It is Sine Die. What that means is the 87th legislative session. The regular session is now officially over and we’re going to have a recap of what happened. There were some interesting events, certainly closed on the Democrats walking out. No question that we are going to have at least one special session, if not more, but what I want to do today in this episode is I want to give an update on the Republican party’s legislative priorities. So with me today is Jill Glover. She is with our SREC the state Republican executive committee, in charge of holding our Republican candidates responsible for the priority. So Jill, welcome to the show.
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Jonathan Schober:
So, what I think we want you to start with, is let’s just start with what are the priorities of the Republican party of Texas and how did we come up with those? So let’s start with that question first.
Jill Glover:
You bet. So our eight Republican priorities were established at our Republican party of Texas convention last summer and our state convention delegates ranked what they thought were the most important issues that needed to be dealt with in this legislative session. And so they were given a choice of 15 and these 15 items came up literally from our grassroots. They came up from precinct conventions, up to county conventions, and then finally up to state convention. And we have a legislative priority’s committee that meets at state convention to go through all of those resolutions and come up with the top ones. And so that top list of 15 was submitted to our state delegates. They voted on their top eight.
Last session we had five priorities at this time. We decided since we didn’t get any of those priorities met, that we would just go for broke and do eight this time. So the eight priorities, and this is in the order in which they were ranked by our state convention delegates, are election integrity, religious freedom, children and gender modification and of course that refers to banning those medical practices, abolition of abortion, constitutional carry, monument protection, school choice for all and banning taxpayer funded lobbying.
Jonathan Schober:
Yeah.
So one of the things I think is really important that we get started, is really emphasizing this was a bottoms up priority selection. This was not the party chairman saying something. Now I know that he did add a ninth, but these eight-
Jill Glover:
Correct.
Jonathan Schober:
So just to kind of emphasize, when we talk about the convention, how many people are at the convention and who’s there? Because I think it’s really important that we understand who set these priorities because a lot of people have their priorities. Certainly the governor had his, that he stated at the beginning of the session, the Lieutenant governor and the speaker, they all had theirs. I think it’s real important. So just kind of give us a little color of who shows up at the convention? Who are these people? How many are they and why should we care? Why should these be important to us?
Jill Glover:
You bet. You know that our state Republican party delegates are people who are active locally. They usually consist of precinct chairs. Our local activists are people who really care about the Republican party and the principles that we stand for, right of liberty and limited government, protecting our traditional family values, those kinds of things. So these are your average citizens who really love our state and care about our liberty and our freedoms.
Generally at state convention we can have up to 9,000 delegates. This past convention, I believe we had about six to 7,000 participating. This convention, our last one, was a little bit different in that it was virtual. And that of course is that we all know presented some challenges, but we still managed to do the business of our state convention and get these priorities passed. And you’re right. Our chairman West did add one more priority, which was reigning in executive overreach. And that was actually one of the items in those top 15. I think it came in maybe around number 10, but of course he felt like it was so important this past year that it needed to be addressed. And I think probably had the convention happened a little later, like maybe August or September, it would have been right there in the top eight because you know, so many things were continuing to go on.
Jonathan Schober:
We were still kind of figuring out what was going to go on.
Jill Glover:
Exactly.
Jonathan Schober:
I’ll just say true colors had yet to appear at that time.
Jill Glover:
That’s right.
Jonathan Schober:
But so this is truly, this is grassroots activists. And another thing I think is important, we did have an unusual convention because it was online. But let me ask this question, were these priorities, were they like significantly different than what had been priorities of others? So is this just something that kind of happened because, well, the convention was weird and so there were different kinds of people. Or were these sort of consistent with what we had seen in other years?
Jill Glover:
These are absolutely consistent. The prior year priorities were constitutional carry, ending taxpayer funded lobbying, pro-life, abolishing property tax and religious freedom. So we had all the same priorities except for one and abolishing property tax. And again, that one was also in that list of 15. So, that is certainly important to our delegates. So absolutely, these were usual kinds of priorities. I will say the one that was a little different was children in gender modification. And I think part of the reason for that is because of the case of little James Younger. And how quickly this issue has come up in our society. And of course he’s not the only child that’s affected in that way, but that one was a new one. But it came in number three. And so it is certainly something I think that our delegates and our citizens are concerned with as they look at our culture and what is happening to children and how children are being targeted.
Jonathan Schober:
Great. All right.
Well, what I’d like to do now is let’s just go ahead and go through each one and you’re the expert. So I know you’ve been down there on the Capitol grounds, you’ve been in the trenches almost on a daily basis. I’ve sort of been the, you know, typical Republican activist, right. I mean, I have my other job, my other stuff. So I think what we’d like to do is we go through each one, kind of, you give your rating of one to 10, I’ll sort of give my rating of one to 10 and let’s just kind of see, and when we-
Jill Glover:
Okay.
Jonathan Schober:
You know, before we even talk about special sessions, what’s the score card for what just ended? So let’s go ahead and go from one to eight.
Jill Glover:
Okay. Sounds good. Election integrity. As you know, the big omnibus bill that we were hoping to get passed died. At the very last minute the Democrats walked out. Although I will say that our own probably did not manage the calendar as well as they should have. So we did get in terms of our priority election bills, we got one passed. So we did get some other bills having to do with election integrity that didn’t meet the wording of our priorities. So we do have a few other good bills that were passed. So, I would maybe give this a one.
Jonathan Schober:
So in terms of what passed, I mean, just give a flavor because I think this is another thing. People that, oh, we had an election integrity bill pass, what exactly passed? You know, cause there really are a number of things in that bag. There’s voter ID. There is criminal offenses, there’s a number of pieces. Of the pieces that are in the bag, what actually got passed and is either sitting on the governor’s desk or has been signed [crosstalk 00:09:07]?
Jill Glover:
So, we did have house bill 574, and the description of it is relating to the prevention of fraud in the conduct of an election. And I’ll just read you our priority because this one did meet that priority. And our priority is require citizenship verification of each voter and felony penalties for election code violations that threaten election integrity. So this bill was by Bonnen and Goldman and it’s house bill 574. And again, it’s a smaller bill, but it passed and it will be sent to the governor.
Jonathan Schober:
Okay.
I think I might agree with you just as kind of that citizen that’s paying attention. I agree. You know, if on a scale of one to 10, we got one.
Jill Glover:
Right. Right.
Jonathan Schober:
So what’s number two?
Jill Glover:
Number two is religious freedom. We did a little bit better and I’ll just read that priority to you. It says to restore the rights of individuals, organizations, and businesses to exercise their sincerely held religious beliefs by prohibiting local ordinances, state laws, or executive orders that violate these rights.
So we did get seven religious freedom laws passed. We got one of them for, I’ll give you just an example, was relating to the display of the national motto in public schools and institutions of higher education. And that national motto of course is in God we trust. And so this bill will say that our public buildings need to have that national motto displayed somewhere, which is a great thing. What disappointed me on, out of all of the seven bills, is there weren’t any freedom of conscience bills passed. There was a really good one that we had that would have protected the rights of healthcare providers in terms of freedom of conscience and religion. And that one did die, but we do have seven and some of them were good, decent bills. So, I think I would maybe give this a five perhaps, and I’m maybe a little generous, but I’ll give it a half a priority.
Jonathan Schober:
You’ll give it halfway.
Jill Glover:
Yeah.
Jonathan Schober:
All right. I think I would probably have been a little bit more generous because you know, it is one of those tough things. I mean, hey, we should already have freedom of religion, right? I mean, this is one of those things that we already have. I mean, a lot of, I think what went wrong is really more the executive overreach. Shutting down businesses, shutting down churches. Side note, I wish that more churches had pushed back, but that’s a conversation for another podcast episode. That being said, I think I would have been a little bit more generous. I think I probably would have scored this a seven or an eight.
Jill Glover:
Okay.
Jonathan Schober:
So, that’s my perspective on it.
Jill Glover:
Alrighty.
Jonathan Schober:
All right, number three.
Jill Glover:
Number three, children and gender modification. So I was the chair of the subcommittee for this particular priority. And the priority reads, abolish the following practices for minors: intervention to prevent natural progression of puberty, administration of opposite sex hormones, and performance of any type of gender reassignment surgery.
So we had seven bills that started between the house and the Senate and our bills actually made really decent progress until they hit the public health committee and calendars committee where they slowed down. Our first bill, which was 1499 representative Krause’s bill. It basically was killed in calendars. And so we were very disappointed about that. At the last minute we had another bill, Senate bill 1311 by Senator Hall. That was very similar. And again, it was a victim to the process and the process was controlled frankly, by our speaker and by the calendars committee and by the chair of the public health department, who honestly just did not seem to be real excited about this legislation going through. So, this is a zero. I’m very disappointed about it. We could’ve protected a lot of kids with this particular bill and this one failed.
Jonathan Schober:
All right, I’m going to be even more negative because if I could give a negative score, I would give these guys a negative 10.
Jill Glover:
Yeah.
Jonathan Schober:
There should be nothing more brain dead, than we do not cut off the genitals of healthy minors.
Jill Glover:
You’re exactly right.
Jonathan Schober:
And that should be brain dead. And here’s, what’s just infuriating about it. Okay. So, I’m going to be the citizens that’s just a bit infuriating. You know, it’d be one thing if they’d come out against it but it was all the shenanigans that they used to kill it. I mean, I think that’s what, you know, speaking as that grassroots person, that person that’s been at the convention a time or two, it’s the shenanigans. It’s the fact that you had the governor tweeting this support about oh, I’m going to investigate. I think it’s James Youngers son. But did absolutely nothing in public to promote this and clearly speaker Phelan.
And I’m just going to name it. Speaker Phelan clearly killed this bill.
Jill Glover:
He did.
Jonathan Schober:
I’m not convinced that Lieutenant Governor Patrick was particularly excited about it, but it did get through the Senate. So, we have to … you know, results matter. So I won’t be particularly critical, but this one just absolutely infuriates me. It goes to protecting children. It goes to the change in our culture about calling right wrong and wrong right.
Jill Glover:
Right.
Jonathan Schober:
And like I said, if I had to score this one, I would score it a negative 10. This is just infuriating.
Jill Glover:
I agree with you. And what’s important about this particular bill is this is a child abuse bill. This is about protecting children from medical child abuse because these kinds of practice sterilize kids and they mutilate them. They physically mutilate them. And the fact that our legislators were not willing to protect children, frankly to me, is appalling. They had opportunity after opportunity.
They certainly had all the information. We had a really large grassroots education program on this particular issue. We gave them documentation of the various pediatric gender clinics that have popped up in the state of Texas. There are now 17. And so we, Texas is kind of known now as a center for performing these kinds of surgeries and giving this kind of treatment and people bring their kids from all over the United States here, frankly, to get this treatment. And so this was a real opportunity to shut down a hideous, hideous practice. And really, as you say, make a cultural difference and they passed on it. And not only did they pass on it, you’re right. There was direct opposition to it. And frankly, that’s inexcusable.
Jonathan Schober:
Inexcusable.
All right, what are we at? Number Four?
Jill Glover:
Yeah. Number four, constitutional carry. Well, you know what? This was a surprise. At the beginning of session, several representatives and senators told me, you will not get constitutional carry passed. And you know what, our grassroots said otherwise. And honestly, if it were not for our grassroots and some really, really concentrated effort on lots of people’s part, this wouldn’t have passed. But we did manage to get a bill 1927, which is now sitting on the governor’s desk, which does give Texas … and I’ll just read the priority, restored legal Texas firearms owners rights to carry them openly or concealed without a permit while maintaining the option of a permit for reciprocity purposes. And so house bill 1927 does meet that priority. There are some exceptions for college campuses and other places that we hope maybe we’ll be tweaked next session, but we did get this priority. And so in terms of scoring it, I would say, you know what? It, it almost met the priority completely close enough. I’d say give it an eight.
Jonathan Schober:
Okay. I’m going to be a little more generous. I’m going to give it a nine. You know, I think what they should have just said is, same rules apply with or without a permit. Permit is there just for reciprocity. They did fail on that campus. You know, I have a daughter a that’s college age and student. I think that’s a failure, but I would give them an A, so I’d give them a nine.
Jill Glover:
Sounds good. Monument protection is next. All monuments or markers in our state shall be protected by law from being removed, defaced, destroyed or otherwise dishonored. In particular, specific protection shall be given to the Alamo Cenotaph, which shall not be removed from its current location off the Alamo battlefield footprint. All right. I’ll be honest. When I saw that this particular priority was in the top eight, I thought, Hmm. You know, I agree with that. I’m not sure it’s one of the most important, but I haven’t changed my mind about that. Because this particular party is about preserving our history.
And right now the other side wants to erase and change and rewrite our history. And so I really see this particular priority is critical and it should have been a no brainer for Republican legislators to pass really good, robust legislation on this. Right? So here’s what we came up with. We got one little bill, just one.
Jonathan Schober:
What’d we get?
Jill Glover:
One little bill. And let me give you the name of that bill. It was HB 3584 by Murr. And it’s not related to our monuments, but it is related to protecting historical markers. And so, okay. That’s a good thing, but we did not get Alamo protection. Or sent it to have protection and that is very, very disappointing.
Jonathan Schober:
Yeah.
Jill Glover:
So …
Jonathan Schober:
Yeah. So, my perspective, I’m a direct descendant of Davy Crockett, so very proud of the Alamo. I think with you, if I had gone back to the convention, I don’t know that this would have made my top 10.
Jill Glover:
Right.
Jonathan Schober:
But the tie in here and certainly during the legislative session, the tie in is what we’re seeing with critical race theory, which is basically retelling our history. And there is a direct tie in with our monument protection and our critical race theory. And again, this cultural fight to restate our history. And again, I think no brainer, I don’t even know if I’d give them a one. I might give them a zero on this.
Certainly, although not legislative, I think there’s some things that the land commissioner could have done. He continues to not do anything to protect these monuments and again, discussion for another podcast. But, I’m kind of with you, I’ll give it a 0.5.
Jill Glover:
I would agree with that. I would agree. School choice for all. This has empowered parents and guardians to choose from public, private, charter or homeschool options for their children’s education using tax credits or exemptions without government restraint or intrusion. We did not get any bills on this. So this would be a zero. And we, our understanding is we lost this in the Senate. We did not have the Senate votes. And so our lieutenant governor did not bring it up for a vote. We would have liked to have seen a vote, but we did not get that. But this was a definite zero.
Jonathan Schober:
Yeah. And again, here’s where I’m going to be even more critical. So I homeschool, I’ve got seven children. I homeschool all of them. Again, we just watched what happened when the schools shut down and people were just, all this money that we spend on public education, all of this money to send. And when you need them most, they were the first to shut down. And they’ve been the last to reopen. This should be an absolute outrage. And here are parents that were left with no option, nothing to do. If there was ever a case that can be made that said the money needs to follow the child. And the parent needs to decide where to go. This was the year, this was the session.
And, like you, extremely disappointed that there was not a vote because every year these elected officials come out and they talk homeschoolers and they talk all this stuff, and then they’re not even willing to vote for it on the floor and take a stand with it. Extremely disappointed, definitely lost an opportunity here. And we should have gotten some more and the fact that it was killed so early and without any recourse was absolutely unforgivable in my opinion.
Jill Glover:
I agree. I agree. Our very last one is banning taxpayer-funded lobbying. This is our most straightforward, simple priority, which basically said abolish all forms of taxpayer funded lobbying. We had a couple of bills that we were hoping would make it through but we wound up with nothing. In fact, what actually happened again, I think was worse than nothing in that our bill out of the Senate came back over to our state affairs committee and representative Patty basically rewrote the bill and made it favorable for lobbyists. I mean, for lawyers to become lobbyists without any problem. And so this bill actually died. Nothing went through. So we’re incredibly disappointed. We know that probably all our other priorities are affected by taxpayer-funded lobbying. And so it was very disappointing. So as last session, we got a big fat goose egg on this particular priority. And that also is inexcusable.
Jonathan Schober:
Yeah, I agree. We get this was a big fat zero. So shockingly, the lobbyist lobbied to not stop taxpayer funded lobbyists, what a shocker.
Jill Glover:
Right, what a shock.
Jonathan Schober:
Once again our elected official showed who they look forward to and who they work for so disappointing. All right, what’s next?
Jill Glover:
That’s it. Those are all of our priorities. I will just add about-
Jonathan Schober:
Did we talk about abolition of abortion?
Jill Glover:
Did we miss that one?
Jonathan Schober:
We missed it.
Jill Glover:
We did. I just went right through it, abolition of abortion. And we actually got something on this I apologize. Abolish abortion by ensuring the right to life and equal protection of the laws to all pre-born children for the moment of fertilization. So we had several approved bills on this. We actually had a true abolition bill. Others have to do with regulating abortion. The one that did pass well, we had two that passed. We have what’s called the trigger bill, which says that as soon as the Supreme Court rolls back, Roe vs. Wade, that abortion will be ended, abolished in Texas. And then the other one that passed is known as the heartbeat bill, which basically says that as soon as a heartbeat is detected that a baby cannot be abolished or be aborted. This bill doesn’t completely meet our criteria for this priority, but it does somewhat. So, you know, I would say probably a five on this. I think it’s going to save some babies. I hope it saves some babies, but the complete criteria was not met.
Jonathan Schober:
Yeah. So I’m going to be a little bit more excited about this one. I would have scored them an eight, maybe even a nine. You know, I think the trigger bill, it basically says that if Roe is overturned, we’re done. The heartbeat, I actually think that is a good bill. And I think it moves the needle a long way. It actually moves the enforcement, if you will, or the standing to any citizen in Texas can actually sue that doctor, the medical provider. So, yes I would love to write a law that abortion is over. The reality is we still have a lot to do on changing the hearts and minds of people.
Unfortunately, we have a lot of people that find this evil, abhorrent sin completely normal. And that’s, that’s a reality that we live in. But in terms of actually doing that and actually providing a tool, which is going after those doctors that are doing it and moving that to individual Texans that are defending the rights of the unborn Texans. Okay. I think that’s a good move. So I’d be more generous. I think this was good. I’d give them an eight, maybe even a nine on this priority.
Jill Glover:
Sounds good. Sounds good.
Jonathan Schober:
All right. Well, we’re going to take a little break here for a moment. And when we come back, I’m going to ask you, what is it that keeps you up at night?
Jill Glover:
Sounds good.
Announcer:
You’re listening to the Elephant Heard. We’ll be right back.
Pastor Schober:
Promises. God’s promises. He makes them, and he keeps them. Hi, I’m pastor Schober. I want to share with you one of my favorite promises from the new Testaments and then Hebrew 13 chapter 13, verse five, and it simply says, I will never leave the nor for safety. And that’s said several times in the Bible, both old Testament and new Testament. God is wanting us to know he’s with us. He sticks with us. He’s the friend that’s closer than a brother. He is our father and our elder brother. Jesus says, I will never leave you nor forsake you. You can depend on that. That’s God’s word. And his word is true. So, I share it with you today. Don’t forget it. Remember, God keeps his promises.
Announcer:
From the capital of the lone star state. Welcome back to the Elephant Heard.
Jonathan Schober:
We’ve been having a discussion about the 87th regular session here in Texas, giving a scorecard on our eight priorities. And, recap, I think we did okay on about two of them. I think a complete failure on the other six is how I think we’d score it. So Jill, what I want you to do here is, you can stay on legislative and politics, but the question to you is, what is it that keeps you up at night?
Jill Glover:
You bet. There’s a couple of things I think about. Number one is we are really at a precarious place right now in our nation. And what is happening in the current administration is very concerning. It’s very scary in a lot of ways. A couple of things that this administration wants to do is completely erode our election system with HR one. And then the other thing they want to do is completely erode our religious freedoms with HR five, the equality act. And so we’ve got two big threats that I fear that the administration is going to make good on. And so that was one reason why it was so critical, in my view, to get our legislative priorities passed completely this session. Because we, as the state of Texas must stand, right? We are, Texas is known I think as should be the leader, Florida’s kind of kicking our rear right now. But we should be-
Jonathan Schober:
I think Ron Desantis is showing us how its done.
Jill Glover:
He is, but you know, we are still Texas and we should be the state that is strong and that stands.
And quite frankly, this session has been a let down. And we may get a second chance and a special session. And I pray that we do, but it is really concerning to me that we have not taken the opportunity this session to strengthen laws, to enact other laws that will protect our freedoms in our election system. Right?
The other thing though, too, that I think about is the really wonderful bright spot of this session. And that was our grassroots. We had more grassroots engagement. We had more phone calls, emails, visits to the Capitol by our Republican voters and citizens than we have in any other session. And people are waking up, they’re participating in their government, they’re stewarding their government. And I think that was a huge blessing and that encourages me. And that gives me hope. I think people are awake and aware now. And so I think we still have opportunity to stand and to do some good things. But I think this is a wake up call, frankly, that we need to participate and we need to be very careful who we are putting in office.
Jonathan Schober:
Yeah.
I think this is a great place to end and you’re absolutely right. You know, I think the call to action after this is what I want, everyone that’s listening to this, is you go through, you evaluate your elected representative. You evaluate the governor, the speaker or the lieutenant governor and decide did they act in your behalf? They are supposed to be serving you. And so that’s the question. That’s I think the responsibility for every engaged citizen. Is to look at this session and evaluate, did they do what they said they were going to do. So I’d encourage you to do that and leave comments. How do you think, what would you rate the priorities? Would you have had other priorities do that? Well, if you do have any questions or comments or suggestions for other podcast episodes, you can contact me and send me a text directly at (512) 729-5712.
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