Good morning,

At the conclusions of today's Texas Minute I reflect on the confusing political relationship between volume and mass.

– Michael Quinn Sullivan 

Friday, February 4, 2022
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But first... please join me in wishing Texas Scorecard senior journalist Jacob Asmussen a happy Sunday birthday!

Speaker Phelan Promises More Corporate Welfare

• After the Texas Legislature chose not to extend a massive corporate welfare program last year, House Speaker Dade Phelan (R-Beaumont) says the legislature will work to either bring the controversial program back or replace it with something new. 

      

• Phelan made the comments at a meeting of the Texas Oil and Gas Association’s Ad Valorem Tax Conference this week. 

      

• Renewed criticism was placed on the state’s so-called Chapter 313 program last year, as many of the unreliable wind farms that failed during the February 2021 winter storm were beneficiaries of the handout scheme.

        
• Opposition to corporate welfare is uniquely bipartisan... among working Texans if not lawmakers. Both the Republican Party of Texas and the Democrat Party of Texas have called in their party platforms for the abolition of Chapter 313 property tax abatements as well as corporate welfare.
      
• I appreciate Speaker Phelan reminding us he serves the crony establishment, and not the taxpayers of the Lone Star State.

TEA Silent As Schools Forcibly Masking Kids

• Despite warnings from health experts, school officials across Texas are again forcing masks on children—and top state officials remain quiet. Jacob Asmussen reports that inquiries sent this week to the Texas Education Agency went unanswered.

       
• Operating under a commissioner appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, the TEA oversees local school districts and sets their operating policies. Despite an executive order issued by Abbott last year, and the TEA's own policy guidance, numerous school districts—including those in Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, and Austin—have either continued or reinstated mask mandates on school campuses. 
       
• The push to mask children is driven by the political sentiments of leftwing “educators,” not grounded in medical science. 
     
• “Children should not wear face masks, no. They don’t need it for their own protection, and they don’t need it for protecting other people, either,” said Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician, epidemiologist, and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Fourteen Texas Senators Want Voting Case Re-Heard By Court

• Nearly half of the Texas Senate – and an overwhelming majority of the chamber’s Republican caucus – is urging the Court of Criminal Appeals to reconsider a decision stripping the Office of the Attorney General of longstanding powers to prosecute election fraud. Brandon Waltens has the story.
     
• The December case saw the CCA – Texas’ highest court on criminal matters – declare it unconstitutional for the Attorney General to prosecute such cases. The court asserted that while the A.G. is in the state's executive branch, local district attorneys are in the judicial branch, and so stated that the A.G. cannot make those prosecutions. 
     
• The briefing filed with the court argues that this is a flawed reading of the state's constitution, and doesn't mesh with numerous other state and federal court rulings dealing with the separation of powers.
     

• Fourteen of Texas’ 18 Republican state senators joined the brief. Only State Sens. Robert Nichols, Kelly Hancock, Joan Huffman, and Kel Seliger did not join in calling for the court to review its decision.

Speaking of the Court of Criminal Appeals...

• The members of the Court of Criminal Appeals are elected statewide in staggered six-year terms. All nine justices are Republicans, and three justices are the ballot in 2022. Only one incumbent, Scott Walker, has an opponent in the GOP primary: Clint Morgan. 
      
• Walker joined the majority in removing election fraud prosecutorial power from the Attorney General. In his re-election bid, Walker has been endorsed by the Texas Alliance for Life and the C Club of Houston.
         
• The GOP challenger, Clint Morgan, has been endorsed by the True Texas Project, the Conservative Republicans of Texas, Texas Right to Life, East Texans for Liberty, and the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, among others. 
      
• As an aside, Walker was elected in 2016 at the height of the public popularity of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, with many political observers crediting Texas’ Walker as getting elected based on name confusion. As the True Texas Project noted in their recommendations, “this is Texas’s chance to undo a silly vote for Scott Walker, who only won because he has the same name as someone famous!”

Is Dan Crenshaw Becoming Toxic?

• It's not been a good couple of weeks for U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw in Montgomery County, which is new territory for him – both geographically and politically. First, he was caught on video berating a young girl who was asking questions about comments the congressman made on a podcast about Jesus.
     
• Now, reports Sydnie Henry, one of the people Crenshaw endorsed is stepping back from him. Crenshaw endorsed celebrated Navy Seal Morgan Luttrell for an open adjoining congressional seat that takes in the rest of GOP-dominated Montgomery County. Interestingly, there is no mention of Crenshaw’s endorsement of Luttrell on the hopeful's website – suggesting Luttrell is worried about Crenshaw's popularity.
      
• More directly, though, at a candidate forum this week Luttrell criticized Crenshaw for joining the Democrats in voting for the Immunization Infrastructure Modernization Act of 2021. Critics say the measure sets in motion a federal vaccine database.

Friday Reflection: Volume and Mass

It’s easy to confuse volume with mass in politics. Our inboxes, social media feeds, news shows… everything is set to maximum screech. All of which makes it hard for citizens to the discern the substance of issues.

My grandfather once passed on something he’d heard from a mounted cavalry sergeant in the old ride-horses days of the U.S. Army into which my grandfather enlisted. He said that if out in the distance you saw a wall of dust climbing into the sky, it could be one of three things: an invading army, an approaching storm, or an idiot running around in circles for hours. To know what to do, you had to know which it was.

That came to mind when a friend recently wrote asking about a particular candidate in a particular race. She explained she was receiving multiple emails every day from the candidate about the strength of the campaign, yet was shocked by how little money the candidate had raised or traction the candidate gained in the community. Polling and fundraising didn’t match the flood of emails, tweets, and posts she saw every day.

She asked a simple question: why the disparity?

A teeny-tiny bluetooth speaker can make a lot of earsplitting noise, while a ton of gold is huge but makes no sound. Volume and mass.

In the physics of politics, volume often creates mass… Run around in circles making a lot of noise and hope others join in. That is campaigning 101 in the modern age, and that’s kind of what the campaign my friend wrote about was trying to do.

Depending on your perspective, a campaign is either trying to convert political volume into a mass of support through messaging, or is using the volume of messaging to conceal their lack of mass.

Either way, citizens should be weary of those politicians who are simply running around in circles, creating a big cloud of dust while yelling and screaming their own praises. That self-serving exercise gives a sense of how they will govern if given the chance.

Campaigns try to give the appearance of mass with the volume of communication, in the hopes of drawing more people in. It works more often than anyone would care to admit. One gets the uncomfortable feeling too many candidates would wear clown make-up and shoot themselves from a loud cannon if it would get them elected. One gets the even more uncomfortable feeling it would probably work. (As an aside, those candidates perform for the voters, wash off the makeup, and then brag to lobbyists about how they – again – pulled one over on the rubes.)

In our self-governing republic, citizens should demand something more and better. Sure, a bit of showmanship and a touch of volume is necessary to cut through the clutter. But citizens deserve to see real results, not choke on the distracting clouds of campaign dust.

For our republic to advance we need substantive candidates offering real plans and substantive ideas for how they will disrupt the status quo should they be hired. Yes, we need a mass of moral men and women seeking office who are committed to putting our citizens first.

More importantly, though, as discerning citizens we must ignore the self-serving circus and redouble our focus on the “mass” of good ideas – shaping them, moving them, and advancing them.