Texas is hot in the summer. Everyone knows this and yet liberals and their media arm are spouting off like this is something entirely new and making it their latest cause du jour.
Haven’t you heard? Texas passed a law that will eliminate water breaks for workers! And during a time of horrific “climate change” at that! At least that’s what the legacy media is telling us and what the newly elected Texas Democrat, Congressman Greg Casar is using for his latest political stunt.
If you don’t know Casar yet, you will.
Casar was one of the chief ringers behind Austin’s original rest break ordinance as the executive director of the Workers Defense Project, which Influence Watch describes as “a left-of-center advocacy group that aids and provides representation for workers in the Texas construction industry, including illegal immigrants.” It’s an advocacy organization that acts a lot like a union but doesn’t file taxes like one.
He turned that activism into a slot on the Austin City Council which he then used as a springboard into Congress. But in the end, he’s the same old far left extremist — a self-described socialist — that exacerbated the Texas capital’s homelessness crisis by rescinding the ban on camping on all public land (save for City Hall, that is). And the city is still reeling from that today.
Casar also led the charge in cutting $150 million from the Austin Police Department’s budget in 2020, worsening the long-existing police staffing crisis in the city.
He was effectively the mayor of Austin for the last handful of years with the actual mayor, Steve Adler, content to do as the young rabble-rousing, “protector of the working man!” — yet son of wealthy Houstonians — demanded.
This past week, Casar staged an 8-hour “thirst strike” on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. He did this to protest a newly-passed law by the Texas Legislature that he and the legacy media would have you believe ban water breaks for all workers in Texas. He even had nurses there checking his vitals for his idiotic publicity stunt. And the media ate it up.
However, truth be told, the new law, entitled the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act doesn’t even take effect until September 1. And it’s actually a crackdown on local government overreach and a restoration of the Texas Constitution’s supremacy.
It was passed with bipartisan support in the Texas House, by the way, and will allow proactive lawsuits against localities that exceed state law in nine sections of code.
A city ordinance that will now be rescinded because of this law is one that was a mandate for construction company workers only, and required they provide a 10 minute rest break every four hours. There were only two cities that had passed this ordinance in the whole of Texas — Dallas and Austin. But San Antonio was considering doing the same.
Blue cities are increasingly passing “ordinances” that exceed state law as if it’s their job to do so. It is not and I could not be happier that the legislature is finally stopping these mayors and city councils from thinking they can act like the legislative branch in Austin.
And guess what? With this ordinance rescinded, businesses, of course, are still free to give their employees as many breaks as they want — something that is good practice anyway. But now these political subdivisions of the state will not be able to pass mandates on businesses that are above and beyond what the legislature puts into code. This gives businesses consistent regulations throughout the state, rather than a patchwork of codes coming from different levels of government across Texas.
Of course, as usual, these facts don’t matter to the legacy media. The headlines all scream that water breaks are now gone and for good measure they throw in their religious zealotry of “climate change,” to add to the horror of it all.
It’s all nonsense of course, but that’s never stopped the legacy media before, so why stop now?
There’s been so much written about this that even President Biden has publicly slammed Texas for “stripping water break requirements.”
The garbage rhetoric just never ends.
It wouldn’t kill the legacy media to actually understand the issues they’re writing on — but then again, maybe it would.