SAN ANTONIO– This past weekend, Texas Republicans completed their work on a conservative party platform, a 331 item document detailing their stance on issues across the board.
The culmination of a week-long process that involved hard work by members of the committee and long hours of testimony by members of the public, the platform was put before delegates on Saturday.
After a few amendments, delegates voted on each plank of the platform and approved them by an impressive margin. (The lowest-approved plank still passed with more than two-thirds support.)
Though the platform includes issues ranging from medical marijuana to the USS Texas, topping the list are the party’s five legislative priorities:
- Constitutional Carry: Pass constitutional carry while maintaining licensing as optional for reciprocity purposes.
- Taxpayer-Funded Lobbying: Pass legislation to abolish all forms of taxpayer-funded lobbying and end the automatic payroll deduction of union dues by the government.
- Abortion: Pass legislation to abolish abortion; including, but not limited to, enacting legislation that would ignore and refuse to enforce any and all federal statutes, regulations, executive orders, and court rulings, which would deprive an unborn child of the right to life, as well as enacting life-saving legislation such as PreNDA or a “heartbeat bill.”
- Property Tax: Abolish the Maintenance and Operation School property tax and replace it with a consumption tax or other mechanism other than income tax while broadening the tax base, eliminating the appraisal board and taxing the property at the purchased value or the free market value upon change of hands for local government funding and special district funding. School Maintenance and Operation funds shall be allocated from the state’s general fund to Texas’ Independent School Districts via an inflation-adjusted, per-student-allocation.
- Religious Freedom and Privacy: Pass legislation prohibiting the violation of the rights and freedoms of individuals, organizations and businesses, to exercise their sincerely held religious beliefs by local ordinances or state laws; and pass legislation that protects the privacy and safety of women and children in multi-use facilities such as bathrooms, locker rooms and showers in all Texas schools and government buildings and oppose legislation that would undermine these privacy and safety protections.
Last convention, party delegates established five legislative priorities and achieved legislative victories on two of them during the legislative session.
A full copy of the 2018 Texas GOP platform can be viewed here.
