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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   33046 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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I've got an update on the Ken Paxton trial, which is probably going to be a general Texas politics update:

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/06/20/ken-paxton-impeachment-trial-senate-rules/

On the trial:

  1. Angela Paxton, Ken Paxton's wife, is being required to recuse herself. Other than that, the trial rules are generally favorable to Ken Paxton.

  2. The trial begins September 5th. Ken Paxton faces 16 charges, a majority vote can dismiss any of them as groundless and it takes 2/3 to convict. If acquitted he immediately faces trial by the senate on another four charges, but those four are grouped together for whatever reason and the senate can dismiss all four by majority vote.

  3. Governor Greg Abbott has appointed an acting attorney general- his own chief of staff. Most other republican leaders who have commented on the impeachment are opposed, including president Trump.

  4. The majority of Ken Paxton's inner circle from the Texas Attorney General's office has taken a leave of office to help with the trial defense. This is likely part of a move to argue that it's worth overlooking some mild corruption because Paxton is good at his job- and it is demonstrably true that he is very competent.

  5. Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas and head of the senate, had this to say about the trial:

If not, they could keep Ken Paxton away from doing his job forever. … In general, we have to deal with it.

This is, uh, a good sign for Ken Paxton.

On other Texas politics news:

  1. Greg Abbott has announced that 1) he intends to call a special session to deliver sweeping school choice and 2) he wants to continue bussing migrants until they stop coming. 1) isn't a surprise to anyone, but 2) is a bit of a change of pace from his previous stance of being interested in carrying out state level deportations but not having the authority to do so without a specific act from the legislature, and marks a shift towards a more permanently-latin-american strategy for dealing with illegal immigration(after all, the fastest way to get them out of your backyard is to bus them to wherever it is they're actually trying to go to).

  2. The Texas house and senate Are Fighting Again, this time over the specifics of how to cut property taxes. The TLDR is that the senate wants to cut taxes immediately, at the cost of possible long term reduction in tax burden, while the house wants the opposite- focus on reducing rates over the long run. Which plan is better for homeowners(their is universal and bipartisan agreement that Texas' property taxes are too high) depends on how much you trust the Texas government to stick to a plan. Greg Abbott claims he will be vetoing random bills until they can come to an agreement, but it's hard not to notice almost all of these bills come from the senate.

  3. The Texas Nationalist Movement has another scheme to get a vote on independence- they're trying to exploit a petition system to get a vote through the primary on holding a referendum. For context, like most fringe groups they're much more popular among the general public than the political elites, although you should treat polling on Texas independence when a democrat occupies the white house with a grain of salt so big it's technically a second moon. They claim to be on track to hit their goal this time, but that could just be actual supporters having an enthusiasm gap even if true.

  4. State efforts to secure the border continue apace, although their real aim is probably to make Greg Abbott look tough. Multiple other states have sent national guardsmen to the border under Texas command and I'm vaguely surprised this isn't the subject of a Desantis ad.

  5. The agreement between the Austin police department and Texas DPS has been renewed again, and APD will be answering directly to the state government instead of the city for the forseeable future. The state government is probably extending this arrangement to Houston, as well, but more slowly.

The Texas independence movement always amused me because of what an utter disaster it would be were it actually implemented. The independence types make a good argument about how Texas has a large economy blah blah blah and could totally stand on its own without help from Uncle Sam. Yeah, probably. But that doesn't happen overnight, especially if if the US doesn't coddle you on the way out. I don't think there would be a war, but when the mail stops being delivered the next day and all the rest of the states Federal employees are laid off as well, things aren't going to look so hot. Texas can talk all it wants about how it's a net contributor of tax revenue but when the Federal funds are cut off it will find itself without a way to capture that excess income; the first order of business for an expressly conservative regime would be to institute sweeping tax increases plus building an enforcement mechanism from scratch. And they'll need that money to build that wall when the Border Patrol up and leaves for Oklahoma and migrants start flooding in unopposed, though after a few months Mexico might start looking like the better option anyway.

The moment you no longer have free trade with the entire US (and its trading partners) you find that what you thought was your strong economy was actually one cog in a giant machine that no longer has a reason to exist. The UT system? No longer attracting talent from around the world or students from other states. Those big tech offices that have been popping up all over Austin? They're all out. The energy industry in Houston? Some presence will remain but they know they're not hiring Americans from other states if it requires them moving to a new country. All those farmers and ranchers in the Western and Northern parts of the state? Now might have to pay extra to ship their goods to Colorado, New Mexico, etc.

As far as I can tell, the actual plan independence advocates have is to win a commitment to secession, build the infrastructure necessary to go on their own, and then negotiate with the federal government. This plan is probably an immense simplification of any reasonable process, but it is at least in touch with reality.

That assumes the US will coddle them on the way out, and the US has no reason to coddle them on the way out. I think the best case scenario is that the US agrees to maintain the status quo in trade (i.e. agree not to impose any unilateral tariffs or restrictions), maintains the US citizenship status of all Texans born prior to secession, and agrees to continue entitlement payments to those who earned them as they would US citizens living abroad. But that would still come with a hard exit date.

The most realistic scenario is that the US government simply rolls their eyes at Texas and acts like nothing happened. Now Texas has to take some affirmative action demonstrating that it isn't in the US, which I doubt it has the balls to actually do. This doesn't have to be something dramatic and violent like trying to take over a US military base or preventing the collection of Federal Income Tax, but I doubt they'd try even the anodyne stuff that isn't even illegal. For instance, do you think that Ted Cruz and John Cornyn (not to mention the entire House delegation) are going to immediately come back from Washington? Is the state government going to discourage (let alone prevent) its citizens from participating in Federal elections? Is the state government going to turn down Federal highway funding? Are they going to raise taxes in anticipation of not having such funding in the future? Are they going to barricade small roads at the Arkansas border and establish customs checkpoints on larger ones? Are they going to start sending their own foreign delegations to other countries? I think we know the answer to all of these questions.

Is Texas not capable of paying all of the (ex) posties to deliver the mail in the aftermath of a Texit?

Posties are pretty left-wing in general but surely they are not all going to up and move to NYC if Texas leaves the reservation Union?

I don't care what the political affiliations of the postal workers are. As soon as Independence Day hits they're no longer USPS employees and are technically unemployed. Even if the Texas Postal Service or whatever wants to hire them, it's not something that happens overnight; setting up HR for thousands of employees is no small task, especially if they expect to get paid. You also have to deal with the problem that this new postal service doesn't actually have any of the resources necessary to deliver the mail—no post offices, no trucks, no mailboxes, etc. Even if we assume they'll simply commandeer United States property, one thing they aren't getting is access to the computer network that mail delivery relies upon. All mail from outside Texas is now international and won't go straight to postal facilities but will show up at airports on FedEx planes, and the state will have to put similar contracts in place for outgoing mail. Which brings us to the issue of postage and how the state plans on collecting it so they can actually pay for all this stuff, which is making my mind spin just thinking about now.

  1. Texas has their own tax system.

  2. Many people proclaimed Brexit would be a disaster. It hasn’t so far.

  3. Of course Texas is a lot more integrated into the US compared to the UK and EU. On the other hand, Texas is massive.

  1. Texas’s tax system is wholly inadequate for running an actually sovereign state for constitutional reasons, even though the economy could support raising enough revenue. Texas would need to draft a new constitution in between voting to secede and taking the preparations to begin negotiating with the federal government, even assuming a cooperative Washington.

On 3., Texas is physically bigger than Britain, but only has about half the population.

  1. Of course you’d need legal changes. The point is they have an infrastructure.

  2. They have much higher gdp per capita compared to the UK

Brexit wasn't a disaster, and almost all of the negative consequences that have flowed from it are the result of the EU not negotiating in good faith.

That latter problem, however, is pretty likely in Texit.

Yeah. A lot of texit depends on how accommodating the US government would be. If they went 1861, then it’s ugly. If they worked with texit, then pretty manageable.

Presumably any peaceful Texit would be years in the making so you wouldn’t have a sudden change in status. Federal workers would leave (or find actual jobs).

Or switch to doing the same jobs for the Texas government- presumably it needs a postal service and a border patrol and the like.

The EU acted just-about as much in good faith as anyone could hope to expect in such a situation, and indeed could have done much worse if some people felt like being particularly ruthless.

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