Inaction or surrender?

Inaction in the Texas House does not simply maintain the status quo. The Texas legislature meets only once every two years. Between now and the next opportunity our legislators will have to address our concerns we will see our property taxes raised twice, the broken school finance system will continue to do its damage, the life of someone's loved will be cut short by the woefully short 10-day-law, and more schools and municipalities will promote social engineering over the privacy of Texans. Inaction by the House Republican leadership is support of the progressive agenda, and it is an insult to the thousands upon thousands of Texans who delivered a near super majority to House Republicans in expectation that these issues would be addressed.

The bill limiting the ability of doctors and hospitals to place do-not-resuscitate orders on patients without their consent or the consent of their loved ones did not pass in the regular session. Thankfully it passed in the final hours of the special session. How many lives would have been cut short by the status-quo over the next two years if Governor Abbott had not prioritized this issue for action during the special session? Where was the sense of urgency during the first 140 days of the session? Why did House leadership delay this action to the second to last day of the special session?

I recently had the opportunity to listen to my incumbent opponent explain that several issues were not addressed because of competing approaches to solving these problems within the house. I followed the session pretty closely this year, but don’t remember grand battles on the floor of the House between competing ideas for addressing Texans’ property tax concerns. I don’t recall the passionate struggle over which method was best for protecting the privacy of our daughters in their school locker rooms. I do recall a group of representatives trying to address the privacy issue for their constituents, and the Speaker of the House telling concerned Texans that their concerns were “manure” while his leadership team made sure the issue would not be addressed for at least two more years.

Complacency is just a word for describing a lack of conviction. It is too easy for two years of inaction to become four years of inaction. Before you know it the Republican majority has the Democrat choice for Speaker of the House for ten years, and a decade of opportunity is lost. It is time for the complacent administrators of government to step aside. We need Representatives who have the same sense of urgency as the constituents who send them to Austin.