Good morning,

As it turns out, tearing down monuments and rewriting history isn’t unique to America’s left-wingers. I end the week reflecting on the urge of some to suppress history to advance their geopolitical agendas.

Here is the Texas Minute for Friday, July 15, 2022.

– Michael Quinn Sullivan 

Paxton Sues Biden Administration Over Abortion Push

• After President Joe Biden signed an executive order last week aimed at expanding access to abortion, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is fighting back. Jake Peterson reports the attorney general has filed a lawsuit for misuse of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act.
     
• The “EMTALA” is the justification the White House used for Biden’s executive order mandating that hospitals perform abortions.
     
• Paxton says that EMTALA cannot be used to authorize the federal government to control the performance of medical procedures. The Biden order, Paxton explains, “forces hospitals and doctors to commit crimes and risk their licensure under Texas law.”
       
• “This administration has a hard time following the law, and now they are trying to have their appointed bureaucrats mandate that hospitals and emergency medicine physicians perform abortions,” said Paxton. “I will ensure that President Biden will be forced to comply with the Supreme Court’s important decision concerning abortion and I will not allow him to undermine and distort existing laws to fit his administration’s unlawful agenda.”

Texas $27 Billion Surplus

• Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar announced the state government is expecting to collect from citizens a historic $26.9 billion of surplus cash – that is, over-and-above the $254 billion previously budgeted. Jacob Asmussen has the details.
      
• “In fact, many tax revenue categories reached their highest collections on record, and this fiscal year has experienced the largest one-year increase in total tax collection, as compared with the prior fiscal year, in Texas history,” Hegar said.
      
• Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who heads the Texas Senate, immediately pushed out his spending priorities for the surplus. His proposal allots $4 billion to property tax relief. He also wants to issue a “13th check” for retired teachers and suspend the state gas tax for the rest of the year.
      
• State lawmakers will meet over the next several months to begin making decisions on the new budget—and surplus cash.
      
• Brandon Waltens will discuss the state budget surplus with the president of Texans for Fiscal Responsibility at 5:30 p.m. today on The Headline.

Texas Senators Weigh Options For Border Crisis

• The Texas Senate Finance Committee met this week to discuss current appropriations to border security efforts and consider future funding needs as the situation worsens. Sydnie Henry has the report.
      
• “We the states simply don’t have the resources to take on 100 percent of the security needs of our border indefinitely. But until the federal government steps up to ensure long term security, we have a duty to act to support effective border security to combat illegal immigration and foster lawful immigration.” – State Sen. Joan Huffman (R-Houston)
      
• Although Gov. Greg Abbott has been asked to declare an invasion under Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, he stopped short of doing so in his recent executive order. 
      
• State Sen. John Whitmire (D-Houston) wants a “diplomatic, humanitarian approach to this, other than this committee sitting here and writing another billion-dollar check.”

Unreliable Energy is Destabilizing Texas’ Grid

• A new study was released yesterday detailing the “decline and fall of reliability, affordability, and competition” in Texas’ power market.
      
• “The greatest danger that the Texas grid faces now is the political establishment’s continued unwillingness to challenge the environmental left’s and energy industry’s push for subsidies,” said Bill Peacock, policy director for The Energy Alliance.
     
• [NOTE: Bill Peacock will be on The Headline with Brandon Waltens at 5:30 p.m. today.]

Poll: Virginia’s Youngkin Has No Texas Support

• Despite recent buzz in the national media that he could have an eye on the White House, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin appears to have an uphill battle in the Lone Star State. Brandon Waltens details a recent poll of the 2024 race.
   
• A recent poll published by CWS Research and commissioned by the Defend Texas Liberty PAC shows Youngkin with zero support among Texas Republican voters in the presidential hunt, while Texas Gov. Abbott is at 4 percent. Ron DeSantis of Florida has 56 percent of the vote if former President Trump declines to run.
     
• Should President Trump jump in the race, he gets 45 percent of the vote – that pushes DeSantis down to second place with 26 percent. Abbott and Youngkin remain at 4 percent and zero, respectively.

Friday Reflection: Suppressing History

It’s one thing to be passively ignorant of history, but something else entirely to refuse to study the past. Regardless of our political, ideological, and even theological beliefs, an honest review of history keeps us grounded in facts as we move toward the future.

This usually isn’t convenient for those who wish to recast history in an effort to seize the future. Thus, we find efforts to tear down monuments even as history books are rewritten.

I was reminded of this on a recent trip to Israel with my son. After visiting numerous archeological sites, we came to Jericho, the world’s oldest inhabited city. It was my second visit to the archeological mound; my son’s first. I was struck by how much has changed since my visit four years ago… and not for the better. 

What struck me was the site’s state of disrepair. It is the archeological remains of an old city, so in one sense, "disrepair" is the order of the day. But not like this; this was the disrepair of the site as an archeological treasure. It struck a dagger through my heart and mind.

For all of its storied history, beginning as a settlement at the dawn of recorded time, most of us know of Jericho because of its prominent place in the Book of Joshua and later references in the New Testament.

But here in Palestinian-controlled Jericho (the modern city, which surrounds the archeological mound), you find… next to nothing. Sign posts around the mound once explained the significance of the site in layman’s archeological terms, not biblical prose. Those have been removed. 

It felt a lot like visiting the Alamo without finding a reference to the 1836 battle – or anything else, for that matter.

The historic site at Jericho is now just a high mound of exposed ancient bricks, a cistern (if you know what you’re looking at), and a few bits of walls from interior shops or dwellings. I am told new archeological work has essentially ground to a halt. 

There is a simple and sad reason why this is happening. The Palestinian Authority’s political narrative will not tolerate any more archeological finds substantiating the words of the Bible.

This is ironic, given that nearby is Qasr al-Yahud. For Christians, this site is significant as the place where Jesus is believed to have been baptized. The old Arabic name, though, attests to something far more ancient. The name translates roughly as "The Place of the Jews." That is an illusion to the third and fourth chapters of Joshua… where the flood waters of the Jordan dried up, allowing the people of God to enter the Promised Land and begin their conquest. (It is also the general area where Elijah was taken up on a chariot of fire to heaven.)

So, we have a site named for centuries in Arabic as the place where Joshua entered the land, but no reference in the city he and his people captured in one of history’s most famous battles.

Whatever one thinks of modern Israel, the political conflict between the Palestinians and the Jews, future one-state and two-state proposals… all of those things should be unrelated to archeological research.

But here’s the political problem: The Palestinians are resting their claims to the land on the belief Jews have no meaningful historic connection to it. The controlling P.A. has decided to disallow any – any – archeological study that might suggest Jews occupied, controlled, or otherwise conquered the land even in the ancient past.

Whatever one chooses to believe about Israeli statehood since 1948, or the governing arrangements in the region going forward, none of us should accept the suppression of history. Those whose geopolitical aspirations are based on rewriting history are building on the shaky foundation of lies. And nothing good will result.

Modern interest groups should argue vigorously for their competing visions of the future, but we must not allow the past to be a casualty in their battles.