82 Days Out, And Tarrant Republicans Are Reading Abbott's Campaign Ad Into the Record

Three commissioners, one campaign ad, zero public support.

Texas Election Code §255.003 - Unlawful Use of Public Funds for Political Advertising:

(a) An officer or employee of a political subdivision may not knowingly spend or authorize the spending of public funds for political advertising.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what the Courts call “electioneering.” But, for Republicans, it’s not corruption if you read the Court minutes with a straight face.

Today, the Tarrant County Commissioners’ Court held a budget meeting. Not too many people showed up because there wasn’t anything scandalous on the agenda, like there was for their last meeting. Just a hum-drum, normal, everyday budget meeting. Except it wasn’t.

Commissioner Matt Krause introduced a resolution to support Greg Abbott’s “Property Tax Reform Plan.” What tax reform plan? The one he’s promising this campaign cycle. You know, the one he promises every election season, even though property taxes have risen 52% in Texas since Abbott initially took office in 2014. We’ll get into how his plan is complete horse shit in a minute, just like every plan before this.

The problem with this is that the resolution was written almost word-for-word the same as the “Texans for Greg Abbott” campaign literature. Local attorney Steven Lawrence caught it and said so at the podium, brochure in hand, “It’s hard to say it’s not political advertising when the governor’s campaign himself says it is.”

This is a county government responding to a promise made by a man running for re-election, printed on a campaign flyer. The Tarrant County Commissioners took that flyer, retyped it onto county letterhead, stamped the county seal on it, and voted to endorse it, 82 days before an election.

Krause leaned into it. “He’s our sitting governor,” Krause said from the dais. “He will be our sitting governor next year.” 30 years of holding Texas hostage has Republicans too comfortable for their own good.

Of course, polling on the Governor’s race over the last week has shown Gina Hinojosa consistently within the margin of error.

• Support Gina Hinojosa

Abbott winning re-election is not a sure thing.

Here is the segment at the Commissioners’ Court where this all happened today:

Public comment opened, and the people told Republicans, to their faces, that they know exactly what game is being played.

Not one person showed up to support their resolution.

Lawrence had the actual “Texans for Greg Abbott” campaign brochure in hand and walked the resolution’s language against it, paragraph by paragraph. He reminded the Court that a violation here is a Class A misdemeanor. He reminded them there’s a TEC opinion process for exactly this situation.

Then came Ambika, who didn’t bother being subtle about it either:

“You continue to use this platform for electioneering, in my opinion, and last I checked that was a criminal offense.”

And then she did something I genuinely didn’t expect. She pointed out that O’Hare and Ramirez “aren’t pulling very well within your own GOP base.” Krause is propping up his own colleagues’ election numbers with a county seal. It’s a rescue mission with taxpayer letterhead.

Last up was David Rodriguez, who did the thing I love most in a public commenter. He read the document and asked who, exactly, Tarrant County meant by “collaboratively with many other entities across the state.”

“Is it Mercy Culture, who profits off the school vouchers? Is it the True Texas Project that both Tim O’Hare and Matt Krause have sponsored tables for? Is it Rakana Solutions, that Alisa Simmons has tried to call attention to, but Manny Ramirez made a motion to block her from being able to expose these things? Is it the Public Interest Legal Foundation that created y’all’s maps? Is it First Liberty Institute, of which you are a lawyer for?”

Rodriguez answered his own question before Republicans could dodge it:

“So again, I think that this proclamation is a farce.”

Zero coincidences. A voucher profiteer, a hate group the SPLC has formally designated as such, an entity nobody on that dais wanted Alisa Simmons looking at too closely, the outfit that drew Krause’s own precinct lines, and the law firm that signs his paycheck.

And then the vote almost happened cleanly. Almost.

It should be noted that Alisa Simmons was present today but absent from this particular vote. I’m not sure if it’ll matter in the long run if she beats Tim O’Hare in November.

After the public comment closed and the motion was seconded, Roderick Miles Jr., representing Precinct 1, which includes Stop Six, Forest Hill, and Highland Hills, spoke.

What Miles said:

“What I’m really concerned with is how this will impact people that come from where I come from, my neighborhood, my community, where I grew up. And I don’t think that it will. I don’t have confidence that it will, because time and time again it has been demonstrated that the people that look like me and come from communities where I come from are not factored into decisions that directly impact them.”

Miles recognizes the Republicans’ patterns on the Court, maybe better than most. He went on:

“We’re in an election season and now we hear about this. Where was this five years ago, ten years ago? When will we be having a meaningful discussion about this and how it affects the people that come from where I come from?”

And then, the line that should be used in every county press release that ever uses the word “collaborative” again:

“My folks don’t have the luxury or the ability to drive down to Austin and meet with legislators. They’re not going to see them. They’re not going to spend any time with them. And you expect me to believe that I was considered when this was proposed. I don’t believe it.”

Krause basically shrugged. He told Miles he “looks forward to being proven wrong.” Which, sure, Matt. That’s real easy to say when you’re the one who gets to decide what “proven” looks like, and your colleague’s neighborhood is the control group.

Here’s the thing nobody wants to say plainly, so I will. This resolution was never about whether tax relief is good policy. It’s about who gets to write the sentence “we want to work collaboratively” before anyone in the room has actually done the collaborating. Krause had Mercy Culture, True Texas Project, First Liberty, and the Public Interest Legal Foundation on speed dial before he ever picked up a pen. Miles’ constituents got a resolution already printed, already seconded, and a commissioner telling them, essentially, trust me, we’ll see.

Because Tarrant County Republicans don’t truly care about all Tarrant County residents; if they did, they wouldn’t spend all of their time cutting polling locations and after-school programs for minority children. And they would do something about the jail deaths.

Here’s why Abbott’s latest tax plan is complete horse shit.

This probably deserves its own article, but it’s still hard to believe that there are still Republicans in Texas falling for the Governor’s tax lies.

Abbott’s whole plan hinges on one thing. That oil and gas revenue stays flush forever. 🤣 It won’t, and he knows it won’t, because nothing in that industry ever has.

Here’s the condensed version, in five ugly pillars.

One. It’s a $17-20 billion hole every year, forever. School property taxes fund roughly half of Texas public education, and killing them means the state permanently backfills $17-20 billion a year. Abbott’s plan to pay for it is a shrug and a surplus. That surplus is mostly oil and gas severance tax money feeding the Rainy Day Fund, which means Abbott wants to fund your kid’s school with something that is, by definition, temporary. Oil booms. Oil busts. Property taxes don’t care what OPEC decided this quarter.

Two. He already tried this. It failed. Nothing’s different now, except the climate math got worse. In 2019 Republicans tried the sales-tax swap, and it collapsed because it meant funding your tax cut on the backs of people who spend most of their paycheck at the register. The Texas Taxpayers and Research Association said Texas would’ve had to double the sales tax rate. That math hasn’t changed. What has changed is that the industry Abbott is betting the whole plan on is staring down decarbonization pressure, EV adoption, and a warming planet that’s making its own long-term price stability a joke.

Three. It’s a subsidy for homeowners, funded by everyone else. Renters and businesses keep paying. Homeowners get the free pass. Abbott’s simultaneously growing a voucher program to $7 billion by 2028 while claiming he can zero out the state’s biggest school funding source. Abbott hasn’t said how those two things are supposed to fit into the same budget.

Four. The appraisal cap is Prop 13, just hotter. Cap growth at 3% and you get California’s forty-year-old mistake with a Texas flag on it. Owners who can’t afford to sell, buyers who can’t afford to buy, and even the Conservative Tax Foundation calling it “not sound policy.”

Five. The spending cap is designed to break during the exact disasters climate change is making more common. Tying local budgets to inflation plus population, whichever is lower, sounds disciplined until your county needs to rebuild a water system after a hundred-year flood that now happens every single year. Fast-growing counties, the ones absorbing climate migrants and building the infrastructure to survive Texas summers that keep getting worse, get strangled hardest. And the two-thirds supermajority requirement means all but one of the last 20 local bond elections in Texas would have failed. That’s making sure nobody can vote to fix the grid, the water main, or the floodplain ever again.

Texas is betting its entire school funding model on an industry whose own volatility is accelerating because of the climate crisis it helped cause.

Zoom out for a second, because it’s easy to lose the forest for the resolution.

Tarrant County is the largest urban county in America that Republicans still hold. That’s the whole reason Krause felt safe reading a campaign brochure into the record today. It’s why O’Hare cuts polling locations before elections instead of after. It’s why redistricting came for Precinct 2 specifically, the seat with the numbers to flip. This county is the state fight. Dallas went blue. Harris went blue. Tarrant is the last big domino, and everyone in that courtroom knows exactly what happens to Texas if it falls.

If we flip Tarrant, the “last big red county” excuse dies with it, and every statewide Republican who’s been hiding behind Tarrant’s numbers loses their cover. Flip Tarrant, and you flip the argument. You flip the premise every national outlet uses when they write “Texas isn’t really in play.” You flip America’s map of what’s possible, because if the reddest big county in the reddest big state can go blue, nowhere is safe ground anymore for the politics we watched in that courtroom today.

So here’s where you put your money and your knocking shoes between now and November:

Alisa Simmons for County Judge. She’s the one who Tim O’Hare has to actually beat, not just out-fundraise, to keep running Tarrant County like his own fiefdom.

Nydia Cardenas for Precinct 4. She’s taking on Manny Ramirez, the second vote on today’s 3-1, the guy who moved to block Alisa Simmons from looking too closely at Rakana Solutions.

Jared Williams for Precinct 2. Simmons’ old seat, freshly redrawn to be harder for Democrats to hold, which tells you exactly how worried Republicans are about losing it. Williams spent his campaign promising to actually restore public comment and bring commissioners court to the precincts instead of making people drive downtown to get three minutes at a podium.

Three seats. One county. Eighty-two days. Krause, O’Hare, and Ramirez just showed you, on the record, in their own words, exactly who they’re building this county for. Now you know who’s on the ballot to build it for everyone else.

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