Lauren Peña Is The Child George Bush Left Behind
The Republican candidate for TX37 doesn't know what Congress does, who runs Texas, or how government works. But she made a Bitmoji about it.
Texas has a long and storied tradition of producing political candidates who have absolutely no business running for office, but now and then, someone comes along who is so spectacularly, breathtakingly unqualified that they deserve a little bit of attention. Lauren B. Peña is that someone.
Peña is the Republican candidate taking on Greg Casar in TX37, a district so reliably Democratic that the GOP might as well have nominated a walnut. But the Texas Republican Party, never ones to let a lost cause go to waste, has found a winner. A woman who lives in federally subsidized housing in Austin receives $50,000 a year in government assistance and has somehow concluded that the solution to all of this is to vote Republican. Specifically, to vote for her.
Most Texans first encountered Lauren Peña the way you encounter most things that make you question your faith in humanity, unexpectedly, and surrounded by Republicans. She showed up to the Texas redistricting hearings to testify last year, and what followed was a performance that had Democratic group chats cracking jokes for weeks.
Strap in.
Where to even begin.
Peña opened by declaring herself sick and tired of paid lobbyists telling people to vote, because they don’t know what it’s like to live in Black and brown communities. Fair enough, except she was testifying before a Republican-controlled legislature that had just finished gerrymandering those same Black and brown communities into political irrelevance, and her solution was to invite the legislators on a field trip to the projects. She would, she assured them, “probably guarantee their safety.”
Probably.
Presumably, she’s unaware that most Republicans in the Texas Legislature are multi-millionaires, who wouldn’t even shake a poor person’s hand, let alone “visit” their neighborhood.
She then pivoted to the new redistricting map, which she was actually excited about because it would put all the housing projects in her district and unleash 40 years of nonvoters who were absolutely going to vote for her. A Republican. Living in public housing and running on the platform of the party that has controlled Texas’ welfare, housing, and social services policy for the last thirty years.
Those thirty years of Republican governance produced the conditions she was standing there describing. The broken elevators trapping wheelchair-bound elderly veterans on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th story floors. The uninhabitable conditions. The neglect. The poverty. All of it, the direct and documented result of Republican policy in the state of Texas. And her takeaway was, “These people are going to vote for me.”
After cataloging every failure of government assistance she has personally witnessed and experienced, after describing conditions that would make a slumlord blush, she looked those legislators dead in the eye and told them these were Democrat policies. In Texas. Where Republicans have run the Legislature, the Governor’s mansion, and every major state agency since 1994.
She doesn’t know. She genuinely does not know.
She closed by promising to take this seat and assuring the committee that there was nothing they could do about it.
Greg Casar won in 2024 by 35 points.
Now, before we go any further, let me be clear about something. I don’t care that Lauren Peña receives $50,000 a year in government assistance. You shouldn’t either. That’s what it’s there for. She has six people in her household, she’s living in poverty, and if the choice is between feeding her kids or dropping bombs on children in Gaza, hand her the EBT card and call it a day. No judgment here.
The judgment is reserved entirely for what comes out of her mouth about it.
Because Lauren Peña will stand in front of a camera, collect her government assistance, live in her federally subsidized housing, and in the same breath tell you that taxing the rich instead of eliminating property taxes for everyone is “a dumb idea.”
She doesn’t pay property taxes. She lives in the projects. The property tax relief she’s defending doesn’t apply to her. She is going to bat for Texas homeowners and landlords from her federally subsidized apartment, seemingly unaware that she has just argued against her own economic interests on camera and posted it to Facebook.
Her defense of the $50,000? One unhoused person in Austin costs $80,000 a year, so technically, she’s a bargain. That’s her argument.
Here’s where it gets truly special.
Lauren Peña has explained, in her own words, why she is running for Congress. She is running for Congress so that Austin city leadership will be forced to meet with her.
That’s the plan.
She is running for a seat in the United States House of Representatives, 1,500 miles away in Washington, DC, because she can’t get a callback from Austin City Hall. A freshman congressperson from TX37 has exactly zero authority to compel the Austin City Council to do anything. Congress does not supervise city councils. That is not how any level of American government works, and a person running for federal office should probably know that.
But it gets better. Greg Casar was on the Austin City Council from 2015 to 2023. He doesn’t need a meeting with Austin city leadership. He was a member of the Austin city leadership. He left for Congress, where he has been since 2023, meaning he has not “reigned over Austin” in any capacity for three years.
She made a cartoon about it anyway.
Greg Casar ruined Austin from his seat in Congress, according to Lauren Peña, in Washington. Where he has been since before she apparently started paying attention, she wants to “take back the Capital of Texas,” which, again, is not something a congressperson controls, and Austin will remain the capital of Texas regardless of what happens in TX37 in November.
She does not know what office she is running for. She does not know what that office does. She made a Bitmoji about it and told her followers to screenshot it and post it everywhere.
I am posting it everywhere. 😂
Here’s what Lauren Peña will never tell you, mostly because she doesn’t know it.
Republicans have controlled the Texas state government since 1994. The Governor’s mansion, the Legislature, the Attorney General’s office, the agencies that administer public housing, SNAP, Medicaid, and every other program keeping Lauren Peña’s family fed and housed, all of it, Republican, for thirty years. Texas has one of the most miserly Medicaid programs in the country, has refused federal expansion money that would have covered hundreds of thousands of poor Texans, and has systematically stripped cities like Austin of local control over wages, housing policy, and tenant protections. The poverty Lauren Peña lives in every single day was built, brick by brick, by the party she is campaigning for.
But somewhere along the way, Lauren Peña stumbled across a YouTube video. Maybe it was some guy named Jimmy Bob in a Gadsden flag t-shirt telling her she was trapped on the Democratic plantation. Maybe it was PragerU, explaining in five minutes or less why everything wrong with America is actually the Democrats’ fault. Whatever the pipeline was, she took it as gospel. She was red-pilled, and now she’s standing in front of cameras in Austin’s housing projects telling poor Black and brown people that the party that has governed their misery for three decades is actually their salvation. 🙄
She blames Democrats for state policy in a state Democrats haven’t controlled since before some of her voters were born. She blames Democrats for federal housing conditions under a Republican-dominated federal government. She blames Democrats for local control issues that Republicans in the Texas Legislature deliberately stripped from cities like Austin because they couldn’t stand that blue cities were trying to protect their own residents.
And her solution is to get those residents, people who haven’t voted in forty years because the system has given them absolutely no reason to, is to come out and vote for more of the same. More of the policies that broke the elevators. More of the policies that slashed the safety net. More of the policies that produced the exact conditions she describes every time she turns on a camera.
If Republican policies were going to fix Lauren Peña’s life, they would have done it by now. They’ve had thirty years.
But Lauren Peña doesn’t know that. She doesn’t know how her state government works, she doesn’t know what office she’s running for, she doesn’t know what that office does, and she doesn’t know that the people she’s trying to convince have been living under Republican neglect their entire lives. She just knows what Jimmy Bob on YouTube told her, and she’s running with it.
Greg Casar is going to win TX37 by thirty-something points. Lauren Peña is going to go back to her federally subsidized apartment, collect her government assistance, and probably make another Bitmoji about it.
And somewhere, a PragerU video will autoplay.
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This is scary. This is the result of the decline in literacy rates. I recently read a well-reasoned and supported Substack article (probably won't be able to find it again) which took the precipitous drop in adult literacy in this country, meaning both reading and basic arithmetic skills and translated what that means in real practice. With the low level of literacy, people don't have the reasoning skills, the logic ladders or the imagination to understand their world.
Ms. Pena is a good example of what it was describing.
The great thing about America is that almost anyone can run for office...but that's the horrible thing too--almost any idiot can run for office.