Good morning,

In the Friday Reflection, Michael Quinn Sullivan looks back on D-Day.

First, here is today’s Texas Minute.

– Brandon Waltens 

Friday, June 4, 2021
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• Forget using tax dollars on roads and public infrastructure. Instead, Democrat-run Austin City Hall is funneling taxpayers' hard-earned money to their preferred political activists. Jacob Asmussen shares the shocking details. 
   

• Back in March, city hall’s Chief Equity Officer Brion Oaks sent an email to local anti-police organization Grassroots Leadership, discussing a plan to purchase Visa gift cards with public funds and offer them to citizens specifically selected by the organization.
   

• The cards would be a cash incentive to get their preferred people to testify at an upcoming virtual public meeting on police “reimagining.”
   

• City officials obliged the gift card plan, ordering 400 $50 Visa gift cards—using taxpayer money—and giving a special provision to Grassroots Leadership as a preferred vendor with the city.
   

• Officials also paid the organization a $2,000 “administrative cost” to distribute the gift cards to people who met that “eligibility criteria.

• Of the many legislative priorities that had been discussed throughout the 87th Legislative Session, perhaps none has been more perplexing and mired in political double-speak than legislation related to protecting children and prohibiting gender modification.
   
• In the latest installment of our 87th Legislature Autopsy Reports, Jeramy Kitchen looks at the timeline of legislation designed to end child gender modification and why the bills failed to reach the finish line.

• More details are trickling out from Gov. Greg Abbott on the upcoming special session(s). During a radio interview yesterday, Abbott all but confirmed there would be at least two upcoming special sessions. While he stopped short of giving a specific time for the first special session, he indicated it would address election integrity, bail reform, and potentially other issues.
   
• The other special called session, which will be held around September or October, will be specific to redistricting and the use of federal COVID-19 funding.

• A vaccine passport prohibition passed by the Texas Legislature wouldn’t protect employees at a Houston hospital fighting a requirement they receive a COVID-19 vaccination or possibly be fired. Robert Montoya reports that legislation that would have addressed such situations died in the legislature.

• All of us in her extended Texas Scorecard family offer our congratulations to Rae Sullivan on her graduation this weekend from Knox College!

Friday Reflection

Fields of perfectly placed markers in the neatly trimmed grass of the cemetery above Omaha Beach in Normandy is one of the most emotionally charged places I have visited on Earth. Your eyes can see, but your mind and heart refuse to entirely process, the enormity of the sacrifices made by so many Americans during World War II’s Operation Overlord. 

Year after year, appropriate ceremonies pay tribute to the sacrifice and heroism of the men buried there. Yet for all the perfect words, none can match the silent statement of the thousands who died on that day of days.

The Normandy American Cemetery is the final resting place of 9,380 Americans – young men who answered the call of their nation in the fight against tyranny. They fought and died on foreign soil in hopes that the war would end there, rather than reach our shores. Each died on June 6, 1944, or in the days immediately following. The names of an additional 1,500 – etched into the Walls of the Missing – are a reminder that war is never a neat and antiseptic affair.

So much has been said and written about these men – the bands of brothers – whose actions and sacrifices liberated Europe, and yet it seems one cannot ever say enough. The valor, the heroism, the bravery, the dignity... it all defies language.

It is also deeply personal for so many. My dad’s dad was a B-17 Flying Fortress tail gunner in the European theater. Like so many others, he lied about his age to enlist with his brothers in the early days of World War II. From the small west Texas town of Seminole, O.W. Sullivan, Jr., survived being shot down behind enemy lines, and eventually returned home to start life and a family after the war’s conclusion.

Yet many in his generation did not. For many of them, the beaches and fields of Europe were their final resting place. They fought so that we would be free.

They each answered the call of our nation, but they died for their friends on the line and their family at home. They perfectly and nobly embodied the words of Jesus found in John 15:13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

To them, to their memory, we can only say thank you. And we cannot say it enough.