Good morning,

I know it is easier to enjoy a beer and burger in the backyard than to reflect on the sacrifices made on our behalf, but I’m doing so anyway ahead of Memorial Day.

First, here is today's “Abbott Fires Back, Shoots Foot” Texas Minute.

– Michael Quinn Sullivan 

Friday, May 28, 2021
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• Yesterday morning we told you about Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick demanding that Gov. Greg Abbott immediately call a June special session for priority legislation that hasn’t been accomplished. As Brandon Waltens reports, Abbott responded on Thursday afternoon by calling it “goofy.”
   
• “If anybody tries to hold hostage this legislative session to force a special session, that person will be putting their members in the Senate or the House potentially into a special session for another two years for the next regular session,” said Gov. Abbott, adding that he would hold a special session to get items passed, “not just open up some debating society.”
   
• The governor then repeated his categorically false assertion that there is “still time” for conservative priorities to pass.
   
• In turn, Lt. Gov. Patrick had to school the governor (and former attorney general!) on the state’s constitution and legislative rules: “It’s not goofy to ask the Governor for a special session and he said this week ‘well, the two teams they can get together the last few days’. Well, the rules say on Tuesday in the House those bills were dead. They can’t be revived so the only way we can pass them is to request a special session.”
     
• Again: Mr. Abbott has been governor for two terms, was the attorney general before that, and on the Supreme Court of Texas before that. Yet conservatives are to believe dead priority bills can be worked on now? That doesn’t pass the smell test…
     
• Also yesterday, Gov. Abbott made it clear he would only put on the call for a special session the things he wants to pass. So when he doesn’t put items you care about on the call for a special session – or simply doesn’t call a special session – you know where your issue stands.

• Forgive me for asking this question... But am I the only person disturbed to realize that Greg Abbott either (a) doesn’t really know the constitutional and legislative rules, or (b) was willing to say something patently false because he hopes no one will check?

• Join Brandon Waltens and Jeramy Kitchen live at 11 a.m. today on The Headline to discuss the possibility of a special session. (The video archive and podcast will be available shortly afterwards.)

• In the final days of the 87th Texas Legislative Session, Erin Anderson reports election integrity advocates are still waiting to see what reforms the Republican-controlled Legislature will deliver. After lawmakers failed to pass their priority election reforms in 2019, delegates at last year’s Republican Party of Texas Convention chose election integrity as their top legislative priority for 2021.
   
• Of the 23 bills flagged as meeting the RPT’s election integrity policy goals, one has made it to the governor’s desk, and a handful of others are close to the finish line.
   

• Most significant is Senate Bill 7, which is currently in a conference committee hammering differences between the two chambers’ versions. The original SB 7, authored by State Sen. Bryan Hughes (R–Mineola) and passed by the Senate in April, contained dozens of reforms sought by election integrity advocates. The House completely stripped Hughes’ language and substituted the contents of House Bill 6 by State Rep. Briscoe Cain (R–Deer Park), creating a significantly different bill.

• Iris Poole reports a bill to stop cities and counties from enforcing federal laws regarding firearm suppressors is on its way to be signed into law.
   
• The legislation – House Bill 957 by State Rep. Tom Oliverson (R-Cypress) – establishes a class of suppressors (“Made in Texas”) that will be declared exempt from federal regulation.

• Texas Right to Life is actively fighting to defend Bob Costea from having his life ended by Baylor Scott & White Hospital in Temple. Robert Montoya has the details.
   
• “Bill is awake, communicates, nods to questions, follows some commands, and reports no pain,” stated Texas Right to Life in a press release.
   
• While the hospital committee finds Mr. Costea may have only a few weeks of life left, they intend to speed up his death by invoking the state’s “10-day rule” and removing his ventilator and blood pressure medication.
   
• Sounds like you don’t want Baylor Scott & White Hospital in Temple to get ahold of your loved ones.

• Please join us in wishing a very happy birthday to Texas Scorecard’s Darrell Frost!

Friday Reflection: No Greater Love…

As Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” More than a million soldiers, sailors, and marines have laid down their lives for the cause of self-governance and in defense of our republic’s Constitution.

Since the late 1860s, we have set aside a day of national remembrance. Yet I fear we have actually stopped remembering. We have allowed Memorial Day to devolve into a long weekend of mattress sales and cook-outs. 

To justify our national forgetfulness, we smugly – and, yes, correctly – assert that our rights to life, liberty, and property are endowed by God.  Yet we gloss past the stark reality that securing those rights has fallen to men and women willing to battle enemy forces intent on destroying the glorious American experiment in self-governance.

We have lived in the liberty their ultimate sacrifice made possible. We have slept easily at night under the protection of men and women who stand willing to give their lives for our liberty.

The love showed to us by those patriots has not exactly been spurned, but gets treated like a trinket without too much examination of its implication.

Our callous approach to Memorial Day is just another symptom of our national disregard for the work of self-governance in preserving liberty. The last year has shown how easily too many of our countrymen will sacrifice their rights for the thinnest veneer of “protection.”

We don’t want to consider the 106,000 teenagers and twenty-somethings crammed into landing craft who died at Normandy, because then we would have to confront the shallowness of college campuses creating “safe spaces” from debate.

We don’t want to dwell on the thousands of Americans who have been killed in the ongoing War on Terror, because we might have to consider the policies we have allowed at home sacrificing small businesses on the irrational altar of COVID response. 

It is undoubtedly easier to enjoy a beer and burger in the backyard than to reflect on the sacrifices made on our behalf – often before we were ever born, by men who would only be known as “the uncle who died in the war.”

Yet reflect, dwell, and consider we must. If we are to give up our liberties and adorn our ankles with the soft chains of tyranny, what was the point of their sacrifice. Did they die for a lost cause, or to give us the opportunity to be better, to be more?

I choose to believe our best days as a republic are ahead of us, and that our honored dead paid for that future with their lives. Let’s not squander their gift.