Election integrity and reliable power are critical.

There is no sanctuary without walls.

The legislature is in session; they are only in session once every two years. It’s getting past time for them to hear from us about what matters to Texans. My understanding is that all bills that will be submitted have been submitted. But there are a lot of them, covering most of the important issues in Texas today, so your representatives still need to hear from you.

I wrote these as separate letters; I don’t trust the ability of staffers to summarize a multi-topic letter.

Obviously, there are a lot of important issues today. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick released a list of thirty priority bills and those are just his “top” priorities. These are mine, and I’ve distilled them down to four, plus one that is less a matter of policy than of justice.

Election integrity

Election integrity is critical. Texas’s elections must be secure and accurate. The failures we saw in Harris County last year are frightening, and we must ensure that debacles such as happened in Maricopa County do not happen in Texas.

Restore felony penalties and enact civil penalties for election code violations; violations need to be able to be enforced by any Texas jurisdiction in which they happened, by affected voters, and by the Attorney General. Restore the ability of the Texas Attorney General to fight election fraud.

We also have to rein in election practices that encourage fraud, which includes reducing the complexity of elections. Citizenship verification is necessary. We should also reduce the time allowed for early voting, and eliminate the gap between early voting and election day. There should be one system for voting, not one for early voting and one for election day, and that system must be secure. Mail-in ballots must be restricted to disabled, military, and, possibly, citizens that are out of their county.

Ban taxpayer-funded lobbying, hard. No part of government or taxpayer-funded entity should be allowed to spend any money or effort on maintaining or extending their monopoly.

Reliable power

Texas’s energy grid must be more reliable than the national grid, with reliable, resilient energy sources. We are Texas, the source of the country’s energy!

• Reserve forecasts should never include unreliable, intermittent energy sources.
• All subsidies for power generation must be ended, especially those that encourage unreliable power or that rely on the grid to keep the grid running. (There is no reason to encourage natural gas producers to use the grid to pump natural gas, for example.)

Our priority should be making Texas’s energy grid reliable, not following orders from federal regulators that kill people. We must retain existing, and build more, coal and nuclear power plants. Coal and nuclear can store weeks, months, and even years worth of fuel, keeping our grid up and running even during long-term crises.

Child abuse

The rise of child abuse and exploitation in Texas schools is crazy. Texas must end the sexual manipulation of children, and especially the chemical and surgical mutilation of children.

It is abominable that we are returning to teaching racism in schools, no matter what that racism is called. Compulsory racist teachings must be banned. It is extraordinarily disheartening that we are even returning to segregating students by race.

Parents deserve educational freedom for their children; education funding comes from taxpayers and must follow the child, not the bureaucracy.

Illegal immigration

Illegal immigration is killing people, and destroying the lives of countless others, on both sides of the border. Texas must be a state leader in creating ways for states to end the human trafficking evils of illegal immigration.

Political prisoners

Anything that can be done to help Texans among the January 6 prisoners in Washington, DC, please do. Even if it requires trading prisoners with DC.