Author: mopress

By Greg Moses
Texas Civil Rights Review

Indymedia Austin / NorthTexas

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund is ready to take its school funding case to the Texas Supreme Court says attorney David Hinojosa. But MALDEF is worried that the legislature is once again failing to meet several school-funding standards already set by the courts.

On Friday the Supreme Court announced that it would take probable jurisdiction of the school funding case, setting a hundred-day calendar for pre-hearing briefs. MALDEF had resisted moving the case to the Supreme Court until an Austin trial court strengthened its ruling on funding equity, but now Hinojosa says MALDEF is not expecting to hear anything more from the lower court.

“We’re ready to go forward,” said Hinojosa when contacted by telephone at his San Antonio office. “We feel we have precedent to support our case, and if the court will apply the facts to that precedent, it will rule in our favor and in favor of the children of Texas.”

Meanwhile, Hinojosa says that the legislature is trying to answer “constitutional questions with political answers” and is therefore missing an opportunity to directly address solutions that are needed.

“MALDEF would be more than pleased to assist any of these legislators to craft a finance plan that will make it possible to never, never file another lawsuit,” says Hinojosa. But he doesn’t see such a plan in the works yet.

“It seems simple to put 100 percent of Texas students inside a single equitable system that offers equitable and adequate funding for everyone,” said Hinojosa Tuesday evening. “But the legislature is answering constitutional questions with political answers, and that’s where the problems occur.”

Hinojosa says the school funding plan now being considered by the legislature would increase the total percentage of students included in a fair system. But the smaller percentage of students left out will result in more dramatic disparities between the richest and poorest districts.

“The equity gap will grow,” says Hinojosa, “giving some students so much more of an advantage. Yet these are public schools we’re talking about.”

“The legislative plan is lacking in many elements,” says Hinojosa. “It is not addressing root problems identified by the trial court, especially when it comes to the inadequacy of state funding for students who are bilingual or economically disadvantaged.”

“And this plan doesn’t even include facilities, which are grossly inadequate and grossly inefficient,” added Hinojosa. “The plan fulfills a legacy in the legislature of failing to fulfill the educational needs of the children of Texas.”

Editorial
By Greg Moses

In a failed editorial on Sunday, I noted that Democratic officialdom was ignoring two things: the ongoing effort by Brenda Denson Prince to win election to Kaufman County Commissioner, and the harassment of Houston voters by Republican attorneys during the Heflin-Vo election contest.

The editorial failed, because it attempted to name the ignored topics under a general heading: “grassroots.” Since the Texas Democratic Party website makes use of the “grassroots” term, I thought the label would help to rally interest not only toward Prince and the Houston voters, but to a general will of some kind. But I was wrong about this. “Grassroots” turns out to be a pretty useless word. For some, it is no different than mainstream, for others it raises fears of loose cannons. I have learned that “grassroots” is a poor term to use when attempting to mobilize “progressive” Democrats.

So let’s forget the general terms and stick to the facts. Democratic officialdom has NOT publicly responded to the harassment of Democratic voters in Houston or to the ongoing struggle of Brenda Denson Prince in Kaufman County. These are just the facts. The official website of the party says many things, but nothing about Prince or the harassment of Houston voters.

Editorial
By Greg Moses

The term mainstream keeps coming up as an aspiration for Democratic Party strategists, and this worries me.

For one thing, mainstream to me screams status quo, and how are we ever going to get anywhere with an aspiration like that?

For another thing, if I go to the party website for Texas Democrats, I find mainstream on one page and grassroots on another. And I want to know, how can you do both at the same time?

Grassroots sounds okay to me. It means that you’re looking to the rising aspirations of people who have not yet come to full power. It means that you’re trying to affect if not revolutionize the mainstream. It means, in the words of Amy Goodman, who spoke in Austin yesterday that you are going where the silence is in order to hear what the future needs to be.

By comparison, mainstream is quite a defensive slogan. It tends to increase pressure to NOT listen to new and troubling voices.

Or to put it another way, Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about the difference between a thermometer and a thermostat. Mainstream is a thermometer measurement. It tells you the temperature of the political climate as it exists. Grassroots on the other hand is a thermostat concept, because when you get into it, you start wanting to change the temperature.

So, to Texas Democrats, a word of encouragement: drop the mainstream language.

Danny Glover last night at the benefit for the Texas Civil Rights Project whispered the famous Langston Hughes line: “America was never America to me.” It was a profound reminder that “mainstream” has never been mainstream for so many worthy voices.

If I try to imagine the motivation behind the clinging to mainstream, the best motivation seems to come from a fear of losing the so-called culture wars, of being left (yes left) with the smaller faction of votes whenever the “wedge” issues get pounded on: issues like gay marriage, pot smoking, affirmative action, reproductive rights for women.

But the best answer to this fear was suggested a couple of weeks ago by Damu Smith of Black Voices for Peace when he addressed a peace conference in Dallas. He said if your program is comprehensive enough and is really aggressive on all matters of jobs and justice, then the wedge issues won’t kill you. I’m putting my own words to his message here, but he seemed to suggest that Democrats were vulnerable to wedge issues only because they were so weak on everything else: war, jobs, rights, whatever.

So Democrats have pieces of the answer already in their language and history. Grassroots, civil rights, housing, wages, women’s reproductive rights, workers’ organizing rights, full and fair education, rights to speech and assembly. It would be great if we could add to this list Peace.

Democrats could do worse than follow the general outlines of an American dream articulated by King (and wonderfully revived last night in a performance by Felix Justice). Fight racism, poverty, and war. Work on empowerment politically, economically, and ideologically. Apologize NOT for your attempt to make America BE America. And who knows, someday we might have a mainstream we can live with.

Meanwhile, the focus on mainstream is damaging needed attention to grassroots. How many words have been devoted by official Democratic channels to the bad voter bill introduced by Kaufman County’s Betty Brown? Well, I’m happy to report that the party channels seem to be working very well in this instance. Now compare that to the number of words that official party people have uttered in recognition of Kaufman County Commissioner candidate Brenda Denson Prince, who is STILL fighting her fair election contest, and you’ll find in the word-count difference the tragedy of a mainstream party trying to survive without its grassroots.

Or take another example from the Heflin-Vo contest. How many grassroots Democrat voters were harassed by Republican attorneys in this race? Again, let me applaud any support that the official party mechanisms have thrown toward newly elected state rep Hubert Vo. But let me also wonder out loud, where is the matching concern for the grassroots voters that made Vo’s victory possible?

The mainstream strategy expresses and encourages a politics that will surely wither the aspirations of grassroots values as it ignores the struggles of ordinary Democrats who seek empowerment through voting and elections. So it is PAINFUL for me to watch Democrat officaldom (officialdumb?) holler “Mainstream!” and whisper “grassroots.” Surely, this is a hollow strategy that will collapse under the weight of its own pretensions.

If the leadership of Howard Dean means anything here, then the so-called grassroots movement among Texas Democrats will not prove to be just another mainstream shelter for a wanna-be status quo. But when I look at the recent experience of Houston voters or one Kaufman County candidate, I am NOT encouraged by what I see.

---

Notes:

First posted Sunday, Feb. 20, 2005.

Greg Wythe considers and rejects the argument at GregsOpinion.

In short, even a good thermostat has to compare itself to a thermometer reading in order to measure progress. To do otherwise, is to seek out reform for the sake of reform alone – a chaotic proposition at best. A grassroots without a tether cord to reality is not a true grassroots movement so much as a loose cannon.

Wythe’s response seems to join in spirit with two brief comments posted at Democratic Underground that want to minimize the diff between mainstream and grassroots, as if “grassroots” posed a threat of some kind. These responses prove that any assertion of grassroots urgency will have difficulty even among self-described progressive Democrats. I should not be surprised by this, I know. But I am surprised. I had imagined that “progressive” included a vigorous “grassroots” commitment. Now I have to ask, what does progressive mean, anyway?

While Wythe’s response announces a disagreement, in fact it affirms a main assumption: that a thermostat or a grassroots movement aims to change the existing temperature or status quo. Yet the prospect of such change seems to make Wythe nervous. Again, I have to figure out why a self-described “progressive” thinks that “grassroots” reform cannot be reality based. For me “grassroots” reform is where emerging realities are born. Perhaps this is what makes me a self-described “lefty.”

On the other hand, SoniaS at DU says there is a self-described grassroots movement in the Democratic Party:

We’ve all heard that saying “if ain’t broke don’t fix it”. Well that’s the m.o. around the party still, but at least they are now willing to try. The grassroots committee is completely brand new. They just set that up at the last SDEC meeting in January. The SDEC simply wouldn’t give up on that. Supposedly it had been proposed for many years but never approved. I think the success of the Dean organization finally woke them up. And I mean success, in terms of the Democracy for Texas growing, the Progressive Populist Caucus growing, and what happened with Travis getting bluer etc.

Sonia’s reply indicates that “grassroots” is a term that has finally achieved practical value in 2005. We’ll see what comes out of the Saturday meeting of the Progressive Populist Caucus.

Aside from the philosophical debate, two specific questions remain: will Democratic officaldom respond to the needs of either Brenda Denson Prince or the Democratic voters who were harassed in Houston? Maybe “grassroots” is not the best way to describe what’s being ignored here.

National Edition of ‘Why Andy Taylor Should Have His Law License Revoked’, posted at ILCAOnline

By Greg Moses
Editor, Texas Civil Rights Review

Texas attorney Andy Taylor set out to prove that illegal and fraudulent voter behaviors were the main reasons behind the November election defeat of a Republican incumbent in a West Houston race for the Texas House. But according to archives of original documents that Taylor submitted in support of his case, it appears that he willfully ignored plain evidence that a number of voters were more likely victims, not perpetrators of wrongdoing. He went after them anyway.

Several voters of Nigerian descent discovered when they tried to vote in the November elections, that they had been fraudulently re-registered into a neighboring House District. Sometime in late 2003, someone had submitted new registrations for these voters, placing them into a legislative district that would soon involve a candidate of Nigerian descent. The candidate lost to an incumbent in the Democratic primary election.

During public hearings in the election contest that he brought to the legislature on behalf of his client Talmadge Heflin, Taylor argued that these African-American voters who preferred Democrat Hubert Vo should have their votes tossed out because they were cast in a legislative district other than where the voters were registered.

Yet, anyone with access to the original documents in the Heflin-Vo election contest (including Taylor himself, who submitted the docs in the first place) would have been able to plainly read the explanation that “fraudulent addresses” for voters of Nigerian descent had been allegedly submitted by someone other than the voters. In fact, the assertion was twice stated in carefully written explanations on envelopes for provisional ballots submitted by a husband-wife pair of voters.

The provisional ballots were approved by Harris County election officials who accepted that the voters should be considered as properly registered. And legislative Master of Discovery Will Hartnett (R-Dallas) also ruled the ballots to be legal. Hartnett explained in the election hearing that he had taken the time to call up one of the voters and discuss the predicament.

While it appeared to someone viewing the hearing that Hartnett was being exceedingly perceptive in his discovery of a pattern of fraud against the voters, in fact he was just reading what was plainly written, not once but twice, on the evidence submitted by Taylor. This plainly stated explanation, which was accepted by Harris County officials and Hartnett, never stopped Taylor from trying to suppress the votes of these African-American voters nevertheless, along with their votes for Vo.

The significance of this finding is that Taylor (the same attorney who defended the heavy-handed redistricting of the Texas Congressional map in 2004) continued to pursue allegations in a public hearing that a number of Nigerian-American voters (4-9 cases according to my preliminary estimate) had cast illegal ballots, even as he placed exculpatory evidence on the record that plainly indicated they were victims not perpetrators of fraud.

By pursuing his allegations against these voters in the context of a rare legislative election contest, Taylor used his law license to call down the power of the state to pursue certain voters under threat of arrest, when he had every reason to suspect they were innocent from the start. If the law is going to jealously guard Taylor’s right to pursue election irregularities, should it not just as jealously guard the rights of voters against willful and obnoxious harassment by agents of the law?

Taylor’s bad faith attack on these African-American voters counts as a Civil Rights infringement in two ways. First, it was an effort to criminalize voters of color by deliberately overlooking exculpatory evidence on the record. Second, it counts as a bad faith effort to overturn the election of a candidate of color. Using the power of law to harass voters of African descent in an effort to unseat a candidate of Vietnamese descent, accusing all parties of fraud when your own evidence indicates they have done nothing wrong, this is offensive, outrageous, indecent, and should cost Andy Taylor his license to practice law in Texas.

Note: The Texas Civil Rights Review contacted Andy Taylor via voice mail on Thursday afternoon and invited him to reply. As of Saturday morning, he had not responded.