LESSON FOR REPUBLICANS FROM A HOUSTON ATTORNEY

“I’ve seen the party change from one of hope and adding to our numbers to one of fear.”

By ‘Tom’

Big Jolly Times
November 9, 2011

I’ve been a Texas Republican since the 1960s. But I’ve seen the party change from one of hope and adding to our numbers to one of fear. We once proposed reasonable laws and we welcomed people to our party.

Things have changed.

Now all that anybody cares about is cutting taxes without cutting spending and a generally fictional view of immigrants. The Legislature is cutting some spending, like education, thereby pushing taxation on to local schools through property taxes, then complaining about high property taxes. We’ve cut appropriations for higher education to the extent that a private law school in Houston, South Texas College of Law, charges a lower tuition rate than the University of Houston for in-state students

Tens of thousands of people like me got to go to college because our parents and others like them taxed themselves to keep tuition low. Now, tuition is so high that the private South Texas College of Law Houston charges lower tuition than the University of Houston law school. Public schools were well funded by the Legislature and local taxes. Education was viewed as an investment in the future.

We have the lowest health insurance rate in the nation. Yes, Obamacare hasn’t worked as well as it was advertised. But what solution has the Republican Party put forward? One liked by about 10 percent of the population.

Then in the middle of the midterm campaign, the Senate majority leader gets on TV and tells people how Congress is going to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to pay for tax cuts which gave only a pittance to the middle class but gave huge cuts to the highest earners. That was a great idea.

My only surprise is the Democrats didn’t have that clip on TV everywhere during the campaign.

As for immigration, yes, illegal immigration is wrong. But without either a rational immigration system and some sort of guest worker program, who would build our houses, pick our produce and do dozens of other jobs?

Do you want to stop illegal immigration? Easy. Target the employers. Require every employer to have a system to ensure that only citizens and legal immigrants get jobs and slap on stiff criminal penalties for violations. It wouldn’t take too many Fortune 500 CEOs going off to Club Fed for a few years before no one would hire illegal aliens.

And, most immigrants — legal and illegal — are hardworking, law abiding people. They don’t want interaction with government, be it welfare or criminal justice. Daryl Gates, the longtime Los Angeles chief of police, was the guy who came up with the idea that police shouldn’t ask witnesses and victims about their citizenship. He decided that solving murders, rapes and robberies with cooperation from civilians was more important than local police enforcing immigration laws.

We need to change our party from a party of negativism to hope and from exclusion to inclusion. We should be coming up with ways to make peoples’ lives better, better health care for everyone, better education fairer law enforcement.

And, we need to be a big-tent party. For example, gays. A lot of gays are middle or upper middle class and would be perfect fits for the Republican Party. So what does the party to? It says we don’t want you. What kind of message does it send to a large number of gays when the Log Cabin Republicans can’t rent a booth as the Republican state convention? The message is go see the Democrats.

Ray Hill, one of the founders of the Gay Political Caucus here, is dying. I’ve noted that once upon a time, in the 1980s, the GPC judicial endorsements were both bipartisan and reasonable. Ray once got his caucus to endorse a county criminal court at law judge who was a bigot and asshole. The reason: Ray told his peers that the judges treated gays like everyone else: just like dirt. Now, the re-named GPC endorses only Democrats and there are thousands of people who vote in a block based on those endorsements.

If you listened to President Trump’s speeches in 2016, they sounded inclusive. Enough people overlooked his obvious flaws to elect him because he promised good health insurance, protection of programs like Social Security, a stronger defense and a lot of other things that were popular in the middle class suburbs. He didn’t deliver and in fact, many people think he wasn’t there to drain the swamp but to wallow in it.

What happened Tuesday is the result of that as much as anything else.

If the Republican Party doesn’t become a party of hope and inclusion, it’s going to be worse in 2020 when a large class of Republican senators are up for re-election. And the party will continue relying on a declining voter base.

[Lt. Gov.] Dan Patrick got only 51.3 percent of the vote against a non-funded Democrat. What would have happened if Mike Collier had a few million to spend? The most powerful post in Texas would have gone to the Democrats. With the exception of Gov. Abbot, Republican statewide candidates got somewhere between 51 and 53 percent of the vote. That’s not the results Texas Republicans are used to.

What the party is going both in Harris County and statewide is a recipe for long-term disaster.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Tom is absolutely right. And I agree that most immigrants — legal and illegal — are hardworking, law abiding people.

As for Harris County, I doubt the Republicans will retake Harris County in the foreseeable future. Predictions are that there will be a lot more Hispanics moving here so that they will constitute an absolute majority in Houston and Harris County. If the Republicans brought out Jesus to campaign for them and called for open borders, that would not get Hispanics to vote for them. To change that the Republicans will have to look more appealing to the Hispanics than the Democrats do now.

There is another factor. When more and more young college educated Anglos turn out to vote, they will likely vote for liberal candidates. You cannot underestimate the influence left-wing professors have on their students.