No Joke: The 84th Texas Legislature

        Any op-ed about the 84^th Texas Legislature should just really write itself – the setup, the joke, the punchline. It's a formula the late-great Molly Ivins mined for decades.

      A corrupt Texas pol proposes a bill for reasons so venal only a moron could possibly buy into it. The reader, now in the know, slaps his forehead, muttering, “Those idiot Texas legislators.” Then tilts his head back for a good, long chuckle. But in the end, who is this joke really on? You, me, us.

      And this legislative session, with its compendium of bad bills that sound like a horror movie film festival: “Open Carry,” “Open Carry Goes to College,” “The Vouchers That Ate Public Ed,” is just choke-full of punchlines.

      Take perhaps the worst bill of a very bad lot, Representative Phil King's HB40. This bill is explicitly designed to take power away from the people, so that energy companies have the inalienable right to frack where and how they want.

      Poor, poor Big Energy. Doesn't your heart just bleed? Those mean ol' Denton voters banned fracking, but Big Energy saw right away that kind of grassroots democracy had to be stopped and now.

      What if other cities and towns got in their heads that they had the right to ban fracking? Anyway, what's more important – the will of the people or Big Energy? In today's Grand Old Party, the answer is clear. Screw. the. people.

      But not only are our legislators making Texas safe for disposal wells and the earthquakes that will surely follow, but, dripping with the milk of human kindness, seek to protect that most endangered of all species, the plastic bag with – I love this – “The Shopping Bag Freedom Act.”

      Such blue cities as Austin, Dallas, and Laredo had the temerity to restrict the use of plastic bags. These restrictions, Republicans claim with a straight face, would lead to the Californication of the great state of Texas. Such a non-reason is beneath contempt, to be believed only by those poor wretched souls forever trapped in the right-wing echo chamber on the Planet Crazy.

      The upshot is, towns and cities, the governments closest to the people, must not be allowed to pass bills in their citizens' self-interest when the energy sector is even slightly inconvenienced because in Texas Big Energy trumps all.

      My own senator, Konni Burton has taken this a step further. She now covers her ears, saying, “Lalalalala,” whenever a lobbyist from a city is within earshot. But what makes Senator Burton even more extra-special is that, bless her heart, she is the walking, talking embodiment of the deep doo-doo we're now in.

      As I watched her “debate” Libby Willis back before the November elections, I couldn't help but wonder what exactly was the Republican vetting process for their candidates. During the debates, Burton came across as, to put it charitably, an intellectual lightweight and a political dilettante. In fact, I defy any one, regardless of political affiliation, to watch those debates and think the best person won the election.

     But what her ultimate triumph at the polls showed was that now Republican voters will vote for anybody with an R by their name, even an obvious incompetent like Burton. In what is pretty much a one-party state now, that's frightening as hell, and probably explains better than anything else why there are so many bad bills this session.

      To console ourselves, we might be tempted to snicker at the over-sized clown car that is the 2015 version of the Texas Lege, but the truth is, bad government isn't funny. It's deadly. Just ask those people in West. Taking money away from public schools, and giving Big Energy a blank check will make us all poorer and less healthy.

      And while historically Texas government has been conservative, this new breed of science-denying, evidence-ignoring, Koch-brothers-backed coterie is so, so much worse.

One political savvy friend wryly observed that because so few Texans bothered to vote we now have the government we deserve. But the truth is -- nobody deserves this. In fact, I believe all of us have an inalienable right to good government, one that works for the average person and the common good. But how we get there is up to us.

      What we shouldn't do is give up hope. Yes, Big Money, gerrymandering, a God-awful voter ID law, and apathy are going to be very hard to work against. But with jokers like Konni Burton and Jonathan Stickland gumming up the works, a revival of progressive populism cannot be far off.