May 10th, 2016 – Second Reading Podcast

The Republicans were in the Democratic Party because there was only one party. So I tell people on a regular basis there is still a land of opportunity in America. It’s called Texas. The problem is these departures from the Constitution. They have become the norm. “But I’m a Christian first, a conservative second and a Republican third, and I praise Jesus. At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room?

[0:00:41 Jim] Welcome to this week’s in the News for Texas politics for the week of whatever the date is. I’m your host, Jim Henson.

[0:00:49 Josh] and I’m Josh Blank.

[0:00:51 Jim] And today we’re here to talk a little bit about what’s been happening this week in Texas government in politics. A lot of what we’ll talk about this week really falls out of one subject, right? The failure of Proposition one in Austin, which was the ride-sharing proposition that got lots of attention statewide, not just in Austin.

[0:01:09 Josh] Right, So in December of 2015 the City Council here in Austin proven ordinance that require drivers of ride-hailing apps like uber and lift, undergo ah, fingerprint based background checks by 2017. In addition to this, ah, it also regulated dropoffs and pickups, vehicle identification, some reporting that had to be done to the city. But the main piece of this was the fingerprint requirement in the background checks so really quickly. In January of the following year, a PAC founded by Uber and List, which is called ride sharing, works for Austin. And if you live in Austin, you’ve received maybe dozens, if not hundreds of mailers. Ryan’s pile right, a huge pile from writing works for Austin, and they submitted a petition that would repeal the ordinance of approved by the voters. This is kind of was actually led to a lot of confusion. And even for me a lot People don’t understand that, you know, if you vote yes on Prop One, that was actually a repeal of the ordinance that the city had passed. And I mean, I was confused. Lots of people were confused. Statesman wrote a whole thing about how confusing this waas

[0:02:07 Jim] it was pretty telling people have followed politics. Ah, lot like yourself were kind of going out. Wait a minute. Which which one is which? If I’m voting Yes, a my voting for the companies or against the company’s or four more safety or against safety. It’s a lot of confusion about which they try to take advantage of

[0:02:23 Josh] right. They definitely try to take advantage of it. So just to be clarify so to vote yes on Prop one would have repealed the ordinance that the city passed to vote against the ordinance would have kept it in place. So we had the election last weekend. On May 7th, 56% of Austinites voted against the proposition. 44% voted for it, so the ordinance stayed on the book. What was interesting was sort of what happened between putting this on the ballot and the election. And, you know, basically a lot of people thought that the outcome was gonna be was a surprise, right?

[0:02:52 Jim] Yeah. I mean, it was a huge surprise. I think, to a lot of people now, it’s sort of like having a hard time finding people that voted for Richard Nixon after he resigned, a reference that very few people will probably get. But, you know, I think going into this there was a growing sense that it was in trouble But when you looked at the fundamentals of this, there was very little pulling out there. But you looked at the the fact that the ride sharing companies spent, I think, in the end, in the neighborhood of $9 million

[0:03:23 Josh] over 8.6 at last show will probably be overnight

[0:03:26 Jim] will be some reporting to come. And you know so and and we’re doing all kinds of extra things that were inherent in their position in offering people discounted rides and using the ride share app to try to turn out the vote for people that were their consumer base. And so I think, for quite a while there was a general sense that the other side was really outgunned. I think in the end, and we haven’t seen final reporting from them either. But they only spend a couple $100,000 so you’re very seriously outspent

[0:03:59 Josh] and turnout was up. They did do what they want to do, is turn out, ended up being around 17% of Austin. I guess the average turned out in city elections over the last five or 10 years is like closer like 11.4%. So they got more people out, which I get a lot of us thought, Oh, they’ve probably accomplished what they trying to accomplish,

[0:04:16 Jim] right? So you’ve got to take on this about that, I think makes sense about maybe why we shouldn’t have been surprised going in there. And I’m not accusing you of saying you voted for Richard Nixon and didn’t admit it until later.

[0:04:28 Josh] I was very, very loosely attached to this position that I thought, you know, the ordinance might get defeated.

[0:04:35 Jim] Nothing like the strength of a loose intellectual,

[0:04:37 Josh] very has very easily swayed. I mean, basically, I thought, you know, I think it’s gonna fail and you said to me, Well, turnout’s up and I said, Okay, it’s probably pass. That’s about the strength of my conviction. But where the conviction came from is guess convictions the word. But where it came from was just I mean, in some ways, I hate this because I’m a quantitative guy, but we’re came from, was driving around Austin, you know, and it also came from any came from this other thing.

[0:05:01 Jim] But you were counting signs.

[0:05:02 Josh] I was counting signs which, of course, everyone, whoever’s worked on a campaign or even around a campaign will tell you this and you’ll hear it a 1,000,000 times, which is lawn signs. Don’t vote. Having said that, I’m going around the city driving around doing my errands, and I’m looking and I keep seeing these vote no on Prop one signs up. I see a couple vote for proper one, which is the uber and lift position. At a couple of years, like commercial intersections, you might see a string of like 10 of them in one place. But the interesting thing to me was the houses where I would see these vote against Prop one signs where the same houses where I’d see signs endorsing a City Council member, right? The same sort of 19 seventies ranch homes people have been in these houses for a long time kind of old Austin. People were who were here long before uber and left, and you kind of got the sense that seems to be more like I can’t find someone who’s voting for Prop one. You know, at least in terms of sort of my circles and I keep driving around. I keep seeing these sort of people that I’d expect actually turn out in a city election. They don’t seem outwardly don’t seem to be against that.

[0:06:01 Jim] These were voters,

[0:06:02 Josh] these air voters. And that’s the main point here is that we start to say, you know, who were the type of people who turn out in city elections were the type of people who are really plugged in to these sorts of local issues, And it’s not necessary the type of people who are going to be. So you know, who are gonna acquiesce to the uber and the left message.

[0:06:18 Jim] We can just, you know, we could really just call them what they are. They’re old time Austin liberals. They’re largely Democrats with a smattering of libertarian is not quite right. Is it a little too formalized, but the kind of leave me alone, but still socially liberal folks that really make up Austin culture and a lot of the Austin electorate and have driven Austin politics for a long time? I think going into it, I still felt, you know, in terms of defending how I was wrong. I mean, it’s still felt to me like some of those people were being peeled off by either the convenience and and beyond the convenience of uber and lift the argument that this was, ah, vote against innovation and the new economy, etcetera. And certainly there are a lot more people in Austin now than there were 15 years ago who are susceptible to those arguments because of the nature of urban development in the city, the growth of the tech sector, etcetera.

[0:07:15 Josh] But the media framing around that changed significantly in that inter period. Right?

[0:07:19 Jim] Well, I think that was the key. Frankly, the Austin American Statesman and social media combined, But the statesman was really all over this, and it got picked up by local media. These storyline became how much money they were spending. So two Fridays before the election of

[0:07:38 Josh] it, and also the misleading nature in which you think. But that was

[0:07:41 Jim] kind of out there. But I mean, the misleading one of the reasons, the misleading nature of the advertisements that were saying Vote for Prop one for safety, when really the no vote was the vote for the more stringent public safety position, right? But it was really when those fine campaign finance reports came out on the second Friday before the election and it came out that Uber had spent up to that $10.8 million or 8.2 that every headline and every lead of every local newscast waas right sharing companies set record spending, and it’s all funded by the corporations. And I think that really resonated with this Austin electorate that you’re talking about in a way that I’m not sure it had up to that point,

[0:08:28 Josh] right? I mean, they were definitely, I mean, sort of interesting me, we and we don’t know. I mean, they definitely reasons to vote against the proposal. I think for the most part, I think people I would like more transportation options, an awesome thing. I think that’s a pretty safe statement. But having said that, you can kind of say, Well, there’s a sort of anti corporate position that was definitely exists here, right? There’s also this sense of, you know, elected the City Council to pass these laws to regulate industry. And who are these guys to come in and say No, don’t do that.

[0:08:55 Jim] I mean, there is a certain amount of attachment to the idea of democracy, as it turns out

[0:09:00 Josh] right. So I guess we’re done with this, right? It’s all over now,

[0:09:03 Jim] right? Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I think not only is this not over, this wasn’t even the beginning of it. Which is another interesting part of this story that you know honestly, is I talked to reporters about this story. I kept trying to get them to go back and put this in contact. So if you go back to well before this all arose in the matter of the ordinance arose in Austin. The ride sharing companies again. In particular, Uber had been very active in the state Legislature in the 2015 session, trying to get some statewide regulation that protected them and was favorable to their model to their economic model in place. Now they didn’t succeed, but it was an open secret in the inside capital community. That is the 2015 session was beginning to gear up, really in late 2014 that a lot of the people that had freelance lobby practices were going out and people were looking to get a ride sharing client on one side of the fight or other of the other, because they knew there was gonna be a fight and uber was out there basically hiring up

[0:10:10 Josh] to literally. It was either Saturday or Sunday. The vote was Saturday. I think it was either that evening or Sunday. State Senator Charles Schwertner came out with the pressure released, basically saying, I’m gonna file legislation in the next session to deal with the patchwork nature of our cab laws and, you know, around the state, because we can’t have these cities stifling innovation, etcetera, etcetera. My first thought was, while the Texas Legislature probably cost $8 million right? Right. So I mean, that was my first thing. But I mean, obviously it fits into this bigger context, right?

[0:10:38 Jim] And I think, you know, the context is both political and economic, So there’s the political context that this has been going on in state politics for a while. Obviously, uber and lift have been fighting with other cities, most notably in Texas. Houston were, in fact, a set of rules like the one the city counsel in Austin wants are also in place in Houston, New York City. You take this nationally, has a much more stringent very New York northeastern liberal. I don’t if you’ve looked at those, but somebody published a list of what you have to do. You have to actually go for an interview with the Taxi and Limousine Commission.

[0:11:13 Josh] Oh yeah,

[0:11:13 Jim] to get your things. So you know, I can’t even imagine with that what those interviews air like. So this has been going on as a political thing well before the awesome thing and well, beyond Texas. And then, economically, those numbers look differently to uber than they look to the city of Austin. And I think they probably underestimated that here, in terms of, you know, Shorter’s price tag will see. Ah, we’re the Legislature’s price tag. To be more fair, we’ll see what that looks like. I think that we’re going to see this in a pretty big way, and it fits into a number of interesting context in the Legislature, a bunch of different political frames. You can look at this through,

[0:11:50 Josh] right? And what’s what’s particularly interesting about this in some ways is that we just mentioned Center Shorter’s is a Republican, right? And there is the sense of art, you know, isn’t the GOP for local control. Isn’t that one of their primary sort of drivers that you know we need to sort of devolve some of these this regulation, you know, from the federal government of the state governments. And then even more, let’s say, from the state governments to local government. And traditionally that has been the frame. But in the last couple years, we’ve really seen a lot

[0:12:19 Jim] less of that

[0:12:20 Josh] lesson. Maybe maybe it’s more complicated than that, right?

[0:12:23 Jim] Yeah. Or, you know, I mean, and I You and I have talked about the slide. You see, they’re more complicated or less.

[0:12:27 Josh] Yeah, I’m starting to settle unless

[0:12:29 Jim] that we just extrapolated too much from one key set of areas. And, you know, in Texas that the rhetoric of local control and devolving local control has really always been focused on education. And it’s been colored by resistance to larger educational standards, particularly federal rules, most recently core. But even going back farther than that, the National Department of Education etcetera, etcetera. So that’s been a huge piece of the education fight,

[0:12:59 Josh] right? It strikes me sitting here and thinking about, like why local control applies to let’s say, or why the GOP’s embrace of local control applies to education versus some of these other issues that you can talk about is probably because there’s so much federal money involved in education, right that they can’t necessarily rest themselves from that money. But they can rest themselves from, let’s say, the rules that go with it, and that’s what the local control argument is about. But as we’ve seen it over, let’s see the last couple sessions at least, especially even in the last session. This embrace of local control doesn’t extend much front

[0:13:28 Jim] or even all localities, for that matter. But I, you know, before even thinking about the other ones, I think it’s also amplified by more recent changes in the nature of the discussion of K through 12 emphasis on locally organized charter schools or charter schools were invited in from other places and private schools, right in the the desire you know, the whole what we call the school choice argument quote unquote, this contention between how state government is viewed versus local governments, where the locus of that is really is one of the major tropes and politics. Right now, we’ve written about this in a couple of different places, so, you know, in the wake of the Austin vote, you go back, and you can see all these other things that fit this pattern of contention about, despite between whether how much authority the state should have over local government and how much the state should proceed in limiting what local government can do. The most prominent example of this recently was the reversal of the ban on Fracking and Denton. So a couple of years ago

[0:14:30 Josh] that dent in the liberal enclaves,

[0:14:31 Jim] right? Exactly. So the city of Denton passes for those who don’t know anything about this passes the C Council with a lot of local pressure, and some would argue local pressure, augmented by people from outside environmental groups. In particular past pretty stout restrictions on fracking inside the city limits the and other kind of oil and gas activity. And then the Legislature comes back. Of course, the Texas oil and gas industry gets an injunction against this ordinance within. You know, it’s much like they’re the company’s leaving the instant you know, this happens. They got their papers ready, and they filed too. An injunction against the implementation of the ordinance.

[0:15:09 Josh] Unlike uber and lift, I can’t say we’re not gonna drill in Texas and

[0:15:12 Jim] right they just have to exit the market, at least at least for now. And then the Legislature gets involved very quickly the following session in 2015 and passes a state law that effectively reverses the ban and prevents other cities from implementing similar kinds of bands. Much to the dismay of all of the advocacy organs of local government, the Texas Association of Counties, Texas Municipal League cities themselves. We saw the defeat of the Hero Ordinance, which was a anti discrimination ordinance, and protecting LGBT communities in Houston. Now state government didn’t act immediately to do that. But the state leadership of the Republican Party, particularly Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, got very involved in that race. And there was again this rhetoric of city government run amok, if you will, and then even finally, and this is actually very active today is we record this. The Broken caucus in the Senate has formed a select Committee on property tax fairness, essentially game of exactly what the title of the committee is, and they’ve been going around this state having essentially field hearings where they invite quote unquote local tax authorities and county judges and mayors to come and testify and then, frankly, give him a good kicking about their tax burden and the way that there running up local debt. So you step back from all this and you were seeing this pattern of state government and mainly Republicans asserting authority over these local governments. And in the cases of many of the big cities, much of these local governments are, we have to say, if not formally, at least informally, because of the way state law works for nonpartisanship in local elections. They are Democrats in many cases, though

[0:17:00 Josh] in a few. What does this tell us? Going forward. I mean, is it? I mean, it seems like this is really kind of central in some way, this fiscal component to this, right? Yeah,

[0:17:08 Jim] I think so. I mean, I think the element is something like, you know, we know that the Republican Party in the main has been very small. Government anti tax had a pretty good run at trying to tamp down taxes and state government as much as they can. They’re now looking for other targets. They can’t do much about the federal level, but they can do stuff to state local government through the agency, the Legislature,

[0:17:34 Josh] and this is in the broader context of a changing state. You know, certainly demographically, we know, but also, you know, potentially changing political culture, right? I mean, Texas has these huge cities, right? These huge urban centers, they’re growing, they’re becoming, you know, a bigger player in this state, right? And they want to deliver the sorts of things that their constituents are looking for. But it’s within this context of a state government that has these, general, let’s say, ideological requirements for how the state is going to be governed. And so because of that, we just we’re gonna expect to see this happening more and more.

[0:18:09 Jim] No, I think that’s a real smart read and the and the tension in these to be as much of a Dorcas possible. I would say it’s really interesting to watch these field hearings, one of which, as I said, it’s going on today as the committee is being led by Senator Paul Betancourt, archconservative from the Houston area, and they’re going to these county officials, county judges and saying, you know, and and Dan Patrick actually testified at the last one and they’re going in there saying, Look, we’re not declaring war on you, but we’re here to stick up for your taxpayers. So there’s almost a kind of interposition here to use a weird historical reformulation in which the state officials are asserting their representative responsibilities over the elected state and local officials. And it’s it’s a pretty interesting development in the role that the state officials seep for themselves. I don’t know what the long how long term of that really shakes out

[0:19:08 Josh] and what’s What’s the Republican brand. And what’s the equilibrium at what point, you know, is the balance of power right between local governments in the state government and its hard within the constitutional system that Texas has. Yeah,

[0:19:21 Jim] and how those mechanisms we’re gonna work. I mean, you know, Dan Patrick was a lecturing a county judge at the last field hearing in Arlington, telling him, You know, leave it to your voters to figure out how much police funding they want, how much other public safety funding they want, how much they need roads. That’s a pretty clunky mechanism. I mean, a certain level. We do have representative government for a reason. They can’t really go to the voters it’s not very efficient to go. Hey, you think crime’s gone up too much? Maybe we ought to go. And, you know, within a year passed a measure that allows us to raise taxes enough to hire a few more cops because the population is exploding.

[0:20:01 Josh] It’s a weird preference for a devolution of power from the presiding officer of the Senate, who has garnered more power for himself. Yeah, over that period,

[0:20:09 Jim] you know, I think the long term plays an interesting one. But as we know, I mean, our polling has shown that there is an opening for them, at least for the state level officials among Republican primary voters in the moment, right?

[0:20:21 Josh] And that’s what’s most important.

[0:20:23 Jim] Least that’s what that that’s what works for them. It’s true until it’s not right. So is there feedback or not? You know, I mean, I think that’s what we’ll see. I think we end on a note of democratic mechanism, So thanks for joining us. Jim Henson here with Josh Blank from the Texas Politics Project, and we’ll talk to you next week.