Good morning,

Here's a curious thing: those who yell the loudest for citizens to be “nice” to politicians tend to be the ones profiting from undermining the values and principles for which the conservatives stand. More on that thought below.

This is the Texas Minute for Friday, July 12, 2024.

– Michael Quinn Sullivan 

NOTE: I'll be away next week on a special assignment; taking over the Texas Minute email and podcast duties for me will be Sydnie Henry and Brandon Waltens.

Trump and Cruz Maintain Leads With Texas Voters

• A new poll from the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs shows both former President Donald Trump and U.S. Senator Ted Cruz are leading their Democrat opponents. Emily Medeiros has the breakdown.
    
• Trump is leading current President Joe Biden by nine points (49 percent to 40 percent). Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy garnered five percent in the poll, while Green Party candidate Jill Stein scrounged two percent.
      
• Four percent of respondents said they did not know or were unsure of who they would support.
       
• Cruz, meanwhile, has a three-point lead over Democrat Colin Allred, a member of the U.S. House from Dallas.
      

• Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024.

Georgia Helps Texas Install New Anti-climb Barriers

• With help from the Georgia National Guard, Texas National Guard soldiers in El Paso have begun replacing concertina wire with new rows of razor wire. Debra McClure has the story.
    
• The wire was replaced to facilitate mowing and other maintenance, making it easier to spot illegal activity.
      
• Earlier this year, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said that “every state is now a border state” because of President Joe Biden’s “failure to address the crisis at the southern border.”
      
• Elsewhere along the border, members of the Texas National Guard erected new barriers near Eagle Pass.

Houston City Council Grills CenterPoint 

• With more than a million Houstonians without power days after Hurricane Beryl made landfall, the Houston City Council is demanding answers. Charles Blain reports council members expressed frustration that the company was not adequately prepared for the storm.
    
• CenterPoint has been criticized for not maintaining an "outage tracker," not answering call lines, and not having enough crews on standby. The company has said it recently filed a resiliency plan to harden infrastructure and increase vegetation management.
       
• “We should have never been in this place to begin with, with a Category 1 seeing the widespread outages that we are,” said Councilmember Abbie Kamin. She expressed frustration that Hurricane Ike "was close to sixteen years ago… now CenterPoint is submitting resilience plans."

Llano ISD Stops Taxpayer From Challenging Inappropriate Library Content

• As the battle over inappropriate content in children’s libraries continues, one Llano resident has been halted from challenging books by a new school district policy. Sydnie Henry reports that the Llano Independent School District has said activist Bonnie Wallace will no longer have standing to ask for a review of books with inappropriate content.
    
• Wallace is a longtime taxpayer in Llano and her daughter graduated from Llano High School. She has discovered 207 titles in need of review.
      
• Now, Llano ISD says they will only consider challenges from district employees or the "parent or guardian of a District student."
        
• But, of course, Llano ISD will still collect taxes from her...

U.S. House Passes Law Requiring Proof of Citizenship for Voter Registration

• The U.S. House of Representatives has passed an election security measure that requires Americans to provide proof of citizenship for federal voter registration. As Will Biagini reports, the proposed law has an uncertain future in the Senate.
    
• H.R. 8281, also known as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, aims to keep noncitizens, including illegal aliens, from participating in federal elections. It was introduced by Texas Republican Chip Roy and passed primarily along party lines.
      
• Ahead of the vote, the Biden White House had announced its opposition to the law.

Friday Reflection
Nicely Killing Liberty

Too many people have been taught to live their days striving to be nice. Among this crowd, it is considered nice not to condemn the contemptible. It’s nice to tolerate what should be intolerable. It’s nice to overlook egregious sin.

It is a niceness that thinks itself immune from a hostile world by being all smiles, exuding a syrupy sentimentality toward those who do evil.

At best, our cultural embrace of being “nice” is a self-serving form of self-righteousness.

In Scripture, we don’t find this modern version of “nice” that so many church leaders and secularists push rank-and-file Christians to embrace. What we do find in Scripture is love. We find generosity. We find kindness. We find sincerity. We find patience.

But this gooey, saccharine-sweet niceness is nowhere to be found.

On nearly every page of the Gospels, you find Jesus dining with culture’s untouchables, healing the infirm, and instructing the weak—but He isn’t “nice.” Jesus is firm, honest, truthful, patient, and—most of all—loving. He tells them the truth about their sin. He tells them to “go and sin no more.”

But with the ruling elite of the day? With the rulers who profit from self-dealing and cronyism? He calls them “serpents” and a “brood of vipers.” He says they are “whitewashed tombs.” He calls them murderers. These words weren’t directed at the occupying Romans, the atheists, or adherents to other religions; they were pointed at His fellow Jews!

You can imagine the nice people of the day were horrified when He turned over the tables of money changers in the Temple.

Nothing about that was “nice.” It was the correct thing to do. And it was a kindness to those who were being economically exploited by the ruling elite.

No doubt, many just wanted Jesus to find a way to get along, to be tolerant, to be nice. You can almost hear them demand, “Do more of the ‘water into wine’ and ‘free bread and fish,’ Jesus, and less of the viper-talk!”

It is no different today. I can only speak to the experience of Republicans, but those who yell the loudest for citizens to be “nice” to politicians tend to be the ones profiting from undermining the values and principles for which the conservatives stand.

We can be nice serfs, or we can be effective citizen-leaders. We can smile pleasantly as our Republic is run into ruin, or we can fight for the inheritance of self-governance meant for ourselves and our posterity.

Rather than be “nice,” let us first and always strive to be passionate citizens faithfully committed to the cause of liberty.

Quote-Unquote

"You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life."

– Winston Churchill