Texas Democrats Honor Bush, Refuse Investigations
In a tone deaf move this January, Republican U.S. Representative Michael Conaway introduced H.R.757, a bill to honor George W. Bush by placing his name on a U.S. courthouse in Midland, Texas.
Surprisingly, though that bill hasn’t gotten out of committee since, it got almost 50 cosponsors, including 11 Democrats:
Henry Cuellar
Chet Edwards
Sheila Jackson-Lee
Eddie Bernice Johnson
Charles Gonzalez
Al Green
Gene Green
Ruben Hinojosa
Solomon Ortiz
Silvestre Reyes
Ciro Rodriguez
Why would these Democrats vote to honor George W. Bush, who has been generally recognized as the worst President in U.S. history? There are a couple of explanations:
First, these Democrats are not progressives. In our legislative scorecard, they have an average overall score of 23.8, on a scale in which a score of 100 is ideally progressive. These congressional Democrats generally helped George W. Bush to implement his agenda, instead of offering resistance.
Only one of these eleven Democrats has endorsed H.R. 104, the bill by John Conyers that would establish commission to investigate the abusive, and possibly illegal, actions of the Bush Administration. That one Democrat from this bunch also happens to be the most progressive, though she still comes in low with a progressive score of just 43 out of 100: Sheila Jackson-Lee.
The other explanation overlaps with the first: All these Democrats are from Texas. That seems more likely to be the root cause of these Democrats’ coddling of George W. Bush, though the causality of antiprogressive politics is twisted all through the Texas identity.
