June 8th, 2021 – Second Reading Podcast

 

[0:00:00 Speaker 1] 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. 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 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 for the week of june 7th 2021. I’m Jim Henson, director of the texas politics project at the University of texas at Austin, joined again today by josh blank Research director for the texas politics project, josh. Are you still are you rained out yet,

[0:00:52 Speaker 0] man? I am so sick of this grain. Don’t even get me. My wife is like going to lose it soon. If we didn’t stop with the rain, it’s too much

[0:01:01 Speaker 1] kid related. I suspect you disagree.

[0:01:03 Speaker 0] You know, it’s more dog related

[0:01:05 Speaker 1] than kidney. Yeah.

[0:01:06 Speaker 0] Using the kids out in the rain, whatever the dogs, They don’t clean their their feet. Well,

[0:01:11 Speaker 1] yeah, right. That’s a bad time to get that second dog. Maybe it turns out, but who could have known? So today, um, you know, texas has been in the national media for the last couple of weeks a bit as a result of, you know, what the closing days of the legislative session looked like. And then more recently for the output of that legislative session, at least this is maybe one of the subtext here, at least the output that was very visible to the national lie and that that legislative session ended on May 31st. So, you know, we’re, we’re just now getting out of the hot take phase, I think particularly given the governor hasn’t finished deciding or at least telling us what he’s going to sign and what he’s going to veto

[0:01:52 Speaker 0] or when exactly he’s going to call them back.

[0:01:55 Speaker 1] Yeah, there’s still there’s still some some things pending out there and and we did very hot takes last week, which was sort of the morning after hot take. But the the national media focus, some of which has also been pretty quick, does does raise some interesting questions from the position of being on the ground here. So a couple of questions that have come up in in the media, national media really in the last couple days. First one of which is kind of right in our wheelhouse is the question of whether the texas legislature delivered to Texans, quote unquote what they want or not. And I say it’s in our wheelhouse, not because we have no special spiritual insight into what is going on in texas, but because we do a lot of polling, of course. And then another related question is how the politics of the legislature’s output fit into if at all, a more national pattern. We’ll talk about those questions more generally though, though each one in in the last couple of days has been focused by some national journalism. So, you know, let’s start, let’s just start right away with the question of whether the texas legislature delivered to Texans, quote, unquote what they want or not. You know, one of many touchstones and of course this, you know, many people have had kind of written broadly about this, this this issue has come up or we hear a lot about it, I guess because we do polling about what Texans want and decomposed that. But Stacey Marie, Ishmael had an op ed in the Washington post. I ain’t published yesterday or maybe maybe late sunday night, but I think monday, you know, there was, you know, telegraphed its its overall intent with the title called, it was called What’s the matter with texas legislators? Which is a take off on the what’s the matter with texas line? Which, you know, it’s funny.

[0:03:38 Speaker 0] Well, it’s funny, but I mean, as you said, in terms of forecasting legislators is in parentheses. So it’s what’s the matter with texas legislators? And I mean, but just,

[0:03:48 Speaker 1] well, that’s why telegraph so. Well, right,

[0:03:50 Speaker 0] Yeah. I mean, that’s and that’s the thing. I mean, most of the national press comes at texas from this kind of an angle, I mean, this has been going on for years. But this idea of, you know, what is texas up to

[0:04:01 Speaker 1] write? Well, and I think that’s why putting the legislators on there is a nice, you know, Yeah, it’s a nice nod to that and a suggestion that we’re going to see, you know, something a little different. So, you know, the big question that comes up again and again and how we think about, you know, texas is the profile and the policy environment, the political culture at large here is, I think, to what degree does the output of the institutions? And that’s why I think that legislators is important, you know, do the rules, the institutions, the patterns of participation, filter the inputs.

[0:04:37 Speaker 0] I

[0:04:38 Speaker 1] mean, so when I see what’s the matter with texas, legislators, there’s almost, you know, you’re invited to say, well, it’s not necessarily something the matter with texas, it’s the legislators, it’s the legislature and we and we, you know, that there was a time honored, you know, tradition in texas going pretty far back, but you have to go too far back. I mean, this was kind of the molly Ivins line. It’s like, yes, texas is a crazy place, but in part it’s crazy because the political class is crazy, right? And that goes back and for those of you, you know, molly. I’ve I mean, this goes back to the seventies and eighties, right? So, and an early nineties of writing about texas. So, you know, how do we, how do we take that into account? Right. I mean, so, so what is the output? That is really, what was the output that’s getting all the attention? Well,

[0:05:25 Speaker 0] yeah, permit, let’s carry, you know, number one, probably, I think stricter abortion laws, you know, probably number two, you know, increasingly, you know, this is a multi session story, but increasingly hostile state government orientation towards mostly city governments, in particular texas’s large cities and in this case, particularly around police and policing. You

[0:05:47 Speaker 1] know? You know, and then the voting stuff

[0:05:49 Speaker 0] and the voting Yeah, definitely. The voting stuff, the voting stuff as well, just call it broadly, you know, and I’ll even sally even kind of add into this depends on which pieces you’re reading. But I mean, there’s also the stuff that texas really hasn’t kind of addressed, you know, police brutality, gun violence, Medicaid expansion and the thing we’re not even talking about here, which is kind of, you know, I would say funny, but more curious as Covid, but which we’re not talking about because that wasn’t really a central piece to the legislative packages that made through.

[0:06:16 Speaker 1] Yeah, not something they did a lot about. I mean, I mean, one might say that about, well, I guess it wouldn’t be fair to say that about the power outage because they spent a lot of time on it and there was legislative output on

[0:06:27 Speaker 0] that. Mhm.

[0:06:28 Speaker 1] And and it may be broadly reflected public opinion, but, you know, it does seem to me that one of the things that’s interesting is how different the agenda felt at the end of the session as opposed to the very the run up to it in the very early.

[0:06:43 Speaker 0] I remember when we were talking before the session about, you know, are they even going to really address that much? You know, partially because of the covid protocols and restrictions, but also because presumably the idea was we just faced this huge pandemic and this was before the winter storm happened. You know, this idea was, what are the important things they really need to address and get done? And we’re like, are they going to have time for all this other stuff? And it turned out they had lots of time for lots of stuff. And yet and yet not enough.

[0:07:12 Speaker 1] Yeah. And ultimately, you know, not, not a lot of substantive public health now. I mean, I think somebody would say we did some of the leadership would say, well, we did do a lot on public health, but most of it had to do with addressing who had the authority to participate in decision making, where the guard rails were for different institutions

[0:07:31 Speaker 0] and where the guardrails were for liability

[0:07:33 Speaker 1] for liability. You know, and not not things that were about public health in and of itself,

[0:07:39 Speaker 0] right? Or the negative, like economic slash health consequences of covid that people are still experiencing.

[0:07:45 Speaker 1] So, I mean, you know, so when we look at this question of, you know, and we should be fair to the point of the piece that we referenced. I mean, the thesis is ultimately that if you look at public opinion on a lot of these issues, we just mentioned on abortion on Second Amendment slash, you know, gun rights to, you know, put that in kind of quotation marks to some degree in particular, and to a lesser degree, but also on the election measures, which I called the voting stuff. But, you know, there was a big bill SB seven that would have, you know, ratcheted down, you know, the voting process and in a number of different things that they

[0:08:23 Speaker 0] curtailed the freedoms of counties to conduct

[0:08:26 Speaker 1] elections. Yeah, I mean, in other words, it was aimed to to prevent counties from allowing things like extended voting hours drive through voting a more, you know, proactive approach to soliciting mail in ballots. Now, that was the bill that got that got killed by the democrats and the final, you know, hours of the session, essentially. But it’s also something that we know is going to be back and something else. The legislature spent a lot of time and a lot of and and there was a lot of profiling involved, that is a lot of, a lot of legislatures talked about this a lot

[0:09:01 Speaker 0] in

[0:09:01 Speaker 1] public and it got a lot of coverage. And so the idea here though, is that if you look at, you know, the public opinion again on a particularly abortion guns and some of the election measures, you know, you don’t find majority support for a lot of what we saw come out of the legislature, right? At least not a clear majority support

[0:09:21 Speaker 0] not among the entire voting population. No.

[0:09:24 Speaker 1] Okay, so talk about that a little bit.

[0:09:27 Speaker 0] Well, I think there’s a couple things here that kind of, I think this discussion is crystallizing for me a little bit, which is, you know, and this is always the case. I mean, I think we we sort of face this in a very pragmatic and functional sense and trying to write polling to assess what happened in the legislative session. And I think what we were sort of struck by and you know, trying to write our, you know, upcoming poll that would evaluate the session is just the volume of really, you know, we call salient issues as the Legislature touched on by saying, I mean, you know, it’s just the sort of things that people probably have some sorts of opinions about. They may not have strong opinions about the particular policies that were pursued, but to say that, you know, Texans as a whole. You know, voters as a whole don’t have opinions about voting about abortion about, you know, election, you know, election kind of guns. I mean, these are all things that have been in the, you know, been in the public discussion for a long time. And so the fact is they touched on a lot of those issues. And so, you know, from our perspective and one of the hard things is, and I think there’s always like, you know, when you try to go and say, well, what did this session, what did the legislature, you know, do this session? And you kind of go back and be like in 2018 or 2019, you would have said no property taxes in public. And now it doesn’t mean they didn’t pass a similar number of bills to this session. They passed over, you know, around 1200 bills, a bunch of those got signed, they had to do with every walk of life and usually in very minimal ways. But we usually we define the session by, it was like this session, it was the bathroom bill session, like what some say 2015 this session kind of, you know, I don’t want to see it defies definition because it’s been defined very clearly, but it’s being defined as the most conservative, you know, legislative session and in generation or ever or whatever you want to call it and that’s made up of a range of different bills and things. And so when people say like, oh did they, did they do what Texans want? I mean part of it is like, well I mean that’s not really, I don’t wanna say that’s not the point, but it just gets more complicated that because they’re sort of the specifics of what they did, which are usually very specific policy things that are either, you know, minimal in nature or have a large cumulative impact, you know, oftentimes, but there’s that versus how these are, you know, how these are going to be described in package to voters. And ultimately, if you take a step back from this idea of like, you know, do people want or not want drive through voting? You know, do people approve

[0:11:41 Speaker 1] or disapprove of a six

[0:11:42 Speaker 0] week abortion ban? But also do people, you know, in our case, this is where things get complicated. But do they also want an outright ban on abortion? Well, it’s a little bit tricky you get into those kinds of space the same thing with the gun issue, you know, do people think it’s a good idea for people to be untrained walking around with handguns in public? Not really, you know, but the majority of republicans do, and this is where we start to get complicated, but the who and the what. But I go even further to say that, you know, when it comes down to delivering on what the voters want, you know, it’s not as the legislators and the governor and whomever are running, are going to go back to their voters and say, let me give you a laundry list of policy proposals. What they’re going to say is we increased, you know, we we made texas the premiere pro life state in the country, and generally, that’s gonna be popular with a majority of texas voters texas voters who continually sent republicans who are pro life back to office, both at the local and statewide level. The governor said that he wanted to make texas a Second Amendment Sanctuary State, whatever that means, and that’s the point, whatever that means. And the Legislature passed a bunch of bills that they could say, presumably increased the state’s places, you know, is a premier Second amendment sanctuary state. Uh, you know, backing the blue again, that’s, you know, a general statement that that probably pulls very well when you talk about it that way, the specifics of those policies, you know, ultimately don’t want, they don’t matter. They matter greatly to individuals, but is in terms of the political space

[0:13:00 Speaker 1] you need. I mean, as a policy, they make a huge

[0:13:03 Speaker 0] difference. Yeah, absolutely. Very clear. As a policy, they make a huge difference. But in a political space, you know what you’re basically saying. You know, I’m a Republican, elected official right now. I’m listening to this national press, which, again, and we’ve said this before, I just real quick new york times. It’s a critical op ed about, you know, texas or texas, republicans, that’s like a badge of honor. No problem. So all this attention in the atlantic and the Washington post new york times, all these places, you know, it’s not like texas. Republicans are sweating this. And the truth is what they would say is, no, we get to go back to our voters and we increased border security funding, we increased gun rights, we made texas, you know, we protected the unborn and we back the blue. What do you want from

[0:13:41 Speaker 1] us? So, you know, it’s important you’re making a distinction there between, you know, basically how they communicate what they did and what they did. And it’s not that there night and day or they’re completely different. But the policies themselves, you know, land in a certain way with those who are very attentive to those policies.

[0:13:59 Speaker 0] I would say they land industry. I mean, I would say this the policies land a certain way with people who are very attentive to those policies. But the way that those policies are going to be described going

[0:14:08 Speaker 1] forward

[0:14:09 Speaker 0] and beyond is such that even for those people who aren’t attentive to the specific policies, they are supportive of the

[0:14:17 Speaker 1] general

[0:14:17 Speaker 0] principles, right? That’s

[0:14:19 Speaker 1] the that’s the distinction I’m trying to clarify. You know, there’s there’s how the policy itself, lands of the people that are attentive and have well developed attitudes about the towards those policies. And then there’s people who have a kind of general, more less informed, less attentive but still but still formed difference informed and informed attitude towards these things says, okay, if they’re doing the pro life thing, that’s great. That’s more or less what I want now, I

[0:14:48 Speaker 0] think a little bit.

[0:14:49 Speaker 1] Yeah. Well, but then I think that’s that’s where the who is the day, but and also like what, you know, if people become find out more about this policy where the policy is actually actuator or the policies are implemented in a particular way. You know, you might actually get some friction. And I think that’s where a little bit of this notion is this what people really wanted kind of came from?

[0:15:11 Speaker 0] I mean, yeah, that’s very generous. But you made you

[0:15:15 Speaker 1] made uh well, yeah, I mean, you made it you made a point in there that was kind of embedded in all that that’s worth bringing out. Which is that, you know, to take the, you know, the ban on abortion after six weeks, which is a law that was passed this session. But there is ambiguity in that if we pull on that and say, do you support a ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy? We do in fact find significant support for that, right, which is virtually, you know,

[0:15:42 Speaker 0] I have the numbers right here was 49 support. 41 opposed overall, but it was reported was supported by 74% of republicans, only opposed by 18%.

[0:15:50 Speaker 1] And so part of the issue there though, is in a different abortion question. If we ask people, would you support an outright prohibition on abortion under any circumstances?

[0:16:01 Speaker 0] Yeah, majority would say no. And if we

[0:16:03 Speaker 1] ask for less than 20% as I recall,

[0:16:06 Speaker 0] and that’s if we talk about a prohibition and then if we talk about whether basically, you know, there’s a bunch of ways you can ask these questions just to be. But if you basically said, if you give people an abortion question with an option of basically abortion should never be permitted. It’s about 10 to 12% of all Texans, about 19% of republicans, so one in five, and that’s the that’s where the beauty lies. But but I think a lot of people are looking at that and say, you see, see that they did something that people don’t want. And I said, you gotta you gotta slow down a second here. Got a cool, cool your jets, right? Because ultimately, you know, that it’s in that friction that actually, you know, I think

[0:16:39 Speaker 1] a lot of politics takes place, a lot of politics explains,

[0:16:42 Speaker 0] and ultimately, you know, for republicans who controlled the state for 20 years and have been passing conservative legislation for 20 years. Ultimately, you know, we’re kind of at a point in the, you know, the lifespan of the Republican Party here and of the conservative dominance here, where, you know, you’re going to have to be pushing the outer bounds of a lot of policy area. There’s not a lot of areas of policy in texas where conservative principles and priorities have not, you know, dominated the discussion for a while and have not acted. So ultimately, it’s not like texas, republicans going to come in in 2021 into the legislative session, say, boy, nobody’s done anything here to, you know, limit abortion. No, they’ve been limiting abortion for decades. So ultimately, you kind of get to this point. But the issue is is that, you know, you know, we always talk about sort of, you know, kind of passive support, and ultimately, you know, most republicans are gonna identify as pro life republicans are the majority of party. There’s generally, you know, we found pulling pretty, you know, open acceptance of limiting abortion around the edges. But then we get into this area where this is the definitional piece where republicans simply, you know, doing what they needed to do to, uh, further kind of limit abortion, or were they taking a step too far and outright banning it? It’s always been the, you know, the supposition that once they go and like ban abortion, they’re gonna there’s gonna be a backlash. But I think, you know, and take another step back. We haven’t seen much of a backlash over anything here.

[0:17:59 Speaker 1] Well, this is going to be, you know, this is a question moving forward and again on this particular issue, or that this particular policy in that particular legislation on the six week ban. That’s a six week plus ban because of the dynamics in which a lot of women aren’t going to know they’re pregnant by the time they find out it’s going to be a de facto ban, you know, for a lot of people, or it’s going to it’s going to get much closer to that. So, the question, you know, will be what is the feedback, you know, what’s the feedback loop look like that? Or that’s one question about that?

[0:18:29 Speaker 0] But I think, I think the point that, you know, here is that the feedback loop and this will kind of get to some of the other points here is, you know, the feedback loop from issue voters from Republican primary voters who are very attuned to abortion policy is going to be extremely positive. You know, if you’re if you’re someone who votes solely based on Second Amendment rights, the feedback, even though again, there’s ambiguity here to write, the feedback is going to be pretty positive and those groups are overrepresented.

[0:18:56 Speaker 1] But it also raises a point that I raised at the outset here that I wanted to get to, which is the forum for that. You know what? We’re kind of very dry way calling feedback the forum for getting that feedback on them. You know, when the legislators are going to feel that the most and when they’re most worried about that for most of these republican incumbents is going to be the primary election, because they’re not anticipating a lot of competition. So, at lea it does lead to what from the consideration of the universe of texas voters could be seen as oversteer, but it depends on where the focus is, right? Yeah, I think so.

[0:19:36 Speaker 0] This over your argument to me is interesting. I mean, you know, I kind of keep coming back to this notion of, you know, democrats came out

[0:19:43 Speaker 1] and the appearance of oversteer.

[0:19:45 Speaker 0] Yeah. No, no, I’m not saying that you’re saying that I’m just talking about this general argument about the oversteer and I mean part of it is, you know, you can look at this two ways which is, you know, it’s an oversteer if you believe that the state is trending democratic and there’s reasons to think that right, and I don’t mean that its democratic, but in the sense that the coverages have got, it’s becoming more competitive. And I think, you know, from the outside looking in, you know, a lot of people say, well look at the demographics of texas and look at where people are people living in these cities, you know, the urban centers are becoming bigger and bigger and growing faster and they’re more diverse etcetera, etcetera. And I would just, you know, say yeah, but for all the crowing the democrats have done, they didn’t advance at all in the 2020 election. And also texas is a place where 60% of the voting eligible population voted in the 2020 election. So the 40% of, you know, the 40% of the of the potential electorate and a lot of the people that I think people outside the state think of as potentially, you know, revolting against some of this don’t vote here. And democrats haven’t really, you know, presented any evidence that they are going that they are good at or have any plan for turning these people out. So if I’m a Republican and I’m sitting here saying, we just keep winning, and also, I think, you know, I mean, this kind of something we should talk about too, but looking at the national level where everything is just grid locked into nothingness, I think it’s odd not to expect the state to, especially the Republican state to deliver to their voters because they don’t have an excuse. Not.

[0:21:05 Speaker 1] Well, yeah, I think, you know, expectations are, you know, are high among, particularly among mobilised republicans. And again, I still think there’s a little bit of an institutional piece there, that whose expectations, right? And so, you know, that that’s a piece of this as well.

[0:21:21 Speaker 0] The institutional stuff reinforces it though, right, in the sense that, you know, we also have a more conservative lieutenant governor than we had previously in terms of dan Pat date. Did David Dewhurst, dan Patrick? We have more conservative speakers now than we had from the Strauss sarah. So

[0:21:35 Speaker 1] what do you expect? So lets you know, you mentioned, you know, the sort of let’s look, let’s look at it again. Now from the outside in this has been almost painfully inside out. Let’s go to that. From the Outside in a second piece this week was Ron Brownstein’s piece in the atlantic, it’s called watch what’s happening in red States. The subtitle, that’s the bullet is kind of in states where republicans control the legislature, american life is rapidly changing now. He covers a lot of the territory and looks at not just texas, but several similarly republican states that have had, you know, similar experiences in a lot of ways in terms of pushing legislation like the legislation we’re talking about and in some other policy areas as well, you know, but it’s interesting, you know, he winds up in a very different place now. Part of this is just focus is that he’s thinking about, you know, a national terrain and and trying to be comparative here. But he also, you know, I mean, you know, he ends the piece with something like a description of people’s expectations that somehow, you know once trump was defeated and donald trump is no longer president that these that these sort of conservative fires would burn less hot. I’m not sure if that’s a straw man or not, but it’s an interestingly different way of of looking at what happened and and thinking about what the causality is and you know and where it’s coming from, right? And I like the two pieces together because I think you know I mean I think they’re both you know they’re both onto something in their own way about what the dynamics are internally and what the dynamics are externally. And it’s an interesting way of thinking about how national and state level politics kind of interact to read them in conjunction. Right.

[0:23:28 Speaker 0] Yeah. I mean it’s funny there’s sort of I mean there are two reactions I have to that you know one is there’s sort of a waiting for good oh, aspect to the whole, you know, well when are the moderate republicans or the principled conservatives going to come in and say, hey wait a second, this isn’t the party and the tree, you know? And the thing is I mean we sort of we experience a little bit this with the Tea Party rise and fall. You know, we would go and we asked the people in polling from kind of 2010 on, you know, whether we asked a question basically to identify Tea Party adherents or not, doesn’t matter, We did it, but so we do this and then you kind of go and we ask about the Tea Party influence would say the Tea Party have too much to learn about the right amount of influence. And the most interesting thing, out of that pair of questions we asked repeatedly I think, was that, you know, the majority of republicans who we didn’t identify as Tea Party republicans, so we just say they’re moderates or just non Tea Party whatever, but they’re probably less, you know, extremely conservative if nothing else. You know, we asked that that influence question, they’d always say that the Tea Party was either you had the right amount of influence or not enough. It wasn’t though there was no that was where the center of gravity was. And we describe this often is like, you know, sort of passive support. And so I think it’s important for people to remember that, you know, even, you know, these sort of, you know, let’s quote unquote moderate republicans who don’t necessarily fit the trump, told they probably agree with trump republicans on a lot more stuff than they don’t. And that’s kind of important to remember here. It’s not like there’s clearly not some block, but the other thing I would say is, you know, the lesson maybe from 2020 in 2018, the combined lessons is that I’m not sure that republicans are one scared of turnout as much as they used to be. I mean, you know, that’s gonna complicated complicated discussion in the current environment, but ultimately, you know, higher turnout in texas did not hurt them. And number two, I think the other piece of this is, you know, looking at sort of how the difficulties they had in 2018 that they didn’t face in 2020 at least. They maintained the status quo is you’re seeing republicans in both texas and other states trying to mobilize that trump coalition for the next round. And ultimately part of it, I think the trump, you know, approaches ultimately the ends always justify the means and you take what you can get. And I think you’re seeing a lot more of that and you’re seeing, you know, that sort of style of governance and I think that’s a calculated risk that I think republicans willing to say especially going

[0:25:27 Speaker 1] into redistricting and I think especially in texas where, you know, as we noted before, the underlying politics that I think from the outside people think of as trumpism or the trump unleashed ex you know, trump unleashed forces, you know, we’re always kind of there, he was the entrepreneur of marshalling these forces, but he’s also, you know, I mean in the end the trump experience had the kind of impact I think you’re talking to your talking about in terms of both governance style and you know, the aggravation of, you know, the forces of negative partisanship, right? That is the idea that we’re really part of what defines you, is not just what. And this is an interesting reflection, I think, on the fact that we think people are focusing on policy output, that what they’re really, you know, what they’re really fundamentally interested in a lot of ways, is identifying themselves vis a vis what they’re not that is or their negative view of what their opponents are. And I think that’s one of the things that we saw really make manifest in this session that’s been lurking in texas and has been around. But it’s the idea that almost anything that you could identify as a democratic policy preference this time became something that was attacked with great with great rigour and that drove a lot of the policy output. And it also drove the process in a way that I think a lot of people noticed, you know, we’ve talked about this like maybe on here or not, but so there is an element in which negative party identification. That is the idea that parties are so identified by their negative impressions of the other party. That’s one of the things that trump tapped into without any guardrails at all. And I think you saw that happening at various points internally during this legislative session where you had, we talked a lot about the different divisions like socially and and factional lee inside the texas legislature. One of the ones that was interesting that I think became more apparent this time was between those who felt like there was still a kind of ethic of cooperation and a functionality to cooperation between members of different parties and those who just felt like that was an inconvenience and we’re not interested in that. And it was and it was pretty apparent at different times on these most divisive bills that we’ve been talking about. It was very apparent during aboard the abortion discussions on the on the floor, particularly in the House, but also in the Senate. And it was very apparent in the gun discussions. It was very apparent in the election discussions that there was almost like a sense from some of the sponsors of some of that legislation and some of the chairman who are very much of a relatively newer generation of legislators, they’re mostly more recently elected, that they really weren’t interested in what they almost seem to take as the ritual of listening to the opposing arguments. It was very much a kind of, you hear somebody that somebody beat the back mike speaking and you sit at the back mike and you know, to give the ask questions of the person at the front, like a sense of kind of uh huh, are you done yet?

[0:28:49 Speaker 0] Yeah.

[0:28:49 Speaker 1] And I think if there’s any moment that made me feel like there is something about that, those were the moments when I felt like this notion of the mood of of what we might think of as the trump impact was really evident now, might that have happened without trump, probably it’s happened in the past. There are people that are that have always been like that, but it seemed much more prevalent this time and that and that is kind of driving, you know, and it is not just that it’s also the duration of the time that one party has been basically dominating the agenda and the process. You know, there’s nobody, it’s also

[0:29:28 Speaker 0] the it’s also the volume of the of the, you know, I would say difficult legislation that they had to deal with also.

[0:29:35 Speaker 1] Yeah, I mean, I think that’s probably a contributor, you know, but I think there’s definitely a sense that I’d have to go and look at it a little bit more because there’s certainly some people that have been there for a long time have probably, you know, adjusted and adopted this attitude. But I do think there’s a certain kind of institutional socialization to the norms of the institution that are being again, reinforced by these powerful outside forces.

[0:29:59 Speaker 0] Yeah. And you know, and I would add to that, you know, I mean, I think, and I know you’re not just, you know, I mean, I think you’re partially describing the Republican majority, but I think, you know, you can also make that description a little bit in terms of the newer generation, older generation, you can all see that on the Democratic side, in terms of the approach of Democratic members at the back mike, in terms of, you know, the whole like, hey, I just want to make your bill better. I know I don’t like this bill, but this might help make it less bad kind of in the older generation, to the sort of, you know, so like, are you aware that you’re a racist, this is racist, kind of some of the newer generation of Democratic, but this is also taking place nationally to. I mean, I think one of the interesting things in all of this, going back to, kind of the national perspective is there’s this sort of focus on get these Republican states in the extent at which there lurching further to the right on the one hand, but ultimately, you know, California is doing its own thing to write. You know, I mean, I mean, there is, there is, and this is sort of, I mean, again, to the extent that the national, the federal government is incapable of moving anything because of a lot of reasons. You know, ultimately it is coming to state legislatures to deliver on policy goals for their voters, the only interest. I mean, the interesting thing to be going forward, and I’m still trying to untangle here is, you know, does this work in a place like texas in a place like florida? I mean, that’s just for the two kind of that I would put together in the sense of, you know, these these very large, very diverse. And I would say, in the case of texas, most more southern florida, pretty much urban states, there’s a tension here that, you know, we’re kind of, that is being papered over, you know, that sort of, curious and interesting in the sense that, you know, most states with large urban centers have democratic control and they’re, you know, going in a completely different direction. And the question is, how long can, you know, the republican state one kind of be hostile two cities on the one hand. But to, I mean, there’s an opera, what I’ve said this before, but there’s an opportunity here, I think, both in florida and texas, to say this is what Republican governance looks like in a largely urban, very diverse, very young state. And I mean, I don’t think there’s anything about the session that makes you think, well, they did it this time.

[0:31:55 Speaker 1] Yeah. I mean, I think that it will be in Tennessee and how that discussion moves forward. And I think there’s a tension between the position on economic development and the the view of the cities that is still pretty unresolved. They’re probably opportunities, their their opportunities for both parties, I think if they can unpack that, so All right, so, you know, I think is to close this out. I’ll be interested to see how this discussion moves forward in terms of our everybody’s view of what this is going to mean and what the what the connections are going to be between, what we saw going on inside the state, the forces inside the forces outside the state and how they interact. So

[0:32:34 Speaker 0] yeah, the thing I’m looking most forward to looking like learning more about here is what what the voters actually got out of this session. I mean we follow this thing closely. We get up every day and we’re reading clips and we’re following twitter watching the stream and you know, we have kind of our impressions of this thing. But what I’m really curious about is how much given the volume, especially how much of this got through to people, did they find out something about what the legislature did an area, A B or C, and do they have an evaluation of it? You know, I’m really curious to see because that’s really, I mean, ultimately all this speculation from us, from other people, it’s kind of moot until we know actually what the voters picked up from, what

[0:33:11 Speaker 1] happened to the key question is, you know, what got through to who, you know, and and and with how much intensity. So okay with that, this has been the second reading podcast for the week of june 7th. I want to thank josh for being here. Thank our crew in the Liberal arts development studio in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of texas and we will be back next week. Thanks for listening.