Report: Texas Lawmaker has heated words for Texas Craft Brewer. Ronnie Crocker, Beer, TX at Chron.com
Testimony in Austin this week from Scott Metzger on behalf of the Texas Craft Brewers Guild appear to have struck a nerve with state Rep. Charlie Geren, R-Fort Worth. In comments published by the Texas Beverage Industry Journal, he called them “crap.”
“I’m very disappointed that he’s bringing this up, and I’m not going to go into the next session with a very good taste in my mouth with him starting this crap this early,” Geren, a restaurant owner and House chairman, told the Texas Beverage Industry Journal on Friday. “It is the law, and I’m going to fight to keep it the law.”
At issue was a bill that Rep. Geren sponsored which basically stripped owners of craft breweries of their own distribution rights, providing the large distributors free-access to increasingly large bucket of money. Not surprisingly, the beer, wine and liquor industry holds the number 3 spot in Geren's list of biggest donors.
This is not to single out Geren, there are plenty of examples of this throughout the State on both sides of the political aisle. As a matter of fact, you'd have to look long and hard to see evidence of a State elected official taking a stance contrary to those that fund his/her campaign. The problem, as is evidenced around the State, is that Republicans as a whole have at once forgotten the tenets of the Reagan Doctrine while fighting to see who can best fit into his underwear on the campaign trail.
The Tea Party? Sorry, try again. They started from lean roots but have morphed to a caricature of themselves wandering around without clearly stated goals, without a base understanding of what the State needs to do (roads, education, water, infrastructure) in lieu of deciding that, seemingly, the State needs to do nothing.
The second problem with the Tea Party movement in Texas is that they've allowed themselves to be defined and co-opted by one Dan (Goeb) Patrick. Sen. Patrick (Soon to be Lt. Gov if polling is accurate) is nothing if not a political opportunist. His initial anti-government lean has been replaced by a doctrine based on rule by intellectual betters (of which he imagines himself one) and government solutions looking for problems to solve. His on/off/on love-affair with property tax cuts is indicative of this.
The rise of the Tea Party has left the establishment Republican group (such as Geren) running back to their moneyed interests hoping to retain power through big-business connections without properly explaining their reasons for doing so. That Geren, financially reliant on business groups such as the beer/wine/liquor distributors for his political life, is so quick to dismiss as "crap" the severance of real value from small business speaks volumes of how far the needle has moved.
Back in the days before the Republican ascendance in Texas establishment Republicans were moderate Democrats. Most of them read the political tea-leaves and wore-down a hasty path to the GOP door once it became apparent that having a (D) behind ones name would be political suicide in an increasingly red state. The problem for the GOP now is that these political nomads find the idea of working with the ideologically driven right abhorrent. It's so beyond their political field of vision as to be outer Mongolia.
Given this the silly question asked by well-passed-his-prime political writer Paul Burka of "Can the Republicans Govern?" is actually turning out to be a salient one. Not because of any political foresight on the part of Burka (he was referring to the initial wave of establishment Republicans, and could not foresee the rising of the house of Tea) but because of the compliance of the GOP in buying into the "faction war" myth cultivated by the Texas Lockstep Political Media.
What the TLSPM relies on fully is their myths being given credence by the leadership class. The Democrats are willing because, typically, those constructs dove-tail with their attempts to get back in power. Amazingly however, it appears that some in the GOP are willing as well. Not only is this self-defeating but it leads to a lot of silly intra-party carping over the 20% of things on which the sides disagree.
At their heart, political parties are not homogenous organizations marching in lock-step on each and every issue. The Democrats are a coalition of special interest groups all with a political axe to grind. Only recently has there been signs that these groups are willing to start pulling in much the same direction. The GOP is a mix of center-right, big business establishment interests, movement and social conservatives. Right now the latter two groups are certainly have their hands on the wheel and are steering the HMS Reagan's Underwear in a direction the establishment does not want it to go.
Where Texas Republicans are getting it wrong is that they don't seem to understand that the direction the ship should go is in the opposite direction in which all are currently fighting to steer. Republicans do best when they argue based on individual freedom and business opportunity for all. They do the worst when they engage in pugilism with immigrant groups and big, wet, sloppy kisses with big business. Republicans need to reclaim the mantle of champion of small business, to remember that the way to build wealth is to support the middle-class, not take from it valuable assets as a hand-out to moneyed interests. They stray too far from these roots at their long-term peril.
While I don't think Texas Democrats have strong enough candidates to make inroads in 2014, I do see a time in the near future where enough of the new, transplanted Texans decide enough is enough and decide to vote in familiar-feeling candidates who are similar in nature to those who have all but ruined the States they came from.
