A Spring Roundup in Texas

By James Moore  

Arrogance tends to take root in places where no one has held you accountable in a very long time. Texas Republicans, who have institutionalized arrogance, have been running this state without meaningful opposition since 1991, and what they have wrought in those thirty-four years is a masterwork of performative outrage married to spectacular, measurable failure. They have given the citizens of the second-largest state in the union the highest rate of uninsured children in the country, a graveyard of shuttered rural hospitals, public schools strangled of funding to subsidize private religious academies, a Ten Commandments mandate in every classroom alongside a vigilant fear of Muslim neighbors, and a presumptive U.S. Senate candidate who has been indicted, impeached, accused of adultery, divorced on biblical grounds, and pardoned, all without once losing a primary.

Why do voters surrender to such nonsense?

One lead example is a lack of health care insurance. Texas has the highest uninsured rate in the nation. No other state is even close to our sad statistics. In 2024, the U.S. Census Bureau confirmed that 16.7% of Texans overall lack health coverage, while 21.6% of working-age adults, more than one in five, have no insurance, nearly triple the rate in states like Massachusetts.

It’s worse if you are a child in this state. We have abandoned our young while marketing them as our bright future. Texas continues to have the highest rate of uninsured children in the nation, at 13.6% in 2024, up nearly three percentage points from just 2022. About 1.1 million Texas kids went without coverage last year, that’s nearly a quarter of the nation’s 4.6 million uninsured children. One state. One quarter of the country’s uninsured kids. A child born in Texas without parents with resources will be forced to depend on emergency rooms and charity care.

The remedy to this crisis, though, has been sitting on the table since 2010. The Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion would extend coverage to hundreds of thousands of low-income adults, people who earn too much for traditional Medicaid but too little to qualify for marketplace subsidies. Forty states and the District of Columbia have accepted it. Texas has not. Fifteen years of ideological obstinance dressed up as fiscal conservatism, while working Texans bleed and rural communities collapse.

From 2013 to 2020, Texas had the most rural hospital closures in the country, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report. Doctors continued to leave areas with hospital closures, giving people even fewer options for care. In communities where the local hospital was often the largest employer, the emergency room, the obstetrics ward, and the only place within sixty miles to treat a heart attack, the doors simply closed. A state legislator from San Antonio, the lone Republican defying his party after it voted down a Medicaid expansion bill, said, “Unfortunately we are stuck in a decade-old narrative that has forced the closing of many rural hospitals and less access to physician care. Fiscal conservatism was denied today.”

Fiscal absurdity would have been more accurate. Texas Republicans denied billions of dollars in federal Medicaid matching funds, money Texas taxpayers had already sent to Washington, in order to make an ideological point about the size of government, while their own constituents drove four hours to the nearest emergency room and their hospitals went dark. That is not governance. It’s more like cosplay governance, wearing that rodeo belt buckle the size of a hubcap while your neighbors go bankrupt from a hospital bill.

But, hey, if you think that’s ignorance, consider our public schools in one of the fastest-growing states in the union. The population is surging, cities are expanding, suburbs are metastasizing across formerly agricultural land at a pace that strains infrastructure and schools alike. In any rational governance framework, a booming state invests in the public institutions that give that growth meaning, roads, water, and above all, schools. Texas Republicans, true to their idiotic ideology, have chosen a different path.

In 2025, the Texas Legislature passed Senate Bill 2, establishing what they have branded the Texas Education Freedom Accounts program, a $1 billion school voucher scheme that allows families to use public taxpayer dollars to pay for private school tuition, tutoring, transportation, and other education-related costs, with awards averaging about $10,000 per family. The price tag, of course, is not expected to hold there. The $1 billion cost for the first biennium is expected to balloon to $7.9 billion by 2030–31, all while traditional public schools have seen their per-pupil funding dwindle under the pressure of inflation with minimal increases from the state. Districts across the state are firing teachers and closing campuses.

The promise from Governor Greg Abbott was that this was for the poor, for families trapped in failing schools, for those who needed options, which was inane and disingenuous spin. The experience of other states tells the true story. In North Carolina, which has a similar voucher program, a 2025 state report found nearly 90% of voucher recipients were already in private schools after income limits were lifted, with participating families earning nearly twice the typical household income. It is, as critics said it would be, a subsidy for the wealthy to keep doing what they were already doing, paid for by the public schools their children do not attend.

In rural Texas, the consequences are already visible and they are not abstractions. Education researchers have described the coming impact on small-town school districts in terms that ought to stop a reasonable person cold. One education researcher described voucher findings from the last decade as “catastrophic,” citing learning loss comparable to the impacts from COVID-19 and Hurricane Katrina for students leaving public school systems. The communities that thrive around their schools, and in rural Texas, those schools are everything, the football team, the band, the pride, the reason people stay, and the town may not survive without them.

Meanwhile, the Republicans who voted for this program continue to talk about parental rights and educational freedom, as though freedom were a concept that applied only to parents with means and mobility. The parents of a kid in a two-stoplight town in the Trans-Pecos, with no private school within fifty miles, have been offered a check they cannot spend on anything real, while the legislature drains the institution that actually serves their child. And yet rural Texans have voted consistently and overwhelmingly for Republicans tearing apart the state’s institutions.

In fact, conservatives have decided, after due consideration of all the state’s other lingering issues, that what public schools most urgently need is a sixteen-by-twenty-inch framed copy of the Ten Commandments on every classroom wall. Governor Abbott signed Senate Bill 10 in June 2025, making Texas the largest state in the nation to impose such a mandate. Texas lawmakers had already required classrooms to hang “In God We Trust” signs in 2021, allowed unlicensed religious chaplains to supplant mental health counselors in public schools in 2023, and approved new Bible-infused curriculum materials in 2024. The march of Christian nationalism through the Texas school system has been neither subtle nor slow.

When Democratic lawmakers proposed that the bill include moral and ethical texts from other faiths like Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, to reflect the actual diversity of Texas children, those amendments were rejected. One faith. One set of commandments. On the wall. Every day. For children of every background, every tradition, and none.

The hypocrisy compounds itself the moment you turn your eyes toward how Texas’s political leadership has treated its Muslim residents. Texas politicians have investigated a planned Islamic community called EPIC City in North Texas, alleging without evidence that it would be governed by Sharia law, running investigations that have so far turned up no wrongdoing. One political consultant described fears over Sharia law as the new border, a political lightning rod capable of energizing Texas voters almost instantly.

In sum, though, my state requires Christian scripture in every classroom while its politicians gin up hysteria over a Muslim community that has committed no crime, violated no law, and poses no threat. The same lawmakers who invoke religious freedom as their reason for posting the Ten Commandments treat the existence of Muslim Texans as a sinister conspiracy. When a Texas high school recently had students handing out free Qurans, it prompted an official investigation. A student named Kennedy Williams, expressed the hypocrisy very clearly. “I find it really weird,” he said, “that they are kind of pissed about it since we’re forced to have the Ten Commandments in every single classroom.”

While they are working to ruin public schools and chasing Muslim ghosts, Texas Republicans are also wasting millions on the fraud of voter fraud. Ken Paxton used the full resources of the Texas Attorney General’s office, staff, investigators, subpoenas, press conferences, to hunt for the massive voter fraud he assured Texans was corroding their elections. He filed lawsuits. He issued warnings. He challenged ballot counts. He tried to get the Supreme Court to throw out the electoral votes of four states after the 2020 election. And he wouldn’t stop. After the millions in taxpayer dollars spent and the years of investigation, the documented cases of coordinated voter fraud in Texas remained vanishingly rare, individually prosecuted, statistically irrelevant to any election outcome.

What the investigation did produce was a $6.6 million judgment against Paxton, paid by Texas taxpayers, after several of the whistleblowers who reported him to the FBI successfully sued him for wrongful termination. And Paxton’s impeachment trial, where the Republican-controlled Texas House voted 121–23 to impeach him, cost Texas taxpayers over $5 million, the majority spent on lawyers and investigators.

So the man who claimed to be the guardian of the people’s money spent the people’s money hunting a phantom, got impeached by members of his own party, and left Texans with an $11 million tab for the privilege of his tenure. Then he announced he was running for Senate.

The curtain still has not come down on Paxton’s theater of the absurd. He is, by any conventional measure of political viability, a man who should not be electable. He was indicted in 2015 on felony charges of duping investors in a tech company, a case that dragged on for nine years before ending in a pretrial agreement requiring him to pay nearly $300,000 in restitution and complete community service and legal ethics education. He was impeached by his own party’s supermajority in the Texas House. He was acquitted in the Senate, where his wife, Angela, sat in the chamber through testimony about his alleged affair as his mistress waited in the Senate’s foyer. Angela was recused from voting on her husband’s fate, but after 38 years of marriage, she filed for divorce on what she described as “biblical grounds,” adding that “in light of recent discoveries” she did not believe it honored God to remain in the marriage.

A man who preaches family values. Whose party posts the Ten Commandments in schoolrooms. Whose political identity rests on the foundation of Christian morality. Divorced on biblical grounds by his own wife, who sat through a Senate trial about his affair and found out there was more she didn’t know.

Paxton’s opponent in November is James Talarico, a Round Rock native, eighth-generation Texan, former public school teacher, Harvard-educated policy thinker, state legislator, seminary student, and devout Christian who drives a Chevy pickup and wears Lucchese boots. He credits his minister grandfather for instilling in him the principles of Christianity, which he applies to politics, and hopes one day to become a pastor. He is not a caricature of coastal liberalism. He is, in almost every external way, a Texas Republican’s idea of a Texas Democrat, which is to say, indistinguishable from a Texas Republican until you read the policy positions.

Talarico’s primary victory speech barely mentioned Donald Trump. “We’re done being divided. We’re done being played,” he said, invoking his Christian faith and promising a politics of love. “We’re not just trying to win an election. We are trying to fundamentally change our politics.”

The structural mathematics of a Texas Senate race remain forbidding for any Democrat, though. Republicans have won every statewide election here since 1994. The party apparatus, the donor class, the rural media environment, the gerrymandered psychology of the Texas electorate, all of it tilts hard against a flip. Paxton, though, is not a typical Republican candidate. He is a man with a criminal record by any reasonable definition, a pretrial diversion is still an admission of culpability, an impeachment, an affair, or two, a divorce on biblical grounds, and a Trump pardon from federal corruption charges doing the work that acquittal could not fully accomplish. He is carrying more baggage than the average Greyhound bus station.

There are sane Texans who will not tolerate these depredations on our state. And we keep asking why our fellow Texans continue returning to the ballot box and handing power to people who have demonstrably failed them? Why does the man with the highest uninsured rate in the country keep getting reelected? Why does the attorney general who wasted millions of dollars on a phantom voter fraud investigation win a Senate primary?

Part of the answer is the basic machinery of single-party dominance, gerrymandered districts, suppressed turnout, a media landscape that amplifies grievance and minimizes accountability, a Democratic Party that has not built the infrastructure in this state to consistently compete. But that is not the whole answer.

The rest of the answer is something darker and more durable and that is the successful substitution of cultural identity for material interest. Texas Republicans have spent thirty-four years telling a significant portion of their electorate that the real threat to their lives is not the closing of the rural hospital, but the teaching of evolution. Not the uninsured child, but the transgender athlete. Not the corporation drilling on their land, but the immigrant crossing the river. They have replaced governance with theater, and a significant number of Texans have decided they prefer the show and keep buying tickets with their votes.

James Talarico appears to understand this. His campaign is built on the wager that enough Texans are tired of the theater to elect something real. The bet is audacious and it may even be correct. But the state of Texas has been making the other bet for thirty-four years, and the outcomes include more than a million uninsured children, hospitals gone dark, schools defunded, rivers of taxpayer money flowing to religious academies and crooked attorneys general, and a Senate candidate who had to be pardoned before he could run for office.

My love for Texas is, personally, greater than my disdain for its politics. Our history, geography, weather, landscape, and, yes, the people, still make this a great state. But greatness is not the same as governance, and somewhere along the way, the people running this place confused the two, or, more likely, knew exactly what they were doing to disassemble the social contract and tear it up. The voters of Texas will, meanwhile, have a choice in November between a man who embodies confusion and immorality or a man who is offering to end it.

Whether they take it is, as it has always been, entirely up to them

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.

 

James Moore is the New York Times bestselling author of “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” three other books on Bush and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, as well as two novels, and a biography entitled, “Give Back the Light,” on a famed eye surgeon and inventor. His newest book will be released mid- 2023. Mr. Moore has been honored with an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his documentary work and is a former TV news correspondent who has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976.

He has been a retained on-air political analyst for MSNBC and has appeared on Morning Edition on National Public Radio, NBC Nightly News, Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, CBS Evening News, CNN, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Hardball with Chris Matthews, among numerous other programs. Mr. Moore’s written political and media analyses have been published at CNN, Boston Globe, L.A. Times, Guardian of London, Sunday Independent of London, Salon, Financial Times of London, Huffington Post, and numerous other outlets. He also appeared as an expert on presidential politics in the highest-grossing documentary film of all time, Fahrenheit 911, (not related to the film’s producer Michael Moore).

His other honors include the Dartmouth College National Media Award for Economic Understanding, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television News Directors’ Association, the Individual Broadcast Achievement Award from the Texas Headliners Foundation, and a Gold Medal for Script Writing from the Houston International Film Festival. He was frequently named best reporter in Texas by the AP, UPI, and the Houston Press Club. The film produced from his book “Bush’s Brain” premiered at The Cannes Film Festival prior to a successful 30-city theater run in the U.S.

Mr. Moore has reported on the major stories and historical events of our time, which have ranged from Iran-Contra to the Waco standoff, the Oklahoma City bombing, the border immigration crisis, and other headlining events. His journalism has put him in Cuba, Central America, Mexico, Australia, Canada, the UK, and most of Europe, interviewing figures as diverse as Fidel Castro and Willie Nelson. He has been writing about Texas politics, culture, and history since 1975, and continues with political opinion pieces for CNN and regularly at his Substack newsletter: “Texas to the World.”