Texas Democratic Party: Moving Texas Forward

Out latest video presents the Texas Republicans hoping to ride their records of failure and scandal to the United State Senate.

(Austin, TX) – Yesterday, Lt. Governor David Dewhurst announced his run for U.S. Senate. Dewhurst’s first act as U.S. Senate candidate was to sign a pledge to vote for the GOP “duck, dodge and dismantle” debt ceiling proposal, which would privatize Medicare, knock up to 300,000 children out of the Head Start program and up to 36 million people from Medicaid.

“Dewhurst’s first act as a candidate was to announce his intention to take his experience in decimating education, healthcare and basic services to the next level,” said TDP Chairman Boyd Richie. “Texas families are already feeling the effects of Dewhurst’s six billion dollar flip-flop. Now he’s announcing his support for an economic policy so bad it would make the Ryan Plan blush.”

“David Dewhurst owes Texas voters real answers instead of more pandering, and he can start by answering one simple yes or no question: do you really support a plan that would threaten the well-being of millions of senior citizens who’ve worked to earn the security provided by Social Security and Medicare?” Richie concluded.

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(Austin, TX) – The Texas Democratic Party has filed suit to prove the redistricting plans created by power hungry Republicans violate the federal Constitution and the federal Voting Rights Act. TDP has filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas – San Antonio Division.

The Texas Legislature has adopted redistricting plans for the Texas House of Representatives and for the United States House of Representatives and has submitted them to the U.S. Justice Department and U.S. District Court. There has been no ruling on preclearance. TDP intends to prove the plans adopted are illegal political gerrymanders, and therefore should not, in accordance with the law, take effect.

“These plans are just another Republican power-grab,” said Texas Democratic Party Chairman Boyd Richie. “They fail any test of partisan proportionality and are constructed in a manner that totally ignores the population groups that drove the state’s growth.”

“Allowing these partisan redistricting plans to take effect would violate the voting rights of every Texas voter who is not a partisan Republican,” said Texas Democratic Party General Counsel Chad Dunn. “The State’s plan is a blatant partisan gerrymander, designed to ensure that Republicans continue to control the Texas Congressional Delegation and the Texas House of Representatives. The plan includes a number of congressional and house districts that far exceed the Republicans’ share of the State’s electorate.”

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In a blog post at the beginning of the 82^nd legislative session, I asked how bad things might get if the people running our state government were more focused on their next campaign than on developing responsible public policy. The post revolved around the quote from Mario Cuomo, “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose” and concluded with this phrase:

“As this legislative session evolves, we’ll learn more about just how severe the cuts will be to jobs, schools and services. Judging by how blatantly political their inaugural speeches (Dewhurst’s speech, Perry’s speech) were, we should probably brace ourselves for a heavy dose of bad poetry.”

As it turned out, the cuts Republicans made to jobs, schools and services could not have been much worse.

You see, the nature of campaign communications requires that candidates talk about complex policy positions in succinct sound bites. But what would happen if an entire political party decided to use those sound bites to constitute the entirety of their actual policy positions? The Republican Party spent at least the last seven months showing you exactly what that looks like…and they aren’t showing any signs of stopping.

We had Rick Perry, who spent the past seven months manufacturing the most transparent “calling” to the presidency ever, presiding over the disastrous 82^nd legislative session. While his presidential aspirations thankfully kept him out of the state most of the time, his use of the legislative session as a prop to further his ambitions nevertheless resulted in tragically bad policy including the first underfunding of public education in at least 40 years and the most drastic cuts to basic state services anyone can remember.

Then we have David Dewhurst, who presided over the Texas Senate while keeping a constant eye on the U.S. Senate primary, and thus managed to single-handedly blow up a bipartisan budget deal that would have provided six billion more dollars to Texans’ basic needs. Because Dewhurst was more concerned with courting GOP primary voters than doing the job he was elected to do, that money will sit in the state’s saving account, unused, while teachers all over the state are laid off and local governments are forced to raise property taxes to make up for the unnecessary cuts to state funding.

And it’s not just Texas Republicans. In D.C. Republican Members of Congress have decided that their Tea Party credentials are more important than commonsense economic policy. And as they’re proving in the debt ceiling debate, they’re willing to risk tanking the entire global economy to prove it. Don’t believe me? The rest of world also thinks Republicans are “dangerous maniacs”.

Here’s the point – the 2012 elections aren’t shaping up to be about competing policy positions. Rather, they’re going to be about a Democratic Party that’s serious about solving our shared problems competing with a Republican Party whose entire economic policy was written in sharpie on a Tea Party rally poster.

You can click here to invest in the only Party that’s serious about actually solving our problems.

Texas Democratic Party Spokeswoman Kirsten Gray issued the following statement on Congressman Ron Paul’s retirement to pursue a presidential run:

“Ron Paul has long been an unorthodox politician – someone who’s defied GOP politicians as well as Democrats. He’s likely to carry that quality into the GOP presidential field where he could cause problems for Rick Perry and other Republicans by calling them out for the hypocrisy and inconsistency within their party.

“One thing is clear from the announcement: Ron Paul doesn’t think much of Rick Perry’s record or his qualifications for President.”

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