had better photos, but my precinct was
seated far back and to the side. And I forgot to get photos of any committee work.)

Our very large SD does things as a mini version of the state platform committee. And since rule changes from last biennium, we had open meetings. We also took testimony. It turns out, Education is where much of the testimony was aimed.

Two years ago there was a huge push for more parental rights and controls, and included in the many rights of parents is school choice. That became a governor’s priority, but it nevertheless did not get through the legislature, even during four special sessions (add-on month-long sessions for specific purposes).

Why is there pushback, especially among Republicans, against school choice? The short answer is fear.

At the state Republican convention two years ago, we were in permanent committee, taking the last hour or two of testimony before final deliberations. All of the testimony time for the Education section taken up by anti-school choice delegates. (I wrote about this here.) It gave the impression that there was a huge sentiment in that direction from across the state. But that was an illusion. Those people were organized to get their names on the list to testify. But there were literally hundreds of precincts around the state that had submitted resolutions in favor of school choice. The anti-choice people almost caused the plank to be taken out, but it was rescued by the Education subcommittee chair at the last moment, describing the overwhelming testimony for school choice.

So, moving ahead two years, we got the same organized group of vocal anti-school choice people (I don’t know if they’re the same individuals, just the same sentiments) taking nearly all the testimony time. This was in our temporary subcommittee, and again during our permanent committee at the senatorial district convention last Saturday. We gave them far beyond their allotted time. I wanted to fully understand their arguments. There’s actually a fair amount we agree on.

We want options to be available to all. They say there already are options, which they want to keep: those options are public school, charter school, private school, or homeschool. I personally do not think that is anywhere near enough choice—and most people don’t even have those choices available to them. I’ll get back to this.

What these opponents fear is that, if you have money follow the child anywhere away from public or charter schools (charter schools are a public school entity; it’s complicated), then you allow government influence into wherever that money goes.

Our platform already says that the money must follow the child with no strings attached. These opponents say you can’t have the money follow the child without strings. And, they claim, this is a back door to government getting control within private schools—namely, church/parochial schools, but also homeschools—where they have no oversight now. Any time the federal government gives money, they attach strings.

Our platform already states that we want to abolish the federal Department of Education. We do not intend for any money following the child to come from a federal funding source.

When we asked the testifiers, what about families who are trapped in public schools that are failing their children—people who are paying taxes for that education they’re not getting—who can’t afford to also pay tuition elsewhere, there were two responses: that isn’t paying double (um, yes it is), and who is deciding the schools are failing—that’s a government entity trying to get more control (um, no; in my case it was me observing and experiencing the failure to meet my children’s specific needs, so I as the parent decided to call that a failure, and I pulled them out).

In other words, they do not care about parents whose children are trapped in schools that do not meet their needs. They will insist that those parents continue to pay taxes with no promised benefit. Tough luck.

These people write books and give presentations (there’s one nearby this week). They will go through the history of education—as I have done (here’s a sample I wrote and presented in 2019, and a part 2 on related info here)—and show the growth of indoctrination over time—again, as I have done. And then they conclude that, because we haven’t yet stopped the indoctrination, we never will, so the only solution is to keep the status quo in order to protect homeschools and private schools.

And that is where we diverge. We haven’t yet stopped the indoctrination—but, while some of us have had that mission for a long time, most parents just woke up in 2020, when the schools utterly failed their kids. This army of newly awakened parents spoke up. In 2022, the call for parental rights and school choice were loud enough to be deafening. We’ve been successfully flipping our school boards to conservative majorities. And so far, since that awakening, we’ve only had one legislative try—and there’s a lot of opposition to overcome there. But we already have the state senate on our side, and we have turnover this year in the House (ousted in the Primary a number of rino-Republicans who had voted with Speaker Phelan to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton without presenting evidence; Speaker Phelan is on the verge of being ousted in a runoff, and Rep. Tom Oliverson, from here in our area, is stepping up to take on the speaker role, and he's on our side).

And the parents are continuing to call for their rights—including their right to choose concerning their child’s education.

Instead of doomsaying, maybe we ought to open our minds to more possibilities. We know that whenever the free market solves problems, it does it with higher quality and lower price than a government monopoly. So let’s see if we can inject some actual free market into the school system. And let’s do it by cutting strings to indoctrination sources—like the federal government, the teachers’ unions, the nonprofits offering “help.”

In our platform, the first Education plank already called for choice. We clarified what we mean—a lot more choice than what kind of classroom the child sits in. Who know what the state committee will do with it, but here’s our SD’s version of the plank with our amendments. Black is wording from the 2022 platform. Red indicates our additions. Green with strikethroughs is what we deleted:

101.  School Choice: Texas families shall be empowered to choose from public, private, charter, or homeschool options, or any combination thereof, including private tutors, lessons, therapies, online courses, technical schools, apprenticeships, certification programs, etc., for their children’s education, and the funding shall follow the student without strings attached, meaning accountability is measured by the parents, in place of any state or federal oversight. We also support tax credits and exemptions for education and choice within the public school system. Public Schools from which funding is removed when the funding follows the student elsewhere shall be prohibited from being replaced by funding with revenue collected from taxpayers or from state or local governments.

We deleted that green line, because the idea of putting choice within the public school system is now expressed in the “or any combination thereof” idea, so it became superfluous and confusing.

The last red sentence was an amendment during floor debate (when we present our platform to the body at the SD convention). The person who suggested it was dealing with that free-market idea. If an entity isn’t providing value, they should suffer the consequences, rather than be subsidized in their failures. I didn’t think the sentence was necessary, and I was concerned it might detract from the good we did earlier in the plank. But I agree with his idea. If they don’t provide the quality, the students leave, and the schools, who get paid according to attendance, lose money. So they are incentivized to improve.

There’s always concern about whether the schools have enough money, and there was another legislative change that made it so there could be quite a shortfall this year. But, as I have mentioned a time or two (or ten), in our district maybe we could empty out that brand new multi-level office building for administrative staff—who do not work in schools! No school district ought to have so many admins. So, let go of any non-essentials (I don’t know, maybe all but a dozen), and if that doesn’t cover the shortfall, then rent out the building as office space.

The mission is not about preserving the public school system; it is about providing the education every individual child needs—without indoctrination, sexualization, data mining, or any of the other things parents are rightly alarmed about.

(This photo is from a source no longer available; I previously used it here.)
We live not far from the bus barn, where lines of school buses come out onto
the street at certain times of the day. Back during homeschooling years,
my kids thought it was funny to hum the Darth Vader march from Star Wars
when we saw these.

But how can you have both freedom and accountability? You leave the accountability to the parents. You don’t need a huge bureaucracy to hover over the parents and examine their decisions. Think about how a health savings account works; you choose how to spend the money, but it can only be spent on healthcare. It’s up to you what out-of-pocket healthcare expenses you use that money on. Or, think of a GI bill, which can be used for higher education. The government doesn’t tell the veteran what to study, or where to study. It can even be used at a religious school, even to become a minister or chaplain. The only stipulation is that it be used for higher education. That’s the kind of choice we’re looking for in school choice.

Can it be done successfully? It can. Will it? I don’t know. But I’m not willing to keep children trapped in the status quo because a small but vocal minority has made it their life mission to prevent school choice—because of their fears.

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.

 

Ideas Rising

I haven’t written here for a couple of weeks. I’ve been busy, working on the platform. At our precinct conventions on March 5, a few days after the March 1 Primary Election, one of the things we did was put forth resolutions for the platform. As I explained recently, the wording can have some “whereas” statements, explaining the background reasoning, and then end with a “therefore” statement. The whole thing gets sent in. Sometimes the only thing we get is the statement of an idea, as best as someone could figure out how to spit it out, maybe even just handwritten.

In my senatorial district, over 600 resolutions were submitted. These included a number of duplicates—exactly the same sent in by different precincts. And there were also a number of duplicate ideas—sent in with their own wording, but essentially saying the same thing. And then there were ideas sent in singularly.

Some resolutions contained multiple ideas—ideas that seemed related, to those who sent them in, but that actually identified multiple separate ideas, usually related to the same section of the platform, but not always.

So, we scanned all the resolutions the day of the Precinct Conventions (I helped do that). Then they got categorized and placed in a huge spreadsheet. And that got divided up among the various subcommittees of the Resolutions Committee in my senatorial district. And then the subcommittees placed them near similar ideas in existing platform planks, so we could begin working on wording.

I was on Education and Health & Human Services subcommittees; I led the Education subcommittee. I didn’t realize ahead of time what that was going to entail. It turns out, Education is where there is a whole lot of interest this biennium. Of those 600+ resolutions we received, around 230 of them, so more than 30%, were for Education. I also have been handling the platform document that our resolutions turn into. So, for the past couple of weeks I’ve been working long hours just about every day. Our Senatorial District Conventions in Harris County were held this past Saturday, so my intention is to catch up on sleep now. And then grocery shopping. And maybe then some house cleaning.

The SD7 2022 Resolutions (Platform) Committee;
at the SD7 Convention March 26, 2022. That's me on the right.

There were fifteen on the committee, according to rules, plus a few extras who also worked hard but didn’t get to vote on issues. My Education subcommittee attracted all the women on the Committee. We worked well together. I love them all as friends now. We began each meeting with prayer, and I often felt God’s Spirit confirming to me His approval and help in the work we were doing. I mean that quite literally. That sense that we were working together for God's glory was present in all the committee meetings I was in. What a joy to work with such good people, who also happen to be bright and well-informed, and dedicated to preserving our freedom, prosperity, and civilization.

Today, then, I’ll share some of what we—and the people who submitted all those resolutions—came up with. What I’m showing here is what we suggest as changes to the 2020 Republican Party of Texas Platform. We’re not actually causing these changes yet; we’re passing them on up to the state committee. (A little more on that below, near the end.)

If there is a theme, it is that we want our freedoms back. We’re not willing to take tyranny any longer, and we’re trying to find solutions.

In Education, many of the ideas were specific. And oddly they weren’t as strong as what was in the existing platform. They were clearly not asking for a weaker platform; they just were thinking, “What can we do?” and coming up with ideas. So, be assured we didn’t weaken things.

In short, what parents want is to take back their power. The schools have had too much power over our kids, and they have proved untrustworthy.

As you’ve been seeing around the country, people are upset about Critical Race Theory being taught in schools—and, yes, it is being taught, even here in Texas, no matter how many times they say, “No, that’s some theory taught in graduate schools; we don’t teach that.” They are teaching that America is flawed, and our founders were evil; they are not teaching the Constitution, and how the founders identified principles of freedom, overcoming millennia of other traditions. They divide children by race—to compensate for what they’re calling “systemic racism,” even though our children don’t treat each other differently by race—until they’re taught to. Parents don’t want their children to be told, “You’re either an oppressor or a victim, and no matter what you do, that’s what you are because of the skin you’re born with.” This “anti-racism” concept, which is part of CRT, is very racist.

Connected to racism is intersectionality—gaining power according to your various grievance claims. These can be race, sex, sexual orientation, transgenderism. So a black transgender would have more intersectional power than a black woman. A black woman would have more than a Hispanic or Asian woman. A white woman would have more than a white male—who is at the bottom. It’s a power scoring system based on happenstance rather than accomplishment or character—exactly the opposite of MLK’s dream.

And because of the power generated by being homosexual or transgender, that LGBTQ agenda is promoted—even to the very young. And to that, parents are saying, “No! Now you’ve gone too far.”

So that’s what we are seeing. Other issues related to wanting more transparency, and of course more choice. People want the money to follow the child—without government strings attached.

We can go into this another day, about how education isn’t actually a proper role of government. That’s why the federal Department of Education is about nothing but control. It does not help educate, period. But in the states, including here in Texas, the government sees education as its responsibility, in fact it’s main responsibility. That’s unfortunate, because you can’t even bring up choice without major outcry reaching the ears of legislators, accusing them of hating kids, and failing them by threatening to take money away.

That’s a mindset we need to get out of. People “believe” in public schools as if it is a religion. They actually say, “I believe in public schools.” Well, I believe they exist. But I don’t believe they are “the way” to educate the next generation to be productive good citizens. Public schools tend to do that more poorly than every other option. But they suck up all the taxpayer dollars, and hold onto those dollars with clenched fists.

So what did we come up with?

We addressed the CRT issue, probably in multiple places. We kept the existing Basic Standards plank (added Texas history to the list). And then we pointed out that schools are there to provide academic education, not to mold students in some way. Schools are not families; they have no business dealing with things like Social Emotional Learning (SEL is a way of indoctrinating wokeness), mental health evaluations, sex ed, anything related to gender identity, and of course CRT and any other socialist/Marxist ideology. Schools don’t have a say in the care and upbringing of children; that right is retained by the parents. (Red means we added that.) 

134.Basic Standards: The educational system should focus on basic standards, which include, but are not limited to, a curriculum of reading (with an emphasis on phonics); spelling; writing; civics (must pass the US Citizenship and Immigration Services test); the arts; music; literature; mathematics (including personal finance); science; geography; economics; and Texas, United States, and world history. We encourage teaching critical thinking skills, including logic, rhetoric, and analytical sciences within these subjects. We advocate the value of vocational training programs.

134A.  Schools Are Not Families: Schools are hired to provide academic education, while parents retain every right to the child’s care and upbringing. Therefore, we insist on the elimination in school of any Social Emotional Learning (SEL), mental health evaluations, sexuality education, gender-identity ideology, Critical Race Theory (CRT), socialism, Marxism, and other social indoctrination. Schools must be limited to teaching the Basic Standards as listed in the Basic Standards plank. All school districts, individual schools, or charter schools are prohibited from contracting with or making any payment to any third party for material concerning any of the above prohibited topics.

 

We already had a plank saying we want no sex ed taught in schools—at any level—because schools have failed in that assignment abysmally. So the multiple requests to teach abstinence 75% of the time weren’t ignored; they just weren’t added. 100% > 75%. But we strengthened the existing Sexual Education plank an added this new one related to the Obscenity Exemption plank:

145A. No Sexualization of Children: Because the fraudulent research by Dr. Alfred Kinsey has been used to allow children access to harmful, explicit pornographic materials and to be induced into sexual performance, we support repeal of the obscenity exemption [Texas Penal Code 43.24(c)], which allows children access to harmful, explicit, or pornographic materials under the guise of education [see Obscenity Exemption plank above]. We require criminal penalties from a misdemeanor to a felony charge for each count of breaking the law by showing obscene materials to a student. An educator—including teachers, administrators, board members, or personnel, as well as guest speakers—so charged must be immediately suspended, and upon conviction must be dismissed for immoral and unprofessional conduct.

 

We have a disagreement among those who want school choice—because of some fears and some misunderstandings. The typical understanding is that families can choose from four types of schools: public, private, charter, or homeschool. But that limits the possibilities. If we had, say, an education savings account sort of plan, those four options would be available, but so would a mix-and-match version of any or all, plus online programs, plus private lessons and tutoring, plus therapies (for example, equine therapy or speech therapy). If the parents could choose the options, they would be limited only by the amount in the account plus whatever additional they might want to pay. It would work similar to a health savings account: you can use the money in an HSA for any qualifying medical service or product. In an ESA, that would be true of any qualifying educational service or product.

But the fear is in the “qualifying.” In general, it would be up to the parents to decide. But it would have to be something related to their child’s education. For example, a museum pass might qualify, but a new skateboard would not. The money simply can’t be used for a nonqualifying purchase.

The fear crowd tends to be homeschoolers or private schoolers worried about intrusion by government into what they’re doing. But they do not have to take any taxpayer money. I believe their fears should not be preventing choices from happening for all the other parents—including homeschooling parents who prefer to be vigilant against government intrusion while exploring multiple options.

Anyway, we rewrote the previous School Options plank to be two planks: Education Mission Includes All Children, which explains why the money should follow the child, rather than be held in the public school monopoly; and Free Market Is Solution to Education, which reminds us that the free market is the way to higher quality at lower costs. Imagine the innovation that would be spurred in the market if parents held the purse strings and intentionally chose the customized combination of materials and approaches that would work best for their child.

141. School Options: Texas families should be empowered to choose from public, private, charter, or homeschool options for their children’s education, using tax credits or exemptions without government restraints or intrusion.

141.Education Mission Includes All Children: The state of Texas has a mission to educate the next generation to become productive good citizens, and it collects taxes for this purpose. Public school is only one tool parents can choose for accomplishing this mission, but public school is not the mission itself. The state must never create roadblocks for families for whom that tool does not meet their goals for their children. Taxing families on top of what they pay out of pocket for another choice does not further the mission. Monies allotted to education must follow the child without government restraints or intrusion.

141A. Free Market Is Solution to Education: We know that the free market leads to higher quality and lower costs. If Texans want higher quality education and would enjoy getting that for lower cost, Texas must incorporate the free market into every aspect of pre-K-12 education. This would lead to greater satisfaction for parents and teachers, could eliminate indoctrination problems, and would lead to generally improved outcomes at lower costs than what we have seen with government monopoly.

 

Beyond education, the big outcry from the public was for freedom from government overreach, and a reassertion of our God-given rights. Two years ago we were writing the 2020 Platform near the beginning of the pandemic. So we had a plank last time about Healthcare Decisions. We extended that with a new Medical Freedom plank, to get rid of those mandates of all kinds that we’ve suffered.

250A. Medical Freedom: We call for an addition to the Texas Bill of Rights that explicitly states that Texans have the natural right to refuse vaccination or other medical treatment. Therefore, the following are expressly forbidden even in an emergency or a pandemic:

a.     Any attempt to mandate, force, or coerce any medical test, procedure, or product, including vaccines or masks.

b.     Any attempt to use a citizen's health, infection recovery, or vaccination status as a condition to maintain or obtain housing or employment or employee benefits, attend school or childcare, or access state services.

c.      Any mandates by public, private, government, or medical entities for treatment, vaccination, vaccine passports, mask requirements, health insurance surcharges, or use of controlled substances of any kind.

d.     Any involuntary isolation or quarantine of anyone not experiencing an active contagious infection.

e.     Any prevention of visitation to the ill when risks are acknowledged and mitigated according to patient and visitor choice.

f.     Any Nuremberg Code violations—including but not limited to the requirement that use of experimental use medications must provide full knowledgeable consent and be free from any form of coercion or inducement.

 

That was in Health & Human Services. In addition, we altered and added a couple of specific planks up in Business, Commerce & Transportation:

58.    Mask Mandates: Government should not be able permitted to force businesses or governmental workers (including election workers and school personnel) to require face coverings.

58A.  Vaccine Mandates: The Republican Party opposes vaccine mandates, opposes any effort to impose such mandates through emergency declaration, legislation, or regulatory action, and supports legislative efforts to allow consumers and patrons to freely conduct business without regard to vaccination status.

 

There are other intrusions into our freedoms as well. I like this addition:

234A. One World: The United States is a sovereign nation founded on the principles of freedom.  We call on the dissolution of the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, New World Order, One World Government, The Great Reset, and other groups who have taken on the role of a government entity and act as such to control freedom of thought, speech, religion, and trade.

We find that these things coming at us from multiple directions, so people are trying to list every iteration and prevent any new ones.

Speaking of which, concerns of mine, which I put forth as resolutions that were accepted, were to stop ESG scoring and DEI programs—both by governments and by businesses, which are being recruited to take away our freedoms at the behest of governments when the governments know they can’t get away with that sort of tyranny outright:

21A. Values Scoring: The Republican Party opposes the use by financial institutions, social media companies, businesses, or any level of government, of any social credit system (such as used by the Chinese Communist Party), ESG (Environmental, Social & corporate Governance) scoring system, or similar system or method designed to discriminate against a person’s beliefs, values, medical decisions or lawful behaviors. The use of such systems prevents citizens from exercising their constitutional rights, including the rights of free speech, assembly, and religion, and further prevents citizens from the full enjoyment of the unalienable rights of our Republic. The Republican Party calls for federal and state legislation banning governmental use of such systems and protecting the rights and liberties of citizens from the use of such systems by businesses.

21C. No Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Policies: When Diversity means no diversity of thought; when Equity means equal outcomes rather than equal opportunities; and when Inclusion means exclusion of anyone not fitting the DEI orthodoxy; then DEI is an abominable forced bigotry and must be made illegal in public and private businesses, government at all levels, schools and universities, and financial institutions.

 

We had a fairly strong Abolish Abortion plank last time. But we’re strengthening that.

325. Abolish Abortion: Since life begins at conception, we urge the Texas Legislature to enact legislation to abolish abortion by immediately securing through enacting legislation that would immediately secure the rights to life and equal protection of the laws to all preborn children from the moment of fertilization and by ignoring and refusing and would ignore or refuse to enforce any and all federal statutes, regulations, orders, and court rulings that would deny these rights, and to oppose legislation that discriminates against any preborn children and violates the US Constitution by denying such persons the equal protection of the laws.

 

Of course we’re asking for some additional safeguards for the election system. We added to the existing Fair Election Procedures plank, and added a new plank detailing what would trigger a full forensic audit:

210. Fair Election Procedures: We support the right of eligible voters to cast a ballot in each election once but oppose illegal voting, illegal assistance, or ineligible persons registering. We support:

a.     Vigorous enforcement of all our election laws as written and oppose any laws, lawsuits, and judicial decisions that make voter fraud very difficult to deter, detect, or prosecute.

b.     Voter Photo ID.

c.      Prohibition of Internet voting for public office and any ballot measure.

d.     Sequentially numbered and signed paper ballots to deter counterfeiting.

e.     No private funding of the election process.

210A. Forensic Audit: For races contested by the candidates, Certification must be postponed, and a full forensic audit of preserved paper ballots and voter records must be performed, including a hand recount of paper ballots, if any of the following is detected:

a.   Statistical anomalies and/or impossibilities.

b.   Voter turnout is more than voter registrations.

c.   Missing audit logs.

d.   Dropping signature verifications for mail-in ballots.

e.   Astronomical numbers of error events in vote tabulators.

f.         Extremely low rejection rates for mail in ballots.

g.   Suspiciously high adjudication or participation rates.

h.   Accepting votes that "scanned" faster than the scanner could physically scan.

i.        Any tabulation error, such as "votes exceeds ballots cast", which must be investigated, allowing no override.

j.        Counting ballots after the Election Night Deadline if the resulting numbers significantly change the outcome.

 

We don’t do a lot of asking for programs—more often we ask to get rid of them. But a resolution came in asking for the restoration of an education program for families. Those of you familiar with “The Family: AProclamation to the World” might recognize the call for citizens and governments “to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society.” So we were able to echo some of that proclamation in this plank:

240A. Healthy Family Formation: We call upon the Texas Legislature, in conjunction with responsible citizens, to promote measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society. Toward this end we recommend reintroducing a Healthy Family Formation program, providing messages on risk avoidance and abstinence outside of marriage, complete fidelity within marriage, and equipping parents to share in the responsibilities of rearing children in a nurturing atmosphere of love and mutual respect and providing the necessities of life and protection for the family.

 

In all, we’re suggesting an additional 41 planks, with changes to many existing planks. The process from here is for us to submit these to the Republican State Platform Committee. So ours get assessed along with suggestions from around the state’s 31 senatorial districts. And the state committee will be comprised of a representative from each of them.

It’s more formal at that level. In subcommittees there is a fairly open exchange of ideas, but when the Committee of the Whole meets, members address the Chairman, not each other, and parliamentary rules are strictly followed.

It looks like I will be editing for the State Platform Committee again this year (3^rd time). It’s an interesting thing to do, and I feel like I’m contributing, using my skills. But at that level I get very little say in how things are worded, and no input on what should be said. So my opportunity to do that was at the senatorial district level. I forget how many times I’ve done this level, but I think I started in 2014; if that is so, then this is my fifth time. As contributions to the party go, this is my wheelhouse.

What new people on our committee commented on was how much respect we show to every resolution that comes in. We’ve always paid attention to each one, but this time we tracked on a spreadsheet what we did related to each resolution, so those who submitted could actually see whether and where their ideas were included.

The system is designed to grow the platform, which explains why it’s so long. I wish that weren’t so. And yet, most of what was in there from last time was worth keeping, at least in some form. We added far more ideas than we took out.

Each of those ideas started out in someone’s head, and they got written down and submitted at the precinct level. We have now handled them at the district level. And they will make their way up to the state level, where they will direct our grassroots work—and the work of our elected officials—for the next two years.

This system is designed to hear what the grassroots are saying. Those are the ideas that are rising up. People are figuratively shouting, “We want our freedoms back!” We want to run our own lives, including our own medical decisions. And we don’t want governments or anyone else telling us how to raise our children, or what we are supposed to believe.

The question now is, will our voices be heard? People with power—the ones who have usurped that power from the people—don’t willingly give it up. But in the end they can only rule by the consent of the governed. And that’s those of us who are speaking up.

 

 

The Neverending Convention, Part III

About the neverending Texas State Republican Convention, (see part I and part II) I don’t know whether the report of the Platform Committee will ever happen. It would normally happen on Friday and Saturday of a convention weekend—usually the last major piece of business. But this year’s convention was anything but normal.

The Eventual Schedule

Thursday was a full day of delay because of technical difficulties related to doing a planned in-person convention suddenly online. All contingency plans that had been underway for months turned out to be inadequate, especially when you add denial-of-service attacks into the mix. Thursday evening an emergency meeting of the State Republican Executive Committee—the SREC: two representatives from each of the 31 senatorial districts—made the decision to postpone all business until Saturday morning and try to do all that would have happened Thursday through Saturday instead on Saturday and Sunday.

That might have worked, if everything had gone smoothly. But online issues continued. Even people who had been able to participate in earlier meetings were shut out of later meetings. Congressional District (CD) and then Senatorial District (SD) caucus meetings went late into the night.

The Permanent Platform Committee would normally have met on Thursday. Instead, most committee members drove home that day. And Friday we were on hold. Then we had to be ready to go all day Saturday, adjusting each time the schedule got pushed back. We eventually met at 9:00 AM, under a tight timeline; we were supposed to present the final report at noon on Sunday.

The online meeting of the Platform Committee was livestreamed.
Screenshot from here

Online meetings are difficult to begin with. There was the added difficulty that SD caucuses met late Saturday night—at which time they elected permanent committee members. During mine, my computer froze and I was unable to vote, although we made all temporary committee members permanent, so I didn’t feel disenfranchised. That was a personal technical issue not caused by the convention’s typical issues, most of which did not affect me.

Anyway, not all of the SD reports got to the committee chair in time. So invitations for the Sunday morning Zoom meeting went out to the temporary committee members—without the knowledge that some of them had been replaced for the permanent committee. Three people showed up who shouldn’t have been there, and three people didn’t immediately get the invitation when they should have. When that was straightened out, we hadn’t gone much beyond roll call. There was debate about a plank, with amendments proposed by a temporary committee member who did not belong there—and she knew she did not belong but acted as if she had authorization.

There was a need for a break for technical reasons—because the livestream wasn’t yet working. During the break, that huge membership issue was corrected, new members were welcomed, and business backed up to the debate of that plank. The original plank was proposed again; the friendly amendment was proposed again and accepted. And the amendment, by the unauthorized committee member who was attempting to infuse LGBT sensibilities to the plank—insisting that the Republican Party was leaving her out—was not proposed. I suspect it was her push for LGBT issues throughout the process that got her replaced by her SD.

There were only a handful of planks and amendments that got handled in permanent committee, and then testimony was taken. The committee had been told there would be no time for testimony, but then complaints about that being against the rules pressed for inviting testimony. I’m glad. I think testimony is an essential element of the process, although it’s not nearly as easy to accomplish online as in person. Time was supposed to be limited to 20 minutes. With getting started, plus additions to the time added, testimony took up about 45 minutes.

Much of the meeting looked like this, with the document shared on the screen.
Screenshot from here

At that point we were already supposed to be getting ready for the report in the general session. And at that point, my challenge is to make the document ready for floor debate (strikes and edits removed, make the document clean—and we still hadn’t had the opportunity for a full careful edit).

Anyway, the meeting handled maybe one more proposed amendment before the meeting was called to close. There were issues people felt strongly about and wanted to handle (an issue I’ll talk about below) that may end up in a minority report—an alternate platform version—which is a fairly rare thing usually handled during floor debate.

General session was postponed from noon until around 4:00 PM. Eventually all committees except Rules and Platform were able to give their reports. And then an hour or more was spent on a proposal to postpone all except the essential business of another SD caucus to some future day, to be determined by some ad hoc committee chosen by the body. (I never saw the choosing happen. While I was watching, the RPT people were handling an onslaught of suggested names—nearly as many as there were delegates—which was yet another denial-of-service attack. How and when that got resolved, I did not see.)

Technical problems were disenfranchising too many in my SD, so we did not gavel in that night; we met around 10:00 AM Monday, getting our voting for State Party Chair and Vice Chair done hours after the vote was in (from the SDs that met Sunday night, and all the way up until 5:00 AM, I heard) and the winners declared. So our vote was irrelevant. But we did get to choose our SREC members, which was important business.

That left Platform and Rules on hold. Yesterday we got word that the ad hoc committee has recommended that these two reports will be approved “pending 60% line-by-line voting by the delegates.” This will be done by a “Survey Monkey-style” survey to delegates and alternates, allowing three days for completion. This will include the proposed language of the Minority Report.

There will be no floor debate. No ability to amend. No ability to add any planks or language. I don’t know if this can be done without a legal challenge, but it might be the best reasonable compromise, since there’s no guarantee that a newly scheduled online meeting won’t meet with the same denial-of-service attacks and resulting credentialing issues that caused the original delay. Any way you look at it, people have been disenfranchised

.

Now, on to the content discussion.

Pandemic Response

The pandemic is on everyone’s minds. There are several new planks related to lockdowns and pandemic response. It was my impression, reading through the resolutions that came in, that just about every subcommittee got proposed ideas related to pandemic response. But two new planks came out of Constitutional Issues and three came out of Health and Human Services. I think you can tell Texas Republicans really don’t like our inalienable rights to be alienated. Platform planks of course do not have the power of law; they are intended to direct our elected officials in what we want the law to say.

Constitutional Issues

Lockdowns Never Again: The Republican Party of Texas calls upon our elected officials to never again implement mass lockdowns on the people, our businesses, and churches in the name of communicable disease response; nor should Texas officials ever again presume they know better how to treat or prioritize the medical treatment of Texans and to make command and control edicts that dictate to healthcare providers how to do their job. We oppose funding or implementation of any form of contact tracing.

Limit Executive Power: In the event the State Executive Branch activates the emergency powers for a disaster, the Legislature will automatically be convened two weeks later for a session to take up whatever matters deemed necessary for the Legislature.

Health and Human Services

Contact Tracing: We strongly oppose contact tracing, tracking, or surveillance, and we also strongly oppose any action similar to the federal TRACE Act. Contract tracing, tracking, or surveillance or not core functions of public health. No government entity, nor private entity, nor combination thereof, nor the Texas National Guard, shall ever be employed to violate the natural rights of Texans.

Pandemic Release: The Republican Party Texas opposes the release of convicted felons from prison due to a risk of infection within the prison system during a pandemic.

Pandemic Business Fines: The RPT supports prohibiting fines or imprisonment of business owners for operating their business during pandemics and call for the legislature to pass these protections into law.

Convention of the States

The Minority Report, which I haven’t seen, I believe will relate to the Convention of States plank. This has been a plank for some time. But the Texas Legislature accomplished its call for an Article 5 Convention of States two sessions ago (if I’m right, it was in 2017). Our platform is long, and one thing that can be done is remove planks that are no longer needed, because the legislature wrote it into law. That’s on a case-by-case basis, because sometimes the law only accomplishes in part, and sometimes the party wants to keep proclaiming the idea, even though it is law in Texas. For example, I think we’ll always say that we want Texas free from any state income tax, even though that is the law—just in case some future legislative body isn’t aware of our absolute declaration against it. But sometimes we can delete a plank. For example, in 2018 we had a plank called Abby’s Law, referring to a woman who testified at convention about the need for swift processing of sexual assault evidence (rape kits). The law was passed in 2019, so this year’s platform doesn’t include it.

About the Article V plank: in 2018, even though the legislation had been passed, it was recent, and the platform committee didn’t want to delete the idea that the Republican Party supported it. So the wording was changed from calling for it to reaffirming our support for it:

Article V Convention of States: We reaffirm our support for our Texas State Legislators’ call for a limited Article V Convention of States for the specific purpose of reducing the power of the federal government, including fiscal responsibility, balanced budget, and term limits. Any proposed amendments must be ratified by three-fourths of the states.

This time around an odd thing happened. It was expected that there would be a decision about whether to still keep this reaffirming language or not, since it wasn’t necessary to say this many years after it was accomplished. Either in or out, Texas is one of the states calling for a convention of the states.

But in subcommittee it got turned around entirely. Some temporary committee members were against the Convention of States and were attempting to convince everyone of its danger, to call for the Texas legislature to undo—rescind—their call for it. While I know people of goodwill on both sides of this issue, I would not say that the rescind side actually represents the will of a strong contingent of Republican voters, let alone a majority. In other words, the call to rescind was the opinion of a relatively small faction. Here’s their wording:

Article V Convention of States: We support the rescission of the State of Texas application to Congress for a convention under article V for proposing amendments to change the current limits on federal spending, jurisdiction, and terms of office. Our Constitution is the firewall guarding our unalienable rights – but it is a document, not self-enforcing. We petition our elected officials at all levels to support, enforce, and give effect to the Constitution and to Interpose between The People and the federal government, as required under Article VI, and resist any efforts to enforce it via changes. This is the remedy espoused by James Madison to “runaway government.”

Article VI is added in, and various other things. Here’s where politics comes in. What I believe happened was this: the temporary committee people who favored the rescind idea planned, got themselves appointed (usually this happens by volunteering to whoever handled the platform at the SD level), and then expressed interest in the Constitutional Issues subcommittee, where they could put forth their ideas and persuade the rest of the subcommittee.

Their SDs were made aware—because the Convention of States people were paying attention—and those temporary committee members were replaced Saturday night at their respective SD caucuses. Then, in the Sunday morning meeting, the debate was to delete the plank—the rescind version above. That passed, meaning no Article 5 plank remaining. But there was confusion by some on the committee, because they thought that this would automatically mean it would revert to the 2018 wording. With more time for debate, that could have happened. A proposal could have been made to add a plank containing the 2018 wording. But the motion to delete happened just before the break to begin testimony. And the short time before close of meeting after testimony didn’t allow for it.

Again, with or without, Texas has already expressed its favor for a Convention of States by passing the legislation. And we haven’t changed that in any official expression. Removal of that plank from the 2020 platform can be seen as just housekeeping. But I believe the Minority Report is asking to restore the 2018 wording.

I was concerned that, bringing it up during floor debate would open an opportunity to the rescind people to express their message to the whole crowd, and it might do more harm than good to the Convention of States cause. (Personally, I lean slightly in favor of COS, but with some reservations. I have experts to turn to, but I don’t know for certain that it is safe. Mark Levin’s book on this issue is on my reading list. There’s time while we wait for additional states to make their call.)

However, the way it stands, being able to bring it up in a survey, without floor debate, may just accomplish what Convention of States people want without the downside of a floor debate.

Notes I scribble to myself to document each
editorial change as I make it permanent,
collaborating with the committee chair.
Glamorous work, I know.

As for my work, it’s nearly done. I was finally able to do a careful edit this week, and go through each and every jot and tittle with the committee chair. There are still a few questions outstanding, where I’m waiting for feedback. Meanwhile that latest edited version is available for viewing on the convention website, as it has been all along (with some formatting problems inherent in Google Docs that look perfectly fine in the master document in Word). I hope when/if they do the survey, it is using the post-careful-edit version, instead of the quick and dirty one the RPT has had in hand since Sunday afternoon in anticipation of floor debate.

What I thought was going to be a week-long commitment has eaten up much of my month. And that was with the help of a good team. So I’d like this neverending convention to be over. If you still find errors in the final product, please forgive me. But I think it’s worth reading. And, if you find an issue you’re passionate about, consider doing some citizen lobbying when we get to the next legislative session, just a half a year away.