Pay attention if you are running for office next year……A little publicized Texas Senate Bill 100 passed at the end of the legislature this year which will throw the election calendars into a big Texas jumble (Sorry I can’t think of a colloquialism to use right now.) Instead of Jan. 1 being the last day to file for election in a state or federal contest, the new last day is Dec. 12, the first day being Nov. 12.
Gov. Rick Perry signed this bill which would make Texas comply with the new federal laws which make it easier for members of the military deployed overseas to vote.
And why is this important? The Texas Constitution has a “resign to run” rule that says that if you hold certain elected jobs but you sign up to run for a different job and it’s more than a year before your current job is up, then you are considered to have resigned your current office. This does not apply if you simply appoint a campaign treasurer.
A change to the Texas Constitution (Amendment 11 on the ballot) making it comply with the new election dates will be voted on this November.
Meanwhile the new election dates have caused some consternation in the cities and school district elections. The cities and school district generally elect their leaders in May and these dates may conflict with the new law as concerns the party primary and their run-offs.
One person this new law would affect is Pct. 4 Constable Troy Nehls who has expressed an interest in running for sheriff. Also running for the same position is the current sheriff’s deputy who has been bird-dogging Nehls for about a year to make sure he doesn’t cross the line and announce for the new office.
The current sheriff spends most of his time either playing golf, dominos, or his accordion, and is pretty much an absentee sheriff anyway. He’d probably go ahead and resign but the county commissioners would get to appoint the new sheriff until an election could be held and they won’t appoint the sheriff’s fair haired deputy. Watch for along about election time, when the current sheriff will tune up that accordion and start playing at retirement/nursing homes so he can help the seniors with their mail-in ballots. Someone once said that wasn’t true at all. They said the reason the sheriff played at nursing homes is because his audience mostly couldn’t run away.
Anyway if you are running or thinking about helping someone else to run, you need to be aware of the new dates. The primary dates will remain the same, but the deadlines for signing up to run are different. Also, the date of the city and school district sign-up and election may also be different.
Rick Perry, where are you…..Here we are in the worst drought of the century and our esteemed governor is nowhere in the state. He’s decided it’s a good time to run for president, leaving us holding the (dry) bag.
Not that there is much for him to do, but he could stay here and worry with us, wringing his hands and jumping up and down in one place like I’m doing. Hell, I’m doing more for Texas than Rick Perry.
When Rick Perry was campaigning for governor, he touted that Texas had no budget deficit, but instead, had a surplus. Come to find out that “surplus” came from the same federal government he has been bad-mouthing for years. Texas used its stimulus funds for balancing the state budget, instead of creating new jobs. Then he bragged that Texas had plenty of jobs. Come to find out, we led the nation in minimum wage jobs and most of the new jobs were government jobs. And that budget surplus? It was a “rainy day” fund and some of it was used to mitigate the pain of the education budget deficit, but certainly not all and we ended up with a huge shortfall in education, forcing schools to cut back on teachers and programs.
Of course, there are some things that Rick Perry has done that I’m also in favor of. For example, he signed the bill to give in-state tuition to illegal immigrants, saying “Education is the future,” and “to punish these young Texans for their parents’ actions is not what America has always been about.”
He also opposed Arizona’s tough anti-illegal immigration law saying, “I have concerns,” he explained, “with portions of the law passed in Arizona and believe it would not be the right direction for Texas.”
Also I applauded his decision to bypass the Texas legislature and sign an order making Texas the first state to require school-age girls to be vaccinated with the Gardasil HPV vaccine. Of course, we found out later that it was sold by one of his big campaign donors, and the legislature rose as one body to oppose him on this measure. He backed down.
So who knew? Perry is a closet liberal.
And meanwhile, while we in Texas are burning, Rick Perry is gallivanting around the country running for President.