At a convention where several of its more prominent lawmakers were harassed and booed, the Texas Republican Party has passed the latest version of its official platform – and it makes for shocking reading.
The platform is not a specific programme of legislation, and just because the party has passed it does not mean all or even most of its provisions will be passed into state law, regardless of the fact that Texas currently has a Republican governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and state legislature.
However, the hardline nature of the platform is nonetheless indicative of where the state’s Republican base stands. And at a time where enthusiasm among more moderate voters of both parties is sagging, these voters could play a disproportionate role in deciding who holds power – especially in lower-level offices that wield substantial influence over many Texans’ everyday lives.
The whole platform is worth reading, but here are five of its most striking statements of intent.
Denying the 2020 election
Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” of a stolen election in 2020 is still widely believed among the conservative grassroots. In primaries across the US, Republicans are nominating candidates who still propagate it to this day. (To take one particularly dark example, Pennsylvania’s GOP nominee for governor, Doug Mastriano, attended the 6 January riot.)
In case there was any doubt where Texas’s organised Republicans stand, they have included in their platform the following resolution:
We believe that the 2020 election violated Article 1 and 2 of the US Constitution, that various secretaries of state illegally circumvented their state legislatures in conducting their elections in multiple ways, including by allowing ballots to be received after November 3, 2020. We believe that substantial election fraud in key metropolitan areas significantly affected the results in five key states in favor of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.
Leaving the union
One of the Texas party’s former chairs, Allen West – a onetime congressman who this year mounted a futile challenge to sitting GOP governor Greg Abbott – made headlines last year by suggesting that Texas could legally secede from the union, a claim that has many times been dismissed as inaccurate.
The idea, however, refuses to go away, and this year’s platform indicates that the anti-federalist bent of the Texas party remains strong:
Pursuant to Article 1, Section 1, of the Texas Constitution, the federal government has impaired our right of local self-government. Therefore, federally mandated legislation that infringes upon the 10th Amendment rights of Texas should be ignored, opposed, refused, and nullified. Texas retains the right to secede from the United States, and the Texas Legislature should be called upon to pass a referendum consistent thereto.
Along with this call to shore up the right of secession, the platform calls for “a convention of states to limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government”.
Criminalising sex education
While there are already legislative moves underway across the US to curtail what children can be taught about sex, sexual orientation and gender, the Texas GOP platform goes much further – instead calling for these subjects to be eradicated from schools altogether:
We demand the State Legislature pass a law prohibiting the teaching of sex education, sexual health, or sexual choice or identity in any public school in any grade whatsoever, or disseminating or permitting the dissemination by any party of any material regarding the same. All school districts, individual schools, or charter schools are prohibited from contracting with or making any payment to any third party for material concerning any of the above topics. Until this prohibition goes into effect, sexual education shall only utilize sexual risk avoidance programs and promote abstinence outside of marriage. Before a student may be provided with human sexuality or family planning instruction, the district must obtain the written consent of the student’s parent or guardian.
More broadly, the platform is another salvo in the anti-permissive battle being waged by the right across the country. The platform’s authors describe homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice” and declare that they “oppose all efforts to validate transgender identity” while also calling for an end to any restriction on people practicing the harmful “counselling” methods widely referred to as “conversion therapy” for LGBT+ people.
Repealing the Voting Rights Act
Within a year of Joe Biden’s election to the presidency, Texas passed some of the most restrictive “election integrity” legislation in the US – a package of measures empowering partisan “poll watchers” while making it harder to vote and much harder to cast a mail-in ballot.
This and similar moves in other states spurred the Biden administration and top Democrats to try and pass a bill strengthening the Voting Rights Act, an effort that failed when two of their own senators refused to join an effort to reform the Senate filibuster.
But the moves made in Texas to throw up obstacles to “easy” voting are apparently not enough. According to the platform, it is the landmark civil rights legislation itself that needs to be cleared out:
We support equal suffrage for all United States citizens of voting age. We oppose any identification of citizens by race, origin, creed, sexuality, or lifestyle choices, and oppose use of any such identification for purposes of creating voting districts. We urge that the Voting Rights Act of 1965, codified and updated in 1973, be repealed and not reauthorized.
Amending the Constitution
No-one could say that the Texas GOP is lacking in ambition. While many of the platform’s demands and recommendations are targeted at specific state-level regulations and policies, one section sticks out for its scope: a wishlist of edits the party would like to see made to the US Constitution itself.
The list is an assortment of cultural, economic and judicial grievances that have had their moments in the sun over the last two decades of Republican politics. Here they are:
a. Support term limits of twelve years for federal and state offices.
