Rick Perry Runs For President, From Budget

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


At this time last year, Arizona was facing a catastrophic budget crisis, the byproduct of building an entire economy on a real estate bubble that finally burst. It was a pretty daunting challenge, and so legislators chose to take their minds off of things by inventing new problems, and then solving those instead. As Ken Silverstein noted in Harper’s:

Lawmakers have turned racial profiling into official policy…Another new law bans the funding of any ethnic-studies programs in the public schools, while a third prohibits “intentionally or knowingly creating a human-animal hybrid.” Lawmakers declared February 8 the “Boy Scout Holiday,” took time out to discount fishing-license fees for Eagle Scouts, and approved a constitutional right to hunt.

Mischief managed. Now, a similar situation is playing out in Texas. The Lone Star State faces a $25 billion budget deficit in 2010, so naturally, Gov. Rick Perry has put the legislature to work on a package of entirely unrelated emergency items. Politico says this means Perry’s running for president, in which case his agenda is great fodder for potential primary voters. It’s less great, however, for women, immigrants, and poor people. Here’s a breakdown:

  •  Mandatory ultrasounds: Per the Texas Independent, “State Sen. Dan Patrick’s Senate Bill 16 mandates that a woman seeking an abortion first view a sonogram, hear a verbal description of the image and listen to the fetal heartbeat.” Patrick, a Houston talk-radio host who founded the legislature’s Tea Party Caucus, made news four years ago when he suggested that the state pay women a competitive 7 cents/hour to have babies. Hearings on the bill begin on Wednesday; we’ll update our map as necessary:
  • Abolish “Sanctuary Cities”: As red meat goes, this one’s little more than empty calories. Perry wants to look tough on illegal immigration without doing anything that would substantially halt the flow of cheap labor into the state. Moreover, while Perry says he wants to crack down on cities that consciously don’t crack down on undocumented workers, Texas itself is more or less a sanctuary state. So far, his most cogent explanation of what this entails is: “If the shoe is fitting you, then you might not want to be wearing it.”* So chew on that. The quote, I mean; not the shoe.
  • Voter ID: With his plan to require all voters to have a valid, government-issued photo ID, Perry has taken dead aim at the only kind of voter fraud that pretty much never happens. The bill, which has already passed the state senate, acknowledges the inconvenience of checking IDs, but makes an exception for just one of the affected demographics: seniors. As our Kevin Drum put it, “Hmmm.”
  • Balanced Budget Amendment: The Texas constitution already mandates that the state have a balanced budget; Perry wants the legislature to pass a resolution calling for the federal government to do the same. It’s not just talk; the idea, which has taken hold on the right, is that if two-thirds of the states do the same, they can call a constitutional convention to propose the amendment themselves.

*Bonus Rick Perry footwear quote: “I’m pretty sure the only thing that works for one-size-fits-all, are gym socks. Not government.” And here he is giving a speech in front of a big shelf full of cowboy boots.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate