Sunday at your rally would have been a good time, but honestly I’m not too picky about that.
Beto O’Rourke
About three weeks after Texas Democrats staged a dramatic walkout to temporarily kill a GOP-led voting restrictions bill, dozens of the party’s most active and well-known members gathered in front of the Texas Capitol to rally again for federal voting rights legislation.
The speakers ranged from one-time presidential candidates — former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who nearly unseated U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018, and Julián Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio — to members of Congress, state representatives, city leaders and local activists. The rally was the last stop on O’Rourke’s “Drive for Democracy” tour, a statewide endeavor that included nearly 20 town halls across the Lone Star State.
Several thousand were in attendance, chanting “let us vote” between speakers and holding up signs: “Protect voting rights,” “Texas voters matter,” “Don’t mess with Texas voters.”
“They’re trying to rig the system to stay in office as long as they can, try to suppress the vote to make it harder — especially for Black and brown communities to vote in Texas — and we’re not going to let them,” Castro said of Republicans. “We’re going to fight back. We’re going to say no, and we’re going to show up.”
The rally comes as Congress is set to begin debating federal voting rights legislation — the so-called “For the People Act” — this week. The Democrat-led measures, H.R.1 or S.1, would mandate that all states implement automatic voter registration, offer mail-in ballots and use new voting machines, among other provisions.
I mean, we’ll know pretty quickly if we can have any kind of voting rights bill or if the filibuster is too precious to overcome. So, maybe by the end of the week? That would work for me. The Texas Signal has a brief interview with Beto that covers what he’s doing now and yes, the inevitable question about next year. For more on that last stop on the rally, see this other Signal story and the Austin Chronicle.
I would like him to debate me and after his defeat, he agrees never to run for anything, and never to be in the public eye, and just get a job like the rest of us. If you can get in touch with him, please have him give me a call. I am the smartest person in the world, but I will debate him without having had coffee, which will slow me down a bit.
He can also announce he won’t run any time, and I wish he’d do that. His presidential run demonstrated he was nothing but an empty suit with no campaign platform other than, “Republicans like me!” As ought to be obvious by now, that doesn’t mean anything when it comes to votes, nor does it lead to effective governance. Beto, go home.
Fodder for three-way Gub race speculation:
Here is another poll …
https://www.kxan.com/news/texas-politics/what-latest-poll-shows-about-potential-governors-race-of-abbott-vs-mcconaughey-vs-orourke/ (“What latest poll shows about potential governor’s race of Abbott vs. McConaughey vs. O’Rourke.”)