May 31st, 2016 – Second Reading Podcast

[0:00:00] Welcome to the second reading podcast from the University of Texas at Austin. “The Republicans were in the Democratic Party because there was only one party chart. Tell people on a regular basis there is still a land of opportunity in America 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.”

[0:00:28 Jim] And welcome to the second reading podcast for the week of May 31st I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. I’m joined by my colleague Josh Blank, and today we’re here to talk about Texas suing the federal government, this time over bathroom policies and about the runoff elections in Texas last week. So Josh Attorney General Ken Paxton announced last week that he was joining the A G’s of 11 other states to sue the Obama administration force of Habit, maybe, and the Justice Department over the administration’s directives to school districts regarding facilities for transgender students. Now, this is the latest chapter in an ongoing saga.

[0:01:15 Josh] Right. I mean, this is ah, Ken Paxton hasn’t been in office that long. He’s been in the news a lot, but he hasn’t been in office that long. But this is actually his ninth lawsuit against the Obama administration. Ah, since I guess 2000 and when you take office 2000 15 for 15 yet feels like longer and

[0:01:34 Jim] somewhat feel like. Well, as the lawsuits pile up, it seems like

[0:01:38 Josh] in my head like that can’t be right. But yeah, it does feel like he’s been here a long time. So that’s Paxson’s ninth lawsuit, but actually ah, Greg Abbott his pred if its predecessor now the governor, filed 31 lawsuits against the Obama administration. So in total, since Obama took office in 2008 Texas has filed 40 right 40 lawsuits against the federal government.

[0:02:01 Jim] Should have, like an anniversary party.

[0:02:03 Josh] Yeah no, when they get to 50 there should be there should definitely be a party. You know, Greg Abbott was was really fun of saying on the campaign trail. Some versions to the effect of, you know, I go into the office in the morning, I sue Barack Obama and then I go home. That was one of his big lines when he was running for governor

[0:02:16 Jim] and an applause line.

[0:02:17 Josh] There’s a big possibly shoot at. So let’s hear. Ah, let’s hear what Ken Paxton had to say on Fox and Friends this weekend about this lawsuit.

[0:02:25 Ken Paxton] So this is, in my opinion, a solution in search of a problem. This CAD line doesn’t address any particular problem. They have not been very specific about what they’re trying to solve. This opens the door for all kinds of issues, with men deciding one day that they want to be women and then switching back the next day. It’s just it doesn’t answer any particular question.

[0:02:44 Jim] I think we’ll bracket just for the moment, the attorney general’s views on sexuality and gender identity, and perhaps just go back a bit and and make sure people know that this is in response to directives issued a couple of weeks ago by the actual their guidelines rather than directives that they were taken his directives by the Obama administration via the Justice Department on the rights of transgender students to, um, access to facilities in public schools,

[0:03:13 Josh] right? And so the idea here was that you know, the Obama administration said that that public schools would need to make facilities available to students based on their gender identity, not necessarily the gender that they were born with. It wasn’t a directive, it was guidelines. But with that came an implicit threat that if you wanted toe, create guidelines that went counter. So what? The federal government was saying you had the possibility of losing federal funding, which is where, why this becomes a potential legal fight.

[0:03:39 Jim] Yeah, and we didn’t include the clip because it would have been too long. But Attorney General Paxton, in response to a question on that same Fox and Friends appearance, was really direct about saying that that was what was at stake here. That school district’s depended on the billions of dollars in this in federal funding and that they were and that the state’s attorney generals were being protective of that funding. And there’s Ah, there’s an interesting, implicit kind of tension here between fighting the federal government to make sure that the federal government continues to give you money. But that’s obviously not Oh, this is not the only case of that, but it’s lurking out there in a lot of ways, as we look at a political context here that when we look at this history of 40 lawsuits over the last several now gubernatorial administrations, mostly under Governor Perry, although there certainly were lawsuits before the Republicans even room power in the state. But we look at that history that really does pose the way that Texas wants to. Texas political leaders are prone to challenging the authority of the national government,

[0:04:44 Josh] right? And why wouldn’t they? I mean, when we look at our own polling in the University of Texas Texas Tribune Poll Ah, you know. In February 2015 we found that 77% of Texas Republican voters hold an unfavorable view of the federal government, 90% disapprove of Obama’s job performance and 90% have an unfavorable view of the president. So if you’re, ah, you know, a Texas Republican statewide officeholder having the opportunity toe make the Obama administration a pinata of yours is something you’re gonna take any day of the week.

[0:05:16 Jim] Right? I was gonna go with low hanging fruit is a kind of foreshadowing, but we’ll what? We’ll wait on that, Um, yeah, I think that this tells us a lot about the current state of public opinion in the very concrete ways that we see in the poll numbers you site and also talks of points us to the the overall political culture in this state, the political history of this state. There’s ah really attraction and and rooted set of beliefs about limited government in the state that go back to the very beginning of Texas, and people sort this out in different ways. We sort it out in our textbook talking about the combination of the Western frontier culture and the Southern culture that’s shaped by the Civil War and the resistance of the Confederacy in the national government, and that the cultural memory of that as a war not about slavery, but about states rights.

[0:06:11 Josh] Right? So I mean, there’s there’s a long history of resistance to any sort of sense of federal overreach. But then this is sort of the perfect storm because you also have sort of, you know, progressive, social. Moore’s being foisted upon Texas by the federal government. This is just this is low hanging for it. This is too easy,

[0:06:29 Jim] says We’re just being, you know, probably get with metaphors. You know it somehow when you mentioned the perfect storm, I’m imagining the film version in which Bill packed in which Ken Paxton is played by George Clooney steering the ship of state in the against the the storming, the storms of the federal government metaphor and large notions of kind of abstract and theoretical notions of public opinion and political culture aside, I mean, this is a very concrete illustration of how patterns in public opinion patterns in public culture in political culture can really converge to shape the incentives in the behaviors of political actors, as we say for all are going to talk about low hanging fruit or whatever metaphor we’re going to use. These factors manifest themselves in very concrete reasons for political actors like the attorney general, um, but the current attorney general in the Attorney general before him to make these concrete decisions to get payoffs from them there. The other 31 times that the federal government got sued in in this time period we’re talking about was by Attorney General Abbott, who then used that as part of his campaign and part of his public profile to get elected governor.

[0:07:49 Josh] And that was one of the big advantages he had actually going into that election because, you know, if the Texas is initiating a lawsuit, its discretion there, the attorney general gets to make a decision about when and what to sue about. You know, the object the federal government we know if we’ve already said is sort of negatively viewed by most Texas Republicans. Most of the voters, we’re gonna put these guys in office. But in addition, they get toe pick and choose which battles reflect most favourably on on them. It might not be the ones they have the best chance of winning, but it’s the one where they can go out and say, Well, I took a stand on transgender bathroom policies or voter I D. Laws or, you know, the 10 Commandments, you know, on the state capital, right? And that’s something that you’re going to hear about again and again and again.

[0:08:31 Jim] And you do here less about. For example, during general abbots terms, Attorney general, there were other, less dramatic things. There are plenty of dramatic things, like the cultural and social issues you’re talking about talking about, but they’re also lawsuits about environmental policy that are less sexy in a way, Um, and if you think about what’s line beneath part of the current lawsuit over transgender policy, we’ve talked about federal funding. That’s a little more complex. Is an issue to talk about, Um and is there. It’s much easier to frame it in terms of these broader issues, even though the payoffs are very direct.

[0:09:09 Josh] Well on, right? And if we do end up hearing about, you know, when Ken Paxton is up for re election, if he’s up for reelection and we hear about this again, this is not gonna be about federal funding for education. This is gonna be about federal directives over your local schools. Exactly. And that’s something he’s more than happy to say. He’s defending the direct, You know, the directives of basically the preferences of local school districts and the parents and protecting the Children. It’s not gonna be about federal funding when they go ahead into the actual campaign seasoning into the politics of how you transform this into a political issue,

[0:09:40 Jim] right? And, you know, I don’t think it’s too cynical to also note it would actually be a little bit of malpractice toe if we excluded the fact that Attorney General Paxson is also under the gun right now, having been accused of some wrongdoing, Shall we say

[0:09:58 Josh] wrongdoing? Couple of a couple of several instances of different instances of wrongdoing, which I’m sure will talk about him like

[0:10:04 Jim] many of the headlines in this state press have really been about some of these political problems Attorney General Paxton has been having. This is a very welcome change of subject and shift of media attention for him. Um, again, even as we think about these notions of the of very, very concrete political choices Now, speaking of political choices are there topic today are, um, focuses on the run off elections that happened in Texas last week and a brief look ahead to the fall. And what these? What these elections tell us. And don’t tell us, for that matter, about the fall elections that’ll be coming up in November, that is the general election’s

[0:10:41 Josh] right. Now, most of you are probably driving around over the last couple weeks, and you saw that the vote here signs up and you, and like most people, you probably thought vote for what? What is what are we voting for it and we just vote in the primary election for president. If you even voted in that which most people didn’t, let’s say you did. You’re driving around. You were seeing the signs or warning was going on. Well, last week was run off week. So what? What is that?

[0:11:04 Jim] Well, so the run offs happened when a candidate in a primary election doesn’t receive 50% or no candidate receives 50% or more of the vote. And so if no candidate receives 50% plus one vote literally, then there has to be a runoff that is scheduled at varying periods, but usually a decent distance after the primary election. So the primary elections this time were held early in March, and the run offs weren’t until last week. So you had a two month plus gap between the primary elections and the run offs. So the run offs are to decide who is actually gonna be the party’s candidate, in a sense, winnowing the field and these happening in state level races, obviously not in the presidential race. So had they happen in the presidential race, we would have had to have a runoff in that race, too. But this is state races only. This is a matter of of laws said at the state level.

[0:11:58 Josh] What’s that? What’s the history? Buying some of that?

[0:12:00 Jim] Well, the history is interesting in Texas, given that and really points to Texas’s peculiar to some degree, not singular but peculiar pattern of one party rule that is for many years in the wake of civil war, Texas was dominated by the by the Democratic Party. The Republican Party was associated with the Civil War and its outcome and in particular, reconstruction. And once reconstruction, the period of military supervision of politics and government in the South was over. The Democratic Party was basically the only game in town. And when I say the only game in town, it was the only game in town We think about. Texas is dominated by Republicans right now, and it is pretty much, but not in the way that it was in in the late 19th and really through the first half of the 20th century, where there were at certain points, no Republicans in the state legislature and if there were, they were in single figures and so there is a history

[0:13:04 Josh] of white rule here for 50% threshold, then, right,

[0:13:07 Jim] well, the 50% threshold, because you do need to get ah, clear. You know you want you need to sort out all of that competition at the level of the primary, right? It’s not gonna happen in the general election because there’s no party competition in the general election. So you have to come out, come up with rules that thin the field and produce a winner.

[0:13:25 Josh] Some sort of majority candidates,

[0:13:27 Jim] right? You can that you can at least appears to have a majority rule,

[0:13:31 Josh] some kind of majority,

[0:13:33 Jim] right, A majority that gets winnowed out through through different sections.

[0:13:36 Josh] Obviously, we’re not discussing, you know, the very complex and real racial aspects to this, To which also layer into that. But

[0:13:43 Jim] yes, certainly. I mean, you know, having to do first with the exclusion of African Americans from voting and the in terms of the two party rule piece. The fact that the first, the first African Americans elected in the wake of the Civil War were were typically Republicans,

[0:14:01 Josh] so long and short of it is The reason you saw those signs last last week was because of the Civil War.

[0:14:07 Jim] Well, something like that. Something like that In a short maybe, in the Civil War and Reconstruction. Yeah, that’s not a multiple choice. Question this.

[0:14:14 Josh] So why are we even still talking about thes thes runoff elections then?

[0:14:18 Jim] Well, you know, in Texas there were a few seats that were interesting. Had either interesting elements for one reason or the other. And and they do tell us something about the state of cop of party competition in this state right now. For one thing, many of these of the races where there were run offs in this election cycle will not be competitive in the general election. I think maybe one see

[0:14:43 Josh] right, I looked this up. So there, 22 total runoff. So this is a cross congressional district. Senate District, House, districts, you know, State Board of Education, etcetera. Of the 22 total run offs Onley one of those races is expected to be competitive come fall. Right, Right. So for all intents, person the other 21 races that’s deciding who is winning that election

[0:15:08 Jim] right now. The other thing that you really note about thes and is probably the defining characteristic of runoff selections in Texas in the contemporary period is that turnout is miserable. So you look at the point you just made that these air, the races that wind up actually in a lot of cases, determining who’s gonna occupy office in a de facto sense. On the other hand, almost nobody votes in these elections. I mean, we started with that premise that people were driving around going, what election? When they see the signs, All

[0:15:38 Josh] right, so you’re probably part of the 99% of people who say what election, then just keep driving. So, for instance, there were two ah to statewide races for the Texas Railroad Commission went on the Republican side and one on the Democratic side. On the Republican side, the turnout was 2.65% of eligible voters actually registered voters to be clear. And on the Democrats, that is 1.32%. In two of the congressional districts where there were, there were run offs and again, these aren’t expected to be competitive in the fall. So these were basically Republicans picking who would represent them in Congress. The turnout rate in contest congre congressional district 15 was 150.4%

[0:16:16 Jim] but less than 1%

[0:16:17 Josh] right, And in Congressional Desert 18 it was 180.37%. So this is This is how this is a defining feature of Texas politics. Is our low turnout and served what happens without competition

[0:16:28 Jim] and to give you a sense of just how, what what it looks like when there is competition. Ah, Congressional Justic 19 which is Ah, was an open congressional seat due to a congressional retirement in West Texas. Safe Republican seat. That was a hot race. There were media buys. There were a couple of reasonably well funded candidates in that race, which was really the high bar in turnout nears. I comptel for that race less than 7%. 6.7% voted in that race, a total of 47,092 votes cast to determine the next congressman in that in that area, essentially

[0:17:06 Josh] right, So so. On the one hand, that’s sort of a defining feature. And then, you know, there are a couple of races that were interesting for other reasons. You don’t talk about those little

[0:17:15 Jim] right, so let’s start with one that’s interesting. In a kind of interesting. Weird. Interesting. You will call it interesting. Weird. So this was, Ah, the Republican runoff to fill a state board of Education seat in district nine, which is up in the Northeast, in the east corner of the state. It’s really our corner defining northeast. Gonna upper East Texas. Right there. That’s part Piney Woods in part and part planes. Ah, And in this race, the most controversial candidate was one Mary Lou Bruner who

[0:17:48 Josh] almost won. She actually got about 48% of the vote, plus a little more in the in the in the first election. And so she almost actually got in there and then ended up going into the runoff. And then all this stuff started coming out about what an interesting person she is.

[0:18:05 Jim] Yes, she had. She had articulated what we should save some interest. Theme opinions about the president in particular, idiosyncratically idiosyncratic is a good word in that, you know, she was She was a pining that in his youth that the president had a drug habit in that he was a gay prostitute to fund that drug habit. Now the national, the national press really picked up on this. She made it, Um, on some of the late night comedy shows. She was interviewed in public radio. She got a lot of attention and, you know, I think some of this is I mean, she earned it. Yes, there’s no doubt

[0:18:39 Josh] that the media,

[0:18:40 Jim] but there’s also the sense of the national media. We joke all the time about how it seems like the New York Times editorial staff has basically an app where they push a button that produces the oh, those crazy Texans. What are they doing now? Stories nonetheless. Miss Bruner did did help. So let’s let’s roll some audio on her response to questions about her views on the president’s past than his his habits.

[0:19:06 Miss Bruner] If he’s on drugs, then how did he pay for them? There’s two ways that people on welfare paper drugs, they, they prostitute themselves. Or they steal?

[0:19:17 Josh] It’s funny that you say that value a kind of national media in Texas, and then we can’t help but play the audio, too. It’s just it’s just too much, I think, what’s interesting about this race? In some ways, it’s like the best and worst of Texas in some ways right. You sort of have these sort of out there outlandish comments from someone who almost won an election to help determine what Children in Texas learn. Right? On the other hand, she ended up gain, you know, soundly defeated in the runoff, like, you know, 62% you know, like 30% or something. So

[0:19:47 Jim] there’s a certain dodged the bullet.

[0:19:48 Josh] There was a certain, But I think once people learn a little more about some of these views, they kind of, I don’t know, figured out. Maybe we shouldn’t. We shouldn’t put this woman in charge of vino setting policy for education.

[0:19:59 Jim] Yeah, and I think one of the other things that puts, um, some heat into this race is that that was an open seat that had been occupied by one of the moderate Republicans in the state, Thomas Ratliff, um, who had been besieged by Mawr. So we say ideological Republicans in this state that we’re focused on the school board, and so there was a little bit of, ah of attention on that. I mean relative to the fact that nobody’s paying attention, right? Or about, but but in spirit, but insider wise, there were people that were looking that and I think in the in the final estimation made an effort to make sure that her story got out there and that voted such voters that did show up. Ah had a thorough idea of what she was about to move on. A couple of a couple of races that were a little more mundane, uhm, but but still interesting what they tell a Senate district one in that same geographical area that northeast corner of Texas, um, was a runoff between conservatives. Bryan Hughes and and David Simpson had both been in the house, and they were both. You couldn’t call either one of those candidates anything other than a staunch conservative butts conservatives a very different and right. And so there was a lot of attention paid that race inside Austin political circles to see who was gonna win that race. Brian Hughes had been something of, ah, insurgent Republican. In a way, he had challenge Speaker Joe Straus for the speakership while back left the house to run for the Senate. See, David Simpson was really ah, conservative who marched to the beat of his own drum. Ah, he I got very ideologically libertarian right often when against the Republic, any Republican establishment he could find, but including even the conservative establishment who found him a little libertarian for for their taste. And Hughes won that race decisively. And it was, Ah, it was very close. She’s barely avoided a runoff. But that was a That was a race that the folks in Austin were watching pretty closely. And then also in Senate District 24 which encompasses both, even a little bit of North Travis County. And it goes up through Marble Falls and then reaches into Abilene. Don Buckingham, be Susan King Buckingham with somebody that had been on active in state Republican politics. Susan King was a sitting House member herself, a little bit iconoclastic. Her husband is a doctor who was active in the Texas Medical Association. And, you know, I misspoke. I said. Don Buckingham was active in state Republicans. She was on the board of the Texas Medical Association, but itself a very entrenched and major player in state politics and in the in the Republican Party. Don. But and that was a race that was to replace ah senator who had left state senator who had left under a little bit of pressure. Troy Fraser and and Senator Fraser had been a very major player in the business politics in the Senate. He had had chairmanships of business and industry and of natural resource is both committees that are very important to folks like the oil industry, the chemical industry, manufacturing major utilities. So that was also a race that got a lot of attention. And Buckingham went up winning that race by a pretty large margin.

[0:23:31 Josh] So I know that. I mean, I was following these races partial just because they were being written about a lot. But I mean, was was the interest in this basically, you know, about sort of where the Texas Senate was gonna be in the next session on on ideology like, is it gonna? Because in the end, I mean, the Texas Sen is a very conservative. Some people would like to say it’s the most conservative it’s ever been. I don’t know how toe how you’d say that or how you know, but there’s sort of this idea of, you know, we’re putting these two potential new people in Is the interest just, you know, where the Senate’s gonna end up visit about, you know, the lieutenant governor and his coalition. I mean, what was what was driving the interests, at least on the inside?

[0:24:03 Jim] Well, I think on the inside there was no doubt that no matter who won either one of those races, right, they were going to contribute to A to a Senate that is already very conservative and already, if not firmly under the control of the lieutenant governor, certainly amenable to following the directions of Lieutenant Governor

[0:24:23 Josh] David Simpson might have been a little bit.

[0:24:25 Jim] Yeah, I know. In King, both were seen as slightly. Simpson is very idiosyncratic. King is a bit idiosyncratic, and that probably has more to do with some things in her personal life. Recently, Um, For the most part, though, this was really an in the attention was about process and gradations of policy.

[0:24:46 Josh] Right? So what? So what broad. You know what, What broad lessons do we learn from the thes Texas run offs of any?

[0:24:54 Jim] You know, I don’t think there’s a lot of broad lessons to be taken from this politically. I think the different factions of the Republican Party won here and lost their. There’s no clear kind of outcome in terms of did the outsiders beat the insiders? These. We’re all pretty much insider fights among different factions. I think what it tells us about the Legislature coming up is that we’re not going. We’re going to see more of the same right, at least based on the Republican politics of this, and we’re not going to see major changes in the Senate. The changes that we were going to see we already know. It’s really basically about Fraser exiting and who the lieutenant governor moves to fill that kind of spot in the Legislature. Very much insider regulatory stuff. So I think with that nod towards the inside will wrap it up for today. We will be back next week with more from second reading. I’m Jim Henson’s signing off for myself, and my colleague Josh Blank will see all next week. Second Reading Podcast is a production of Texas Politics Project and the Project 2021 Development studio at the University of Texas at Austin.