Recent editorials from Texas newspapers

San Antonio Express-News. Oct. 4, 2015.

Reports offer context on immigration

A couple of recent reports on immigration do much to inform the debate on the topic. All sides should pay attention.

The first report, by the Pew Research Center, reaches the eye-opening conclusion that 88 percent of the U.S. population increase between 2015 and 2065 (to 441 million) will come from immigrants and their descendants.

It breaks down this way: 56 percent of this growth will be from new immigrants; 26 percent because of the addition to the country of their U.S. born children; and 5 percent from the immigrants’ grandchildren by 2065. Another 12 percent will come from the growth generated by people who were already here in 2015.

And the foreign-born, says Pew, will still account for only 18 percent of the U.S. population in 2065, “only” being a relative term. This will exceed the historic high of 14.8 percent set in 1890, but it will still mean at least 82 percent of residents will be U.S. citizens. And the number of citizens will certainly be even higher than that because foreign-born doesn’t mean a person hasn’t been naturalized, though the naturalization rates for immigrants can stand some improvement.

Have fears about their failure to assimilate and what this means to the social fabric? Don’t. Another report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine says assimilation is occurring as quickly as previous immigrant waves, measured in improvement in education, the quality of jobs secured over time and income gains. And this process includes learning English - the only language spoken by the third generation of those immigrant households.

But there’s a twist. Incarceration rates are lower and labor participation higher for immigrants, who also tend to be healthier than the native-born in many respects. At some point, however, their native-born progeny start mimicking their fellow native-born - which means they start getting jailed at the same rates and developing work habits like the native-born.

But they are assimilating and will likely do so even more quickly if immigration reform offers a path to legal residency. The anti-immigration rhetoric of late simply isn’t supported by the conclusions outlined in these reports.

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Houston Chronicle. Oct. 2, 2015.

No Cruz control: Texans would like to see Sen. Ted Cruz focus his energies on Texas interests

On a sunny spring day in 2010, rising fifth-graders from J.R. Harris Elementary, a prize-winning school near the Ship Channel, gathered at the newly opened East Side headquarters of the Harris County Republican Party. They were there near the end of the school year to claim new bikes from the party for having met their TAKS requirements. Before the youngsters could claim their prizes, though, they had to listen to a few political speeches, including stem-winding remarks from a dark-haired guy who had been the Texas solicitor general in years past. Sitting cross-legged and quiet on the gym floor, they endured a speech aimed more at the TV cameras than at them. Talking over the kids, literally and figuratively, on that May afternoon five years ago was the Republican Party’s soon-to-be rising star, Ted Cruz.

Even then, it seemed, Cruz was running for president, two years before he took the intermediate step of winning a U.S. Senate seat in a crushing defeat of then-Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. Cruz has been running ever since, to the neglect of the people of Texas. Unlike the state’s senior senator, John Cornyn, who, while less so lately, follows in the tradition of former U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison by focusing on the needs of his fellow Texans, the state’s junior member of that august body focuses on himself.

The constitutional-conservative crusader is not going to be the next president. He’s not likely to be the Republican Party nominee, despite his rapturous following among archconservatives and recent polls showing him running second to Donald Trump among registered Texas voters who say they’ll vote in the Republican primary. Nationally, according to the RealClearPolitics average, he’s in sixth place at the moment with 6.2 percent of the vote.

Now we have confirmation that when he trudges back to postelection Capitol Hill next year, he’s also likely to have trouble succeeding in the Senate. His fellow solons, Republican and Democrat, don’t like him, aren’t shy about saying so and don’t trust him enough to work with him on legislative matters that might redound to the good of Texas. Conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post labeled him “the Rodney Dangerfield of the GOP.”

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., put it this way, as he explained why Cruz was unable to force a government shutdown a few days ago over funding for Planned Parenthood: “He is pretty much done for and stifled, and it’s really because of personal relationships, or lack of personal relationships, and it is a problem.”

Granted, Paul is on the presidential hustings himself, but that’s a truly damning assessment from a fellow Republican.

Cruz, of course, relishes his self-proclaimed role as the insurgent insider whose mission is to oppose - oppose Planned Parenthood, oppose Obamacare, oppose immigration reform, oppose Common Core, oppose the Environmental Protection Agency, oppose the IRS, oppose the Iran deal, oppose any kind of sensible gun regulation. “From the moment he arrived, his only purpose as a senator has been to excoriate the GOP leadership of that body and depict himself as a lone tree standing in the RINO desert,” Washington Monthly blogger Ed Kilgore pointed out last week.

Texas voters knew what they were getting, of course, when they sent him to Washington, but at the risk of sounding parochial, we’d like to see him focus his energies and his vaunted intellect on something other than opposition. Could he focus on NASA for a while or hurricane preparedness or health care or energy issues? Could he pay attention to higher education or the advantages the Export-Import Bank offers to Texas business or economic cooperation with Mexico? Those are just a few Texas interests he’s supposed to be representing.

Cruz is still a young man, still a rookie senator, so there’s always a chance he’ll resume his Senate duties after next year’s general election as an older, wiser, somewhat chastened representative of the people. It could happen, although it’s more likely he’ll take a cue from one of his mentors, former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, and leave the Senate to become the unelected leader of the Conservative Movement. He still could be running for president for years to come.

For those East Side youngsters at J.R. Harris School a few years back, the tires will be flattened and the fenders dented on the bikes they won, but they’ll still have an opportunity to vote for Cruz - regardless of whether he’s done anything for their native state.

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The Dallas Morning News. Oct. 1, 2015.

Cruz, Cornyn dragging feet on crisis-level judicial vacancies

When you go to federal court, you expect to have a judge.

But in Texas, vacancies in the federal judiciary remain unfilled for months, sometimes years. The system is operating under emergency status from the crush of too many cases and too few judges. And Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, the men empowered to recommend candidates to the president, haven’t moved quickly enough to address crisis-level vacancies in a timely manner.

Right now, there are nine Texas vacancies - two on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and seven on its district courts. The oldest vacancy, in the Southern District of Texas (Brownsville), dates to June 2011. Six other district court seats across Texas have been without a judge since July 2013. And little progress as been made since this time last year: There are only two fewer district court vacancies now than a year ago, and the same number of Circuit Court of Appeals vacancies.

The crisis likely will worsen before it improves. The Eastern District of Texas (Tyler), one of the busiest courts in the nation, is already short two judges. It will have a third vacancy in January when a judge moves from full-time duty to “senior” status and a lighter workload. Many other federal judges are expected to reduce their workload or retire in the next few years, creating greater urgency for filling positions quickly.

Cornyn and Cruz need to do better. Most of these vacancies were created by judges who left after giving months of advance notice. Yet the senators just now are beginning to formally seek replacements for some of these positions. At their snail’s pace, these seats are likely to be empty well into 2016. Maybe longer.

In an email, an aide to Cornyn said the senators are “making progress on filling vacancies in other, less-visible, ways.” The senators recently recommended to the White House two names to fill a vacancy in Dallas and are accepting applications for judges in the Southern and Eastern Districts. That’s great news, but shouldn’t replacements have been agreed upon months, if not years, ago?

A shortage of qualified applicants is not the problem. It is most likely foot-dragging on the part of the senators, presumably because federal judicial posts are lifetime appointments, shape federal law and can be stepping stones to the U.S. Supreme Court. There’s a great temptation to play partisan politics with such decisions. If that is a factor here, it is wrong.

Justice fails when the court system fails. Crowded courts and long waits mean higher costs and justice delayed.

As lawyers, Cornyn and Cruz know what is at stake. Now they need to fix it.

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Austin American-Statesman. Oct. 1, 2015.

RINO: A label for a Republican who tries to govern

Congress passed a temporary spending bill last week that keeps the government open through Dec. 11. The vote means Congress has given itself 10 weeks to try to negotiate a long-term budget deal. Or, to put it another way, Congress has given itself 10 weeks to get back to where it was the day before the vote.

Optimism does not follow last week’s vote.

Meanwhile, House Speaker John Boehner prepares to leave Congress at the end of the month. Boehner announced his resignation last month, and as one of his final acts as speaker, he refused to go along with his party’s hard-core conservatives who wanted to shut down the government over federal funding of Planned Parenthood. Boehner did not want to a repeat of 2013, when a similar fight over the Affordable Care Act shut down the government for more than two weeks.

Boehner’s exit won’t end congressional dysfunction and paralysis, not when ideologically rigid Republicans insist on political purity, and not when the pursuit of purity and the reality of governing are incompatible. Odds are Boehner’s successor - at this point, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California is expected to be elected speaker next week - won’t fare any better with the party’s hard right than Boehner.

Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has been full frontal in cheering Boehner’s resignation and criticizing the Ohio Republican for planning to remain speaker until Oct. 30 rather than leave office sooner. Cruz was leading the charge to strip Planned Parenthood of its federal funding and was willing to shut down the government over the issue. Never mind that an attempt to defund Planned Parenthood would have failed because Democrats would have blocked a vote on the issue in the Senate. In addition, President Barack Obama would have vetoed the effort should it somehow have succeeded in Congress.

Using the kind of language that has earned him widespread contempt from his Republican colleagues in Congress - language and action that at various times have prompted Arizona Sen. John McCain to call him a “wacko bird,” Rep. Peter King of New York “a carnival barker” and Boehner “a jackass” - Cruz called last week’s vote to keep the government open for the next 10 weeks “a win for the Washington cartel, and another setback for the American people. Republican leadership chose to abandon its constitutional power of the purse and to fund 100 percent of President Obama’s failed agenda.”

Cruz spares no one. He has been equally openly critical of Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, and, by implication, Texas Sen. John Cornyn. When Cruz refers to the “Republican leadership” he’s full aware that Cornyn is the No. 2 Republican leader in the Senate.

Last week, Boehner correctly called Cruz and his allies “false prophets” because they “whip people into a frenzy believing they can accomplish things that they know - they know - are never going to happen.”

Accusing their leaders of betraying them is nothing new to the GOP’s self-proclaimed true believers. It’s as common as their regular forecasts that gloom and doom will follow every Democratic initiative put into law.

To his credit, Boehner was not willing to shut down the government over funding Planned Parenthood - and for once he acted in defiance of his party’s obstructionists. But Boehner is no less conservative on most issues than Cruz. A lot of the headaches he and other Republican leaders have faced over the past few years are of their own making - arising from their unwillingness to confront a political monster they facilitated and encouraged. Boehner was an accessory to his own political demise.

But Boehner at least understood that compromise and making deals are necessary to govern effectively. Acknowledging that a good legislator must sometimes put pragmatism above ideology hardly made Boehner a Republican in name only - or a RINO, the dreaded label Republican absolutists attach to anyone they consider insufficiently conservative.

As for Cruz, it is the comfort of his Senate seat that allows him to maintain his own political purity, as he sees it. In the Senate, he can rail safely against those he sees as traitors to conservatism without fear of having to engage pragmatically in governing. Attempting to govern can be left to others.

But should Cruz become president, as he hopes, or should he suddenly decide to take his role as legislator seriously, Cruz probably will find himself where he and his fellow purists now see Boehner and McConnell: as a traitor to the cause. The RINO label awaits anyone who actually tries to govern.

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Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Oct. 4, 2015.

Texas’ top court downsized the right to know

Among the most basic of the reasons for We the People to have a right to know is so we can review how our government is spending our money.

The Texas Public Information Act protects this right, with careful exceptions meant to protect commerce without infringing on this basic right. An example is the right of a private company that contracts with the state to protect trade secrets that make its products or services unique.

Recently, the Texas Supreme Court extended private companies’ right to keep secrets from the public way too far. In a 7-1 ruling leaving dissenting Justice Jeff Boyd as the lone defender of the public’s best interests, the court has decided that Boeing, the Seattle aerospace giant, could withhold financial details of a lease of public property - the former Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio.

Boeing had been fighting since 2005 against disclosing details such as its share of maintenance costs and its insurance obligations. There are a few rare secrets that even we advocates of the fullest possible disclosure would concede - begrudgingly - are worth keeping. But these aren’t those. We’d understand if the request were for the Boeing equivalent of the Colonel’s 11 secret herbs and spices. But Boeing wasn’t fighting disclosure of how to build an aircraft nobody else knows how to build.

What was at stake were mostly financial secrets - cost-of-doing-business stuff. The court decided that Boeing had a right not to risk giving competitors the advantage of knowing Boeing’s overhead costs. The court also decided that the advantage didn’t have to be decisive. Any advantage at all would be too much of an advantage.

Because, heavens to Betsy, theoretically somebody else could use that kind of information to outbid Boeing. And we wouldn’t want that to happen, now would we?

Oh, wait a minute, yes We the People would. If it’s a government contract, the taxpaying public would benefit from either a better bid by a competitor or a more competitive bid by Boeing.

Private companies should know and accept that there are risks and responsibilities involved when they contract with the government. If the risks weren’t well worth it, there would be no government contractors.

The public right given up by the court to protect Boeing from acceptable risk is unacceptable. As the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas pointed out, contracts between governments and private companies traditionally are what’s known as “super public” except for those aforementioned rare exceptions. The Colonel can keep secret how he makes chicken, but seriously, if he has contracted with the government to make chicken, his cost of chicken shouldn’t be kept secret from the ultimate buyer of the chicken.

The request for the lease information came from a former Boeing employee - not that who asked for it, or why, matters. Who asked for it is a matter of public record. Why is supposed to be nobody’s beeswax according to the law. Any individual should feel comfortable exercising the right to request public information as did this former Boeing employee. We point this out because not enough people know they have this right and they might feel intimidated trying to exercise it.

It’s unfortunate that the court put the rights of this intimidating large corporation first, thus extending the rights of large, intimidating corporations at the expense of those it should protect. We rue the chilling effect of this ruling. The Legislature should undo the damage at its first opportunity.