What I am telling you is that you cannot use the word “Democrat” or “Blue” like it’s an identity. It is not. Texas is not Red or Blue. Texas is Texas-colored. How well that aligns with a national party in any given year has more to do with the state of the party than anything else. (Though running a Texan on your ballot certainly helps. Just like Americans like to see other Americans doing well, at anything, Texans like to see other Texans doing well, at pretty much anything.)
Neither is a deep red conservativism as the core Texas identity. Saying “most Texans” don’t see Austin as “real Texas” is just as incorrect. I’m talking about how people are voting, and just under half the state voted for Biden, which undercuts your argument that “most Texans” have unified, conservative identity. It’s just not true.
I have the feeling that civic public health measures during a pandemic are one of those things that the founders never put in the Constitution (other than a brief bit on quarantine) because “why would we need to?”
It’s strange how no one seems to be digging into the precedents during past epidemics. How did they do things during the 1918 Flu, 1793 Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic, and countless other events?
I don’t know what the precedents are, mind you, but I notice that the Freeedums people aren’t mentioning them, and they’ve probably looked.
I have lived all my life in Austin. My family resides mostly in West and Bellmead, and have for generations. I do not speak cavalierly, or from lack of experience. I speak as someone who has seen both sides of the county line. Outside of Austin, Austin is viewed as something of a city of tourists (which I find to be less comfortable than when it was a city of hippies).
Of course Texas has differing views internally, as evidenced by the fact that West, Texas and Austin, Texas, and Houston, Texas are all very different, often antagonistic and yet still all Texas. What I’m saying is that if you view local politics through the “red/blue” lens of national politics, you will come away with little or no information about what is actually happening in Texas. Lots of people voted for Not-Trump. That’s not allegiance, that’s an alliance. At a state level, most people simply don’t care if a name has a D or an R after it.
Whose constitution? The US Consitution (which, if it left the power anywhere, would leave it to the states) or the Texas Constitution? The Texas Constitution has 507 ammedments. Nothing in it was left as unsaid because of obviousness. It is very, very precise in the degress of powerlessness the state holds over its citizens.
" Good thing we’ve still got politics in Texas - finest form of free entertainment ever invented."
“Havin’ fun while freedom fightin’ must be one of those lunatic Texas traits we get from the water - which is known to have lithium in it - because it goes all the way back to Sam Houston, surely the most lovable, the most human, and the funniest of all the great men this country has ever produced.”
-Molly Ivins
Any constitution that was drafted back when epidemics were common. I have the feeling that they all understood that public health measures were required in an emergency and didn’t see the need to spell it out.
In 1918, the San Francisco Board of Health passed their mask ordinance, but I don’t see any mention of the legal basis for it, or of legal challenges, which the Anti-Mask League surely would have tried.
As you say, disease is nothing new. If anything, we are less familiar than the reality of unchecked disease than our predecessors. The whole point of having a constitution is to spell out powers, or else it’s not a constitution. The U.S. Constitution specifically leaves almost everything to the fundamnetal units of U.S. government, the states. The constitutions of the states are widely variable, and Texas’ is less workable than most.
Like all formerly-Confederate states, Texas had to submit a new Constitution to “rejoin” the Union. (I shudder to simlpify it as “rejoin”, because under Union legal theory it never left… but then how can you ask for a new constitution as if you were a territory… yeah. Legal theory of states is best handwaved here.) It does so, submitting basically the same constitution it had before, which is the same as teh Texas national consitution, which was basically a copy of the U.S. Constitution.
It got sent back. Other states’ did too. The (poorly-named) Radical Republican faction wanted stronger protections for former slaves than existed in any constitution so far, so they sent back a lot of them requesting 4 specific clauses. Texas did not appreciate the gesture. So it added the clauses, and rewrote everything else. Now Texas needed a constitutional amendment to do pretty much anything. And so it’s stayed, for 140 years, mostly because Texas likes having a government that does nothing and a legislature that only meets for 140 days (MAX) every 2 years.
What do I mean when I say everything takes an amendment, or that the state basically can’t do anything? Well for example, the Robin Hood system of school financing – taking money from high-tax-base school districts to send money to low-tax-base school districts – was declared unconstitutional about 20 years ago… because the court ruled it was a de facto tax, and the state didn’t have the right to levy a new tax. That’s right, the state does not have taxing power by default.
There’s an amendment creating a state dog catcher, and another amendment voiding that office. There are amendments that take away rights previously held by the governor (who can no longer grant pardons because a previous governor sold them). There are 507 amendments, each of which had to be approved by a majority of the voters on the state ballot.
Surprise! The virus doesn’t care whether or not our Governor has declared it “beaten”.
Also Surprise! Individual businesses don’t care if there’s a mandate or not, they’re going to continue to require masks. All you’ve done is give ammo to maskholes to berate and abuse likely-minimum-wage staff who request that they mask up to enter.
As a current Austinite, and as a fellow Ken, Thanks, Ken Paxton, for shitting on the little guys, and I wager, not for the first or last time.
texas may have its idiosyncrasies but democrat as an identity works as well here as it does pretty much anywhere else in the states. i’m an 8th generation native with at least the last four generations, counting my children, being liberal democrats who support union organizing. among my immediate family we have more in common with alexandria ocasio-cortez and bernie sanders than we do with any republicans anywhere.
the attorney general like every other official from the republican party is a representative of a death cult, which is what the republican party has become over the past 40 years. there is no democrat anywhere in the state who has anything in common with the present day republican party. having been to a couple of state conventions and hiving worked for 37 years with the county party, i’ve met a lot of democrats. there are several who are similar to joe manchin but i haven’t met one yet who was like a republican anywhere.
like every other republican in the state ken paxton favors local control until he disagrees with their actions. if the locals wish to allow their police to abuse people of color, fine, local control is great. if the locals want to prevent needless deaths due to a pandemic or remove statues built to honor traitors and terrorists then local control is terrible.
your reading of the history of the texas constitution is, unusual. i think the only thing we seem to agree on regarding that is that the texas constitution is one of the worst organized and most poorly written of all the fifty states.
So, after reading all of these answers, it basically comes down to - “doesn’t matter, its unenforceable. And its really up to the individual businesses to decide mask rules for entry into their stores / restaurants.”
there could in theory be some reasons, mainly because towns and city governments don’t always have the expertise to make good health decisions. ( like if a town said everybody had to take hydroxychloroquine to go shopping at a big box store.)
but, of course, that’s a hypothetical.
austin is just telling people to follow the federal guidelines; so they’re not inventing any medical science of their own.
Yet another example proving that the call for “State’s Rights” has nothing to do with a governing philosophy favoring localism, but is rather because states are the only level of government in the US where conservative rural voters can force their will upon liberal urban voters.
