July — Party in 'Great Shape' says Candy Noble

Candy Noble our State Republican Executive Committee member reported on the state GOP in Texas.

Reporting to the monthly meeting of the Republican Club at Heritage Ranch, Candy Noble updates the group with the last actions of the Special Legislative Session in Austin.  

Sanctuary Cities bill did not pass but a minor amendment to SB1 added a provision that DPS will now check citizenship when folks apply for a driver's license.

• Redistricting

The Constitutional requirement of the decennial census together with the Voter Rights Act of 1965 requires the redrawing of Congressional districts and in texas our legislative districts.    You have to "preserve traditional minority" districts and also "communities of interest"  this means historical voting patterns are added to the usual quantitative redistricting.  This results in some very gerrymandered-looking districts.  For example see the new Texas House district 33 which is a giant "horseshoe" around the edge of Collin County.  Redistricting plan now goes before the U.S. Department of Justice and that will be appealed to the District court and all this has to happen before the Dec. 19th.  Districts are made up of "voters" but the census just counts people so that makes the process much more complex.  The good news is that Candy predicts that Republicans have a chance of again getting 100 State House seats.  For the Congressional districts we get four new districts in Texas of these she thinks that the numbers are favorable in about 26 seats of the new total of 36.  She said also there may be a chance to take Lloyd Doggett's district 25. Remember the 'poison pill' he added to the education funding bill.

• Election Calendar

MOV (Military Overseas Voters act) requires a longer time between when the absentee ballots are sent out and the time they must be returned.  This good, but it makes the calendar more difficult  and the RNC has made it more difficult with rule 15b.  They wanted to restrict the number of primaries that could be held before March 1st except (NV, NH IA, NC) but if you do are penalized by losing half your delegates or you have to allocate your delegation proportionally, not "winner take all" as Texas has done.  We will have ours the 1st Tues. in March.  In past each Congressional district got 3 delegates.  Texas gets 171 delegates second only to CA.  To do that we would have to lose half of our delegates and the SREC will figure that out by Oct 1st.     

• State of the State Party

Last year before the state convention there were rumors that the party was in debt but no one was sure by how much.  Soon after Candy was elected to the SREC she found out from the new Chairman Steve Munisteri that they were $750,000 in debt and that the she and other SREC members were personally liable for this debt.  That was a great motivator and with the leadership of Steve Munisteri and new fund raising model call the "grassroots club" which gets folks to pledge $8.25/month they now have $780,000 in the bank.

• Questions

There were a dozen or more questions from the floor on questions ranging from those about our precinct  which were answered by the precinct 179 chairman, Kathy Hebert, to how delegates are chosen for the state convention.  If was a lively and informative discussion which provided much new information to the those in attendance.  

For more information see:  Minutes of the Meeting