‘Rebellion is the strategy’: Jim Hightower breaks down the Texas gerrymandering battle—and what comes next

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. Texas right now is the bellwether for the power of the right in America, Texas. Governor Abbott has threatened to diminish Democrats in their congressional delegation and to prosecute democratic state lawmakers who refuse to return to their seats to stop him from railroading his authoritarian agenda. Who better to talk about this than my guest today? The legendary populist Jim Hightower, who joins us from his home in Austin, Texas. We publishers the Low Do newsletter that we’ll be linking to. He was twice elected Texas Agricultural Commissioner and has remained a thorn in the side of the powerful, as he puts it, giving the America’s ordinary people a voice against the rule of the plutocratic elites. Welcome, Jim. Good to have you with us.

Jim Hightower:

Always good to be joined with you.

Marc Steiner:

So I was looking at my notes and I wrote at the top for some reason as I was doodling, Texas is the fascist canary in the coal mine. Not all of it, but let, let’s do, talk about what seems to be taking place in Texas right now with the governor. The Democrats running away so there won’t be a quorum. And Trump wanted to redistrict all of Texas, give Republicans more power. I mean, there’s a real war going on. So talk a bit about how that happened and what do you think is happening?

Jim Hightower:

Well, in old fashioned power grab, that’s all there is to it. The governor gerrymandered the state of Texas most recently, just four years ago, he was very proud of that. In fact, he was in court defending his gerrymandering. But then Donny wanted to get five more congressional seats squeezed out of Texas. So dutifully, Greg Abbott, the governor, kowtowed to the Donald and said, yes, sir, we’ll work on that. We’ll do, we will gerrymandered the gerrymandering. And that is what he proposed to do, convening a special session of the legislature, which is an expensive proposition by the way, to bring them back together. And always a dangerous proposition

And commanded that they re carve out the states to squeeze the people more thoroughly out of the political process. The people being the workaday folks, the consumers, the environmentalists, just regular poor people, just farmers, just regular people so that Trump could have five more seats in Congress. And the Democrats to their credit said, no, we’re not going to sit here for that. And by the way, that is an important thing because there are those who say, I want to hold office. I want to have a seat in Congress. Well, it’s one thing to hold the seat, but it’s another thing to use the seat to put it to work for ordinary people, which is the idea of democracy. And that’s what the Democrats are standing up for and in order, rather than just sit there and be abused by the Republican, super majority because of gerrymandering, have been able to control the entire government of the state of Texas. So they’re in a position to run this thing through. And the Democrats used one tool that is always available to them. And that is just to say aios.

Marc Steiner:

So what the Democrats are doing by fleeing and not allowing the votes to take place at the moment, it’s a delaying tactic. But is it a strategy? I mean, what takes place in terms of this war that’s going to go on that can spread like wildfire to Republican held states across the country? What do you do besides just saying, I’m not showing up?

Jim Hightower:

Well, that is a powerful message. Number one, the people of Texas will just assume that the legislature never show up. We have, what is it? We meet twice a year for 140 days in the regular session of the legislature. The people would rather we meet 140 years for two days would be a better deal. So there’s always been a distrust of centralized government in Texas and centralized government, which used to be the bugaboo of the Republican party now is their program. We want centralized government. We don’t want cities to be able to pass things that we in the legislature, that we, in the governor’s office, that we in the Lieutenant Governor’s office, we attorney general’s office don’t want because we’re I logs, we’re right wing plutocratic, theocratic, kleptocratic ID logs. And we don’t want the people getting in the way of that. And so that’s why they continually try to rig the system.

And then occasionally, as in now have to rer the system. And some democratic governors in California and Illinois in particular New York it looks like as well, saying, okay, if they’re going to play this stupid game, then we can play too, and we know how to do it. And so for every five seats that they squeeze out of Texas, we’ll squeeze another five out of some other state. And so we’ll balance the system again. And that’s why the people are so sick of government gameplay. And that’s really all this is, is partisanship run amok and the people are sick of it. And that’s why there’s no cue and cry by the public in Texas against the Democrats abandoning their role, abandoning their job. They must come back here and do their job. And do their job means to them that the Democrats should just sit quietly in their seats. No, we use what tools we have. And yes, it is not a long-term strategy, but the long-term strategy is democracy. That’s what Republicans consistently are fighting in most state legislatures and certainly in the national government as well.

Marc Steiner:

So I mean, you have the situation where Trump is supporting this move to diminish democratic seats in Texas. You now have Governor Newsom saying that he of California saying if this continues, they’re going to have their own laws to diminish Republican seats. So where does this take us? I mean,

Jim Hightower:

No, it’s making a mockery of government itself making a mockery for sure of democracy. And so the Democrats are using the one hand of cards that they have, and you’ve got this Republican super majority here that can run through the most godawful legislation. And we have the worst government in the United States of America, in Texas, which is really going some, I mean, that takes a professional skill of obstructionism and just anti-democracy and disregard for the people themselves to be able to achieve that. But we have done it. We have the highest poverty rate in the country. We had the fewest number of people with health coverage in the country. We had the highest number of poor people, the highest number of poor children. We had the worst infrastructure. We can’t even get warnings set on a floodplain out in the hill country of Texas as we experienced horribly in the last couple of months and just issue after issue. Our government is failing again because of gerrymandering. And you mentioned that Trump supported this? No, Trump initiated this. He’s the one who made the phone call to Greg Abbott and said, I need five more. Remember that phone call he made to

The treasurer, I guess it was, or whoever official in Georgia and said, I need 11,000 more votes. Bring me 11,000 votes. Bring me the head of Diego Garcia. And he expects that to be delivered. And the Republican party has become the Donald party. And so they just say, yes, sir, for anything that he asks for. And our obsequious psalmus, I’ll say that a bunch of Republican officials just go along with it. It is as if they have no pride whatsoever within themselves. And we’ve had a history of this in Texas. There’s all kinds of rebellions. When the state of Texas had a special move by the slavery, people in our state in 1861 moved to dissolve Texas affiliation with the United States and become a confederate state. Sam Houston was the governor at that time. There’s not a more iconic Texas figure than Sam Houston,

Marc Steiner:

Right?

Jim Hightower:

And yet Sam Houston said, no, I’m not going to put up with that. I believe in the union in the United States of America. And so he refused to swear allegiance to the Confederacy. And so they came to get him literally, I mean physically moved in to the state capitol to try to remove Sam Houston. And he stepped aside. But only by saying this is a matter of principle. I’m not going to swear allegiance to something that I don’t believe in. And to something that I think is a disaster for the people, the ordinary people of Texas in a disaster for the union as well.

Marc Steiner:

So I wonder what you think in all the years you’ve been fighting in Texas and around the country where this takes us, what is the strategy to not allow democracy to be shattered?

Jim Hightower:

That’s always up to the people. And that is the good news that I can bring to you is that these power grabs, these audacious unprincipled, just rigging of the system and stealing of people’s fundamental political rights, infuriates the public. And it is that public that is now in rebellion. And that rebellion is the strategy. It can’t be done by Greg, by Newsom out in California. It can’t be done by any other democratic party figure or political figure. It’s got to be done by the people themselves recognizing that they are being screwed. And they most certainly are. And these kinds of actions make that just blatantly obvious to people. A lot can go on that people don’t pay much attention to. It’s, well, that’s just politics. Well, this is more than politics because it is stealing your rights and it is then translating into stealing your healthcare, stealing your workplace safety, stealing environmental protections, et cetera, et cetera. And so people at some point get fed up with that, and that is happening. The first real expose of it was that big movement a few months ago when there was massive no kings protests that happened all across the country. We had 20,000 people out here in Austin, for example. We had hundreds of thousands in New York and

California and other places. There was even a little village in Alaska that had a protest of one guy.

Marc Steiner:

I saw that

Jim Hightower:

I’m not going to let this happen. Somebody’s going to protest here and it’s going to be me. Well, that’s the attitude. Fundamentally, the people of America are revolting in the very best sense of that term, by the way, and are saying no to these ripoffs. And we want an honest politics again. And that goes further into we got to get the big money out of politics because that’s what is behind all of this. That is the power that is behind.

Marc Steiner:

So in Texas itself at this moment, how do you think this plays out? The Democrats can only stay away for so long just in terms of money, in terms of representing their constituents. So how does this play itself out?

Jim Hightower:

It plays out by the elections. We’re going to have elections and we’re going to put all of this stuff through. We’re recruiting candidates, very, very good candidates at all levels. We put out a call. Bernie Sanders did this too, by the way, and it was very effective. And that is run for precinct chair. That’s not a heavy duty office. And you could become the precinct chair of the Democratic Party, and that will change the politics in your county. We have 50 counties in Texas that have no Democratic party chair, much less democratic party apparatus. So we have to build back an alternative, build back the infrastructure of that alternative to then recruit good candidates and rally the folks around those candidates to elect and throw out these scoundrels. They’re just reasonably running roughshod over people’s rights.

Marc Steiner:

Well, you’re also facing a moment where this could lead to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and has turned everything on its head that was fought for the last 60 years.

Jim Hightower:

Yeah, yeah. We’re in a hardship time, not just in Texas, in the country. I mean, the Supreme Court, as you say, is essentially dismantling the Voting Rights Act, which are voting rights. By the way. The words are important. Those are the rights of the people to be able to vote. And the Supreme Court is going along with the Republicans and the Plutocratic corporate leaders who want this to happen. They don’t want a democracy. They want a plutocracy, they want an autocracy, and that’s what they’re trying to put in place. And the Supreme Court is a part of that. And again, the money powers are totally behind this. And so that’s a longer term fight, is to get the money out. The first thing is to replace enough of the scoundrels who are stealing our voting rights in office to change that. And we’re on that program in a very serious way. And by the way, we’ve been making advances in the last couple of elections. We elected Greg Casar to be a member of Congress right here in Austin. San Antonio Congressional District, a former worker rights advocate in our state, got elected to the Congress, Jasmine Crockett up in the Dallas area, a ferocious voice. So ferocious than Donald Trump is afraid of her basically. And is ens saving her? He has every right to be afraid of her, by the way. She’s tenacious and she’s terrific. And so more of these kinds of people. And now we’re recruiting others to take offices in the next election cycle, which will be beginning in the primaries next march, I guess it is.

Marc Steiner:

So the question I have here in the time we have left together is we could be facing, given what’s happening in Texas at the moment, and what other Republican governors have said they’re going to do in this war a moment that is probably the most critical moment in American history since they killed reconstruction and allowed this kind of dictatorship to take over in the South and other places. So what do you see as the strategy to combat that? The strategy to not allow that to happen?

Jim Hightower:

It is politics. The other strategy is upheaval, riots, violence revolution. So the only strategy you have short of that, which is unpleasant for all, is to build a politics back. We’re not a right-wing state despite the evidence that you see in the people who are in office here in Texas and in our congressional delegation. We are a non-voting state. We have the lowest voter turnout in most elections of any state in the country, and certainly within the worst two or three states in the country. And that’s what we have to build back. And it has been the collapse of the Democratic Party that has allowed this to happen. The Democratic Party became a money party beginning in the 1980s and proceeding now just full tilt. But now people are taking that back. People within the Congress, people running for office around the country, people who are Ken Martin, the new chair of the National Democratic Party just came out for a proposal that would prohibit dark money being used in our primary campaigns that cannot take unaccountable money from corporations. Nearly all of it comes from corporations so that the people don’t even know who’s paying, who’s buying the election. So reforms like that are taking place. Structural reforms are taking place that are going to make a difference in the long haul, but it is a long haul fight.

Democrats can’t stay out forever here instead of Texas. They’ve got families, et cetera. They’ve got the actual jobs that many of them have, and that eventually they’ve got to come back to those. Alright? But we’re going to use that to make a point and to rally other supporters for office to become political activists and to begin to rebel against this thievery that is taking place right in front of our very highs. And that will build a new politics that will then build up for the long haul. And we’ve done this before. That’s the thing I keep saying to people, particularly young people, they think, oh my God, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened. Well, you pointed out one thing. Jim Crow laws were pretty godawful.

And we had a civil war, we had a horrible depression. And even an attempt under Franklin Roosevelt for a coup, there was a corporate coup attempted by Wall Streeters that were going to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt as president of the United States and remove him. That actually happened in our country. So we, we’ve had these crises that are just imminent before and they play out for a while, but then the people rebel. They come back and build something else in their place. And that is, the history of Texas is a constant rebellion. And then the money powers come in and then we rebel against them. Again, democracy is a process. It’s not a thing that happens.

Marc Steiner:

Right. And one last thing that before you go, I mean I was thinking about what Greg Cesar said, the congressman we were talking about earlier, he said that people need to pay attention to what’s happening in Texas right now because Donald Trump wants to spread this kind of ploy across America. Trump knows he can’t win the upcoming midterms. So he’s trying to rig them and dismantle the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as we know it. And that’s clearly what they’re attempting to do on both levels. So again, I want to come back to the point I was making earlier, how you fight that in Texas.

Jim Hightower:

You do just what Greg Cassar said and just what I’ve been saying and what Democrats, the progressive Democrats are saying across the country. And that is you can’t just fight it in Texas to their Korean, I mean, Trump thought that we just plan this through in Texas because I’ve got Greg Abbott there, I’ve got my boys that’ll take care of this for. And then it turns out that, wait a minute, California says, well, we’ve got some action in this too. And then Illinois says that, and then New Hampshire says that, and finally Alabama, Steven says that. And so it builds. So already they’re in a much bigger battle than they had any idea that they were tampering with.

Marc Steiner:

It seems like we’re on the verge, if not, we’re already in it of a major political civil war in this country.

Jim Hightower:

Well, yes. I mean, I don’t use civil war oddly because we had a civil war. No, yeah, right, right, right. It was deadly. But we’re in the middle of a

Marc Steiner:

Political

Jim Hightower:

War for the very sole and possibility of democracy. So that’s the fight. This is not a fight about the Texas legislature. This is a fight about whether the people themselves are going to be able to have a vote that matters, a vote that is counted fairly

Marc Steiner:

Well. It’s always a pleasure to talk with you. I know that you have a fighting is down and deep deepen your bones. And so I want to continue staying in touch about what’s happening in Texas.

Jim Hightower:

Please do. I would love it.

Marc Steiner:

And we will be talking again soon. Thank you so much for being with us today.

Jim Hightower:

Very good. Thank you.

Marc Steiner:

Take care.

And thanks to Cameron Grino for running the program today, audio editor Steven Frank for working his magic Roset Ali for producing the Mark Steiner show and putting up with me and the tireless kra, making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making the show possible. Please let me know what you thought, but what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover, just write to me [email protected] and I’ll get right back to you. So for the crew here at World News, I’m Mark Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.