This might be a weird response but kudos to Shahid Shafi for sticking to his guns and not resigning in protest? I don\u2019t at all understand why he wants to be involved with a party that\u2019s treating him like this but if he quits then the Republicans in the county that contains Fort Worth and its suburbs have effectively blocked Muslim citizens from full participation in the political process which seems pretty grim. For what it\u2019s worth it sounds like the proposal to remove him is going to fail.
Two important bits of Texas context, first that Muslims were a \u201cmodel minority\u201d associated with conservatism, the oil industry, and the state Republican Party. When you said \u201cMuslim\u201d, Texans would have generally pictured an oilfield STEM type who left an unstable Middle East for a Texas boom in the 1970s, who\u2019s religious in a college-graduate bourgeois \u201cvalues\u201d way, who reminds oil executives of themselves more than native Christian roughnecks do.
This is key to why George W. Bush was so quick to stand up for Muslims-as-such while railing against \u201cIslamic fundamentalist terrorism\u201d, it\u2019s key to why he so confidently committed the country to \u201cwinning Muslims over to Americanism\u201d abroad and his party to \u201cwinning minorities over to conservatism\u201d at home.
Second, what conservatism means in Texas. Texas has a reputation as very conservative, very Republican, and very rowdy so it\u2019s tempting to think of the Tea Party and Trump-era Republican Party as just Texas carried to its natural endpoint.
But that\u2019s not really right - the core of Texas conservatism was an older conservatism, pre-Eisenhower, a conservatism of frontier land barons and resource extraction, defending not the bourgeois 50s against the upsets of the 60s but rather the aristocratic Gilded Age against the Roosevelts\u2019 Square and New Deals.
And even if that conservatism had captured the state Republicans, the Republicans didn\u2019t capture the state until the mid-90s; for most of the 20th century Texas was a thoroughly blue state with a political culture of agrarian populism.
So Texas was very Republican but it was business Republican; it was very conservative but it was business conservative. Some chest-thumping broke out in the periphery like the school textbook commission, but it was a state firmly under the go-along-to-get-along country club leadership of ranchers, oilmen, bankers, land developers, and executives.
Until now.
In 2014, Dan Patrick, champion of the firebreathing, cultural-populist wing of the Republican Party, was elected Lt. Governor. (Texas Lt. Governors, who control the state Senate, run separately from and are effectively more politically powerful than Governors, who oversee administrative agencies.)
The business Republicans hate him, and by controlling the state House in the figure of Speaker Dan Strauss they had leverage to push back. Patrick called the legislature back into session to demand a bill firming up the preexisting implicit gender enforcement regime of public bathrooms as a cultural defense against gender fluidity
(The Texas Legislature meets every other year for 140 days, about 100 of which they spend on meaningless formalities and then rush to pass everything before the deadline comes, with opponents bargaining by calibrating their delaying tactics to run out the clock - Wendy Davis\u2019 \u201cpink shoes\u201d filibuster was actually pretty significant in eating up a full legislative day near the deadline.)
but they turned him down; Patrick pushed for a conservative tax plan and they balked at its implications for rural school districts.
So the firebreathers targeted more seats and got some in the 2018 election. Strauss didn\u2019t run for reelection but the Speaker\u2019s gavel passed to his designated business-Republican heir, but the caucus knows the firebreathers have a close eye on them, and a talk-radio whip in their hand.
Which is to say, this isn\u2019t all a random sideshow, there\u2019s a war in the Texas Republican Party between the business conservatives and the conservative-as-identity types rn, \u201cwho controls a given county party\u201d is very much a battleground, and \u201cwhat do Muslims mean w/r/t Texas Republican conservatism\u201d is very much the stakes.
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