Will the Real Joe Straus, Please Stand Up

Representative Drew Darby is correct in saying that the San Angelo TEA Party is opposed to Joe Straus as Speaker of the House. The TEA Party stands for smaller government, lower taxes and fiscal responsibility. Mr. Straus is not committed to those concepts.

First, however, I must take issue with Mr. Darby’s statement that Scott Turner is “against water, against transportation and against public schools,” because he’s against spending tax dollars on them. That contention is glib at best and patently untrue at worst. If Mr. Turner is against water, transportation and public schools, then, by analogy, Mr. Straus (and Mr. Darby) must be for use of foreign (including Sharia) law in our courts, abortion (including late-term abortion), and sanctuary cities, since Speaker Straus made sure bills prohibiting them never reached the floor.

To correct the record, Mr. Turner is not against spending money on water, transportation and public schools. He’s against spending more money blindly on programs that currently don’t work. There’s a significant difference.

The transportation issue which Mr. Darby brought up is indeed a serious one. Will road fees and taxes have to be adjusted up at some point? Perhaps, but before that happens, we’d do well to take a critical look at current allocations. Twenty-five percent of transportation funds are being diverted to education. Let’s create some lock boxes so we know exactly where our shortfalls are and stop raiding the general and Rainy Day funds, which Misters Straus and Darby are quick to advocate.

As for public education, Mr. Darby—no doubt accurately reflecting Mr. Straus’s views—seems to be not only sending a mixed message, but he clearly misunderstands the role of public schools in the community. He says: “Our communities out here are defined by the school districts.” I respectfully submit that he has it backwards. Our school districts should be defined by our communities. That’s what the Founding Fathers intended. For two centuries local communities defined what their children needed to learn, and did a very good job of it. We were the best educated country in the world—until the creation of the Department of Education. The recent widespread rejection of Common Core and the Texas equivalent, C-Scope, is an unmistakable reaction against imposing outside agendas.

Mr. Darby is also concerned that vouchers will drain funds from public schools. He seems to forget those funds are tax money; they belong to the tax payers, not to bureaucrats in Washington or Austin. The point of school vouchers is to empower parents to get the best possible educations for their children. I hope his remark about parochial schools doesn’t reflect an anti-religious bias.

Ironically, Mr. Darby later makes the statement that vouchers are not ready for consideration in these uncertain times. In other words, he’s not opposed to them. He just doesn’t want to implement them now. Sort of like fiscal responsibility, I guess. We’ll get around to it some other time. When? If we continue down the road we’re currently traveling in funding transportation, schools and retirement funds, the problems will only get worse, and at each juncture the response of legislators will be even louder and more acrimonious. “We can’t do that now. Not in the midst of a crisis!”

Finally, let me point out the obvious. The fiscal problems we have in Texas are the result of legislators in Austin not doing their jobs. They have failed to exercise fiscal responsibility, otherwise we wouldn’t have retirement funds that are $1.55 billion under water. We wouldn’t have roads that are deteriorating, school districts that are failing and public debt of $25,000 per person, the second highest in the nation, just behind New York and ahead of California! Business as usual isn’t working in Washington, and it’s not working in Texas.

And to keep the record straight, in the last term, Mr. Turner, who is a member of three House committees, authored or co-authored 85 pieces of legislation. Mr. Darby, who is a member of six committee and chairs two others, authored or co-authored 67 pieces of legislation.

Mr. Darby calls himself a conservative, but he received only a 25% rating from the conservative Grassroots Texans Network, while Scott Turner received a 100% conservative rating. Mr. Straus was not rated because, as Mr. Darby pointed out, he didn’t vote on anything except the budget bill. It is interesting to note, however, that Joe Straus received 100% endorsement from NARAL, the nation’s largest pro-abortion lobby. Perhaps that’s why Governor Perry had to call special sessions of the legislature—at taxpayers’ expense—to get the late-term abortion, parental notification and sonogram bills passed, which they did by large margins. Mr. Darby is inaccurate, therefore, in saying Mr. Straus lets legislators run the House.

The social, educational and fiscal goals and agendas which Mr. Straus facilitates, to use Mr. Darby’s words, are not based on conservative values, and they don’t reflect Texas values. Joe Straus is, as Patrick Gleason in Forbes Magazine aptly characterized him, the Harry Reid of Texas. We need a new Speaker of the House, Scott Turner.