Well, to be fair (for no good reason) - the Texas legislature ceded some (lots?) of their power/prerogatives to the governor because they could rest fairly easy knowing he was, like them, on the side of evil. Pulling them back is understandable.
I’d argue that these powers are not arbitrary, they’re simply not powers of the President that can be found in the Constitution.
I would sign up for significant legislative restrictions on presidential powers, even if it only took effect post Trump. I think it’s critical.
Of course, I’d prefer them immediately. A boy can dream.
Which returns back to the larger philosophical question of whether any branch of a government, or a government as a whole, can do anything not explicitly prohibited by their documents, or only the few things specifically enumerated in their documents.
There is a vast gulf between those limit-case worldviews. Or is it some mix in the middle, but how to tell which? And this is true for every non-cynical non-dictatorship of every scale on Earth, from your hometown to continental scale countries such as the USA.
The US constitution originally was envisioned as both explicitly permitting some things, explicitly prohibiting others, with the 10th amendment serving as catchall supposedly meaning that everywhere the constitution was silent, the Feds were powerless and it fell to the states and the people to deal with that unmentioned stuff. Whatever that stuff might have been in the late 1700s and also whatever unimagined and unimaginable stuff the far future might hold.
Like every other afterthought catch-all provision of any contract ever, it was poorly thought through and created more problems than it solved. Almost immediately the foolhardy nature of the functional compromises required by the 10th came to the fore. And it’s been honored more in the breech ever since. It may have been politically necessary to get enough sigs on the Bill of Rights, but it was a practical disaster from real early. And only grows more so with time as society grows and changes and the quill pen on handmade parchment words remain stubbornly stationary.
Idjit trump’s views have always been the same dating back to his youth. If something is not prohibited, both by word of law and by a security force actively on guard strong enough to prevent you, it’s OK to grab or do.
IOW: Whatever you can get away with is de facto OK. De jure? Who cares; we don’ need no steenkin’ de jure! Not a great way to run a business or a country. At least not if you’re thinking of anyone but yourself.
A truly strict reading of the 10th would require the immediate dismantlement of probably 3/4ths of the federal government. And an immediate return to 1800s style government. The US public would not like that, US businesses would collapse, and our enemies would dismember the anarchic remains of our 50 warring states.
So whatever we do do to realign the post-trump US government more to our liking, we’ll still be floundering around in the gray area where the constitution says we should not be at all.
My bottom line:
The answer to our real problems are not found by religiously interpretting those faded words written by farmers for farmers. They’re found by doing the much harder work of thinking and deciding from honest first principles with an eye to the welfare of all and the practicalities of the 21st Century, not the 18th. Call it enlightened collective self-interest.
The recent era has seen plenty of self-interest. Enlightenment and collective? Not so much.
Yeah, Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 the “war powers” was perfectly workable in the 1700s not so much in the late 1900s.
That’s a fundamental problem, while the Constitution is a living document some of it just isn’t, necessarily, applicable in it’s current form.
The fix, an Article V Constitutional Convention, is a terrifying thought given the current state of America.
Very scary.
Too many people think that if we held a Constitutional Convention to modify the Constitution, then they could control it. That is pie in the sky dreaming that they are doing.
In reality, a Constitutional Convention would open the whole thing up to pretty much anyone who wants to push their own agenda.
Apropos of @flurb’s request: I’d like to keep this thread open because interesting things are happening in Texas post-election. I don’t think we need a whole new thread about those things. And of course, fuckworthy things can still go here. Maybe ask mods to change the title? Something like
Reluctantly – Fuck Texas … let’s pause that
or
Reluctantly – Fuck Texas … maybe not today
For example, a great story in today’s San Antonio Express-News:
Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa on Thursday announced
leaders of her transition team, including a rural
Republican whom Gov. Greg Abbott had worked
to oust for opposing school vouchers.“We are forging a new way forward,” Hinojosa
said. “People are tired of the divisions, of the
fighting, tired of the culture wars. This is a time
to come together in a way that is about just
delivering for the people of Texas.”Hinojosa said former state Rep. Ernest Bailes was
a close ally in “delivering for our public schools”
during his time in the House. Bailes was one of two dozen Republican House
members who helped block Abbott’s push in 2023 to pass vouchers, warning that
they could threaten the financial future of their local school systems. Several of
them, including Bailes, lost their GOP primaries the next year to Abbott-endorsed
opponents. The voucher program passed in 2025.The transition team will lay out the path to the first transfer of power in Texas in 12
years — and the first to a Democrat in three decades.
…
You go, Gina! Let’s show them what it looks like when lawmakers behave like grownups.
[Line breaks are wonky because of copying from a pdf and I’m too lazy to fix them.]
Here’s another article on the restoration of normalcy in Texas.
In her victory speech Tuesday night, incoming
Gov. Gina Hinojosa promised to fire Texas
Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath on
“day one” in office.But Morath is not the only appointee facing an
uncertain future as Hinojosa takes the reins from
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.Hinojosa has the power to reshape Texas
government by appointing leaders of the state’s
most powerful agencies. The Austin Democrat is
likely to make more than 1,500 appointments
during her four-year term as governor, and dozens in the first few months,
including leaders of the state’s public university systems and members of key
boards that oversee data center development.Abbott amassed so much power during his 12 years as governor in part by staffing
state agencies with loyal appointees to carry out his vision.Hinojosa can’t fire Abbott’s appointees before their terms end without the approval
of the Republican-controlled state Senate. Morath’s term expires on January 10,
shortly before Hinojosa will be sworn in as governor.“I’m sure there are other people who will have to be replaced,” Hinojosa said during
an October press conference. “But he is the one that I am prioritizing because I
know firsthand with a child in public schools the damage that he has done to our
public schools.”A former Austin ISD school board member, Hinojosa will also have the chance to
reshape higher education through major appointments to the boards that oversee
the University of Texas, Texas A&M and Texas Tech University.
…
Texas will probably still be at the bottom of the national heap on education and children’s health care, but Gina’s vision is heartening to me. My 40-year career was raising money for non-profits in these fields (and others), asking the private sector to do what was the gummint’s duty.
Good riddance to the gruesome threesome: Abbott, Patrick, and Paxton!
I bet vouchers for private schools was a huge issue in the governor’s race. If you go to right wing social media, you’ll find lots of support from people who don’t want their kids to be associating with non-whites. But most communities in Texas who don’t have many options just want their schools to be the best they can be.
With a good football team, of course.
Lol, before seeing this I created a new thread in Politics and Elections – Wither Blue Texas? I do think it’s more appropriate to have these conversations around the new politics of Texas in that forum.
I don’t object to this thread remaining open, though (and got overruled by mods on that front anyway 
).
I had the sneaking feeling there was already a thread continuing to discuss Texas but I didn’t bother to search.
Whatever.
While the results of the election are encouraging, I look at it as merely flipping a 49/51 vote to a 51/49 vote. There’s still way too many people who are ok with the fascist, racist, sexist policies of the right, so the tide could turn at any moment.
Sure, this is as much if not more about the Republicans losing than the Dems winning, but it’s also important that the worst of the leeches were stomped.
We’ll see what happens in 2 years, especially if the Republican Presidential candidate is unexciting, but, more importantly, the hope is the slate of Republican candidates in Texas is that much less corrupt and terrible. Maybe even approaching ethically uncompromised.
I’m not going to hold my breath on it, but chipping away at the problem over the years has had an impact, and there’s certainly room for improvement.
More importantly, that’s state money that goes toward vouchers rather than toward already cash-strapped rural school districts.
For the most part, rural people didn’t want vouchers. From what I can tell, the people who did were some sort of witch’s brew of horrid racists and extremely religious weirdos who lived in the suburbs or in smaller cities. You know, the people who essentially view school of any sort as indoctrination, and who believe that as such, public school is indoctrination in the opposite direction as them.
From what I understand, vouchers were the pet project of those evangelical West Texas oil billionaires (Wilks & Dunn) who had a hand up Abbott’s ass and were working him like a sock puppet.
To the best of my knowledge, except for the Robin Hood Plan, schools are funded by local taxes. The state has no business funding school districts. Let us fund our own.
How about
Texas - Fuck Yeah
That succinctly describes my feelingsat around 11:00PM on the 3rd.
According to this source, 47.7% of funding comes from local taxes, 38.6% from the state, and 13.7% from the federal government.
But at what levels?
The Texas public school system ranks in the middle to lower-middle tier nationally, notable for its massive scale and lower per-pupil funding compared to the rest of the United States.
Size: Texas has the second-largest public school system in the country, educating more than 1 in 10 of all U.S. public elementary and secondary students.
Per-Pupil Spending: Texas consistently spends $3,000 to $4,000 below the national average per student, placing it in the bottom 10 states nationally for student funding.
Basic Allotment: The state’s basic per-student allotment sits around $6,160–$6,215, supplemented by weights for specific demographics. By comparison, states like New York, Illinois, California, and Florida spend significantly more per student.
Overall State Standing: In multi-factor state-by-state education studies (such as WalletHub or general K-12 performance indexes), Texas often lands in the bottom half to middle tier (e.g., ranked around 34th to 41st depending on the specific metrics like graduation rates and test scores.)
(Info from Gemini)
Here’s the kicker. For all the Anglo parents who don’t want their kids in the sub-performing, underfunded schools. Not to mention having to sit next to brown kids.
Charter Schools: Texas has heavily expanded alternative public school options, particularly charter networks in major metro areas like Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Houston.
Yeah! That way, poor kids will always get a shitty education! It’s the cycle that keeps on not giving. 'Murica!
I’ll point out that if the state did withhold all the funding they control, the schools would lose over 1/3rd of their current very marginal funds. That’s immediate bankruptcy and closure for a lot of systems.
To the degree the Federal money is passed through the state on the way to the counties, it too could be diverted. Reducing Texas school funding to less than half of its already too-meager level.