John Washington III Asks Who Really Controls Texas: The People or the Government?
In an investigative analysis published Monday, John Washington III examined state government power, constitutional rights and the people's authority to reform their government - and grounded the argument in the Declaration of Independence: government derives its authority from the consent of the governed.
John Washington III turned his attention to his home state on Monday, publishing an investigative analysis under a question as its title: 'Who Really Controls Texas: The People or the Government?' The piece, dated November 9, examines state government power, constitutional rights and the people's authority to reform their government. 'The government was created to serve the people,' he wrote. 'But what happens when the people begin questioning whether their own government is using its lawmaking authority to restrict the very rights it was established to protect?'
The areas he named are the live wires of Texas government. Across Texas, he wrote, lawmakers have passed legislation affecting voting, freedom of expression, immigration enforcement and the authority of local communities to govern themselves. Some of those laws have faced constitutional challenges, and the courts' answers have not run one way: federal courts have blocked certain provisions, upheld others, and dismissed some cases without deciding whether the challenged laws are constitutional. Together, he wrote, those disputes raise the question his analysis sets out to answer: 'When does government regulation become government overreach, and who has the ultimate authority to decide?'
His answer starts in 1776. The Declaration of Independence, he wrote, establishes that governments derive their legitimate authority from the consent of the governed, and it recognizes the people's right to change or abolish a government that becomes destructive of the purposes for which government was created. He was precise about the Declaration's opening passage, which refers to a people choosing to 'dissolve the political bands' connecting them to another political authority: that was a declaration of the American colonies' separation from Britain, he wrote, not a modern legal procedure allowing an individual state to leave the United States.
The founding principle, he argued, is what matters for Texas now: government is an institution created for the people, and its legitimacy depends on serving them. That is the standard his analysis applies to the state's lawmaking - on voting, on expression, on immigration enforcement and on how far Austin may go in overruling the decisions of Texas communities themselves.
