Recent editorials from Texas newspapers

Here are excerpts from recent editorials in Texas newspapers:

The Lufkin Daily News. Oct. 22, 2019.

There are more opportunities now for Angelina County students to graduate from high school with college credits and technical certifications - and in some cases entire associate degrees - than ever before.

The Angelina County Cooperative Early College High School partnership, Advanced Placement courses and dual-credit/concurrent courses allow high school students to earn their diplomas while becoming licensed in a trade or get a good head start on course hours toward a college degree.

Pineywoods Community Academy’s PARAMUS Early College High School is a free public charter school open to all students in Angelina County. Hudson High School offers an ECHS for students who were in its Advancement Via Individual Determination program while in middle school. Meanwhile, Lufkin High School’s ECHS is designed for traditionally underserved populations. We think that’s great.

What we don’t agree with is the Texas Education Agency’s gender and race requirements that curtail the participation of girls and students who aren’t African American or Hispanic under state-designated ECHS programs.

More than 100 LHS freshmen started their high school and college careers simultaneously last fall in the school’s new program. The ECHS allows students to earn up to 60 college credits toward an associate degree or certification program at zero cost thanks to a partnership with Angelina College and an $864,000 grant from the T.L.L. Temple Foundation.

The ECHS students who applied were accepted based on one or more of the following criteria: being the first in the family to attend college; desiring to attend college but lacking the funds; being motivated to be challenged with college-level course work; and/or being willing to receive academic guidance from dedicated collegiate instructors.

LHS Superintendent Lynn Torres said in a column in June that students are accepted based on one or more of the following criteria according to the blueprint established by the TEA and the demographics of Lufkin High School and the Lufkin Independent School District:

- The student must be at-risk as determined by 13 criteria from the TEA.

- The student must qualify for free or reduced lunch.

- The student must be African American or Hispanic.

- The student must be male.

After those criteria are met, other students may be eligible for admittance through a lottery system.

Because Hudson’s ECHS is not state-designated, the school is allowed to set its own parameters to determine who qualifies, with no restrictions based on gender or race. Although the national AVID program serves all students, it focuses on the least-served students in the academic middle.

We like that PCA’s ECHS is open to anyone. We also like the state’s efforts to bridge the gap between the lowest- and the highest-performing students and rich and poor students with the ECHS offered at LHS.

The TEA says its intent was not to exclude any population - that data determined that “specific subpopulations were underrepresented when compared to the district population.”

We get it. It’s a widely known fact that women have made up the majority of college-educated adults going back four decades now. Whether the workforce represents that or not is a subject for another editorial.

But for the love of God, it’s 2019. Let’s not penalize any student who could benefit from this program just because of their gender or the color of their skin.

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The Dallas Morning News. Oct. 22, 2019.

Dennis Bonnen’s decision to not only step down as speaker of the Texas House but to retire from politics altogether comes as a relief because it signals that character still matters in Texas politics, even if it seems to matter less and less in the nation at large.

Bonnen’s position as speaker was at grave risk. But it’s entirely possible he could have held on as a representative.

Doing so would have hurt his party and hurt the effort to build what must be a truly bipartisan legislature that works together towards common solutions for all Texans.

What happened to Bonnen, though, is a lesson that political parties must learn and relearn over and over at the cost of all of the people they represent. In the ashes of Bonnen’s political career, we can sift out a fundamental problem that has chased American democracy since the founding.

On his peaceful surrender of the first presidency, George Washington warned the nascent country that the division of political factions would tear at the country.

Before he left office, in 1796, he wrote to Thomas Jefferson the following, “I was no party man myself…and the first wish of my heart was, if parties did exist, to reconcile them.”

Washington had no fear of letting the best of all ideas surface from any side to be considered in the light of what was best for the country.

Bonnen’s problem as a legislative leader, and the thing that led to his downfall, was what he saw as the necessity of dealing with a person for whom party division is absolutely central to political life.

Michael Quinn Sullivan, an unelected blogger, could never be satisfied with compromise across the aisle. It was always all or nothing, driving ever farther to the right even as suburban districts pulled back to the left. Good conservative legislators got caught in between, and Sullivan helped ensure they lost their offices by supporting politicians for whom political battle, not policy agreement, was the first order of business.

The results have been predictable. A correction is afoot. The electorate is pulling away. Bonnen understood that. He was and is a smart political thinker, as well as a good policy leader.

He saw that if he didn’t somehow convince Sullivan to stop running candidates well outside the mainstream in Republican primaries, the GOP would lose its House majority. That may yet happen.

Bonnen’s error was in imagining that a person like Sullivan - or name any other unelected political media personality - was genuinely interested in a functioning majority.

When the fight is the point and when the factional division is what comes first, there is no sense in trying to trade.

Sullivan recorded Bonnen’s comments and destroyed his career. Potential political disaster for Texas Republicans is the result.

It’s a perfect outcome for Sullivan, and a terrible one for governance.

As for Bonnen, he is leaving. He demonstrated himself as untrustworthy to his party and to his constituents, whatever he might have been trying to accomplish.

At the very least, though, his decision suggests he is a person of depth, someone who can put something larger than himself above himself. And that is to his credit and to the benefit of Texas.

___

San Antonio Express-News. Oct. 22, 2019.

Disgraced Texas House Speaker Dennis Bonnen has finally announced he won’t seek reelection, giving up his position of power.

This should bring to a close a long-running soap opera that left Texas (and Republicans) mired in scandal for months. Bonnen’s June conversation at the Capitol with a conservative activist, secretly recorded and released publicly last week, was so incendiary it was disqualifying.

Bonnen’s cynical targeting of his fellow Republicans, coupled with his crude insults of Democrats, left no political choice. Last week, the GOP caucus went just about as far as it could out of session, releasing a statement saying members “condemn in the strongest possible terms the offensive language used and statements made.”

And in the days that followed, more and more lawmakers called on Bonnen to step down. In an earlier version of this editorial, so did we. Bonnen could not continue to serve as house speaker not merely because he lost the trust of his fellow lawmakers. Above all, he had to give up his position of power because he betrayed the Texas residents he was elected to represent.

In the recording, Bonnen is heard offering media credentials to Empower Texans CEO Michael Quinn Sullivan in exchange for the activist’s targeting of 10 GOP members of the House. After Bonnen left the room, state Rep. Dustin Burrows named the targets. They were all moderate Republicans, but they also shared a more specific trait: All 10 had just voted against Senate Bill 29.

Known as the “taxpayer-funded lobbying” bill, the failed measure would have prevented the largest cities and counties in Texas from paying lobbyists to advocate for them at the Capitol. It was also a reflection of the extreme animus that has risen among the far-right in Texas toward its urban residents, who constituted more than 80% of the state’s population in 2010 - a share that has only ballooned as people flock to the state’s urban centers.

Immediately after mentioning his desire to pass the bill in the next session, Bonnen is heard saying: “Any mayor, county judge that was dumbass enough to come meet with me, I told them with great clarity, my goal is for this to be the worst session in the history of the Legislature for cities and counties.”

“I hope the next session’s even worse,” says Burrows, who represents a district that encompasses Lubbock, a city of more than 250,000 residents.

“And I’m all for that,” Bonnen adds.

Later, Burrows says, “Taxpayer funded lobby is the benchmark for next session.” He also says: “We hate cities and counties.”

Proponents of the taxpayer-funded lobbying bill frame it as an effort to protect residents from higher property taxes. But that’s a narrow reference to Senate Bill 2, a measure that lawmakers passed this year over the objections of cities and counties that limits how much more in property taxes the entities can collect without voter approval.

The reality is that large cities track hundreds of bills at the Capitol each session. San Antonio tracked 1,600 pieces of legislation last session alone. In fiscal year 2019, the city spent about $300,000 on four lobbying firms to advance its interests in Austin, which included funding infrastructure for area military bases and fighting attempts to undo a local ordinance that regulates short-term rentals such as Airbnb.

The city also tried to stop Senate Bill 1152, which eliminated a major fee paid by telecom companies that use public land for cable and telephone services. A look at the Texas Ethics Commission’s list of registered lobbyists shows a virtual army of advocates who argued on behalf of the telecommunications industry last session.

Despite the city’s lobbyists working to counter the bill, it easily passed. The loss of those fees will likely cost the city $7.3 million in general fund revenues in the next fiscal year.

Already, the playing field at the Capitol is far from level. Undercutting the ability of cities and counties to advocate on their own behalf would tilt it even more. And contrary to the rhetoric about property taxes, the losers often would be Texas residents who care about a diverse set of issues.

Nonetheless, Bonnen and Burrows seem to have considered an assault on local control an end unto itself, as evidenced by their appalling conversation with Sullivan.

For that reason alone, Bonnen could not seek reelection.