Why did state leaders let the federal government mess with Texas?
Let me begin by noting that I am a longtime apologist for the 10th Amendment, which stipulates that powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the people or the states. Similarly, I’ve often defended Texas leaders for getting crossways with their counterparts in Washington. The concept of “states’ rights” has been invoked to justify all manner of sin. But sometimes the federal government is the author of an injustice, rather than merely complicit with it. And even politicians who mean well are perfectly capable of bungling things. So I appreciate the 10th Amendment for the same reason I appreciate the separation of powers: It’s good to have checks and balances. And Texas should lead the nation in standing up to the federal government when the latter is out of line. We’re a net contributor to federal tax receipts, with 38 electoral votes; our fellow Americans need us on such occasions.
Texans who share that perspective will understand why I find our state’s current leadership vacuum profoundly embarrassing, among other things. One would think that Texas Republicans could have persuaded Republican leaders in Washington to provide disaster relief by this point. And one would expect them to object to any unusually brazen efforts to mess with Texas, such as the one we learned about this week.
The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which was established in June and disbanded in Jan. 3, was billed as an effort to improve the security of our federal elections by identifying our vulnerabilities. To that end, the commission asked state election officials to provide all their publicly available records about registered voters. On Monday, The Washington Post reported that the commission had asked Texas officials for an extra assist: In addition to providing the records in question, they wanted us to
highlight the ones related to voters with Hispanic surnames.
That is so wildly inappropriate that even the visionary behind the commission recoiled when the Post asked him about it.
“At no time did the commission request any state to flag surnames by ethnicity or race,” said Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, who served as vice chair of the commission under Vice President Mike Pence.
“It certainly wasn’t a committee decision,” he insisted, after being told that the commission’s policy adviser did so when he filled out the forms required to purchase Texas data.
I’ll confess that I always had my doubts about whether the commission was really about safeguarding our federal elections, rather than a certain president’s self-esteem. Donald Trump won the election in 2016. But he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton and was clearly receptive to the notion that up to 5 million of the votes cast in the presidential election were cast illegally.
Texas’ compliance
This was a baseless claim, needless to say. And even the people who floated it as a possibility, including Kobach, declined to corroborate Trump’s additional contention that most of those illegal votes were cast in California, all of which were for Clinton.
Still, this is why Trump decided to establish the commission. And thankfully, many states refused to play along; that’s why the commission was disbanded earlier this month.
But Texas was among the states that agreed to comply, at least partially, with the commission’s request. In July, Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos announced that his office would provide Trump’s commissars with some information about Texas voters, including our names, addresses and whether we have turned out for state elections in the past.
“As always, my office will continue to exercise the utmost care whenever sensitive voter information is required to be released by state or federal law,” Pablos said in a July statement explaining his decision.
As he noted, the information he had agreed to provide is public. It can, in theory, be used responsibly and for legitimate purposes.
I would add that my own experiences with the Texas secretary of state’s office, both as a voter and a journalist who has served on the agency’s Elections Advisory Committee, have given me no reason to question the professionalism of its employees or their commitment to encouraging Texans to participate in the electoral process.
Also, there’s a reason that the commission singled out voters with Hispanic surnames in Texas specifically. The Texas secretary of state’s office offers the option of flagging Hispanic surnames to people purchasing voter registration data. That’s the result of a 1983 ruling from the Department of Justice that required Texas to step up its efforts to facilitate access to information about bilingual voters.
Wrong decision
But I think it’s fair to say that Kobach’s commission had goals other than improving ballot access. The data itself could clearly be used for purposes other than that. And so this week’s news makes it all the more clear that Pablos made the wrong call.
The voter information he agreed to release was requested by the federal government, not required. A lawsuit filed by the Texas NAACP and Texas League of Women Voters argued that providing it would have violated state law, under which the data should not be made available for commercial purposes.
That’s debatable, perhaps. But let me raise the following question: Why on earth would the state of Texas debate that? If the federal government is making dubious requests, Texas leaders should respond by suggesting that the federal government go fly a kite.
And the appropriate response to Kobach’s request, certainly, would have been considerably less polite.