January 19th, 2022 – Second Reading Podcast

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 Toronto 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.

At what point must a female Senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room.

And welcome back to the second reading podcast on Jim Henson, director of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin. Very happy to be joined today by Ross Ramsey, executive editor of the Texas Tribune, who has been kind enough to join us today, to talk about the current landscape in Texas politics as election season continues to unfold.

We have a little bit of news on that this week. So welcome Ross. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me being here remotely. We’re back to doing this remotely. We’ve done a couple of these in the studio on our end, and now.

And the

commute, right, exactly. Um, you know, there’s a lot of different places we could start here and I, you know, we’ll get to, I mean, some of the things I collection numbers, you know, so that there was some, you know, current events, but a couple of days ago for Martin Luther king day, you had a column.

Noted how elections in voting rights remain at the center of politics in 50 years, 60 years after the civil rights movement, I thought we might start by considering, you know, how the state of the major push on voting rights by Washington Democrats, you know, the dat the dire Strait of that. As we record this on Wednesday.

The Senate Democrats are set to try to make a, what will probably be a Pyrrhic attempt to move voting rights through the Senate, I think is there’s a certain amount of Kabuki theater here in terms of how that’s going to turn out. I don’t want to presuppose the end, although I think it’s pretty easy to do so, but from the perspective of Texas, I mean, you know, if tonight is the demise or the, at least the big comprehensive attempt at election reform at the national level, You know, it also marks the starts with a bang ends with a whimper travail of Texas Democrats efforts to block Texas Republicans.

Right. I mean, that makes sense to you.

Yeah, it does. You know, the Republicans came into the 20, 21 regular session, you know, after that 20, 20 election, you know, in January 6th and all those things in a mood to, uh, tighten up a bunch of Texas voting law in particular, they were. Um, Concerned about what had gone on in Harris county?

The state’s biggest county where Houston is during the 2020 elections. And in response to COVID Harris county did a couple of things that were within the law, but had not been done before 24 hour 24 7 voting, uh, drive through voting. Instead of waiting for people to ask for absentee your mail in ballots.

They just sent them to every registered voter. They did a bunch of things that probably make perfect sense through the lens of a pandemic where you say, you know, people don’t want to stand in line outside of the school house or wherever they vote and you know, so let’s get around it. But, you know, the, the take on this was that they were making voting accessible to a bunch of people who hadn’t voted before.

Republicans were worried about turnout going into that election. And the election was, you know, the Trump prevailed and Republicans won congressional and legislative races. You know, the turnout was large in the margins were small, so they had plenty of worry about, and they came into the 20, 21 legislative session saying, well, you know, these things that were not done before that were done in Harris county, let’s get rid of those things.

We’re going to outlaw that and we’re going to do some other things and nip and tuck here and there. And they eventually through, you know, the regular session in three special sessions got their way on the voting law. The governor signed it into law and it’s in courts now. And, you know, whatever you think about that situation, the Republicans had the numbers and the will to prevail on it.

The Democrats tried to stop them at the very end of the regular stuff. They walked out, uh, to, you know, deny the Texas house, a quorum that was needed to cast a vote on this voting bill. They went and stood in a church in east Austin, um, a black church where there’s been a lot of voter activism over the years, pretty symbolic.

And then in the first. Special session. They decamped to Washington and they had two ideas there. One of them is if you’re going to walk out of the house or the Senate to deny it a quorum, the governor or the presiding officer of the house or Senate can tell the state police to go get them, go round up those people and get them in here to do their job.

But the state police can’t cross state lines. So if you’ll remember the walkouts in the early couple of years of the, of this century, the house Democrats went to Ardmore, Oklahoma, the Senate Democrats went to Albuquerque New Mexico. I think the food’s probably better in Albuquerque and, and the DPS couldn’t get them this time.

They went to Washington partly for that reason, but partly so that they could lobby Congress to. Pass a federal laws that would preempt what Texas and other states were trying to do. Um, they failed in that and they came back kind of with their tail between their legs. The Republicans passed a law, it got signed, bada Bing, bada, boom.

And then you go a couple of months forward and the Washington Democrats are now trying to do what the Texas Democrats wanted them to do last summer. And as you point out that effort’s not going through.

So in a sense that’s kind of a, I mean, I, you know, uh, the immediate point I have there is that was sort of, you know, that the Texas Democrats answer to.

What the end game was when they, when they went to DC and then made that move was that the, they wanted to support the national democratic effort. And so it’s, it feels to me like, you know, we should at least know that this sort of suggests as many people said at the time that that strategy was still a pretty, a pretty long odds.

Bet. You know, in retrospect, I’m interested in the way that you described that, because describe that. That arc, but in particularly how you described the legislation, um, you know, I, I don’t want to get you in trouble or get either a priest in trouble with too many people here, but I mean, I think where you to, you know, as Democrats described that bill and have described the bill in retrospect, it certainly sounds a lot more dour or a lot more dire in a lot more fundamental in its affects.

Then you have made it since. And, and, and certainly in the recent, I just did a fast run in recent days. We’ve seen that we’ve seen this come up in the cities and I’m not trying to say, Hey, you’re, short-selling it. But I mean, I think there was a lot of discussion. I think that people weren’t having in public at the time in which folks said, you know, this bill is not good for Democrats.

And one could argue that it’s net effect is to reduce participation or make it, put it this way, make it harder to vote and to participate then. It is now in terms of net effect. I mean, in retrospect, how do you kind of, uh, how do you sort of weigh all that out? And obviously in the last few days we’ve seen.

You know, a lot of, I told you, so in terms of the problems with ma with registration, with requests, for mail in ballots, in some of the major urban centers, the Travis county clerk did a precedent yesterday that God, at least in our world, a decent amount of attention. I don’t know that it, you know, how much it, it attracted outside of Texas.

But in retrospect now with a little bit of time and though not an election. You know, how do you, how do you really assess the impact of the bill?

I think that the Republicans would not have been as strongly for this piece of legislation. If it did not preserve their place in Texas politics, they’ve got the majority that haven’t lost a statewide election since 1994.

And I think they view the narrowing margins and the increasing turnout as encroachments and threats to the. Had Gemini. And I think that this law is a piece of protective legislation that the Republicans passed to sort of hold their place. Um, I mentioned the things that were sort of like the facial.

This is why we’re doing this, but there’s a lot of stuff in this bill. It goes on and on. And as you point out, you know, their practices have been, you know, anti-democratic whether they’re actually. Um, and I mean that small D not capital deal though, it’s also been capital D anti-democratic, you know, and, and this latest episode is they’re blaming the supply chain for not having enough applications for vote by mail and for absentee ballots.

Well, you know, if you wanted to run government like a business, as they profess to do what a business would do is say, well, you know, heck with the supply chain, let’s put this on. Yeah, digitize. Let’s make it easy for everybody to do this. You ought to be able to, maybe you don’t think it’s secure and safe to vote on your phone.

And I can see those argument. But, you know, it is hardly a breach of security to apply for a mail in ballot, or even to register, to vote online. If it can be verified separately in another way and handled that way. And you don’t have the supply chain problem of not enough paper, not enough thing, not enough mail, not another stamps, whatever the hell they’re arguing.

Um, and they’ve gone sort of piece by piece through the voting and election laws to sort of tighten the screws in ways that. You know, sort of preserve the political order as it is in Texas now, and to disrupt any, you know, anything that might advance the other side, you know, a lot of this bill goes into how you conduct an election and how you conduct your counting and who can watch when you’re counting and how close they can stand to you.

When you’re counting. It’s a very micromanaging piece of legislation and, you know, the, the Democrats and the. Us department of justice and some others have sued over this law saying basically you’re on unconstitutionally trying to suppress the

votes. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the interesting things about the strategy that the authors of this bill and its, and its supporters took was exactly what was, was playing small ball on a really, you know, large, plain field.

You know, and I, and I’ve sometimes wondered if that wasn’t the lesson of voter ID, that if you don’t give people, you know, they’ll give opponents one big thing to hang it on. You can dismiss objections to a series of incremental adjustments in your favor as carping, or, you know, not wanting, you know, being against efficiency.

When what you really have to do is take that bill in Toto and look at the way. That it increases costs and increase it, or, you know, make small adjustments and Republicans face. Um, across the board each, you know, taking individually, a lot of those adjustments can be presented as trivial or administratively sound, but in total they have the effect you’re talking about, you know,

and a lot of this bill, you know, purports to fix things that they haven’t shown our problems.

You know, they’re saying, you know, this is really a, an election security bill and this is a bill. Um, it makes it harder to cheat in elections, but they did that without any, um, you know, after years of failing to produce any real evidence of cheating in elections, you know, most of the, um, Most of the attempted fraud in the 2020 election was after the votes were cast when people were trying to, and by people, I mean, Donald Trump and the people that he was able to convince in states to tinker with and, and, um, mess with the vote.

He’s got an attorney general in Texas, Ken Paxton, who to this day is still doing that. They haven’t documented the problem they’re trying to fix. And the fix is arguably. Work against the people who they’re trying to defeat it and elections

are attempting to use it to alter the outcome. Right. Um, you know, I mean, I think you said something interesting that I want to pick up on and kind of to broaden the conversation a little bit, uh, you know, there, there’s an aspect of this that can be described as a certain amount of business as usual in terms of an incumbent party, trying to maximize its advantages and, and preserve its position.

Through the way that they are making laws that are trying to affect this as we go into an election year. I think it makes sense to look at. The shifts in, in election laws that were pushed by the Republican majority’s and Republicans that are, you know, basically dominate, you know, running the political system right now, for, for lack of a more nuanced way, putting it as part of a broader, you know, sort of strengthening of Republican advantages in the state.

I think people from outside the state, you know, especially reporters, but just people that are don’t live here. You know, often seem a little taken aback. It just has throw the Republican advantage here is, you know, I mean, it’s one, you know, I mean, I, I mean, I just, I did a media hit, you know, somebody in Canada just before we did this podcast.

And there was a certain sense, you know, I mean, one of the questions as well is, is, is Texas still purple or is it, you know? So I really, I, you know, I’m curious what you think you’ve been watching the arc of this for a long time. Is it wrong to think that, you know, those advantages or the Republican advantages of the state right now, by virtue in part of how long Republicans have been running the machinery are really deep and well entrenched.

And I, I, I have a hard time making an argument for what’s going to undo any significant part.

Yeah, I think that’s probably right. I think the Democrats had a similar, you know, kind of political inertia going where, you know, if you’re, if you freeze the other party out of statewide offices, just as an example of this, you freeze them out of, if you think about it, you freeze them out.

The parking spaces where you used to develop both your bench and your experts. So you win an election and then you go into office and all the people that worked on your campaign, whether they were paid workers in your campaign or their. Friendly activists or those kinds of people, you know, they, it’s not exactly a patronage system, but it’s not exactly not a patronage system.

And you can put people in big agencies. And if you go through, you know, big agencies like land or the controller’s office or the attorney General’s office, or even some of the big health agencies in Texas, where most of the employees are certainly some of the universities, there are a lot of people parked there who are.

Politically sympathetic and empathetic to the people in power Democrats did this for years and the Republicans have done it as well for years and somewhat methodically. You know, Rick Perry, when he was governor had really studied Bob Bullock, a former democratic controller, and had really studied how, you know, you could look around any room at the Capitol during a hearing that got a little bit boring and just start, you know, Playing a guessing game on who in the room had formerly worked for the Lieutenant governor, Bob Bullock.

And after, you know, a few years of Rick Perry as governor, you could see that he was doing the same thing. So you would look, Perry was the longest serving governor in Texas history, 14 years. And certainly by the end of it, but probably two thirds of the way through. You could look at state agencies and say, well, you know, the executive director over there worked for Perry.

And so did the general counsel then so did the head of communications. And so did this person and this person, and they kind of marbled their people in the government at the same time that you’re doing that, strengthening yourself, you’re weakening the other party by sort of taking that part of the.

Those people out of the party. So a lot of, if you’re my age and you’ve covered this for a long time, or you’ve been around this for a long time, a lot of the people that you knew who were powerful consultants or interesting rising stars in the democratic party, in the eighties and early nineties.

Decamped to other states and not because they were trying to NY legislative quorum, they were looking for work. So there are a lot of Texas Democrats working in California. There was some Texas Democrats I know, working in New York who just had to leave because the work wasn’t here anymore. There are a lot of California Republicans who ended up in Texas politics.

The governor’s main political consultant lives in New Hampshire. You know, there’s a, this has become a Republican state and, you know, You sort of have marbled them all the way through. So the next piece of this, and I’ll try to be quicker with this part. The Republican’s successfully thought about that and figured out how to attack it, uh, starting in the seventies, but really concentrating through the eighties and then closing the deal in the nineties.

And they basically built a bench. They put a bunch of money in politics. They continued to run. Really viable, respectable candidates and not there, their worst nuts for office against the Democrats that they thought they probably couldn’t beat and they chipped away and chipped away and they were really methodical about it.

And they had a medium to long-term plan. Uh, the Democrats had been unable to put the same kind of an operation together and, you know, you get the feeling that they have episodic wins. You know, they have a moment when, you know, a. You have a dream team in 2000 and you have a Beto O’Rourke in 2018 and you know, you have moments when it looks like, well, maybe, but you don’t have the kind of methodical thing where the Republicans are looking at something getting increasingly large in their rear view mirror and Democrats are seeing the car in front of them get closer and closer.

Yeah. I mean, I think when. You know, one of the, you know, kind of classical ways of looking at this. And I, you know, we’ve talked about this before, you know, from an academic perspective is to, you know, and this is kind of more based on a European model, but still becomes more and more relevant to the United States is that, you know, you have these domains that, that parties function in that enabled them to remain viable and relevant and, and have influence as parties, you know, You know, you have the party and the electorate, which is, you know, your, your strength among the voting base and you know, how much ground support you can, you can count on.

And then there’s got the party as an organization, which is kind of what you, I think, to some degree, just alluding to, which is a party with the capacity to both mobilize those people and inform government and inform governance and, you know, come up with ideas and become, you know, the, you know, what any organizational element does, which enables you.

To get things done. And then you’ve got the party in government and that is, you know, your ability to, you know, be inside institutions and use your position in institutions, both, you know, when you win election, say in a parliamentary system and you, you know, you’ve got your hands on the wheel. Um, but also at the, you know, in a more subtle way, you know, I think in the bureaucracy, you know, just filtered in, even at the staff level, You know, if you were to, you know, do a little column and compare Republican and democratic assets in Texas in those three columns, the Democrats are largely be raft.

And I guess the question is, you know, is at what point does that just become something that all the Democrats can really do is wait for the Republicans to collapse. And we’re not seeing any sign of that. I mean, I think that’s why, you know, during the 2010s, there was a lot of democratic glee and we still kind of see that now as the Republicans, the Republican party in Texas, you know, really experienced intense internet seeing fighting.

And there was a sense that maybe this is the moment we could take advantage of that. That seems not to have happened, but I, you know, I don’t know what the road out for the Democrats is. And that’s obviously a, you know, a big question here. I’m in democratic circles. I don’t know where they

start. You know, I’m not sure that I have the answer to that.

And you know, those consultants get paid a lot of money to come up with answers to things like that. But you can look at history a little bit and say, what did the Republicans do that the Democrats aren’t doing? And one of the things that I think is notable is that in the early to mid eighties, it became more and more socially acceptable for conservative Democrats.

And there were a ton of them in Texas. For conservative Democrats to look at national Democrats and say, you know, I can’t go with those guys. I can’t, I’m not with those guys. So you had, you know, what was, what’s now called generally the Reagan Democrat, but kind of the business class version of this was, you know, Hey, I’ve been a Democrat all my life.

I was with LBJ I’m with Mark White, you know, yada, yada, yada, but I can’t go with Mondale or McGovern or some of these, these national Democrats who are so. Uh, liberal and the Republicans. Made a case for you should come over here. The water’s fine. The Democrats now have not made that case to, you know, what you might call liberal Republicans or at, or at this point, just disaffected Republicans.

You know, the part of the party that’s in control isn’t necessarily, you know, socially acceptable. Let’s say to the part of the Republican party, that’s not in control, but those Republicans, to the extent that they don’t feel like they’ve got a home in their own party, Are looking at the Democrats and saying, well, I’m not going over there.

Have nowhere to go. Right. Well, and I think, you know, another piece of that, I think that even predated some of that is if you look at, you know, I think you find most of this, the accounts of this, and either, you know, just people’s memory or memoirs. I mean, there’s some good stuff on this. I mean, you know, uh, in Wayne Thorburn book, There was also some kind of, you know, invisible stuff that went on, you know, the Republicans women’s clubs going back to really the sixties and seventies.

Um, and these kinds of social networks, you know, we used to call social networks before digital social networks. That became the, you know, if you will, the Petri dish for breeding, a degree of both Republican acceptability, but also the kind of candidates and the kind of grassroots. You know, support and, and feeders that help that happen.

And, you know, I think it’s fair to say that tends to happen a little bit out of the public view. I mean, I think you have to be really close to it to see that happening.

I think, you know, when I was a young reporter you had to cover to cover Texas politics, you had to be pretty well sourced and pretty attentive to groups like the Texas Federation of Republican.

Right. To an extent that you don’t necessarily, now we’re in a much more, top-down sort of Republican party now, but you’re exactly right. The grassroots of that party were. Essential to their growth and eventual capture of the population away from the Democrats.

Well, and I don’t wonder, I mean, I think, you know, somebody, you know, I think if we had a, you know, the consultants that work for the farther right.

Candidates in Texas, and, you know, we know sort of who these, some of these folks are and, and what they would tell you is that that is in fact going on, but that part of what’s happened is. You know, the, the there’s a bit of antipathy right now between those kinds of forces that are most active in Republican politics and the folks at the.

I think there always was. I just think it’s a matter of which group is more influential at a given point of time. I think when the, you know, when the Texas Federation of Republican women were going on, that was kind of the, you know, that was the bridge clubs in the social set. And, you know, it was sort of like the, not the blue collar.

Republicans and not the, you know, and now you’ve got a different, you know, sort of social class in charge of that political group. And, and, you know, I think those tensions are always there and are still there.

Yeah. Well, and it would be interesting to look at. I mean, I think that, um, you know, the groups that are most.

Energize and active say in Republican primary politics, you know, are a mixture of, you know, non-issue based groups, kind of regional Republican county parties and things like that, which, you know, do do periodically make a lot of noise and, and, you know, either support or become a thorn in the side for certain incumbent.

Or become the base of support. I mean, for somebody, you know, that that’s, it’s kind of a lifeline for somebody like a turtle, Janet attorney general then, but I think they’ve also been supplemented by, you know, these hyper energized and more well-funded issue groups. Be it, the gun groups, be it, you know, some of the, the, the anti-abortion groups.

You know, we could probably start losing some of the property rights groups. So, you know, I think what’s going on at there. The Republican party, you know, reflect some of the changes in politics that we’ve seen. But again, if you look over on the democratic side, it’s harder to see, you know, the kind of ferment out there.

I mean, I think we hear about groups and they kind of appear in election cycles, but not many of them have lasted more than a cycle or two. It seems.

Yeah, they, they are very quick to judge defeat and to replace whoever lost the last election with a new set of people to lose the next election and the Republicans, you know, at least when they were taking over in Texas, we’re pretty good at look, we’re going to have a couple of losing years.

We’re a rebuilding team right now, and they were more tolerant of their losses and they were incrementally better every year.

Well in anticipation of, you know, should anybody hear this? You know, some of them, you know, angry mail, we’ll get from the usual suspects that this kind of gets to the question I started with, which, you know, I mean, this is not to say.

It’s just bad decision-making or bad leadership among Democrats. I mean, there’s something about, again, their, their structural position where they just, you know, the lack of resources, the lack of, you know, the kind of the kind of resources and the kind of I’m struggling to get, like those resources are both material and also, you know, intangible to mobilize people and get them in it for the long haul.

Democrats just have very limited access to all of those because they don’t have any patronage. They, you know, the, your employment opportunities as a Democrat. When you think about the number of people, I mean, You know, I’ll tell you what the decline of the debt of the Democrats has been good for the real estate entitled business, right?

As people just kind of throw up their hands and, and, and high-tech, and go do something else where they can make a living and not feel like they’re constantly losing. And I don’t know how you, you know, I mean, there are ways to analytically process that, but as we look at, you know, the terrain and, and where some of the most, some of the people that were seen as promising in the earth, you know, in.

The last couple of decades, you know, you were talking about, you know, political professionals going to work in other states, but you’ve also got the bench just sort of empties out to go do other things after a loss or two, or because the frustration just builds,

you know, the Republicans and the Democrats have this in common, the people that bust through our kind of entrepreneurial campaigners, there are people that bring in their own.

Money or their own access to money. That’s not party dependent and their own access to ideas. That’s not party dependent. It’s a bill Clements in 1978, winning for the Republicans or somebody like a Beto O’Rourke coming along who had. And ability to raise money. That’s distinct from the party. Isn’t necessarily the first choice of the powers that be within the party, but isn’t, you know, unacceptable necessarily to them and comes in and sort of busts through.

And then you can sort of start to fill the field out. You know, the, you get a clemmensen officer, you get a John tower in office and you have a beachhead and you begin to, to build around that the Democrats have been for one reason. And another, I mean, there’ve been a number of reasons. They’re not great at recruiting candidates who break through the candidates who breakthrough are not the ones that they recruited.

You know, they get a, a loop, a Valdez is a bad example for them. And, uh, Beto O’Rourke is, uh, is a good example of this. Those are extremes, but that’s kind of the idea. And unless you can get. People who are viable political leaders to jump in and take the chance. And also, um, are independent enough of the powers that be to sort of just jump ahead of the game.

You know, I th I think you’re, I think you’re stuck in.

So that brings us a little bit know before we wind up to, you know, your column today. I mean, your, your column today was headline, you know, Texas politicians await our instructions about what do voters want. And I was very, you know, interested in the overall tone of that column in terms of say, yeah, there are big issues out there, the pandemic blackouts education, and they seem to be.

Out there in the mix, but the way that the candidates and, and the governing class are responding to them, I’ll just say you seem less than impressed with,

I was unimpressed.

How much, how much of that H how much of that is linked to this broader. I mean, is that just, I mean, I think one would be tempted to say, well, it’s just politics.

These are all hard. And you know, if you’re going to be mad because politicians are picking the low hanging fruit, you’re going to be mad all the time. Um,

um, I am mad a fair amount of the time. That’s sort of the nature of call.

Is this linked to, to where we are in terms of the lopsidedness of the political system.

I just, you know, there’s, there’s a couple of things going on here and, and that column started with the idea that as a problem solving machine, this is not working. If, if your idea for a legislature or for this government was we have some problems that we can all agree are problems. Whether those are, whether that’s keeping the electrical grid, uh, keeping the educational system, going, keeping the border, you know, open and closed in the way that we want it to be open and closed.

All of those kinds of things are the sort of communal problems that we send all these people to Austin and or Washington to solve. And they have. This is nothing new, but right now they’re in, they’re not in a place where they’re really solving these problems. They’re dithering on the edges. You know, we have an education system that because of the pandemic, this was one of the examples in the column today.

Uh, the learning loss is just measured by standardized testing are enormous over the last two years. And so you’ve got this problem of, you know, case. So the fundamental thing we’re trying to do here is educate kids and we’d gotten demonstrably. Poorer at that. What are we doing about it? And what they were doing in the legislature was talking about critical race theory and which books are in the library and a bunch of peripheral social issues that really didn’t get to the point.

There was a, the kind of the inspiration for this was one of our reporters. Eleanor Klebanoff went to Montgomery county to a hospital there and talked to nurses and. Her opening case in this story was this guy who decided that he didn’t trust the vaccinations and had the attitude of, I mean, he said this out loud, I’m not inferring anything.

You know, I’m not going to use the vaccination. If I get the disease, I’ll go to the hospital and they’ll take care of it. And one of these nurses was just flipping mad about it and said, you know, I’m here, I’m missing my family. I don’t get to see my husband. I don’t get to see my kids. And you’re yelling at me about a disease.

I told you how to. And, and, you know, when you look at this and you look at what the legislature has done with COVID and what they’ve done in response, they’re sort of not focused on the problem. There’s a really great movie that I kind of refer to in my head when I’m thinking about things like this, Apollo 13, and there’s a place in that movie when the astronauts are in dire trouble in outer space.

And the people on the ground in Houston are trying to figure out what to do about it. And they’re all. Running around like chickens with their heads cut off. And one of the guys says, work, the problem, people settle down, let’s get to work. And you know, you’re watching the legislature kind of going on any number of fronts work, the problem.

People let’s go stop barking at each other and stop playing for voter attention with, you know, this sort that. You know, hot button of the day. And actually, you know, there are plenty of big problems to solve. Why don’t you get to it? And that was sort of, you know, the underlying idea of the column. It’s not new and it’s going to happen, you know, continually again, and we’re entering, we’re actually in an election season, you know, we’ll start voting in a, what is it about four weeks?

Um, February 14th, Valentine’s day, we start early voting the election. The primary elections are on March 1st. So we’re actually in the time when you could, at least in theory, if you read all those civics books, um, I personally ditched those classes, but you know, if you read all those civics book, you know, this is period, this is the time when voters could raise their hand and tell them, Hey, you know, you need a course, correction, go do X or go to Y.

And that’s where the headline came from.

Do you expect.

Not necessarily. I hope for

it. I mean, I guess the why the why is what I would get at here. I mean, you know, to my mind, I mean, I there’s a lot, you know, actually I would say I agree with all of that. It does seem to me that something is broken that has, that has impaired responsiveness in the state.

You know, I like the way you frame that the institutions are not really working the way. We should be able to expect them to now I think, you know, I think one has to be careful. I mean, it’s not as if, you know, Texas has historically given us the model of responsive government. There’s a lot of, a lot of noise in the lines here.

Um, and, and including, uh, a political culture, they skeptical of government doing much to some degree, but it seems like we’re pretty far out right now. And that a lot of the mechanisms that we rely on to make the kind of corrections you’re talking about. Are broken in one of those is that there’s no, there’s no effective opposition to the folks in charge of handling this right now.

Well, when does it become, you know, not a political problem and becomes a. A real problem, you know, it’s a real problem. I think, you know, I think in voters’ minds is what, I’m, what I’m looking at. And, you know, at what point do voters think that we’re depending on hospitals to do a lot of things that hospitals aren’t designed to do, they’re not designed to operate at peak capacity for two years on a pandemic that.

Hospitals are designed for episodic things. They’re not designed for plagues. And when you put a plague on them, what are you doing to help them out? You know, would it kill you to put on a mask? Would it kill you to get a vaccination? And you have to figure out, you know, what’s the, what’s the trade you’re making here?

What are you losing in the process? I think education is one of those things. Like a dripping water pipe in your attic. You know, it can drip up there for a long time before you notice it and cause a real. Big giant problem. You can tell I’ve had some plumbing issues in my house lately. Um, the, you know, you can, you can get into a thing where you have a real big problem because you didn’t pay attention to it.

At the beginning, we’ve got a bunch of things like that right now, where if you give them some attention and solve these problems, it probably helped your politics and it would certainly help the state.

Well, and I wonder, I bet it’s for the next time to think about just what the conditions are too. To make that a little more likely, because I think we’re in a, we’re in a tough spot on that right now.

Uh, I want to thank Ross. Thanks for being here. Much appreciated.

Always a pleasure.

And thanks to, uh, as always our technical crew in the liberal arts development studio at the college of liberal arts at a university of Texas at Austin. Thanks to you for listening. Uh, you’ll find Ross’s column in the Texas Tribune today@texastribune.org.

Uh, we didn’t talk about a ton of polling data today, but as always. Tons of data content, et cetera@texaspoliticsdotutexas.edu. Chimp Henson here. Thanks again for listening and we’ll be back next week.

Second reading podcast is a production of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin. .