Out of Touch

It is difficult for politicians to think outside of their political boxes. How often do we see politicians work together to produce a result that just leaves the folks back home shaking their heads? When asked to defend their actions they may even have some reasonable arguments. Reasonable, that is, if we put ourselves in the shoes of the politicians. How do we get the politicians to put themselves in the shoes of their constituents?

In Texas there is a bit of a scandal currently underway around the election of the Speaker of the House in the state legislature. Joe Straus is a RINO. Everybody knows he's a RINO. Nobody mistakes him for a conservative. He represents everything that the recent groundswell of conservative activism in America reviles. He's a compromiser. He's a moderate. He's unprincipled. He's a political creature. He builds his coalition from both sides of the aisle. He initially became house speaker by building a coalition of democrats and moderate republicans in the Texas State House. When the GOP rode to massive gains in the Texas House of Representatives in November the grass roots was confident that Straus' days as Speaker were numbered. But it was not to be.

On November 3rd Joe Strauss posted a pledge of support containing the names of 79 Republican State legislators. The folks back home have been shaking their heads ever since. I had the opportunity to discuss the issue briefly with my State Rep. He said that Straus was a fiscal conservative. He said that Straus could be relied on to allow conservative initiatives to move forward if the case could be made that there was reasonable support for them. He said that Party affiliations of committee chairmen is dictated by apportionment in Texas, so the damage Straus could cause with chair appointments was limited by the process. He said that those that pledged their support to Straus had done so to avoid a big political fight over the election of Speaker. He said a lot of things that sounded reasonable. Reasonable, that is, if we put ourselves in the shoes of the politicians...

I don't agree with everything that my Representative said, but there isn't any real point to addressing the points he used to defend his support for Straus. Those are all things that the folks down at the State House care about; political things. A large number of Texas State legislators are missing the point that the wins in November were more about the people doing the electing than they were about the people being elected. The grass roots won this election for Texas and America, not for Austin and Washington. The grass roots, the TEA party movement, and dedicated conservative Republicans handed a trust to these Representatives and these Representatives immediately betrayed that trust.

The House Speaker fight that some of these GOP Representatives hoped to avoid will return to them multiplied. The excitement that many voters had in the run up to the election has been diluted with skepticism. Now the grass roots is targeting Republican legislators to coerce them into breaking their pledges of support for Straus. It is dissapointing to see this growing divisiveness in the relationship between constituents and Representatives while the sweeping victory is still fresh in our minds. The fight could turn ugly. There have already been whispers that the grass roots is opposing Straus, in part, because he is Jewish. Yes, that would be the same grass roots that was such a praiseworthy ally prior to the election.

Politics as usual lost the election in November. Unfortunately, the politicians didn't catch on. The GOP in Texas is squandering an opportunity to solidify its appeal to the independents in the grass roots. The risks are high. Some damage has already been done regardless of who now becomes Speaker of the House. The division between the establishment and the grass roots has always been real and this episode has clearly exacerbated the problem. Only time will tell how much. It is good for constituents to limit their trust in their representatives, but antics like this will result in some people becoming disillusioned and disengaging from the process. The Texas Representatives defending their ill advised act of supporting Joe Straus should be very careful about how they proceed. The people they are defending themselves against, and in some cases even vilifying, are the same people they will be asking for votes in the future.