And it’s not Sarah Palin. Her name is Debra Medina and right now she’s polling right at 16% in the GOP primary race. Here she is:
She has participated in the Texas Tea Party movement and she spoke at last summer’s gathering of Texas secessionists at the State Capitol. And yes, she did call for secession. Here is her speech:
The two big planks of the Medina platform deal with property taxes and gun ownership. Medina refers to property taxes as “rent” being paid to the state. So the elimination of property taxes is an essential step to take in her framework of property ownership. Her revenue-raising alternative is to broaden the base of the Texas state sales tax. One thing she is unclear about is whether she is in favor of taxing the food Texans buy at the grocery store, which is currently sales tax exempt.
Gun ownership and the training of Texas citizenry in the use of guns follows right behind the property tax issue. Gun ownership is a sacred right in the Lone Star state; generations of Texas youth–myself included–have grown up learning to use firearms. My dad (a liberal, Yellow-Dog Democrat) was merely following through on his paternal responsibility when he put a .22 rifle in my little hands and then taught me the safety rules that naturally precede going out to the country and doing a little plinking. And plinking naturally preceded learning how to hunt. It also led to target shooting, which is a favorite sport among gun owners. Medina has tapped into a fundamental vein of Texas culture here, as she speaks to the irrational fear that Barack Obama is going to come and take people’s guns away. In the words of Mr. T, I pity the fool that would ever attempt to take guns away from Texans.
Then comes the issue of sovereignty (secession), which began to catch fire primarily in the southern states soon after the election of Barack Obama as President. Medina says this on her website:
Texas must stop the over reaching federal government and nullify federal mandates in agriculture, energy, education, healthcare, industry, and any other areas D.C. is not granted authority by the Constitution.
One wonders if this would include federal ag subsidies and EPA restrictions on what power companies and other industries might dump in Texas waterways or expel into the atmosphere (not that the EPA’s regulations are all that stringent or enforced.) What about the protective FDA regulations that (should) call for sanitary conditions in meat packing plants? Would she opt out of the federal highway and transportation system? If so, how will Texas continue to maintain its highway infrastructure? Wouldn’t such a move necessitate handing even more Texas roads over to private toll road companies?
Debra Medina will likely lose the primary, but perhaps force Rick Perry and Kay Bailey Hutchison into a run-off. Win or lose, she is likely going to remain an active force in Texas politics. Like Sarah Palin, Deb Medina won’t fade back into the scenery. And though Deb isn’t the beauty pageant type, she is an attractive, outspoken, glasses-wearing female politician. Expect her to run again in ’14. Depending on how bad or good things get between now and then, she may have a fighting chance to win. And if she does, the normally whacked-out state of affairs known as Texas politics will become even crazier.
I know. You’re wondering, given the current situation, how getting even crazier might be possible. But I look at the current occupant of the governor’s mansion and think back to 1978, when an unheralded oilman named Bill Clements came out of nowhere to clobber the Democratic candidate for governor, John Hill. Clements’ win was historic: he was the first Republican governor to be elected since Reconstruction. I remember the atrocious, ham-handed way he attempted to govern, how the Lege had to school him a bit, how coarse and pugnacious his speeches and press statements were, and I remember thinking then that his election set an all-time low in Texas politics. Little did we know that this was only the initial stage of sinking for the good ship “Political Gravitas.” The ascendancy of George W. Bush and Karl Rove to the Texas political main-stage heralded the onset of new lows. And amazingly, W.’s understudy, Rick Perry, has plumbed uncharted depths in his secessionist rantings, his selling off Texas roads to private toll road firms, and his Big Pharma connections with Merk that relate to his attempt to require that all Texas girls be immunized with Merk’s HPV vaccine, Gardasil.
The one thing Debra Medina would seem to offer that is sorely lacking in the governor’s office at the moment is integrity. Watch her in action and it becomes apparent that she truly believes in and is passionate about her intent to honestly represent “We Texans.” If the incumbent wins re-election, as the polls suggest he will, then maybe the stage will be set for 2014, when another victorious candidate might just swoop in from the margins. Perhaps, in the long term, that is what Debra Medina is counting on.
This Tumbleweed Life 
Nice post. However, I think that the term “arch-conservative” does her an injustice. To some it might suggest ultra right wing neoconservatism, which is not Debra Medina by a long shot. Is she conservative? Yes. But, hers is a kind of constitutional, libertarian conservatism that is far more independent than that expressed by the typical run-of-the-mill Republican who claims to be a conservative.
You may be interested in my blog which is following the Medina campaign closely.
http://freedomfollies.blogspot.com/
Alan, thanks for dropping by. Your blog suggests you are a Medina supporter and a rather passionate one at that.
As for the arch-conservative description, I leaned heavily on the understanding that the prefix is synonymous with “extreme.”
Engaging in talk of state secession from the United States, combined with her desire to completely dismantle the property tax system–a system that has been the key to funding government services and programs at state and county levels, not to mention the state’s public education–these positions I consider to be extreme and radical social deconstructions. So I would agree with you that she’s not a traditional conservative, nor is she a Neocon, whose expansion of government was primarily focused on privatizing wealth and socializing debt.
I have listened to this speech several times, because people keep saying she calls for secession. She does not. She does say that secession exists as a last option, but that we also have the tools of nullification and interposition, tools which have not been used yet. She concludes the speech by saying that Texas will do what needs to be done. To me, she’s saying that yes, secession is there as an option, and it will be used if necessary, but only if everything else fails.
Hi, Amanda, thanks for your comment. She does indeed suggest that the first order of business would be for Texas to use nullification to block the federal programs she opposes and that secession would follow if this didn’t work. But let’s go back to the name of the rally at which she speaks: Sovereignty or Secession. In her speech she refers directly to secession, saying “We are aware that stepping off into secession may in fact be a bloody war….We understand that the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.” So she is lifting up secession and the scenario of civil war as a valid path to take failing attempts at nullification. She’s smart enough not to call for such things directly, but the implications in her message are clear as day.
JD, I beg to disagree. Read my analysis in the following post, which has received laudatory comments on other sites. It addresses the points that you raise in your comment to Amanda. It is long, but I think you will find it not only worth the read, but provocative and entertaining in places. Also, I should point out that your response to my comment was the inspiration for my writing it, as you will see, in that I reproduce our conversation and link back to your blog.
http://freedomfollies.blogspot.com/2010/02/debra-medina-heart-of-political-poet.html
Alan, I believe we’re going to have to agree to disagree, and that’s ok. I’m actually glad we’ve had this chance to dialogue through our blogs.
One thing I’d be interested in hearing more about is this notion that the sovereignty and/or secession movement is a necessary reaction to the imminence of tyranny.
President Obama and the Democratic Congress were democratically elected by a majority of the electorate with a margin sufficient enough to keep the results from being arbitrated by the Supreme Court as they were in 2000.
The problem at the moment has nothing to do with them ramming unconstitutional legislation down our collective throat, like the Republicans did with the Patriot Act, for example. The problem is the gridlock and the recalcitrance of these elected officials to take on the real work of health-care reform, getting us expeditiously out of two seemingly endless and expensive wars, and ending the unregulated excesses in the Financial Industry, especially Wall Street.
These continued references to the threat of tyranny seem more like a straw man argument in this context.
Again, I expect we’ll disagree, but I appreciate the dialog and your link to this post in your blog. I’ll drop by there from time to time. And while I disagree with Debra Medina’s proposals on the property and sales taxes, I nevertheless admire her spunk and her integrity.
As a person who lives in Texas and votes and has been involved, in the past, as the communications manager for a lobby group for a regular and three special sessions of the Texas Legislature; I personally see Debra Medina as a breath of fresh air in Texas politics.
This has been a long time in coming. I am happy to see that she is pulling anywhere from 19% to 24% in various polls. It sends a very clear message (I hope) to both parties in power.
Texas leave the union? I think not. But the ability to do so is there; as is the ability for Texas to split into, as if II remember correctly, five states. If Texas did do that, the rest of the United States would really, really, “fear our wrath and fury.”The five states of Texas with ten US Senators…OH MY!
” In the his behavior today, “Adrian Wainer” aka “Robert Shaw” and a parade of bogus other personas that have afflicted this page has now shown himself to be an unmitigated bastardized, accretion of human qualities that in their conglomerate whole fit together to produce a human being with little, redeeming human virtue. ”
Dr Alan D Price.
Debra Medina
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Debra-Medina/95669721909?ref=ts
Is it possible that Dr Price does not like Adrian Wainer ?
JD,
“Ólafur Björnsson” is one of many aliases of the persona, “Adrian Wainer,” who has made it his mission to attack me wherever he can find a website where I have posted. He has no qualms or compunction about posting comments directed at me, which have no relevance to the readers of your blog or any other website. He has been attacking Debra Medina and me for over three months and has been increasingly thwarted in doing so by her supporters, Facebook administration, and recently by Debra, herself; consequently, he is reaching out in other ways to perpetrate his attacks. Your blog happens to be one of the lucky ones. I suggest that you may wish to blacklist this individual and monitor for future posts by other fake names. The other alternative is set your blog to approve comments before they are posted.
i have been a fan of debra medina for months.. and i’ve seen this guy come in and post totally irrelevant things. debra was focused on Texas and had no time for the kind of things being posted by adriane.. he’s been a thorn in the side of anyone who goes to debras page to post links and chat with others who feel the same way.. he really needs to get a life.
I was about to write that I found all this a bit too weird. But then I remembered that the original post dealt with Texas politics, and I realized that too weird is pretty much par for the course.