San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
O’Rourke: Fight on voting key to other wins
Beto O’Rourke will be spending Father’s Day on the south steps of the Texas Capitol.
The most famous Democrat in the state of Texas will join several of his allies — including former San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro — at the For the People Rally, a 5:30 p.m. gathering designed to build momentum for the voting rights cause.
That cause couldn’t be more timely, with 389 voter restriction bills introduced in 48 states this year and many Republicans trafficking in the Big Lie from their standard-bearer, former President Donald Trump, that voter fraud cost him the 2020 election.
Texas produced a particularly egregious election bill, Senate Bill 7, which was blocked only by a final-night walkout from House Democrats. It’s certain to resurface in a special session.
O’Rourke simultaneously hopes to put enough pressure on Texas Republicans to soften SB 7 and to galvanize public support for a federal voting rights bill, the For the People Act, which would override restrictive state laws.
He compares the GOP’s logic on voter fraud to that of the “arsonist wanting to gain credit for putting out the fire he started.” You stir up the public with allegations of fraud, then justify your restrictive legislation by saying the public is worried about election integrity.
O’Rourke, a former congressman from El Paso, did more to energize voters than any Texas
Democrat in the past 30 years, when he came within 2.6 percentage points of knocking off U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018.
He followed that up with a thoroughly disappointing presidential campaign that ended months before a single primary vote had been cast.
Since December 2019, however, his driving passion has been Powered by People, the political group he formed to register voters and increase election participation.
In a Friday interview, O’Rourke said his 2017-18 campaign odyssey, driving to each of the state’s 254 counties, instilled in him a missionary zeal when it came to the cause of voter participation.
“All the things I care about — confronting climate change before it’s too late, getting a minimum wage that’s a livable wage, expanding access to health care, addressing racial justice — are only possible when people can vote,” he said. “So I just think this fight is fundamental to winning any other fight.”
We perpetually hear that elections have consequences; and in Texas, those consequences can be extreme.
After Texas Democrats put a scare in the GOP in 2018, Republican lawmakers were on relatively good behavior during the 2019 legislative session, working in bipartisan fashion on a breakthrough public education funding bill.
This year, after Democrats flamed out in 2020, the GOP was on a mission to hammer through a series of culture war manifestos.
“(The 2020 election) helped Republicans go to the extreme in 2021,” O’Rourke said. “I think there will be another reaction to this in 2022.
“I would not be surprised if Democrats do very well in 2022, including capturing a majority in the state House, after the Republican majority failed to address the electricity grid, or prepare for the next pandemic, or expand Medicaid, or do any of the very basic things that I think Texans of both parties want them to do.”
In the three weeks since the legislative session ended, Republican lawmakers already have backed away from two of SB 7’s most divisive provisions: setting the Sunday early voting start time at 1 p.m. and lowering the bar for judges to overturn election results.
They continue, however, to push for other items that can’t be rationalized as election security measures, such as preventing counties from sending unsolicited applications for mail ballots to voters. (something that Gov. Greg Abbott’s campaign,
among others, has done).
O’Rourke recounts a recent visit to Rains County, a small, overwhelmingly Republican community in Northeast Texas, where he found common ground once the issues were clarified.
“The chairwoman of the Republican county party came to the event, and she kind of challenged me on some of this stuff,” O’Rourke said.
“She said, ‘What about voter ID?’ And I said, ‘Hey, I think we might be on the same page. What if we expanded Voter ID to the following forms of identification?’ And she said, ‘OK, I can get behind that.’”
In January, O’Rourke revealed that he was considering a 2022 run for governor. Five months later, with no other prominent Democrat in the race, he has neither entered the contest nor removed himself from contention.
“I want to see this fight through. And we’re really, really close on it,” he said of the voting rights battle. “I want to focus on this, and then I do want to see how I can best serve this state.
“That could be as a candidate. It could also be continuing the work we started with Powered by People. But one way or the other, I’m going to devote myself to public service in Texas, and feel very lucky to be able to do that.”