Daniel Miller opens this week’s Late Night Coffee Talk fresh off a hard run of road stops, a Port Aransas fundraiser for the South Texas Alliance of Republicans and a packed Anderson County Republican Club meeting in Palestine, with a Newsmax hit on the Chris Salcedo show bumped to Friday by breaking news. The undercurrent of the whole night is the petition campaign. He does not want to slide across the finish line by the skin of the movement’s teeth. He wants the number blown out of the box, and he is blunt that it takes new circulators, volunteers actually collecting signatures, and people mailing in the signatures they already have.
The thing that made him most furious is the special-session redistricting that ran the House floor until three in the morning. As he watched it on the TNM Roku app’s Texas Legislature Live feed, he saw the map drawers hand a concession to quorum-busting Democrat Erin Zwiener, who had cussed at constituents calling about House Bill 1359, while obliterating the district of first-term Republican Jeff Cason and gutting the seats of other HB 1359 signers. When Cason offered an amendment to undo it, the House shot it down. To Miller that is the entire argument for the Take Texas Back campaign: recruit candidates to challenge the legislators who told Texans they were too stupid to decide the Texas question themselves. The petition wins the vote in a landslide, he says, but the landslide means nothing if a pack of do-nothings in the Capitol refuses to act on it.
He also previews two events. His own announcement of the office he is running for, set for October 23 in Conroe, may pivot to a virtual format earlier in the week so it does not pull field workers off the petition drive. And the governor’s virtual town hall on November 7 will put Chad Prather, Don Huffines and Allen West on one screen taking submitted questions, with Miller moderating. TNM has not endorsed in the governor’s race.
Questions answered in this episode
- Why does the movement call its members Texians instead of Texans, and what is the story behind the I pin and the old new-member orientation?
- What does it say about TEXIT’s popularity that every one of Abbott’s primary challengers now promises to ignore or disregard federal mandates?
- How does Texas get reimbursed for the state money spent on border security that was the federal government’s job, and what was the Federal Tax Escrow Act idea?
- After independence, does Texas have to make concessions to the feds, who owns the national debt, and can Texas simply sever ties and walk away from it?
- Has the TNM decided who it will endorse for governor?
- Did Texas enter the Union lawfully, given the failed annexation treaty and the joint resolution Congress used instead?
- Is the GOP redistricting assault aimed specifically at the legislators who backed House Bill 1359?
- In an independent Texas, could individuals opt out of Social Security and Medicare for a credit toward private options?
- What good is running for office if the fix is in and elections cannot be trusted?
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