GOP Vows on Endless Sessions and Votes
Show Desperate Need to Create Voter Fraud

Capitol Inside
July 14, 2021

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick might have a shot at the Guinness World Records Book with a vow on Tuesday to pass the GOP election bill out of the Texas Senate as many times as possible during the next year and a half as he vowed to do on Tuesday until Democratic lawmakers come home from an epic adventure out of state. That will depend on whether Governor Greg Abbott is really prepared to call 16 more special meetings of the Legislature between now and the regular session in 2023.

State Rep. Jim Murphy - a powerful Houston lawmaker who's the House GOP Caucus chair - could be the only member of the majority party leadership battalion with a chance to have a wax statute shaped in his honor at the Ripley's Believe It or Not! across the street from Alamo Plaza and the Republicans' beloved Cenotaph statue in downtown San Antonio.

One of most likeable, moderate and old-school normal Republicans at the Texas Capitol in recent years, Murphy raised the bar on bull to yet another record level for the GOP at a caucus press conference on Tuesday after House Democrats broke quorum and left the Republicans behind on a summer session Titanic.

Murphy, who chairs the Higher Education Committee, said that the Democrats who've gone astray were killing legislation that Texans "desperately" need. Murphy could have passed the truth test with flying colors if he'd accused Democrats of killing bills that the rest of the Republicans in Austin appear to think they absolutely have to have to survive politically in a party that Trump has moved farther to the right than any of them could have imagined a year ago. Democrats say such a claim has no more credibility than the Trump election challenge.

Senate Bill 1 cleared the Texas Senate on Tuesday when nine of the 13 Democrats were absent including several who are spending the week on the red carpet in Washington D.C. with a significant share of 58 House Democrats who have been absent without excuses for two days with no plans to come back until the special session ends on August 8.

The voting legislation is the state's most urgent need in the Republicans' view based on their determination to fight to the end of eternity if that's what it takes to clean up a Texas election system that had impeccable integrity until they began to raise suspicions about it recent months. Murphy parroted the theme on an ongoing series of special sessions until the next regular session gets under way in early 2023.

The caucus media briefing on Tuesday in a packed room off the House floor raises a fundamental question on why Texans would desperately need to have the Legislature fix a process that hasn't been broken by any legitimate standard? The facts seem to suggest otherwise.

More than 400 people signed up in opposition to the Senate elections bill at hearing last weekend for which they had almost no advance notice. Sixty-nine other individuals registered in support for the voting measure at a State Affairs Committee meeting on SB 1 in the Capitol auditorium where the hearing began on Saturday morning and ended early the next day.

A criminal justice impact study that the Legislative Budget Board conducted on SB 1 and a sister proposal in House Bill 3 found that 45 people had been arrested for voter fraud in Texas in the past three fiscal years. The LBB analysis showed that "fewer than ten individuals" were placed in community supervision for election-related offenses in each year and the same number sentenced to state prison for voter fraud.

The budget board all but confirmed beyond any rationale doubt that voter fraud is not a problem in Texas. GOP State Senator Bryan Hughes - a Mineola Republicans who chairs the State Affairs Committee and doubles as the election bill sponsor - said at the hearing on SB 1 that 44 voter fraud cases are pending at Attorney General Ken Paxton's office. That would imply that only one of the nearly four dozen electoral piracy cases that the LBB cited has been resolved in a three-year period.

Instead of being proud of themselves and their state for the way it's preserved the sanctity of the ballot box, the Republicans would effectively be creating voter fraud that doesn't currently exist by establishing an entire new class of criminals and crimes with restrictions on behavior that's perfectly legal now.

The Republicans' obsession with election integrity has raised the specter that some of Texas elected officials might not have been legitimate winners in political races on the roads to current stations. Did Murphy really beat a Democrat in 2018 by more than 16 percentage points or less? Patrick defeated Democratic challenger Mike Collier by less than 5 points on paper that year.

Does Patrick believe he was cheated out of a double-digit victory by the same devious Democrats who stole the election from Trump last year? If the answer is yes, could that mean that the 2018 election in Texas could have been a practice run for the Democrats in down-ballot races en route the ultimate heist in the 2020 presidential vote?

Murphy actually didn't use the elections bill as a specific example of Abbott summer call items that he says are desperately needed by Texas residents. The Republican Caucus chair referred instead to traditional Democratic priorities that Abbott added to the agenda in a surprise move last week like funding boosts for retired teachers, foster care and family violence prevention.

But the Republicans didn't consider any of those to be desperate needs during the regular session during the first half of 2021. Every lawmaker on both sides of the aisle knows that a reliable and resilient electricity grid is something that Texas desperately needs. Texas is perennially desperate for money for public schools, health care, transportation and other infrastructure needs that have been priorities for Democrats.

Democrats would be foolish as a result to believe that the measures that the caucus leader highlighted were anything more than bargaining chips or outright illusions that are being waved as bait in a desperate attempt to manipulate them into coming home soon.