Spiritual Warfare in the 89th Texas Legislative Session

February 24, 2025 | Austin, TX

by Cindi Castilla, President, Texas Eagle Forum

Everything about the 89th Texas Legislative Session feels like a spiritual battle. The goal of Texas Eagle Forum is to preserve traditional family values and we understand we will often face adversity when we are fighting the good fight. We want good people to thrive as our Founders envisioned, but oftentimes we see lawmakers pandering to special interests or doling out our money to draw businesses and new residents here, both the good and the bad. Sure, growth is great – but not when it creates negative repercussions on the citizens already here.

For example, Senators we usually think of as true Conservatives have filed bills in this session that override local authorities to “create more affordable housing” in Texas. In reality our home prices rise as more people arrive here from states with a higher cost of living. Our property taxes are less than what they paid in state income taxes, so they bid up our home prices to live better here than they could in their former home state.

We have a chance to get rid of our lottery. We have heard testimony about internal corruption. We know people living in the lowest income zip codes spend the most money on the lottery. Our Lottery Commission (and state) collected money from our poorest residents, but in turn allowed unscrupulous businesses to commandeer jackpots with the Commission’s help. This should never be. We believe the only way we may get the unprincipled lottery shut down is through the voices of Texans demanding that we close it down and treat the poor with greater dignity.

Voting is one of our most precious rights. We are not yet seeing enough serious election bills get hearings. The Senate and the House have heard a few that do a bit of something to help our election process, but we have also watched our House and Senate pass a ridiculous bill out of their respective committees. Specifically SB 62 and HB 492 which allow a child to read and mark the ballot for their parent at the polling place! We testified against this bill at each chamber’s committee hearing.

Why these bills are a terrible idea (you likely already instinctively know, but apparently committee members and bill authors don’t):

• Children are allowed in a polling place already

• Children can view the voting process

• Reading ballots out loud and a parent telling a child how to mark the ballot could become electioneering in the polling place

• Reading and discussing the ballot is not allowed for anyone else while voting

• Election Judges will have no way to have a “child” prove their age or if they are actually the child of the voter.

• This could be used as a method to deliver votes using a “child” paid by a ballot harvester to mark the ballot of an uninterested voter they claim is their parent.

• The right to vote is for U.S. citizens who reach age 18, have registered, and aren’t in the middle of serving a felony. That is not a high bar, but we don’t even try to respect it when we tell children that they are allowed to practice this on an actual ballot!

• When a voter uses an assistant to help them vote, Judges are required to get this helpers I.D. and have them sign a sworn statement about the duties and limitations of assistance. Children don’t have the legal capacity or ID to qualify to sign these statements so they aren’t required.

• This law would diminish the sanctity of ballot and the privilege of voting while pretending it is a parent’s only way to encourage their child to want to vote someday.

• We strongly oppose both of these bills.

So this is how Texas Eagle Forum is spending our time at the Capitol - fighting to kill foolish bills that could have detrimental results. Of course, we have supported some very good bills but many more are just now getting assigned to a committee in the House.

Now that the budgets are published, we are dismayed, but should have expected, that we don’t see spending cuts. No one is bragging about cutting a budget where they found waste, abuse, mismanagement, or a lack of necessity. Education takes up a very large portion of our budget, but we don’t see many bills that want to try to change education into something that works again. Texans for Fiscal Responsibility wrote a helpful article discussing this topic - click here to read.

Visit Montgomery County Eagle Forum’s Legislative Alerts page for Monday Legislative Updates from Texas Eagle Forum, and other action alerts for the 89th Texas Legislative Session.