Good morning!

In the cause of liberty, everyone can do something. I’ll expound more on that at the end of today's Texas Minute.

– Michael Quinn Sullivan 

Friday, December 10, 2021
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Not A Hotline

• Yesterday we reported on Gov. Greg Abbott creating a “hotline” for people to call if their employer is requiring them to get a COVID-19 vaccine, so we decided to give the number a call.
     
• Turns out, reports Brandon Waltens, this hotline is just the phone number for the Texas Workforce Commission’s unemployment line. There wasn’t even a menu option for reporting “illegal vaccine mandates in Texas.”
   
• This faux-hotline was less than the least Gov. Abbott could do.
   
• “I called it. I went ahead and used option #3 just to talk to someone,” Charlie T. commented on Facebook. “The workforce employee had NO CLUE what I was talking about. They put me on hold and never came back.”
   
• Meanwhile, the Republican Party of Texas and a growing number of GOP lawmakers are calling on the governor to bring the legislature back for a special session to pass legislation banning vaccine mandates.

• Join The Headline conversation with Brandon Waltens and me, where we’ll talk about fake hotlines and real news! If you cannot be with us live at 11 a.m., the video archive and podcast will be available shortly after we end.

GOP Candidates Respond To Problems In Texas Military Department

• In March, Gov. Abbott launched Operation Lone Star and deployed the Texas National Guard – under state orders – to the border following a surge in illegal immigration. Now, problems are plaguing the Texas Military Department – ranging from a state-imposed vaccine mandate to soldiers simply not being paid. Sydnie Henry reports on the responses of the governor’s Republican primary opponents.
     
• “It is highly disturbing that our Texas National Guard members are being ordered — mandated — to take a COVID shot. Unless on active-duty orders, the Commander-in-Chief of the Texas National Guard is the Governor, not Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.” – Lt. Col. Allen West (retired)
      
• “Texas employers continue to carry out the mandates and people are losing their jobs. Why hasn’t Abbott called a session to make this a law? I bet the Texas National Guard is wondering the same thing. His [executive order] is ineffective and worthless.” – Chad Prather
      
• “Greg Abbott is commander-in-chief of the Texas Military and took an oath to protect Texans’ rights. His continued refusal to take action against vaccine mandates puts our state and our citizens at risk at a time when the Texas Border is being invaded by thousands of illegal aliens every day.” – Don Huffines
   
• Abbott himself has refused to discuss either the pay issue or his own military department issuing a vaccine mandate.

School Board Association Continues Lobbying Push

• As more and more Texans speak out against the National School Boards Association for comparing parents fighting harmful school district policies to “domestic terrorism,” Erin Anderson reminds us that state lawmakers failed to defund the NSBA’s Texas affiliate—despite repeated calls from constituents to stop sending tax dollars to lobbyists.
     
• The Texas Association of School Boards is a statewide tax-funded lobbying group for school officials. All 1,024 Texas school boards are TASB members, and dues are paid with tax dollars. TASB, in turn, sends some of those dollars to the NSBA.
     
• Nearly 90 percent of all Texans—Republican and Democrat—oppose taxpayer-funded lobbying of any kind. In 2020, 94 percent of Republican primary voters said Texas should ban the practice of allowing tax dollars to be spent on lobbyists who work against taxpayers.
   
• For example, TASB is against measures to improve transparency and voter participation in elections held to increase school districts’ tax rates or debt, and it advocates for promoting “equity” and eradicating “systemic racism”—terminology based in critical race theory that echoes NSBA’s “public school transformation” plan.
    

• In 2019 and again in 2021, ending taxpayer-funded lobbying was a legislative priority for the Texas GOP. Yet the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature has failed to ban taxpayer-funded lobbying, bowing to pressure from the very lobbyists Texans wanted defunded – including representatives of TASB.
     

• Last week, Texas GOP officials adopted a resolution also encouraging TASB to terminate its affiliation with NSBA and calling on local school districts across the state to “sever ties with TASB in order to protect Texas children and the voices of parents.”

Preparing For Christmas – And Families Being Together

• In a video conversation, Tim Lambert at the Texas Home School Coalition talks about how families spend time together – at all times, but especially during Christmas.
   
• “There is a reason that typically homeschoolers tend to continue to hold the values of their parents, of their families, and that is because they spend time together as a family.” – Tim Lambert

Friday Reflection: Doing What You Can

In the fight for the future of our republic, everyone can do something.

Ahead of Texas Scorecard’s annual Conservative Leader Awards dinner this year, someone asked me what our theme was for the evening. Fortunately, the team always comes up with a theme to help drive the way we put the program together, so I was able to respond “It’s ‘real fighters.’” 

This fellow laughed and said, “Next year you need to have a theme for the rest of us!” Except… I know all the stuff he is involved in, from fights at city hall and the school house, and beyond. He is definitely in the fight – he just doesn’t see it that way.

That conversation made me think of Martin Treptow.

At the age of 23, working as a barber in Iowa in 1917, he answered the nation’s call to fight against the Axis powers. A year later, he was at one of the most important battles of the Great War in Europe. 

A messenger was needed to deliver critical information to one of the platoons. Not exactly the most glorious assignment, but Private Treptow volunteered, grabbed the message… and ran into a barrage of gunfire – giving his life. He did what he could do.

Among his positions was a small diary he kept in his uniform jacket pocket. In it he had written these words: “America must win this war. Therefore, I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone.”

Each of us need to make that same pledge. To fight cheerfully, doing what we can, and where we can, to advance the cause of liberty.