The following transcript has been provided by https://otter.ai
Welcome to the Luke Misia show, there are a lot of things that we have brought to your attention, things that were left undone things that the legislature failed to do most of the times the Texas House killing good legislation. And those have caused us and many of you to realize that a lot of our elected officials just aren’t ready. They’re not born for the time that we’re in to be in the positions that they have. But that being said, often, we don’t recognize all the victories that we do have, because we have moved the Overton Window considerably to the right. And legislation that for years has not gotten the traction and been killed in the process passed this session. And so today, I’m actually going to take a step back and go through a list of Republican victories, conservative victories we had, this doesn’t mean we can’t continue to have more victories, or we don’t desperately need more. But it does mean that we need to at least recognize the victories we’ve had so that we can be encouraged in the fight ahead. Let’s get to the show. So I’m going to literally just start going through a list of victories and tell you why these are conservative Why They Matter, and why we should be grateful that they passed this session, when I say grateful, we should be grateful to everyone in Texas that has continued to insist on changing the political environment, such that things that were once incapable of passing now actually get to the governor’s desk and get signed. Here’s the reality. We do have a lot of victories. My big picture thing before I get into this list, is that when I go through this list, some people will say, Well, if we got all that done, then we’re doing great, the states fantastic. The problem is that being a conservative, actually isn’t about just accomplishing 10 or 15 legislative victories. And if you say, hey, well, two sessions ago, we could only get five and now we got 15. Therefore this is sufficient, you’re not asking yourself the question, the question that you should be asking yourself, is, what do we need for the time we are in, we are at a point in time, where the left is doing everything they can to take our state and move it, not only are they trying to move it in a direction that conforms with their Marxist ideology, they want to actually get at our kids, they want to reshape the hearts and minds of the next generation, they’re actually thinking decades in advance. And so here’s the sad truth is that you could have 20 legislative victories and still be in a place where hey, the legislature didn’t do what they needed to do. Millions of people are coming across our border. We didn’t stop them this session. We didn’t even start building a wall. We didn’t even actually put a border force together that was going to take some of those people and put them back into Mexico. That’s wholly unserious. On a massive issue, we had a $30 billion surplus, and the legislature right now is arguing over how they’re going to spend the less than $13 billion of new tax relief, it’s wholly insufficient. We are still entering a time where the average family is seriously trying to figure out financially how to buy a three two home that they could raise a couple of kids in. And that’s a massive part of what it means to be an American and a Texan that is out of reach for many just middle class families. So not to start on the downer. But my point is that people would take this episode and then they’re going to complain and say, Well, if that’s the case, Luke, then I don’t know why you’re thinking we need something better or new. So I will be most definitely coming back and highlighting all of the problems, the things that we didn’t get to this legislative session. But today, let’s focus on the victories. And when we talk about the Overton window, we talk about the fact that sometimes things show up on the scene, you start talking about an issue, and literally even within the Republican Party, it’s viewed as radical, unthinkable, then all of a sudden, it seems palatable. Maybe it’s comprehensible. Ultimately, it starts to move to popular, and then it gets to policy. And this is the way that this process transpires. And so when you start talking about issues, this is why you don’t fret if an issue you greatly care about isn’t able to get to the finish line because you realize that this is a process we have to keep fighting. So the first one we’re going to talk about is HB 2127. This is a statewide preemption bill and I’ve talked about this on the show before but this is a bill that David feeling killed when he was state affairs chair, so on Understand a bill that David feeling as the state affairs chair under speaker Bonnen killed and said no, this bill is a threat to LGBT ordinances. Four years later as Speaker his chamber is passing this bill. Why? Because we have moved the entire discussion so far to the right when it comes to the state dealing with cities. Overall, when Speaker Straus was speaker, it was hard to get a lot of legislation through even small little bills through, hey, we just want to make sure that cities can’t ban fracking in their city limits. And that was this huge push this bill says we don’t want them to do that on a whole host of issues. It’s a massive statewide preemption bill that says cities, you are going to stay cities within your constitutionally defined roles. It’s not a perfect bill. But it is a tremendous victory, that we should be very grateful for HB 2127. We then have four major victories within the family policy arena, Texas Family Policy strongly pushed these issues. A lot of other groups got behind this concern women of America Eagle form the Republican Party of Texas, Texas values, all these groups come in and say, Hey, we’re gonna push this stuff and got more victories than we’ve gotten in a long time. So the first one was the ban on genital mutilation. And I’m going to talk about that a little bit more in the coming weeks. But that legislation wasn’t not only was it the way I’d say it, the legislation was guaranteed to pass meaning a bill was going to pass the dealt with the issue. But the bill that passed being as strong as it was, was not guaranteed. And in fact, there were multiple opportunities for it to be undermined, that were defeated by organized conservative efforts. And so not only should we be grateful that something passed, but that the thing that passed, was prevented from being gutted. Right, so Senate Bill 14 was a victory. We then had HB 900, which gets which gives a mechanism by which we can get pornographic material out of school libraries. Okay, that is a victory. Now we’ll focus on the fact that it doesn’t, it doesn’t include all taxpayer funded libraries. And it also doesn’t guarantee that all those books get out, it gives a mechanism by which they can, when we come back, next session, we’ll know how successful HB 900 was, if all of the pornographic materials that are currently in the school libraries are out, then HB 900 will have done its job. And if they aren’t, then we’ll have to pass another bill. But at least now parents have more tools that they can use to address the pornographic filth in public school libraries. Women’s Sports was protected. Again, an issue that two years ago, conservative said, Men shouldn’t compete with women. And the house caved and the governor caved. And they said, We don’t want to deal with this. We want boys to not compete with girls in K through 12. But we’re actually fine. If men compete with women in college, we don’t want to pick a fight with the universities, that’s probably going to get into a university, an overall university win, which is that I would say for as long as I’ve been in Texas politics, there’s never been an organized conservative push against these universities. We’ve complained about it for a long time, various different policy centers and individuals. I don’t want it to sound like nobody was talking about it. But I’m telling you that the legislature as a whole was not really considering anything that would negatively affect universities, there’s almost like the Holy Grail, even when the Senate would push aggressive policies, they weren’t directly creating problems for universities. So saving women’s sports was one of many victories. We got this session that told universities were starting to put you in check. And universities in Texas, sadly, are essentially taxpayer funded and created and established and protected and preserved, Marxist creation factories, okay. That’s what they are. That’s what they’ve become. They could reverse course and become something other than that. But that’s what they are today. And this session, the legislature started to recognize that more especially the Texas Senate, who pushed all of these bills out quickly, so that the house was in a tougher position to sit on him. Before we go on to more bills, that’s an important thing to recognize. The Texas Senate came into this session ready to do work. And they basically said, Hey, we’ve got a lot of things to do. And we know that Texas house is going to try to accomplish as few things as possible. So we’re not only just going to pass these bills, we’re going to pass them quickly, which showed that the Senate started the session out basically saying our goal is to actually accomplish policy. We’re not here to create show votes. If the Senate wanted to create show votes, they would have passed a lot of this conservative policy in late March, late April, early May right pass a bunch of Senate bills out and make the house have to work real We fast at the very end to try to accomplish any of this stuff. But that’s not what they were doing. They were focused on accomplishing policy, which is why as soon as they possibly could get to work, they were getting to work and passing these bills quickly. They were priorities. And if the bills that died died at the end, and the House said, Oh, we ran out of time. And so they were intentionally holding these things off while the Senate was passing them quickly. So women’s sports, Senate Bill 15, was a victory. And then the last one is on the kind of family policy or area is the drag show legislation, SB 12, which the Texas family project went in, and spent 10s of 1000s of dollars, saying we’re going to talk directly to date, feelings, constituents, and we’re going to tell them the Texas House is killing this bill, because the Texas House was killing the bill. And within 24 hours of them going up on television and text blasts and all these people, they’re aggressively talking directly to dades voters, that bill goes from having sat in the legislature for four months, no action taking taken on it in the Texas House, to scheduled for your hearing, had a hearing got voted out of a hearing, went to calendars got placed on the calendar quickly. This is the power of the grassroots, when you have conservative organizations that say we’re going to call these people out. We’re going to demand some victories. A couple of these victories, we’re literally almost forced through at the end. Thank God that we have conservative organizations ready to answer the call and step in and try to force these things from happening. I mentioned in women’s sports that we had this overall change of approach amongst higher education. So I’m gonna jump to the other two bills that we got one was moving the conversation on tenure, which was Senate Bill 18. This was a victory for us. It was not the victory that Dan Patrick wanted, and that we would have all rejoice in having, which is Dan Patrick said we’re going to end tenure, which is we should do. He said, We have to stop. We have a bunch of leftist our universities who say I can say and do what ever I want. And you the taxpayer have to pay me to create these Marxist these leftists in the classroom. And it doesn’t matter. I don’t care, what gets reported. I’m gonna say whatever I want, I don’t care what law gets passed, I can ignore that law because I have tenure. That’s what these professors belief. And it’s true. And Dan Patrick is trying to change that. Now, ultimately, the Texas House pretty severely gutted that bill. But here’s where we move the conversation. We went from two years ago, Dan Patrick saying we need to get rid of tenured our universities. And everyone just kind of took a step back and said, I don’t know if that’s a good idea. If this doesn’t seem well thought through. Now, I think those criticisms were wrong and inaccurate. And you fast forward two years, and we passed a bill that recreates a slightly new process by which tenure is approved. And it gives more power to regents who likely will just rubber stamp these tenure proposals. But it at least changes the conversation we have moved in the direction to say, Hey, if you are wanting to get rid of tenure, we’ve at least taken a step towards the possibility. And we’ve made it slightly harder for professors to get tenure. So I think that still is a victory that moves us in the right direction. But the other victory that we got, which was significant was Senate Bill 17. The dei ban and I’ve talked about this on the program. I brought a lot of information to y’all about this during the session. This is another bill that was sitting dying. Matt Rinaldi goes in by his television ads and date fields district says, Look, we cannot afford to lose these key pieces of legislation. These are huge victories we need this session. Again, Chairman Renaldi clearly isn’t sitting there saying hey, I’ve got at least five or six things that I can tell all the delegates we did great, so I don’t have to worry about the rest of the session. He’s not sitting there dealing with show votes that just give us a couple things that we can brag about to our delegates. He’s on foot. He’s focused on policy. That was his approach. He basically came in and said, I am focused on policy. I want to deliver as much as I can to the delegates who elected me as their chairman. That’s the kind of Chairman you want. That legislation that was pushed quickly through by Senator Creighton was championed by Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick comes in and says we’re gonna get rid of all these di offices and officers 300 employees at a&m and UT, the Texas House guts it says actually, we’re going to keep all of them there, as long as they’re privately funded. And then conservatives in the house Matt Schaefer, Brian Harrison. Nate Schatz line several others fight to bring this language back in, in alive went with the Senate. They say no, we’re really gonna get rid of them. And they had the votes to do it. So that was a huge victory. Well, then the Texas House said, No, we’re gonna get it again and say that all these Marxist employees have to stay at the university, essentially. But huge national pressure is put up, a lot of conservatives call this out. We call this out, we worked with other people call out Texas scorecard posted op eds from Scott yener, who also came on our program and talked about this issue. Chris Ruffo talked about this nationally and said, Hey, this is a major problem, we got to get rid of these people from the university. And Brandon Creighton took it to a conference committee and basically just said, Look, we’ll give those people a letter of recommendation. But we’re not working to make sure they stay at the university. Huge victory. Senate Bill 17. There were some another couple other little city ones. One example of a restriction on city is that Senate Bill 2038 passed, which is an annexation reform of the ETJ. So some people live in the city limits, I live in the city limits of a big city, you can also live in the extraterritorial jurisdiction of a city and then you can live outside of the ETJ. Right, and we have passed over the years annexation reform. Again, this goes to show the fact that we’re moving in the right direction in some of these areas. It was a very big battle. But ultimately, we did pass a annexation reform, which just said a city can just come in and annex this area, if they don’t want to be annexed those people who the city wants to annex and bring under the city limits with additional regulations and rules or restrictions. They have to vote to be brought into the city. And that was a big win. Well, now we’ve taken it even a step further with Senate Bill 2038, which actually says that, we’re going to let citizens if they’re in the ETJ and want to get out of the ETJ, we’re gonna give them a path to get out of the ETJ, which would also mean maybe they could form their own city, right? Maybe if you were in the ETJ of a liberal city. And you’re saying actually, we want to form in this area, our own municipality that’s governed in a very different way than they govern. And we can form our own basic services. And we can operate separately that you could do that. I think there’ll be a huge benefit. And that would be a great thing, if we were to see that occur in some of these areas. So Senate Bill 2038 was, I think, a good move in that direction. Another one that is local government related was actually a huge win for charter schools across Texas. This was House Bill 1707, House Bill 1707. And this bill almost got gutted. This is to show you why every single one of these races ends up being important. This bill almost got gutted. On the floor. Glenn Rodgers, a very liberal Republican, from Mineral Wells, tried to team up with all the Democrats and got the bill. And his amendment failed by two votes, two votes, if two members of the legislature have voted a different way, or another way of thinking this, if maybe one or two of the victories that conservatives had during the last Republican primary and runoff. If one or two of those victories weren’t had, then that bill would have been gutted. But what HB 1707 said was that the city’s can’t discriminate against charter schools within the rules that they’re passing. See, what these cities are doing is they’re actually going in and saying, Hey, charter schools, we’re going to pass these special regulations rules for you. And the Liberal Democrat run cities are trying to work with teacher unions to keep the charter schools from expanding. So they’re making it harder and harder for them to even find space. I’ve got family members that charter schools, people in our church, people that I know, all across the city, hugely benefit from charter schools, they have long waiting lists. And then the cities are saying we know all these people want to get in, but we’re going to make it harder for charter schools even build in the city, House Bill 1707 stopped, that was a huge win for charter schools. And so that’s again, another victory, especially for people who believe that we need to have more alternatives to the monopolistic public education system. Charter schools are part of the public education system publicly funded, but they’re better in so many ways. And so having those alternatives grow and expand, ends up being a good thing for us. Okay, there was a bill that passed HB five that we all opposed. It’s a corporate giveaway to basically property tax abatements to all these corporations. A lot of them are what corporations with ESG policies and di offices and all this stuff. But this is one that says hey, if you come here, we won’t charge your property taxes for 10 years or however long. We’re going to do it you want to bring your plant here. You want to bring all your liberal employees so on and so forth. So conservatives have opposed this for a long time also opposing this because if they would come and build here and then we’d be able to tax them, we might actually have a better path to property tax elimination over the time. And so we’d love to bring them here and then use that tax base. We all kind of spread out other revenue sources grow the economy and continue to bring our overall property tax burden down. But that being said, one of the victories that needs to go that can’t go unstated is what I would say. One of the victories is that chapter three Thirteen’s that have existed in Texas as long as I’ve been involved in Texas politics, were a massive corporate giveaway. It was the it was the identical program, okay, that said, Hey, we’re gonna give you all these property tax abatements. But over time, it basically became a financial vehicle for the green New Deal. And over 60% of the projects approved by these things were just wind and solar farms. Okay. And so this thing that many of us already criticized for a lot of different reasons, also became a weapon that the left was using to expand more green energy programs, make our grid less reliable, and pad the pockets of a bunch of crazy environmental leftists. Now, what Dan Patrick did do was he insisted when the House sent him over a bill that had a clear path for all these green New Deal energy projects to be funded through this program, they cut that out. And they basically insisted on that language in order for the bill to pass. Now, again, I don’t like that the bill passed. And if your Senator or House of Representative member voted against HB five, they did the right thing, you should be grateful. We should also recognize that when the Senate insisted on some of the more conservative language in the program, they did save the program from being able to be used as a weapon by AOC. And Bernie Sanders and all these green energy, environmental leftists. And that is a good win. And it is something we haven’t had in Texas for a very long time. So I’d rather HB five and not pass. But the fact that it passed was some of those restrictions is a victory worth focusing on. There’s a number of medical freedom, and medical Liberty vaccine choice, whatever you want to call it, wins that we had this session. The biggest one being HB 44. The duty to treat it, I believe, is what it was called. But essentially, and many of you know this, right? I’m private insurance. But there are only a handful of doctors in San Antonio, that will provide pediatric care for my children, because they are not, they have not received every vaccine that Dr. Fauci wants to give them. But this is a major problem for many Texans. I’m not the only one that deals with this. If you’re in rural Texas, you’re in a big city. Everyone’s struggling with this. So HB 44, took a massive step in the right direction. When it said that if you’re a Medicaid doctor, ship, if you’ve got if you’re on these government programs, and you’re taking these government funded patients, you cannot discriminate based on their vaccine status. huge victory for us. Huge, huge victory. And this was hard with a lot of work. I will tell you just having long conversations with Texans for vaccine choice, this organization was working there. I mean, they were working day and night, even in the very final stages, just to get every single senator on board needed to pass this bill out of the Senate after a pass the Texas House, huge victory, very grateful that the Senate stood firm took this good bill that was passed by the House and got it out, in order to ensure that so many of these families actually start gaining access to doctors who say, hey, I want to be part of this government program. I want to take all these government patients, but I don’t want to treat anybody that hasn’t gotten every single vaccine that I think they should get. No, you signed up. You can’t discriminate. And it was a huge victory for all those people who believe in medical liberty, guys, you can’t say how you get you get the decision of what gets injected into your kid. But we’re going to persecute the heck out of you if you decide to do something we don’t want to do. And that has been the reality for parents for the last for decades. And then COVID brought this to light. And so we had a huge opportunity. A lot of the Democrats tried to get this bill to make it just a COVID vaccine bill. Absolutely not. And there was a good victory because there were less than I think 10 Republicans that actually sided with them on that vote. I think if you rewind six years 3040 Republicans in the House were decided with them on that vote and that goes to show how hard so many of these people have been working to move the legislature on these issues. There’s still so much that needs to be done. And I’ll in every one of these areas and vaccine choices, a great example, guys, there were great bills that got killed by the Texas House of Representatives on vaccine choice. We’ll talk about those later. Not today. But they did pass Senate Bill 29 heavily watered down but it does put some restrictions on what the governor can and can’t do. Also HB 609 business liability protections for businesses that don’t let’s say you’re a business that says hey, we’re not going to have a masked man A we’re not going to have a vaccine mandate you can’t be held liable for somebody gets sick by coming into your business, things like that. So huge victory on issues there as well. The last bill I’ll focus on is actually Senate Bill 833. Again, multiple ESG bills passed this session that were killed in the Texas House of Representatives, very unfortunate, huge loss. But Senate Bill 33 did pass, it was one of the last bills to pass the legislature passed the Senate early Texas house sat on it for a while set it at the very bottom of the calendar to where they made it and a bunch of bills vary, you know, let’s say killable by Democrats, which essentially means they’re killable by Republicans, because Republicans are the ones that determine where they go on the calendar at 833. What it does is it starts to tell these insurance companies, they cannot discriminate, they can’t have these environmental social governance policies. And you might think, Well, what does it matter if an insurance company has an environmental social Governance Policy? Well, think of it this way, if you’re a gun manufacturer, if you’re an oil and gas company, if you’re somebody who’s literally keeping the lights on for all of America, because you’re producing the energy that God has blessed us with, some leftist insurance company can come in and say, Hey, we can no longer provide your business insurance. Because you’re in oil and gas, we can no longer provide your business insurance because you manufacture weapons. And what you need to understand is that the left in California are passing these mandates, you cannot insure you can’t do insurance business here in the state of California, unless you have these ESG policies, and you enforce them throughout the country. So Texas, again, some losses in the ESG. area. We’ll highlight those later. But it is worth recognizing the fact that Senate Bill 833 getting passed at the end was a victory and a victory there, we should be grateful for it. Because without it, the insurance industry would continue to be even not even necessarily, I’m not telling you, every CEO of an insurance company is a leftist. I’m telling you, they’re all getting pulled left whether they want to or not. And if states like Texas aren’t willing to try to pull them back to the right. We’re not going to recognize that entire industry over the next 246 10 years. Do you want to get paid to make a difference? Gen Z is now in Congress. And if you’re between the ages of 18 and 25, you may not necessarily want to be in Congress. But if you still want to fight for the future, we have the opportunity for you. Texas scorecard is Texas leading new source for citizens. And we’re looking for young fighters to join our fellowship program. Texas scorecard offers a paid internship for spring, summer and fall semesters, allowing participants to get their feet wet in the media business. fellows can apply for one of three tracks, writing, research and administration, thinking about what it takes fills up and leave the program with the opportunity to continue to work full time. These are some victories that we had they can’t go unstated, they have to be recognized. It’s why every single one of y’all actually care about the state of Texas, is what you’re doing something. And yes, you and I will be frustrated because the Texas House of Representatives killed dozens and dozens of layup wins, most of which were just handed to them by the Senate to get done. And they didn’t do it. Both chambers didn’t take border security that seriously this session. That’s a problem. Neither chamber said hey, we need to deliver $20 billion of new property tax relief and we have a $30 billion surplus. That’s a loss. But guys, these are real winds that will have real impacts. So you can think through the list of things that I’m talking about realize that’s going to change somebody’s life, that’s going to make someone better, that’s going to provide an opportunity for somebody that otherwise might not have existed. That’s why we appreciate these wins. That’s why conservatives were in the capital when I was in the capital this session. I mean, there were people I met that hadn’t done anything in politics to four years ago. And they’re sitting here there every week, talking to members pushing bills, arguing for policies testifying before committees. There’s groups that were fighting this session that didn’t even exist last session. There were members, there were even new members that aren’t good members, but there were even members of the legislature that might represent a district that previously had a Republican that was like an F was like one of the always the five or 10 voting with Democrats, and then they would be replaced by somebody. And that person would vote in the middle of the pack. Doesn’t make them a leader doesn’t make him a conservative fighter. But those changes you started to see on things like the charter school fight that we won by Two votes that we wouldn’t have won two sessions ago. That’s why we continue to be engaged, it’s why we’re going to fight during the interim is so that this list can be twice as long next time. And again, I go back to in close with, we’re at a time in our state and nation where we have to be doing even more. The problem is, even with all these victories, the left is still going to successfully be allowed to move considerable portions of society further and further left with some very dangerous and radical ideas. They’re still gonna be granted access to groom our children in classrooms, they’re still going to be granted access to push this ESG policy and in a more aggressive way in every area that wasn’t covered in Senate Bill 833. Right universities still get to teach racist ideas with critical race theory because the Senate passed that the House killed it. I don’t want to go through the whole list because much longer list than that. But yes, being a conservative is about conserving what we have. And all these victories don’t mean we get to conserve what we have, which is why we have to keep fighting. But I hope that this is at least encouraging to tell you that there were some serious victories that you should be grateful for that I’m grateful for. Please continue to share this information with everybody you know, because I think Texans need to know what’s going on. May God bless you and may God bless the great state of Texas. Thank you for listening to the Luke Misia show. To find out more information about what’s going on here in Texas, visit Texas scorecard.com Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
