Home rule

Rightwing rule isn't just evil, it's also making the good old places look bad

One of the many conservative principles allegedly held sacred by the Republican Party is devolution, or local control of government. It’s the old-fashioned Town Meeting idea that the state knows what it needs better than the federal government, and the city knows better than the state. (Speaking of Town Meetings, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, now one of the tomato cans toying with a run for Increased Name Recognition I Mean the Republican Presidential Nomination, said at his last inauguration that “in New Hampshire, we distill decision-making down to the lowest possible levels of power, empowering individuals to make their voices heard at the local level, where their voice is the greatest.”)

Of course, as with pretty much every other conservative principle in the modern era, local control has proven expendable; we’ve seen a lot of almost comically hypocritical over-rulings of local authority, such as the Republican House vote to overturn the District of Columbia’s bail and election laws, and literally hundreds of “preemption bills” pushed in GOP state legislatures to overturn town and city laws on criminal justice, guns, LGBTQ rights, and other such topics, apparently because flattering the prejudices of the national rightwing base is more important that the consent of the governed.

Few states are more egregious in this regard than Texas, customarily portrayed as the individualism capital of America. You may recall when the citizens of Denton voted not to allow fracking in their jurisdiction, the oil and gas industry vassals in the state legislature and Governor Abbott reversed it. And I recall following back in 2016 the city of Austin’s referendum that rejected Uber and Lyft because they disapproved of those companies’ safety measures, and the worst people in the world (Reason magazine, Kevin D. Williamson) snarling and licking their wounds. “Austin’s resistance gladdens my heart,” I wrote at the time; “it’s like Dürrenmatt gave The Visit a happy ending.” Well, Claire Zachanassian put Alfred Ill to paid at last: Abbott and the lege muscled that reversal through, too.

This comes to mind as the Texas GOP prepares to make it easier to meddle with the votes in the state’s biggest, bluest county.

Harris County, which includes Houston, has more than 2.5 million registered voters, which is unusually large for the sparsely-populated state; its elections administrator had trouble providing enough ballots in the 2022 election. A GOP judicial candidate narrowly lost and her case is going to court — though data analysis suggests the snafus aren’t the cause of her defeat.

Texas Republicans took advantage of the hue and cry over the handling of the election to push through two bills this week: One that would remove Harris County’s — and only Harris County’s — elections administrator and give that job to the county tax assessor-collector and county clerk — and another that would, “if an administrative election complaint is filed with the secretary of state; and the secretary of state has good cause to believe that a recurring pattern of problems with election administration or voter registration exists in the county” — that is, if the probably-Republican SoS feels like it — allow him to just take the job over and put a flunky in charge.

As you and everyone else knows, Republicans are accustomed to scream “fix” whenever they lose an election since Trump made it de rigueur. For the most part, so far, courts have laughed them off. But the Texas GOP is basically writing this paranoid fantasy into law. Now if some Screaming Mimi demands satisfaction, however flimsy the grounds, there’ll be no public examination and legal scrutiny of the facts — there’ll be just the say-so of a rightwing functionary who can pretty much pick the terms of the do-over.

All this stirs me not only to anger but also to something like sorrow, because like many Americans I’m sentimental about Texas; its beauty and culture and some wonderful people make me want to also believe in its reputation for independence and freedom-loving. Well, God bless Waylon and Willie and all good Texicans but, as represented by Abbott and his colleagues, Texas ain’t as advertised. And, come to think of it, given how things are going in allegedly tough and proud places like New York City (apparently ruled now by its paramilitary police department) that goes for the rest of us, too. (Wisconsin gets a pass, though, for the time being.)