FreedomTalks

Here is a good round up from our friends at Texans for Fiscal Responsibility.

In the Mail
A quick House Appropriations hearing this week referred all the good tax and spending limitation legislation to a subcommittee chaired by stalwart conservative Carl Isett of Lubbock. The legislation will get a hearing this week, which means now is a good time to write, call and e-mail your legislator, asking them to sign in to legislation like House Joint Resolution 53, HJR 2 and others.

The timing is good for TFR. Nearly 80,000 households in selected House and Senate districts around the state are receiving mail in the next few days asking them to raise their voices in favor of fiscal responsibility.

Add your voice today! Sign the online letter, supporting these important initiatives, and TFR will hand-deliver it to your legislator.

See the Elephant?
Last spring, 89.7 percent of Republican voters supported a primary ballot question calling for a greatly strengthened state spending limit.

Yet with two-third of the legislative session complete, not one major taxpayer protection bill has been heard in committee, much less made it to the floor for a vote. That’s a very large elephant sitting in the room; Texas taxpayers are beginning to wonder if the Republican majority in Austin will heed calls to reform government spending.

Seeing the fate of Republicans nationally who abandoned fiscal conservatism (and common sense), conservative voters hoped – expected – that strict limits on spending would fly through the Texas Legislature.

Considering the role issues like property tax relief, spending restraint and government reform took during the Republicans’ re-election campaigns in November, Texans should have seen solid results by now.

But what has occurred? Not much. Some Republican legislators think their districts are too safe to be challenged, and thus feel free to ignore the core principles of fiscal discipline that brought them power. Perhaps some are safe.

But a great many legislators are all too vulnerable, especially if a dispirited 10 percent of their base fails to show up on Election Day. A conservative-leaning Democrat could easily (and probably rightly) carry an election in several “Republican” districts; just ask a batch of former Republican congressmen how fun that is.

Losing a legislative majority is increasingly easy; some Republican legislators seem determined to make it even easier by failing to address core issues that motivate their voters.

Lawmakers must understand the simple politics of their precarious position; a failure to provide sound fiscal leadership will frustrate the voters they rely on most. By focusing the Legislature’s work now on providing true tax relief, a real spending limitation and honest budget reform, the Republican leadership could rightly claim to have delivered on their promises.

For Texas,
Michael Quinn Sullivan

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 11:45 am and is filed under Grassroots Tactics, State Budget, States, Taxes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.