Good morning!

Here is today's Texas Minute.

– Michael Quinn Sullivan 

Friday, December 11, 2020
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But first... The 2021 legislative session starts one month from tomorrow. If the last 12 months have taught us nothing else, it’s that citizens must be ready to fight louder and harder than ever. Please make a special contribution to the cause! Whether as a one-time gift or monthly donation, it will help us deliver the ammunition Texans need to fight for liberty!

• In this morning’s edition of The Headline, Brandon Waltens will interview State Sen. Bob Hall (R-Edgewood) about the senator’s efforts to ban taxpayer-funded lobbying.
      
• The Headline can be enjoyed live at 11 a.m. on Fridays, and the archive is available for viewing (or as a podcast) immediately following.

• Taxpayer-funded lobbying was dealt a partial defeat earlier this week in an unlikely place: Dallas City Hall. Robert Montoya reports the city council hasn’t abandoned the immoral practice of taxpayer-funded lobbying, but they also aren’t adding on.
   
• Perhaps most significant is the specific lobbyist the city council rejected hiring: Andrea McWilliams. She and her husband are two of the top-paid lobbyists in Texas.
          
• As Transparency USA puts it, the McWilliams “are now known for their lobbying expertise and for entertaining the ‘political elite’ at lavish parties in their West Austin home. Twenty percent of Andrea McWilliams’ clients are taxpayer-funded.” 

• And speaking of Dallas... the Democrat mayor pro tem was busily telling residents to lockdown and observe Thanksgiving with as few people as possible – then he himself headed out to enjoy the fully reopened Florida.
   
• Dallas’ Adam Medrano joins the expanding list of Democrats and establishment Republican politicians who have been exposed violating the health guidelines, shutdown orders, and restrictive mandates they have imposed on everyone else.

• With the state government facing a cash shortfall, casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson is hoping to convince state lawmakers to legalize casino gambling in Texas. Jacob Asmussen has the details.
   
• But before libertarians get their hopes up and start chanting about how this is a win for the free market, Adelson doesn’t want just anyone to be able to start their own casino. The proposals would have state government deeply in bed with the casino operators – specifically to strangle competition.
   
• As expected, Democrats are excited about the prospect of one more way to game revenues into state treasury while vastly expanding the size of government through new bureaucracies and social welfare programs. “Now may be the best opportunity that casino gambling has had in quite a while,” said State Rep. Joe Deshotel (D-Port Arthur).
   
• Meanwhile, economists working for the National Association of Realtors find the impact of casinos on neighboring property values to be “unambiguously negative.”
   
• A study from the Institute for American Values adds: “Evidence from the health and social sciences suggests that the new American casinos are associated with a range of negative health, economic, political, intellectual, and social outcomes.”

Friday Reflection

We all heard it growing up from our mothers: “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” Come to think of it, I’m not sure that ever properly motivated me to actually clean my room as a kid. (Sorry, mom!)

Thanks to sin, none of us – like petulant children before bedtime – really want to be clean on our own. But thanks to God, we can be.

The notion of cleanliness pervades Scripture, specifically the realization that none of us are clean enough by God’s standards. That’s why a tree-lined bend along the Jordan River is so meaningful. It’s the place recognized as where John baptized his cousin, Jesus.

Jesus’ baptism marked the beginning of His public ministry. On the one hand, it seems strange that Jesus – literally, the Son of God, the Incarnate Word, the Messiah – “needed” to be baptized. But that even He was points to our own need.

Let’s be clear: Baptism isn’t about physical cleanliness, but rather the state of our heart. Just as a dirty room cannot clean itself (another mom-based truism), neither can our dirty hearts. Making our spiritual lives “clean” takes an act of God, as expressed outwardly through baptism.

John Adams once wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” So if we want to clean up government, let’s pray for a cleansing revival of the people. 

In a self-governing republic, we cannot bemoan corruption in government and hope someone else will do something about it. It’s up to us, and sometimes we have to start doing the work alone, where we are.

A dirty room won’t clean itself, and neither will a dirty government.