Lowlights of the Republican Party of Texas Platform 2018

Last week the Republican Party of Texas held its bi-annual state convention in San Antonio. One of the major tasks of any political convention is writing the platform. It should come as no surprise that the RPT platform includes some real doozies and a few jaw droppers. One of my favorites is their stated wish to repeal the seventeenth amendment which would take away our right to elect our United States senators and put it in the hands of the power brokers of the state legislature. I don’t know about you but the last thing I want is a literal handful of legislators who are beholden to their wealthy campaign donors selecting my senators for me.

Apparently hard core Republicans, despite all evidence to the contrary, still believe that “climate change is a political agenda promoted to control every aspect of our lives”. There are a lot of old farmers who’ll tell you that over the last 20 years they’ve seen changes in rainfall patterns and amounts from what they experienced when they were young. We’ve had increasingly better predictions of what to expect from climate change as the science develops and is able to test formulas and work with new evidence being collected and yet they want to believe that Democrats just want all of us to toe the line because of some need for control. Oddly these same folks watch the Murdoch family propaganda network enough to put it on top of the ratings rankings.

Under the guise of religions freedom the Republican platform states a desire for school administrators, teachers and staff to be able to display religious paraphernalia on school property and pray in groups. If you’ve ever been an outsider to a school clique you know it can be really uncomfortable to be forced to spend all day every day for years in that environment. Now imagine that the clique isn’t just your peers it also includes your teachers, coaches and other authority figures. I went to Catholic grade school and well remember the year that some poor Baptist girl was enrolled there. She was ostracized from the start and it never ended, fortunately for her she didn’t come back the next year. I doubt there are many Lutherans who would care for a Catholic teacher evangelizing to their children, or vice versa. Real religious freedom doesn’t require making kids who aren’t members of the predominate faith in the neighborhood feel unwelcome. Public employees should not be allowed to proselytize on the tax payers’ dime.

Since Republicans are always focused on cutting taxes without much regard to how to pay for said tax cuts it should come as no surprise that their platform calls for abolishing property taxes entirely but especially those that pay for the operation of public schools. That would be a real boon to anyone with rental property or extensive commercial real estate holdings. Right now if you own real estate in a county you pay property taxes on it whether or not you live there, under their plan people can profit from their real estate holdings without ever having to give anything back to that community. The suggested replacement for property taxes is raising sales tax, are you ready to pay 15-20% sales tax?

Those are just some of the highlights, there’s plenty more outrageous material in the 45 page document including abolition of numerous federal agencies like the Department of Commerce and the Department of Labor. Next week I’ll report on the Texas Democratic Party platform for 2018 that I’m helping write.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - June 22, 2018