@Mr. Deez has alignment with Texas State Speaker Bonnen. Is thid secretly recorded conversation getting a lot of play in Texas?
It is getting quite a bit of play in political circles. I couldn't get past the Post's paywall to read the whole thing, but here's
something from Texas that I think covers it well. I've got some thoughts on it, but this could be a little lengthy.
First, the stuff that Bonnen said about his membership is only controversial because it got recorded. Stuff like that gets said in the Texas Capitol and every capitol all the time. That doesn't mean he was right to say it. It just means that you're getting a glimpse of insider politics that existed long before Dennis Bonnen and will exist long after he's gone. And for the record, I didn't follow Michelle Beckley very much, but Jon Rosenthal is a piece of ****. The label is accurate, if unprofessional and rude. Bonnen definitely isn't the only person to call him that or something similar.
Second, I'm quite surprised that Bonnen would have an "honest" conversation with or strategize with Michael Sullivan. I would trust Trump and Chuck Schumer to have an honest conversation far more than I'd trust Sullivan and Bonnen.
Sullivan is a hand-puppet for a guy named Tim Dunn, who's a billionaire oil man from West Texas. Sullivan's big issue is bringing down property taxes and curbing local government spending and debt, and he (with Dunn's money) has an organization called Empower Texans and its project Texans for Fiscal Responsibility.
On paper, I have no problem with Sullivan. Our property taxes are ridiculous. Furthermore, our local government debt is outrageous. You hear a lot about how the State of Texas is in better fiscal shape than California, New York, Illinois, etc. That's only true for the state. In terms of local government debt, Texas is a dumpster fire. Of the ten largest states, only New York local governments are in worse fiscal shape. California local governments have more total debt, but per capita Texas has quite a bit more. Even with all the fiscal problems Detroit, Flint, and the surrounding areas have had, Texas local governments have almost double per capita the debt that Michigan local governments have. It's a disgrace.
In a conservative state like Texas, you'd think the legislature would rein all that in, but here's what happens. Cities and school districts are political operators at the state level. They form organizations that hire lobbyists with taxpayer money. The special interests who make money off their spending and debt donate money to politicians. That means that Sullivan gets resistance. Democrats and probably 10 percent of Republicans won't even talk to him, and probably another 20 percent of Republicans might listen to him but frequently breaks with him. Bonnen has mostly been in that 20 percent. He gets a C- in Sullivan's scorecard.
And here's the problem with Sullivan - he's an *******. He's a bit of a dirty trickster (though I've seen worse) and very much adopts a no-compromise, tax-no-prisoners style. If you get on his bad side, you're dead to him, and he is a major player (or tries to be) in Republican primary elections. So you can be a pretty conservative Republican, but if you break with him on a local government issue because the cities in your particular district are more fiscally responsible than the rest of the state's cities and don't need state interference, he'll crap on you. That means he hates Dennis Bonnen's guts and would like nothing more than to see Bonnen shitcanned by the House. So why Bonnen was willing to talk to him like that is baffling to me. He should have seen this coming.
As for the Trump angle, Bonnen is right. He's definitely hurting Texas Republicans in the suburbs a lot. Suburban counties that were very deep red turned purple in 2018, and many suburban areas that are in urban counties went blue for the first time in decades. Bonnen knows that he has to stop that trend, or their majority is gone.
Some Trump defenders will point out that this was happening before Trump, and they are right. Democrats were picking up some inner suburban seats 10 years ago (especially in the Dallas area). However, it was manageable, because the growth in population (and therefore in seats) was in the suburban counties, and they were still solidly red. Trump burst open that dam, and it cost them 12 seats in the House (the equivalent of losing about 35 at the federal level). Will they regain some of those seats in 2020? Maybe, but plenty aren't coming back. Furthermore several more are in play that they narrowly held in 2018. Telling educated voters to screw off has consequences. If the Democrats stay in crazy town, the GOP will probably get some of those voters and maybe a few seats back, but it'll be a fight to keep them long term.
