so conservative whites can force their will upon non-whites is the real story there.
yes, that’s largely a rural+suburban vs urban divide – but that’s very explicitly because of policies which excluded farmers of color from usda programs, from redlining, from voter exclusion, from the drug war and the like.
abbott knows full well that the people who are going to be most hurt by this are latinx and black workers, and the beneficiaries will be white business owners who do not have to even visit the workplaces they run.
yes, some rural white communities will be devastated by this too. but abbott and the rest of the gop don’t mind so long as the money keeps flowing and the core of their white, wealthy supporters are happy.
Slapping on my planner hat for a moment. The Dillon Rule is actually really hard to apply without a close look at existing law. Texas grants less home rule than say, Ohio, but does grant limited home rule to chartered cities, including Austin. The general rule is that chartered cities that had a population over 5000, at the time of chartering may make laws consistent with the constitution and statutes of the state and the charter of the municipality. That’s in article 11 section 5 of the Texas constitution for more detail. The Austin charter explicitly grants the right to pass legislation in defense of the health of the community in section 3, General Powers. Turning to the state statutes gets thornier and you should start looking to a lawyer rather than a planner, but a quick look at Title 2 section 121 of Texas’s statutes grants an explicit right for both counties and municipalities
The governing body of a municipality or he commissioners court of a county may enforce any law that is reasonably necessary to protect the public health.
So, not being a lawyer, and doubly so, not being a lawyer in Texas, it looks like the existing body of law grants that power. There may be another thing prohibiting it, but tossing out the Dillon Rule isn’t enough.
The Texas constitution and statutes explicitly grant municipalities the power to pass laws to control communicable diseases. The federal courts have generally found the power for states to do that under the police power. It is so central to the police power that the normal wording for the power is to protect the health, safety, morals, and general welfare. There’s a giant stack of case law upholding that power from the early days of vaccination.
You know, in most states, having been arrested multiple times for disturbing the peace by playing the bongos naked in public would hurt your chances at a statewide office.
He had a crazy idea when being led handcuffed through the gated passageway to the street, deciding — while “still naked and reluctant to submit to the inevitably of my predicament” — to run up the wall, do a somersault backflip over the less civil cop, who was behind him.
“My thinking was that in mid-flight, while upside down in the air, I would assume a pike position and then slide my cuffed wrists under my butt and up and over my legs, and then stick the landing … with my fettered hands in front of me.” He thought “pulling off such an extraordinary Houdini-like stunt, the officers would be so impressed they would abrogate the arrest and set me free,” adding, “I know, stupid, but I’d been celebrating for 32 and a half hours straight.”
Radical in that context is about getting to the root of the problem (from the latin radix, meaning root), the problem in this case being that slavery existed and might exist again. It’s less about extremism and more about having the determination to stop the problem.
Don’t you think their own (perceived) financial self-interest, and the pressure received from their large funders/patrons, has anything to do with it?
And yes, also they are a literal satanic death cult (and not like the cool Satanists who make cool statues and stuff, I mean like actual satanic forces).
their desire to bring the political and military leadership of the south to justice was another element of their platform which made them radical. in this effort they opposed lincoln who wanted a forgiving peace, although not as forgiving as the one johnson ended up trying to administer.
Indeed. The Radical Republicans might have been the most radical mainstream political party that ever had any real political power in the US. The People’s Party in the 1890s was pretty radical, but they just ended up absorbed into the Democratic party after William Jennings Bryan took and watered down much of their platform. They never get very far in national politics, not like the RRs.
