If you learned nothing else in this election cycle, it should be that attempting to censure Republican incumbents in Texas is an arduous process that really doesn’t bear any fruit.
Despite touting the strengthened Rule 44 as a means of keeping squishy Republicans from running as Republicans, no one will be kept from being on the ballot.
I love transparency – I created Grassroots Priorities and House of Bad Cards for Grassroots America We the People. Both websites show a great deal of transparency. You can know, for example, how often our “Republicans” vote like Democrats on Democrat bills. (For too many, the answer is that their voting record is pretty much indistinguishable from a Democrat.) That’s damning stuff for a Republican. It’s important that primary voters know this.
But we hear from county GOP organizations across Texas that either the votes aren’t there, or there wasn’t a quorum present, or threats were made against those who wanted to censure an incumbent, or the RPT itself really narrowed the list of what could be considered for censure.
As a result, Rep. Ken King is the only returning incumbent with enough strikes against him.
And yet, he just picked up President Trump’s endorsement:
And there you have it – the death of censure. Nobody in their right mind would waste their time in the future trying to work up a censure resolution after this.
I’ve been saying for a while that censures are not the best use of our time, anyway. You want your bad incumbent gone? Then, you organize early, find a challenger, and assemble your army, along with their willing support, to carry the challenger to victory. It’s why I wrote my book, The Goal is to Win, and why I give the election/campaign seminars that I give all over Texas.
At best, a censure would remove a person from the ballot, and as we’ve learned, a censure won’t achieve that. If you do censure your bad incumbent, without a replacement you support, your censured rep will be your re-elected rep.
We get the government we allow. You want a better rep? Then you work to organize early, or you continue to endure the government you’ve allowed.
