Texas State News

Progressive Populist Caucus of the Texas Democratic Party

Vol. 2, No. 2--March 19, 2005

On January 20, our Caucus, which is focused on reforming and transforming the State party with progressive and populist values, held a Steering Committee Meeting in conjunction with our State Democratic Executive Committee meeting. Key actions included heading off an attempted endorsement of Martin Frost by the Executive Committee, then favorite son candidate for the DNC Chair position. We did it by a very significant presence and interaction with the Party leadership communicating that we favored Howard Dean as national Chair and by "blitzing" the SDEC members with literature supporting our argument in favor of Dean. A PPC member also "infiltrated" a Frost luncheon to which only Party VIPs were invited. When asked to leave, he rose and said, "I'll not eat your food but this is a public gathering of our Party and I am entitled to stay." Chair Merriman had a one-on-one encounter with Frost as well, advising him politely that it was time for the DLC to relinquish their leadership of the Party and to make way for progressive solutions to Democrats' failure to connect with voters. He was politely attentive. Additionally, we actively lobbied our Texas DNC members to support Howard Dean's chairmanship.

The Statewide Steering Committee is tracking election reform legislation, specifically requiring paper trails and open source code, which is being introduced in a new legislative session and is also communicating with our State Chair on pushing the official State party position on this issue as a result of our success in securing a resolution on "paper trails" at our State convention last summer.

The Dallas regional Caucus has been engaged in rebuilding their organization and providing leadership in the attempt to unseat a Dallas County Party Chair, a corporate attorney, who endorsed on a Party letterhead a Republican judicial candidate in November. They are also involved in filling vacant precinct chair positions in the region and challenging electronic voting systems in use, which resulted in suspicious "malfunctions."

The San Antonio Caucus is engaged in challenging the Bexar County Party to revitalize the precinct Executive Committee and rebuild the precinct chair organization.

The Corpus Christi regional group has started a progressive FM radio weekly talk program and successfully negotiated the first Air America programming soon to come to Texas.

The Houston regional group has completed and published a comprehensive voting security and fraud report and is meeting with the City of Houston legal department to elicit their support in demanding the use of paper trail printers on voting machines they rent from the Republican County election division and which will be used to conduct upcoming City elections. Also, they are engaged in both recruiting to fill vacant precinct chair positions and setting up organizing training for new precinct chairs.

We held our annual meeting on February 26 in Houston, attended by 220 activists from all over the State of Texas. Ronnie Dugger was the keynote speaker and gave a brilliant presentation, which we will offer on DVD shortly. The theme was: resistance to the Republican juggernaut and becoming the Party of opposition while projecting progressive values to the nation. David Van Os, PPC co-founder, announced his candidacy for State Attorney General in 2006. We elected a new team of statewide officers, retiring Stan Merriman (now Chair emeritus) and the team who served the start-up of our Caucus for the past three years. Michael Boyette was installed as our new Chair. The new leadership brings an outstanding mix of rural and urban backgrounds, ethnicity and activism ranging from globalization, environmental, anti-war and other significant progressive and populist movements.

The PPC is counseling a group of progressives in Caldwell county in resolving transparency issues with their County Party organization and mentoring a newly forming progressive group in the "refinery toxic emissions belt" of Beaumont in SE/Gulf Coast Texas. The Texas Caucus is exploring new and positive relationships with PDA, which will be acted on shortly in a review that will take place with our newly elected Steering Committee.

Stan Merriman Chair Emeritus

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