An entire classroom was massacred with an AR-15 just 280 miles from this stage, and the Texas GOP is loudly booing someone for proposing even the mildest of gun safety legislation. #txlege https://t.co/oOJGEqtyxr
— Texas Democrats (@texasdemocrats) June 17, 2022
A Texan opines:
A Texas journalist (Christopher Hooks, Senior Editor of the Texas Monthly) — “Yes, the 2022 Texas GOP Platform Is Extreme. But Little of It Is New”:
Party conventions are supposed to win a public spotlight for the party in question. By this measure, the 2022 convention of the Republican Party of Texas in Houston was a stunning success. Typically, the event, in which thousands of activists gather to rub shoulders while elected officials give speeches, can be a dry business. But this year, national media pored over the party’s interminably long platform, highlighting language that declared the 2020 presidential election results illegitimate, endorsed a referendum that would allow Texas voters to declare their secession from the United States, and called for the state’s schoolchildren to be drilled on “the humanity of the preborn child.” The platform also declared homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle choice,” and called for Texas to strengthen the electric grid, not with regulations that keep the lights on in other states hit by extreme weather that our own leaders are averse to, but rather to defend against mythical “electromagnetic pulse weapons.” …
The convention indeed showed a state party moving back to the right after a brief period, in 2018 and 2020, in which it inched ever so slightly to the center over concerns that Democrats might be getting more competitive in elections here. But the difference from prior conventions was one of degrees.
The Log Cabin Republicans have never been allowed to participate in the convention. Abbott has long been loathed by conservative activists, and both the current and former chair of the state GOP are among his enemies. (Current chair Matt Rinaldi, who presided over the convention, called Abbott a petty tyrant two years ago.) And John Cornyn is always booed at the gathering. He was simply booed louder and longer this time, and for a specific reason rather than a general sense among the grassroots that he is a wishy-washy Republican In Name Only. (When Cornyn spoke of the pain the families in Uvalde must feel after the school shooting, shouts of “No gun control” filled the room.)
The platform, meanwhile, always contains ludicrously extreme planks and is mostly irrelevant when it comes to actually passing bills. The platform-drafting process at the Texas Republican convention is a sort of day-care program for the grassroots. For many right-wingers, this is the highlight of their year. Texans who get their news from Facebook threads and chain emails gather together, load up a document with their complaints, pass it, and then elected officials throw it in the trash. That elected officials don’t enact the platform is among the most common criticisms you’ll hear from those who draft it. But it would be tough for even the most ideological legislators to adopt the planks wholesale: they are always a jumble of often-contradictory messages. (The 2022 platform, for instance, opposes decriminalization of drugs but also calls for marijuana to be moved from the federal Schedule 1 to Schedule 2, which would lessen legal penalties.)…
A difference of degrees is still a difference, however, and those degrees can add up over the years. There were indeed some developments at this year’s convention that seemed indicative of larger dysfunctions within the state party. One of them was the convention’s attendance. Somewhere between four thousand and five thousand showed up, which is not unimpressive. But a decade or so ago the convention regularly boasted ten thousand or more attendees. Back then, speakers would describe it as the largest gathering of its kind in a free country, or some such boast. Whether or not it was true, it was possible to believe. This year, state senator Brandon Creighton from Conroe, north of Houston, rather limply described the event as “one of the largest gatherings of conservative patriots in the country.”
Can I dream of the term ‘extinction burst’?
