Degrees Of Value, Degrees Of Control

What the Texas Legislature is doing while most of the state isn’t voting.

One more legislative week is now under our belt, and the legislators will have the weekend off. Today, the major topics of debate are voter suppression and the oppression of free thought on college campuses.

We’ll get to that, but first, here is West Texas Representative Wesley Virdell (R-HD53) talking about balls (as in testicles):

Yeah.

That was during the debate for HB437, which is about making sure that transgender children incarcerated in juvenile detention facilities are housed with the same gender as on their birth certificate. Even though this is not an issue in Texas, nor is there any record of it happening, Valoree Swanson (R-HD150) is very worried a transgender girl might rape a cis-gender girl in juvenile detention. Her bill excludes transgender boys.

The Republican obsession with children’s genitals continues to ooze its way through this session like a sewer line backing up into the Capitol. It’s gross, it’s creepy, and frankly, it says a lot more about them than the kids they claim to be protecting.

The sheer amount of legislative time spent policing the identities of vulnerable children, many of whom are in the juvenile system because they’ve already experienced trauma, is nothing short of state-sanctioned harassment. There is something deeply wrong with this. And no, it’s not the trans kids.

While Valoree Swanson was busy laying out a bill obsessing over what kids had in their pants, her protégé, Lacey Hull (R-HD138), was in another committee hearing discussing what kids were putting in their mouths.

Republicans continue sidestepping real access to healthcare while pretending to care about public health.

To her credit, Hull opened with some genuinely alarming statistics: American life expectancy is plummeting, early-onset cancer rates are up, and over 40% of adults are obese. We spend more on healthcare than any other nation and somehow still live shorter, sicker lives. So what’s her solution? Universal healthcare? Free school meals? Medicaid expansion?

Of course not.

HB25 is the House version of Kolkhorst’s health initiative we discussed last month. It proposes nutrition advisory councils, more PE in schools, updated food labeling, and vague warnings on ingredients banned in other countries.

Daily PE and better health education are important. But it’s hard to take a wellness agenda seriously when it comes from the same party that has consistently blocked basic access to healthcare at every turn. You want to talk about childhood obesity while keeping millions of low-income kids uninsured? You want to combat chronic illness but refuse to fund mental health care? You want families to know what’s in their food but still let medical debt destroy them?

It’s all theater.

Are the elections in Texas still not secure?

If you tuned in to the House Elections Committee yesterday, you’d think Texas was ground zero for some mass voter fraud apocalypse. Forget that the actual data says otherwise. The GOP is once again treating the Elections Code like their personal anxiety blanket.

Let’s take a look at what the committee dragged in:

It’s all part of a familiar script. Raise the alarm, restrict access, criminalize the process, repeat. The right-wing rhetoric insists our elections are broken, but the only thing being broken here is public trust and voter access.

So, are our elections secure?

Yes.

Are Republicans trying to convince you otherwise to pass even more restrictions?

Also yes.

But by all means, let’s keep pretending the real crisis in Texas is too many people voting. Listen to what Ballotpedia had to say about Texas voter turnout in the Senate Committee on State Affairs:

Texas voter turnout in the May elections, the so-called “off-cycle” elections, is so low that it practically doesn’t register. The average turnout across the state’s seven largest counties was 8.3%. It was even worse in Harris County, home to nearly 5 million people, with an average turnout of 4.8%. That means the electoral equivalent of a PTA meeting is deciding bond measures worth tens of millions of dollars.

The data confirms what most of us already knew: off-cycle elections are where democracy goes to die.

Meanwhile, on-cycle elections during federal general election years see a considerable spike. Presidential elections get over 60% turnout in Texas. Midterms? Over 40%. But stick a tax hike or a school board race on a random Saturday in May, and we’re lucky if more than 1 in 10 voters even knows it’s happening.

Ballotpedia called it a “voter turnout pyramid,” Texas’s base is solid. But once you get to the top, those odd-year, off-month elections, it’s a sad little tip that barely supports anything. Yet that’s where a shocking amount of big decisions get made, especially the ones involving money and power.

So when Republicans pretend that the real threat to democracy is voter fraud, don’t don’t fall for it. The real danger is designing elections to be invisible, low-turnout affairs that benefit the politically connected and keep the rest of us in the dark.

This testimony came during SB1209, which would move the May elections to November, which is a good thing, but it was the only good bill heard in a six-hour hearing in the Committee on State Affairs yesterday.

The rest of the hearing? A parade of paranoia.

• SB16: Requires voters to submit proof of citizenship to register.

• SB76: Eliminates the countywide polling place program.

• SB505: Sets up a whole process to “investigate” so-called election irregularities and allows the Secretary of State to install a conservator to take over a county’s elections.

• SB827: Mandates audits of elections using electronic voting systems.

• SB964: Requires personal IDs for non-citizens to look visibly different.

• SJR37: A constitutional amendment reminding us that voters must be US citizens.

Altogether, these bills aren’t about securing elections. They’re about controlling them, centralizing power, sowing doubt, and intimidating voters and election workers. If they could put poll watchers in your living room, they would.

Texas was already the last state in voter turnout, and our turnout dropped by 6% in 2024.

And I can’t help but think about everyone who didn’t vote. Millions of Texans sit out every single election. It’s sad, it’s frustrating, and it’s stupid because here’s the truth:

Democrats have the numbers to flip this state.

We do. It’s not a fantasy. It’s math. But math doesn’t mean much when voters stay home.

I think about this every time I watch these hearings. Every time, I see lawmakers spend hours arguing over what kind of genitals a kid has, how to make it harder for people to vote, or how to hand more money to giant corporations while ignoring healthcare, housing, education, and infrastructure. I always wonder:

If people saw what these lawmakers were doing in Austin… If they watched Valoree Swanson panic about trans kids in juvie… If they listened to Lacey Hull’s rant about food labels while ignoring actual medical care… If they saw Republicans trying to purge voter rolls, ban drive-thru voting, and install election “conservators” in blue counties….

Would they finally vote?

Would they show up for local races? Would they care who sits on a committee, who controls the Legislature, or who chairs a subcommittee on public health while voting against every expansion of public health?

Until that changes, we’ll be stuck with this. A government run by people whose hearts are filled with hate. People who legislate not for the public good but out of fear, grievance, and cruelty. People who punch down because they’ve never had to answer to the people they hurt.

So, if you’re wondering what apathy gets us in Texas, look around.

The attack on free thought.

It’s not rhetorical. It’s literal.

The Senate Committee on Higher Education heard SB37, a bill to eliminate entire fields of study in Texas public universities and replace them with a sanitized, state-approved version of education controlled by political appointees.

If passed, this bill would effectively ban programs like Women’s Studies, LGBTQ+ Studies, African American Studies, Chicano/Latino Studies, and anything else that dares to examine the world through lenses of race, gender, or inequality.

Senator Brandon Creighton wants “degrees of value,” which, as he defines it, means programs that align with workforce demand and don’t offend conservative donors. The idea is that higher education should produce employees, not thinkers, artists, activists, truth-seekers, or people who might question power.

Professors from across Texas showed up in force to testify against it, many exhausted, furious, and terrified for the future of public education in this state. One of the most compelling voices came from Dr. Karma Chavis, a professor and department chair at a Texas public university, who cut through the performative nonsense with calm, precise truth.

Dr. Chavis called it out directly: this bill isn’t about removing ideology from campuses. It’s about silencing anything Republicans label “woke,” race, gender, queer studies, and anything critical of power.

“If what you truly value is a free society,” she said to Senator Creighton, “you can’t have it both ways.”

And she’s right. You can’t claim to support academic freedom while criminalizing entire fields of study. You can’t promote diversity of thought while threatening people who express perspectives that challenge the ruling party. You can’t build a free society on fear.

This is what authoritarianism looks like in the classroom. It doesn’t kick down the door. It rewrites the hiring policy. It cancels majors. It replaces faculty votes with live-streamed surveillance. It creates “offices of excellence” that sound like something from 1984.

If you want to know how the far-right justifies banning entire fields of study, look no further than Sherry Sylvester, a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and one of the most influential conservative voices in Texas higher education policy.

Sylvester testified in support and painted a picture straight out of a Fox News fever dream: classrooms overrun by gender studies, Marxist math, and rogue professors disrespecting the Founding Fathers.

What Sylvester is doing is framing the very existence of race, gender, and LGBTQ studies as dangerous ideological activism while insisting that “Western Civilization” and “American Constitutionalism” are somehow neutral, apolitical, and objective.

It’s a shell game.

This isn’t about academic balance. It’s about censorship. It’s about dismantling entire disciplines that study marginalized people and replacing them with handpicked “core values” approved by wealthy board members and politicians.

Forget critical thinking. Forget challenging ideas. Forget rigorous debate. In the world of SB 37 and Sherry Sylvester, your degree is worth more if it comes with less questioning, less discomfort, and absolutely no drag shows.

And they’re selling it all as “preparing students for the workforce.”

An update on SB3, which Dems voted in favor of banning THC.

I promised you the vote record after the Senate journal was published yesterday. What’s interesting is several Democrats also put statements in the journal regarding their votes.

The vote:

Here is the statement from Senator Molly Cook (D-SD15):

Here is the statement from Senator César Blanco (D-SD29):

Here is the statement from Senator Nathan Johnson (D-SD16):

Here is the joint statement from Senators Judith Zaffirini (D-SD21), Carol Alvarado (D-SD06), Sarah Eckhardt (D-SD14), and José Menéndez (D-SD26):

It speaks volumes that most of the Democrats in the Senate felt the need to enter a statement regarding how they voted on this bill, whether in favor or not. It was a contentious bill. Now, it heads to the House.

While Texas Republicans are laser-focused on punishing the vulnerable and protecting the powerful, they’re banking on you not paying attention.

They hope you’ll be too tired, discouraged, or checked out to care. That you’ll skip another election, another off-cycle ballot, another fight.

But we’re not powerless. Not yet. We can still fight back. We deserve a Texas that invests in people, not paranoia. A government that expands opportunity, not censorship. A Legislature that serves the public, not its ego.

Show up. Speak out. Vote like it matters.

Because it does.

• June 2: The 89th Legislative Session ends.

• June 3: The beginning of the 2026 election season.

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

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