House GOP Schedules A Day Of Harm

Tomorrow, 10/25, House Republicans will take to the floor to advance the Nazi-aligned Defend Texas Liberty PAC and Texas for Strong Border's agenda.

Fucking Republicans. Yes, that’s how we’re starting this. There are 15 days left of the Special Session in the Texas Legislature and tomorrow, the Texas House will take up some of the worst bills imaginable. Democrats may be able to kill one or two of these, but with the time we have left, Republicans would likely just rework them and bring them back in a few days.

The House is set to gavel in tomorrow at 10 am, and here are the bills they will be debating:

SB7 and SB4 are Senate bills that have already passed the Senate. If they pass the House tomorrow, they’ll get sent to the Senate for a third reading on the floor.

HB6 and HB4 are House bills. If they pass the House tomorrow, they must go through the Senate Committees before being heard on the Senate floor.

SB7 - Increasing Covid-19 Deaths in Texas.

When Covid-19 first exploded in America, I still worked in a corporate job. One of our clients was a meat processing plant. The client had many factory workers earning low wages, possibly even many undocumented workers. Within the first few months, the Coronavirus swept through their facility, killing two workers and one manager. I remember a lot of talk about lawsuits, although I don’t know what ultimately became of that after I quit the corporate world.

Last year, my 92-year-old grandfather died. He was healthy and active, and then he got Covid. It was all downhill from there. Although he didn’t die of Covid, it led to his health deterioration, ultimately killing him.

Oh yeah, Covid is still around. Here is this week’s confirmed cases in Texas:

Did you know more people have died in America from Covid-19 than in any other country on Earth? That’s right. Out of the 6.9 million global deaths, 1.1 million were in the USA. One hundred thousand of those deaths were right here in Texas.

People who are up to date with their COVID-19 vaccines are far less likely to be hospitalized or die from COVID-19 than people the same age who have not been vaccinated or are not up to date on their COVID-19 vaccines. However, even though vaccines reduce their risk, some people, particularly older adults with multiple underlying health conditions or people who are immunocompromised, can still get very sick from COVID-19.

SB7 will prevent employers from protecting their most vulnerable employees.

This stupid bill will prohibit private employers from adopting or enforcing a Covid-19 vaccine mandate. Why? Because Republicans politicized a highly transmissible disease. They’ve taken their medical advice from grifters and conspiracy theorists, who have convinced them that Bill Gates is using the vaccine to inject nanobots into the masses and Klaus Schwab has a secret red button that one day he will press and kill all the vaccinated in the world simultaneously. I wish I were making that up.

If an employer wants to protect his elderly or immunocompromised employees by mandating all workers get a COVID-19 vaccine, he would be unable to under Texas law mostly because conspiracy theorists don’t want to get fired for not being responsible citizens. So much for the free market.

But who is behind this bill? Well, Jonathan Stickland, for one.

Jonathan Stickland recently ended his career by meeting with prominent white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Stickland has been ousted from the Defend Texas Liberty PAC because of his ties with the neo-Nazi and has left a trail of destruction in its wake.

Representative Brian Harrison has also been a strong advocate for more Covid deaths.

Since Nazigate ignited, Brian Harrison has been one of the few Republicans who haven’t denounced the Texas GOP and Defend Texas Liberty’s meeting with self-avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes. In the last two years, he’s taken $18,000 from the Defend Texas Liberty PAC and has not announced any plans of returning the money or donating it to charity.

If you remember, Speaker Dade Phelan called on all Texas Republicans to return or donate the tainted Nazi money. (Many already have.)

Just so we’re all clear, as Nazigate continues to obliterate the Republican Party, the same Republicans who swore off the Nazi money and affiliation are progressing the anti-vax Nazi agenda.

SB4 - sending Black and brown young people in Texas to prison for ten years.

Like most things the Republican Party of Texas has put out in the last few years, SB4 is particularly vile. It’s being dubbed an “anti-smuggling” bill, but it gives a mandatory minimum sentence to anyone caught with an undocumented immigrant in their car.

Hear what one expert had to say about this bill:

Essentially, you could be an Uber driver and go to prison for ten years if caught giving an undocumented person a ride. You could be picking up a neighbor for church or providing a family member a ride to the doctor. Under this bill, it puts average Texans at risk of a lengthy prison sentence for partaking in an everyday activity.

During this committee hearing, a teenager living in Houston testified how they were offered $1,200 on Snapchat to go and pick someone up and give them a ride back to Houston. They never had anyone in their car, but DPS pulled them over and charged them with human smuggling.

Listen to his story.

An immigration rights attorney also testified about how many clients she had who were arrested under Operation Lone Star who were American citizens.

Why does this matter? Under SB4, these teenagers and young people arrested under Operation Lone Star would be given a minimum mandatory sentence of ten years.

Here are some more facts about Operation Lone Star:

1. 80% of the people arrested under Operation Lone Star are American citizens.

2. Taxpayers are footing the bill at around $40,000 per arrest.

3. Abbott has been keeping migrants charged with trespassing in jail for months and is now being sued by the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and the Texas Fair Defense Project.

Now, the GOP wants to tack ten-year prison sentences onto the mess. SB4 is a mass incarceration bill that will primarily target teenage and young Black and brown people who are American citizens.

SB4 is one of Texans for Strong Borders’ top agenda items.

If you haven’t been keeping up with all the key players in the Nazigate scandal, the Texas Tribune was nice enough to make a graph for us.

Chris Russo is the President of Texans for Strong Borders and also played Nick Fuentes’ chauffeur while he was in town. Texans for Strong Borders has been widely documented to spread white supremacist propaganda, like the great replacement theory and ending the 14th Amendment.

Here is how Texans for Strong Borders feels about SB7:

HB4 - the “Show Me Your Papers” bill.

This bill is horrendous and similar to HB20 during the regular session. Democrats managed to kill HB20 earlier this year. Hopefully, they’ll be able to kill HB4 as well. The only difference between HB4 and HB20 is that HB4 empowers police instead of vigilantes.

You can see the full hearing for this bill here, but it’s long.

HB4 will allow any police officer in the State of Texas to ask any person for proof regarding their documentation status. If the officer cannot prove that the person is here legally, they can arrest them.

Several counties testified during this hearing and talked about the massive strain this would put on county jails, raising costs and, in turn, raising property taxes. One woman from Bexar County testified that this would increase their jail population by 8,000 heads. This would rapidly send county expenses rising in almost every county in Texas.

Republicans also did not think the logistics through on this, as each country would be responsible for getting the immigrants to return over the international bridge. It’s a statewide bill.

Aside from that, migrants with legal status or even American citizens could be stopped and harassed under this bill, and without documentation, they could be illegally incarcerated. This is a human and civil rights disaster waiting to happen.

But do the Nazis like it?

Check out Texans for Strong Borders endorsement of HB20, a similar “Show Me Your Papers” bill.

HB6 - free money to the Governor, maybe for a wall.

Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee held the hearing for HB6 yesterday. It was a shitshow. They want $1.5 billion for the border wall, which will be appointed to the Governor’s office with no transparency or stipulation other than “wall.”

Texas taxpayers have already given Greg Abbott $1.6 billion for the wall, which, as we learned about in the committee hearing, only 11 miles have been built so far. That’s about $145 million per mile.

This new $1.5 billion is supposed to go for 50 miles of wall as Abbott sees fit. During the hearing, Republicans refused to add language to the bill prohibiting Abbott from using these funds to build a wall between Texas and another state. If you missed it, recently, Abbott admitted to building a wall between Texas and New Mexico.

This should concern every Texas woman as cities all over rural Texas are passing bills to restrict women from traveling.

On top of that, during the committee hearing, it was revealed that contractors for the border wall have already been hired, but Republicans and officials from Abbott’s office couldn’t tell you who those contractors are. I’m still looking into it, but we shouldn’t be surprised when we learn that the contractors are on Abbott’s donor list.

Call your House Rep - tell them to VOTE NO on these bills.

Don’t know who your House Rep is? Find out here.

All of these bills are unacceptable. This is not who Texas is.

Fucking Republicans.

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