A Lone Star State of Affairs: The Dangers of Targeted Democratic Oversight

Graphics by Taylor Whirley

The Texas State Capitol building in Austin is the largest in the nation – in fact, it rises some fifteen feet above that of the US Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Historically, however, this is somewhat ironic: the oversized physical space of the state legislature housed a governing body that only meets every other year and has prided itself on imposing very few regulations on its constituents in comparison to most other states. Recently, though, this dynamic has shifted. In 2021, the Texas State Legislature passed 3,849 bills, the most in the nation and more than twenty other states combined. 

This editorial explores how the Republican-dominated state government has wielded its power, especially when regulating democratic and civil rights. It finds that state government action in Texas has been enabled by strategic framing and the successful ‘othering’ of minority groups. These arguments are supported through an exploration of county-state election policy relations in Texas and how the GOP has successfully legislated voter suppression under the guise of protecting and shoring up democratic rights and processes.

Since the major shifts in US political party affiliation in the South of the 1960s and 70s, the Republican Party has made limited government and neoliberalism the backbone of its platform, with these values strengthening after the election of Ronald Reagan. Republicans have fought for increased power for local municipalities and state governments to ‘govern themselves’ without the overreach of the federal government, and this has led to efforts to establish more localized authority over most services that impact the lives of Americans on a day-to-day basis. As time went on and cities grew, localized power became increasingly centralized in municipalities more often governed by Democratic elected officials. The Republican Party, once the party of limited government, soon realized that regulation and intervention at the state level might be good for politics and for business.

This shift in perspective is evident in the most recent Texas legislative session, where both chambers and the governor signed off on House Bill 2127. Under the guise of protecting local businesses from municipality-level regulation, the law prevents cities almost entirely from regulating labor, agriculture, natural resources, and finance. As a result, metropolitan areas lose their rights to combat predatory lending, protect invasive species, enforce excessive noise ordinances, or investigate nondiscrimination violations in the workplace. This legislation also prevents cities from enacting “fair hiring” policies that give recently incarcerated Texans a fighting chance at securing employment and preventing recidivism. However, the Texas GOP argues that the bill is good for business. By eliminating local authorities’ capacity to require things like construction site water breaks, the market is allowed to run its ‘true course.’  The party finds these regulations to inhibit enterprise and innovation, arguing that protections are less valuable for quality of life than commercial liberty. HB 2127 is just one example of Texas Republicans’ authoritarian regulation of municipalities: in each of these efforts, the party found that neoliberal justification allowed for ease in stifling the rights of their liberal urban centers.

This phenomenon, though popularized in states like Texas and Georgia, saw the light of day all over the country, where pieces of legislation have had a disproportionate and sometimes monopolizing impact in counties or cities with a certain, and usually large, number of residents. Studies find that the most recent legislative sessions in U.S. states saw the introduction of more than 650 preemption bills in legislatures. In fact, every state except Hawaii enforces some kind of preemption, whether it be preventing local control over police budgets or teaching the history of race and racism in school curriculums. Republicans can often justify these actions, too. Elections, emergency services, K-12 public education, road maintenance, and new developments are, unsurprisingly, much harder to manage in larger municipalities, leading to consistently fewer fairy-tale outcomes than are sometimes possible in smaller, less populated Republican-controlled municipalities in other parts of these states. As a result, Republican voters and legislators in rural and suburban areas of the United States have become increasingly anti-democratic, and their support of state-level preemption proposes that as long as they are on the side of power, authoritarian rule is permissible. 

Unfortunately, this is just the beginning. Urban centers (and their nearby suburban counterparts), apart from being harder to manage due to their sheer size, are also home to the majority of Black and brown Americans. Thus, the challenges and inefficiency of urban centers, in the eyes of giddy and reactionary Republican officials, can be blamed on racial minority groups (and the Black and brown elected officials that often govern those centers). This ‘othering’ not only distances rural and exurban white Americans from urban centers and their minority residents – it creates justification for state officials to regulate local power in the places that ‘need it most.’ In confronting this perceived inefficiency of select metropolitan areas, Republicans used age-old neoliberal ideology: markets, perceived to be reservoirs of innovation and efficiency, were the perfect solution. This allowed red states to justify the privatization of municipality functions and further shrink government, even at the most basic level. Texas Republicans are masters of this phenomenon. In 2023, the state replaced Houston Independent School District’s locally elected school board trustees and superintendent – who were predominantly Black and brown – with a mostly white, appointed board of managers and superintendent. The new superintendent, Mike Miles, previously ran a charter school company in Colorado and Texas, positioning his new post as a chance to run Houston ISD using the ‘higher scores, higher salaries’ system that his model preaches. The argument by the state here is clear: local authority is incompetent, and the education system would be better served if operated by entrepreneurs. However, these actions – using neoliberal ideology to justify the removal of local authority from minority electorates – constitute the dismantling of democracy and democratic rights in Texas.

Since the Civil Rights-era party switch, the Republican Party in Texas has long-supported policies that suppress minority voices; the poll tax wasn’t officially removed from the Texas Election Code until 2009. Republicans have become quite good at the game of politics in which they design, referee, and play all at once. It is important to recognize that Republicans in Texas are not merely political players, as they, on most levels, run and regulate the game that holds the livelihoods of all Texans in the balance. 

In 2020, Chris Hollins was appointed in Harris County as the interim County Clerk, a position tasked with overseeing elections and voting centers. Hollins, a progressive and native Houstonian, attempted to expand election accessibility as much as he could, enacting pilot programs of drive-through voting, 24-hour voting, and attempts to send mail-in ballot applications to all registered Harris County voters. Amidst the COVID-19 crisis, these policies were a major success and became the gold standard in the voter-restricted South for expanding voting options. However, the coverage and praise that other states, voting advocacy groups, and media outlets gave to Hollins and his office alarmed Texas Republicans, and they quickly started what might be considered a coup d'état against Harris County election authority. During the 2021 Texas legislative session, Republicans passed an omnibus bill specifically designed to target Harris County. These new regulations prevent counties from distributing mail-in ballots to those who did not request them, ban 24-hour and drive-through voting (practices implemented only in Harris County), and mandate continuous video surveillance, but only for large counties.

In doing so, Texas Republicans have prevented the work of rival players like Hollins and others in Harris County from continuing their work, too: SB 1750, which was recently greenlit in the Texas Supreme Court, allows for the state government to reorganize county elections for counties with over 3.5 million residents (of which there is only one: Harris). Republican state officials, rather than local election administrators, now claim the power to determine the administration and outcome of Harris County elections. 

Republicans in Texas are also not alone. Their colleagues and allies in states like North Carolina, Georgia, and Wisconsin are producing and enacting similar proposals, and the network appears to be growing. For now, voter suppression tactics are state-specific and relatively fragmented, meaning the broad application of my argument would be questionable, especially when looking at states in which Republicans do not control nearly every aspect of state government. However, if Republican power continues to coalesce, state platforms will presumably fall into line and systemically suppress the voices that the party feels are better left unheard. In Texas, Republicans appear to have their house in order, both literally and figuratively. New redistricting will likely prevent seats from flipping blue in the near future, and state election regulation in metropolitan areas does not appear to be slowing down anytime soon. 

In short, the future of Texas elections is bleak. Urban centers and their liberal residents have been stripped of political power through gerrymandering, voter intimidation, and the like.  If asked just five years ago, I would have said otherwise, that Texas was a source of hope and potential for democratic expansion. However, after the three failed campaigns of Beto O’Rourke for U.S. Senate, U.S. President, and Texas Governor, Texas is becoming redder. Recent studies find that in the post-Beto era, an influx of out-of-state voters is mostly red, too: new Texas residents are voting more than 60% in favor of Republicans. Democratic gubernatorial and senatorial challengers are becoming less competitive, and failures in 2018, 2020, and 2022 severely reduce the likelihood of heavy democratic resistance in the next decade.

Pushing back against the state is morally important but futile, and I argue that resistance draws attention to the few democratic practices left. Resistance like that in Harris County provides progressive Texans with short-term hope and solutions but may have inadvertently harmed electoral institutions in the long run. The work of activists, while well-intentioned, simply draws attention to progressive urban centers and policymaking that successfully fly under the radar. In short, the seemingly irreverent work of activists, no matter how well-intentioned, inhibits democratic advancement more than it enhances it.

If anything is to be done, it would come in the form of steady shifts in state power. The Democratic Party in Texas, now the minority supporter of democratic rights and access to the vote, needs to (re)gain the support of one of two groups: centrist Texans or young progressives in urban centers. However, both populations offer issues to Texas Democrats. Centrist Republicans — now shrinking in numbers due to increasing levels of polarization — are where O’Rourke found success in 2018, closing the gap to nearly two percentage points. As the Democratic Party in Texas became more progressive in efforts to reach a potential young base, centrists felt exiled from the party, leading to a double-digit win for Governor Abbott against Beto in 2022. Considering this, Democrats in Texas should identify young people as their target population to cultivate in the next decade. Democrats must refrain from alienating moderate Democrats and Republicans alike, especially more socially conservative minorities like older Black and Latinx populations. Democratic theorist Nancy Fraser makes this point especially clear: “​​What is at issue here is inclusion in, or exclusion from, the community of those entitled to make justice claims on one another.” Those who aim to support democracy cannot do so simply for themselves: social justice must be actualized for the entire electorate to ensure political equality. Restoring democracy in Texas will not be easy, and the work that comes with it will likely come with compromises that are hard for some to swallow. But to effectively re-enfranchise thousands of Texas voters and restore democratic institutions to the state, this work is well worth the time.