The Battle Royal

Its almost guaranteed that the there will be a big ole Texas sized fight When the Texas Legislature meets in January.  The fight will be who lead as the The Speaker of the House. Now one might think with a 98 to 51 Majority,  (State Rep. Edmund Kuempel, R-Seguin, died  Nov, 4th from a heart attack) that Republicans would have pretty smooth sailings.  The problem is in the fight for the leadership, between the the RINO camps the Teaparty folks and the Country Clubbers.

The Texas Speaker’s race is getting interesting. You have an old-school conservative Democrat turned convenience Republican Warren Chisum challenging one of the new breed of conservative Republicans, Joe Straus. You have the typical big-government social conservatives wanting back into leadership rolls. You have Tea Party organizers joining up with the challengers because, you know, it is time for a change. Some of the same people that helped Steve Munisteri’s upset victory of the old school, big government Cathie Adams have reversed course and are slinging mud at Straus. Interesting race. And along comes Debra Medina.

Straus took control when the Republican gang of 11, conspired with the Democrats and took the throne away from Tom Caraddick. There are lots of hard feelings out there. Leo Berman rights an open letter to Craddick and pulls no punches.

At the beginning of last session you and 10 of your cohort Republicans, RINOS would be the proper term, decided you did not want my good friend Tom Craddick, a solid conservative Speaker, to preside over the session.  You met and voted among yourselves as to who would be your Speaker candidate.

It fell upon you since you were the least controversial although you were the one with the least service in the House. You had 11 votes but needed 65 more to make the 76 it takes to elect a Speaker.

You decided to go to the Democrats who eventually gave you the 65 votes to win.  What did you give them?  You gave them a promise not to bring legislation dealing with ILLEGAL ALIENS, PRO-LIFE ISSUES, or VOTER-ID to the House floor and that is exactly what happened during the session. The Democrats loved that deal because they opposed all three issues vehemently.

When I saw that no bills on illegal aliens were coming out of the State Affairs Committee Chaired by Rep. Burt Solomons, I did notice that Democrats were bringing bills to the floor that would have funneled millions of dollars directly to illegal aliens.  I started to amend those bills immediately, with simple words which said, “These benefits are for U.S. citizens only”.

Excuse the term, but the Democrats went “nuts” over my amendments and Joe, you tried to come to their rescue.  You came to my desk on the House floor and asked what you can do for me (like hearing one of my bills in Solomon’s committee) to get me to stop amending the Democrats’ bills.  I could not believe what I heard from you.  I asked you if you took the same oath of office that I did and then requested that you leave my desk quickly before I really got angry.

Finally, you single-handedly killed the Voter –ID Bill, a bill that 96% of Republicans in the 2008 Primary election voted to have considered in the next session.

Your Elections Committee Chair Todd Smith, another RINO, finally brought out a Voter-ID Bill with two weeks remaining in the session.  You allowed the Democrat Speaker Pro-Tem, Rep. Craig Eiland, to delay the session by 5 full days, which automatically killed the Voter-ID Bill.

Now it gets strange. Remember Deborah Medina?  Yeah the libertarian Teapartying antiestablishment candidate that ran against Rick Perry in the Primary.  She is coming out supporting  RINO Straus or Chisum, the Democrat turned Republican.  

If there are candidates for speaker who will commit to a return to limited government and a return to a consistent application of the rule of law, a respect for individual freedoms, the Constitution and state sovereignty and who will work toward those ends while respecting the members of the Texas House and upholding the rules thereof in a fair and just manner, I hope they will offer themselves in service to their fellow members and the people of Texas. To date Joe Straus and Warren Chisum have done that.

Hope that they won’t spend all their time fighting each other and will spend more time time fighting the liberal agenda.  They need to address what they were elected to: a conservative agenda, and they need to make up for the oportunities that Straus and company blew.

  • The parking Lot Bill
  • Campus Carry
  • Border Security
  • Eliminate the Franchise Tax.
  • Voter ID

Once we resolved last sessions issues maybe we can lookm at some other issues that have become important in the last two years.

  • Term Limits
  • Redistricting (Lets knock off the Gerrymandering though)
  • The budgets, with some meaningful cuts.
  • Banning Red Light Cameras.

Texas politics might be bloody they sure are looking to be entertaining!

About Liberty

Blogging is something I do for myself. I've been blogging since Sept. 2003, mostly about politics, guns, and observations about the word around me.
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