Strong Roots, Bold Insanity

This is the document that will drive the 2027 Legislative session.

There are two documents on Earth I know to be batshit crazy, The Turner Diaries and the Republican Party of Texas’ platform. The contents of both are very simialar. Going into the first official day of the Republican Party of Texas’ (RPT) 2026 Convention and their permanent committees, it’s a good time to really hone in on and take a gander at the changes they made to their platform. After all, it is their governing blueprint.

But before we get into how coo-coo their platform is, we need to talk about how bananas our Supreme Court Justice Jimmy Blacklock is. No, not bananas. Scary. This dude is scary.

This so-called neutral arbiter of the law stood in front of a party convention crowd and talked about preserving “the flame of Christian civilization.” Blacklock bragged about cutting ties with the American Bar Association because they dared to push DEI policies, which means allowing Black people in law schools. And he defended the court’s ruling upholding the ban on gender-affirming care for minors by essentially arguing that if Texans in 1876 didn’t think of it, it doesn’t exist as a right.

1876.

That’s his standard. A constitutional framework frozen in the year that Custer died at the Little Bighorn and Reconstruction was being actively dismantled.

Then came Senator Bob Hall. (I only clipped the funny parts.)

The audio in the committee was atrocious, so I got more screengrabs than videos, but I did get this one (you’ll have to turn way up). The reason this is so hilarious is that the far-right Christian Nationalists have been actively pushing for a Convention of States for years. David Barton at WallBuilders, in particular, has sunk tons of money into making this a Republican priority in previous years.

Now, the Republicans want it completely off their platform because they think the Marxists will use the opportunity to turn America into a Communist State. Yes, they actually said that they think that, from their own little heads:

They actually wound up keeping that plank. But the discussion was hilarious.

The platform.

Let’s start with 7b, because the audacity is breathtaking. The Republican Party of Texas wants to codify the number of Supreme Court justices into law, specifically to prevent Democrats from ever adding seats. They call it the “Keep Nine Amendment.” What they don’t want to know is that for the last decade, the GOP has done more to manipulate the composition of the Supreme Court than any political party in modern history. Mitch McConnell stole a seat by refusing to hold hearings for Merrick Garland for nearly a year, then rammed Amy Coney Barrett through in the final weeks of an election. They packed the court. They just did it slowly, and with shamelessness instead of legislation. The “Keep Nine Amendment” is about locking in their wins.

• Further reading: The Case For Expanding The Supreme Court

Then there’s 7d. The RPT wants to repeal the 17th Amendment, the one that gives you the direct election of your US Senators. Under their vision, you don’t get to vote for your senators anymore. The state legislature picks them. The same state legislature that has gerrymandered itself into a supermajority. They don’t want a republic. They want an oligarchy.

7e takes aim at the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause, limiting citizenship to children with at least one parent who is already a legal US citizen. It was ratified in 1868 specifically to guarantee that this country could never again create a permanent underclass of people born on American soil with no rights and no recourse. The people who wrote it knew exactly what they were doing and exactly what they were preventing.

And then there’s 7f. The Republican Party of Texas, the party of the state that was part of Mexico until 1836, that conducted government business in Spanish before it conducted it in English, that wouldn’t exist without the vaqueros and the Tejanos who built it, wants to make English the only official language of the United States.

9a is a NEW PLANK requiring all elected officials in Texas to be natural-born US citizens. Not just citizens. Natural-born citizens. That’s the presidential eligibility standard, applied to every school board member, every county commissioner, every state rep. They’re not even trying to be subtle about what they’re doing. Racism, xenophobia, pick one.

Then 9B, the “Undivided Loyalty” plank, goes further. Any person holding dual citizenship is flatly prohibited from serving in any elected or appointed capacity at any level of Texas state or local government. And they want the Texas Congressional Delegation to push the same prohibition at the federal level.

There was even a moment when they discussed Ted Cruz and declared him safe because, allegedly, he renounced his Canadian citizenship.

They want to ban preK, because they’re stupid.

I don’t know what else to call it. No one there has ever read a research paper or data on the benefits and outcomes of preK programs, because if they did, this wouldn’t be a thing. But it is.

The Republican Party of Texas wants to prohibit publicly subsidized pre-K and kindergarten. They’re calling it the “Nanny State” plank, because in their world, the state providing early childhood education to working families is government overreach, but the state forcing a rape victim to carry a pregnancy to term is just Tuesday.

Let’s be clear about what pre-K actually is in Texas. For hundreds of thousands of kids across this state, disproportionately Black and brown kids, disproportionately poor kids, pre-K is where someone first notices they need glasses, or they’re not hitting developmental milestones, or they haven’t eaten since yesterday. It’s where a teacher is sometimes the first safe adult a child has ever known. For a lot of Texas families, it is a lifeline disguised as finger painting.

The RPT wants to hand all of that to private childcare providers and let the market sort it out.

This isn’t about parental choice. School vouchers were never about parental choice. This is about completing the privatization of public education from cradle to diploma, making sure public dollars flow to private religious institutions with no accountability to taxpayers, no curriculum standards, and no obligation to serve the kids who need it most.

Plank 164B is dressed up as a transparency measure, but don’t let it fool you for a second. The RPT wants to strip the Joint Commission of any oversight authority over Texas state-funded hospitals. The Joint Commission is why your hospital has infection control protocols and doesn’t just freestyle your open-heart surgery. But the RPT isn’t worried about patient safety. They want to strip away every independent check that stands between the state of Texas and the ability to prosecute doctors in state-funded hospitals for providing legal medical care. They’re building a dragnet.

More ignorance and bigotry.

The “Don’t Sharia Our Texas” plank wants the advocacy of Sharia law declared a seditious criminal act, punishable by criminal prosecution, disqualification from public service, denaturalization, and deportation. They want to deport people for their religious beliefs. That is what this says.

Then they want to eliminate or severely restrict programs that allow Muslim workers, students, and clergy to immigrate to Texas legally. A religious test. For the state of Texas. In 2026.

There are approximately 420,000 Muslim Texans. They are your neighbors, your doctors, your coworkers, your kids’ teachers. The RPT just voted to treat them as an enemy combatant class.

Jimmy Blacklock talked about preserving the flame of Christian civilization. This is what that flame looks like when they aim it at someone.

Plank 27 is where the Republican Party of Texas drops all pretense of governing and hands you a wish list written by a freshman economics student who just discovered Ayn Rand.

They want to repeal the federal minimum wage. Dodd-Frank exists because Wall Street crashed the entire global economy in 2008 and took millions of working people down with it. Sarbanes-Oxley, which exists because Enron (a Texas company, by the way) committed one of the largest acts of corporate fraud in American history and wiped out thousands of employees’ retirement savings. The Lacey Act, which prevents trafficking in illegally harvested wildlife and plants. Gone. All of it. Because businesses shall be “minimally regulated at all levels.”

Then they get to state laws. They want to eliminate business licensing. Professional licensing. Mandatory sick leave. Family leaves.

Professional licensing. They want to eliminate the requirement that the person cutting your hair, pulling your tooth, or rewiring your house actually knows what they’re doing.

And then, mandatory sick leave is on this list twice. Once under federal laws to repeal, and once under state laws to eliminate. They hate the idea of your sick ass staying home from work so much they listed it twice.

These are not serious people.

I want to be fair here for a second, because Plank 172 is more complicated than most of what’s in this document.

CPS in Texas has real, documented, serious problems. Children have died in state care. The system is underfunded, understaffed, and has failed kids in both directions, removing children who didn’t need to be removed and leaving children in homes where they were being actively harmed. Nobody who has paid attention to Texas CPS for the last twenty years is going to argue it doesn’t need reform.

But here’s where this plank goes sideways.

Requiring proof beyond a reasonable doubt to permanently terminate parental rights sounds like due process until you remember that “beyond a reasonable doubt” is the standard we use to send people to prison. The people pushing this plank aren’t interested in protecting children from abuse. They’re interested in making it functionally impossible for the state to intervene in a family regardless of what’s happening inside that home.

And then there’s the provision requiring that upon reunification, a parent’s name be immediately and permanently deleted from the Texas Central Registry with no residual notation or record.

And the people most harmed by it will be the kids.

The RPT’s platform is a fringe document.

This is the official platform of the Republican Party of Texas, adopted by delegates from every corner of this state, cheered for in a convention hall in Houston, and handed to every Republican lawmaker as the roadmap for the 2027 legislative session.

They want to deport people for their religion. They want to eliminate your vote for US Senator. They want to strip hospitals of independent oversight so they can prosecute doctors. They want to defund pre-K and hand your child’s early education to the market. They want loyalty tests for public servants. They want to freeze the Constitution in 1876.

And in November, every Republican candidate on your ballot will have either signed onto this platform or been too cowardly to say otherwise.

This is not a party that has lost its way. This is a party that knows exactly where it’s going. The question is whether Texas goes with it.

Register. Organize. Vote.

The flame of Christian civilization Jimmy Blacklock talked about? We’ve seen what they do with it.

Don’t let them burn it all down.

• Who Will Be On The 2026 State Ballot?

• Who Will Be On The 2026 Federal Ballot?

• Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.

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