San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Texas GOP chair treats allies like opposition
There are two types of political party leaders
There is the traditional type of party chair, who focuses on growing the party and helping candidates win races.
Then there are the party chairs who try to mold the party in their own image and orchestrate the activities of elected officials.
Allen West is the second kind of party chair.
West, a former one-term Florida congressman who moved to this state in 2014, has spent less than fourmonths as chairman of the Republican Party of Texas.
On his watch, Texas Republicans beat all doomsday election expectations in the Nov. 3 election by maintaining their 83-67 majority in the Texas House, holding on to all of their congressional seats and securing the state’s 38 electoral votes for President Donald Trump.
But West also has stirred up a remarkable amount of unrest by targeting fellow Republicans who fail to meet his ideological purity test.
In September, he joined a lawsuit against Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, in opposition to Abbott’s decision to extend early voting by six days and allow mail voters to drop off their ballots during the early voting period.
In October, West led a “Free Texas” demonstration outside the Governor’s Mansion, blasting Abbott for what West perceived to be overly stringent coronavirus restrictions in this state.
Over the past week, West has directed his fire at state Rep. Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, the presumptive next speaker of the Texas House.
After Phelan announced that he had the support of a clear majority of his House colleagues, West called Phelan a “Republican political traitor” and said the Republican Party of Texas “will not support nor accept” Phelan as speaker.
Last I checked, it was the support and acceptance of state representatives that mattered in the race for House speaker, but West doesn’t recognize those kinds of boundaries.
Although Phelan touted the support of 57 House Republicans (nearly 70 percent of the GOP caucus), West couldn’t stand the fact that Phelan also gained the backing of 49 Democrats.
What the reasonable political observer would interpret as a promising coalition for bipartisan governing, West viewed as a sellout. What longtime Texans would recognize as the standard way that speakers get elected in this state, West saw as a travesty.
On Nov. 9, San Antonio Republican Lyle Larson tweeted, “Mr. West needs to go back to Florida.”
Outgoing Republican House Speaker Dennis Bonnen described West as “out of line” and “irresponsible” this past Tuesday on a Lubbock radio show hosted by Chad Hasty. When West visited Hasty’s show three days later, the host mentioned Bonnen’s criticism, but West cut him off.
“It’s irrelevant to me,” West said.
West added: “You know, I never thought that standing up for principles and doing what is right could be termed as outspoken.”
A retired Army lieutenant colonel who served in Kuwait and Iraq, West rode into Congress in 2010 as part of the tea party wave. Two years later, redistricting sent him packing.
Throughout his political career, he has been prone to conspiracy mongering and overheated rhetoric recycled from the Joe McCarthy era.
During a 2012 Florida town hall, West asserted that there were “about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party (in Congress) that are members of the Communist Party.”
When the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced, a month before the 2012 presidential election, that the U.S. unemployment rate had dropped from 8.1 to 7.8 percent, West alleged that the numbers had beenmanipulated to help then-President Barack Obama.
“This is Orwellian to say the least,” West wrote on Facebook.
West’s conspiratorial bent and warrior mentality have aligned perfectly with the theory that Trump was cheated out of the Nov. 3 election by voter fraud. West helped lead a pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” rally Saturday in Dallas.
He is making this argument despite the fact that the cybersecurity agency under the oversight of Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security released a statement Thursday calling this year’s election “the most secure in American history.”
He is making this argument despite the fact that Trump’s own lawyers conceded in Arizona and Pennsylvania court proceedings that they found no election fraud.
West also has stated that his biggest concern about the election is universal mail voting, in which counties automatically send mail ballots to all registered voters.
It’s worth noting that only one battleground state — Nevada — employed universal mail voting during this election, and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden secured his victory even before the outcome in Nevada was settled.
Right now, West should be celebrating the GOP’s election success in Texas. But he’s a battalion commander who distrusts tranquility and sees enemies in his own ranks.
Republican elected officials know their party chair is a fighter: They just don’t know if he’s fighting for them or against them.