Peter Morrison is back with an admonition to conservative Texans to get busy on the next election cycle. What with the federal courts intervening in our redistricting process, it makes this election ever more important to weed out the RINO’s from state and national politics as much as possible.

I think this applies to just about every state, even those that we may think are lost such as California. After all, every move towards conservatism is a step back from communism.

The Peter Morrison Report

Summary of this week’s report:

RINOs are the curse of the GOP, but, as hard as it is to believe after two years of Tea Party activism, many key RINOs are still in office and Joe Straus is still the Texas Speaker.  Despite the current redistricting turmoil, we need to organize to give the boot to as many RINOs in Austin and DC as possible.

Full report:

In 2012, Texas conservatives need to focus our energies on removing our own RINOs from office, and keeping them off the Republican ticket, this coming election.  It’s impossible to overstate how important this task is, on both the state and the national levels.  RINOs are poison to a conservative agenda.   There is little real difference between them and Democrats, and once elected they use their power to sabotage attempts to enact good conservative legislation.  We’ve seen this take place in Austin over and over.  No matter how loudly conservatives speak at the polls, and how good prospects for conservative legislation look, the RINOs in the party often manage to water good bills down, or block them altogether.

On top of this, activist federal judges have thrown the election into complete turmoil by throwing out the new legislative district maps recently drawn up in Austin, creating their own maps, and ordering the state to follow them.  This was in response to a lawsuit claiming that the maps drawn up in Austin discriminated against non-white voters, particularly Hispanics.  The court found in their favor and drew up new maps that were much more to their liking, because they include more districts where Hispanics are a majority. (You can compare the legislature’s map and the court’s map by doing an internet search for Texas District Viewer.) Given long established voting patterns, what this boils down to is that the court has created several more solidly Democratic districts, and eliminated some solidly Republican districts.

Attorney General Greg Abbott has filed an emergency appeal with the US Supreme Court to put the enactment of this ruling on hold, partly because Monday, November 28th was the first day a person who intends to run for office could file paperwork for a place on the ballot.  When it’s not even clear what districts will exist come Election Day, it’s pretty difficult to file the proper paperwork, so everything is in flux right now. Hopefully common sense and judicial restraint will prevail at the Supreme Court, and this ruling will be put on hold, but that is by no means certain.  Furthermore, even if this ruling does wind up being eventually overturned on appeal, the voting trends driven by huge population growth among Hispanics in Texas virtually assure that the state legislature and Congressional delegation will become increasingly less Republican and more Democratic.

Given all these factors – the dim prospects of a truly conservative presidential candidate, the state elections being up in the air, and the massive demographic changes taking place in Texas, it’s imperative that we work harder than ever in 2012 to elect genuine conservatives to the state house and to Congress.  The 2010 elections demonstrated what we can do when we’re truly motivated, and we need to recapture that same level of energy and motivation for the Republican primaries of 2012, which take place in early March.

If a RINO currently represents your district in Austin or DC, or if one is currently the favorite for the GOP nomination, start organizing now to defeat him or her in the primary.  Wherever there are genuine conservative challengers, it’s time to get behind them. If there aren’t currently any, it’s time to recruit someone.  If you don’t know of anyone else that might run, consider running yourself! It’s easy to think of reasons not to run or get involved, but as Edmund Burke once said, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

Don’t underestimate the impact you may have.  All incumbents either run unopposed or run scared.  RINOs in particular know they have betrayed their base and are scared of being called on it.  Several conservatives won in 2010 in the primary against well-funded incumbents, like former RINO state representatives Tommy Merritt and Delwin Jones.  By running against someone, even if you lose, you make them spend money, money that an unopposed incumbent can use to prop up his fellow RINOs in other districts.  If you lose and do better than expected, you might still accomplish your goal.

Case in point: RINO Burt Solomons just announced he won’t be seeking re-election.  Insiders I know report that this is because he was shown to be weak in the 2010 primary when he squeaked by with 53% of the vote against an opponent who spent a tiny amount of money, and big money conservative donors were looking to run a very strong race against him this year, so he chickened out.  There’s nothing more humiliating for an incumbent than to lose in a primary (and many of them are lazy from years in office with no serious campaigns), so often fear of losing makes them quit, and you win by default.  This happened in 2010 when RINO Brian McCall decided not to run after the Tea Party started organizing against him in 2009; now that district is represented by a real conservative, Rep. Van Taylor.  Slowly but surely conservatives are removing the turncoats who betrayed their constituents and elected Joe Straus as Speaker.

The Republican primary election date of March 6th is not very far away at all.  Right now, the candidate filing deadline is December 15th.  That may change, depending on what happens in the courts.

In the next few weeks we’ll have a definitive answer one way or another on the redistricting map, so if your district is currently in flux that should change soon.  So keep an eye on the news, and get ready to do battle this March with GOP sellouts!

If you have any specific questions about your district, such as whether your incumbent deserves a challenger, feel free to email in.  I can find out if there is an existing challenger and help connect you with some folks who can help you if you decide to run.

The Peter Morrison Report

http://www.PeterMorrisonReport.com

http://www.facebook.com/morrisonreport

Sources:

 http://www.empowertexans.com/around-texas/the-very-definition-of-modern-judicial-activism/

http://www.empowertexans.com/features/judicial-gerrymandering/