Massachusetts seems to have a thing about Senate races. The state is holding elections more often than usual for US Senate seats, and in ways that garner the national spotlight. First, remember what's typical under the US Constitution: Each state has two Senate seats, with each coming up for election…
A new law requiring Texas schools to display donated “In God We Trust” posters is the latest move by Republican lawmakers to bring Christianity into taxpayer-funded institutions.
Under the law, Senate Bill 797, which passed during last year’s legislative session, schools are required to display the posters if they are donated.
The law went into effect last year, but these posters weren’t popping up then as many school officials and parents were more concerned about new COVID-19 strains and whether their local public school would even open for in-person classes.
The “In God We Trust” law was authored by state Sen. Bryan Hughes, the East Texas Republican who crafted Texas’ Senate Bill 8, which restricted abortion to the first six weeks or so of pregnancy starting Sept. 1, 2021. The abortion law artfully skirted legal challenge by relying on the public instead of law enforcement to enforce it.
Hughes’ “In God We Trust” poster law is also precisely written. Texas public schools or colleges must display the national motto in a “conspicuous place” but only if the poster is “donated” or “purchased by private donations.”
After an appearance for a Northwest Austin Republican Women’s Club event on Tuesday, Hughes touted the new law and praised the groups stepping up to donate the posters.
“The national motto, In God We Trust, asserts our collective trust in a sovereign God,” Hughes wrote on Twitter. “I’m encouraged to see groups like the Northwest [Austin] Republican Women and many individuals coming forward to donate these framed prints to remind future generations of the national motto.”
Patriot Mobile, a Texas-based cellphone company that donates a portion of its customers’ phone bills to conservative, “Christian” causes, on Monday donated several “In God We Trust” signs to all Carroll Independent School District campuses, claiming it is their “mission is to passionately defend our God-given, Constitutional rights and freedoms, and to glorify God always.”
“Patriot Mobile has donated framed posters to many other school districts in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and we will continue to do so until all the schools in the area receive them,” the company said in a Facebook post. “We are honored to be part of bringing God back into our public schools!”
Carroll ISD includes Southlake, the mostly white, affluent Dallas-Fort Worth suburb. The community’s struggles with a school diversity and inclusion plan — as well as how parents opposed to the plan started a political movement there — were the subject of a seven-part NBC podcast released last year.
The Southlake Anti-Racism Coalition, or SARC, said in a statement that is not happy that the law mandates public schools put up these posters.
“SARC is disturbed by the precedent displaying these posters in every school will set and the chilling effect this blatant intrusion of religion in what should be a secular public institution will have on the student body, especially those who do not practice the dominant Christian faith,” the statement read.
Donations of the “In God We Trust” posters have also been made to the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District, in the Houston area. The posters were a donation from The Yellow Rose of Texas Republican Women.
Moms for Liberty, a conservative nonprofit organization, donated posters for Round Rock Independent School District campuses, said Jenny Caputo, a spokesperson for the district. Most campuses have the signs up in a hallway near the front of each campus.
The Keller Independent School District in Tarrant County has received posters from a private citizen for all its facilities, and they are displayed mainly in front offices, said Bryce Nieman, a spokesperson for Keller ISD.
Erik Leist, a Keller resident and a father of a soon-to-be kindergartner, said the motto represents America’s founding and believes the law allows communities to do what they think is best.
“If it’s important to communities, the community will come behind it,” Leist said. “If it’s not something that the community values, it’s not gonna end up in the school.”
Leist also said he sees it as just the nation’s motto, not pushing any one religion.
The Yellow Rose of Texas Republican Women and the Northwest Austin Republican Women’s Club did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Texas Tribune reached out to Hughes as well as Aaron Rocha, Leigh Wambsganss and Scott Coburn with Patriot Mobile to discuss the poster law. None responded immediately to the Tribune’s request for comment.
In 1956, Congress passed a joint resolution that made “In God We Trust” the nation’s motto, replacing “e pluribus unum (one from many).” Lawmakers did this partially to differentiate itself during the Cold War from the Soviet Union, which embraced atheism.
The “In God We Trust” national motto can be found on money and government buildings and has proven to be bulletproof when it comes to legal challenges that assert the reference to God could be seen as government-endorsed prayer, impinging on Americans’ First Amendment rights.
In a 1970 case, Aronow v. United States, a federal appeals court ruled “It is quite obvious that the national motto and the slogan on coinage and currency ‘In God We Trust’ has nothing whatsoever to do with the establishment of religion.”
In this century, there’s been a growing movement to place the motto in more visible government spaces.
Since 2015, efforts to place “In God We Trust” on police cars, for example, have spread. There’s even a website, ingodwetrust.com, that specifically states the movement is about protecting citizens’ “First Amendment right to religious liberty, a freedom that is being threatened through a well-organized and well-funded effort to remove all vestige of God from the public domain in America.”
For Patriot Mobile, this is the company’s latest effort in its plan to “put Christian conservative values into action” and it has been targeting Texas’ public schools through its political action committee, Patriot Mobile Action.
During the past spring and leading into the May school board elections, the Patriot Mobile Action PAC raised more than $500,000 for conservative school board candidates across North Texas, including Carroll ISD.
The conventional wisdom that the Republican Party is likely to win control of the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm election was challenged by Susan Glasser in The New Yorker.
"The results of this midterm season so far have shown how nearly complete Trump’s Republican triumph already is. Dozens of election deniers who have adopted the former President’s lies about his 2020 election loss have won Republican nominations, up and down the ballot," Glasser wrote. "So why are Trump’s opponents—at least some of them—feeling in any way optimistic?"
Glasser noted historical precedent, President Joe Biden's low polling, and record inflation.
"But, over the summer, a new school of what might be called 'Trumptimism' has taken hold among some Democratic strategists and independent analysts," Glasser reported. "In the mess of our current politics, they discern a case for optimism—history-defying, experience-flouting optimism that maybe things won’t work out so badly after all in November."
Glasser noted hopes of a blue wave from Simon Rosenberg of New Democrat Network.
"The Trump factor, according to Rosenberg, is key. For the past several election cycles, nothing has united Democratic voters more than the chance to vote against him. And all summer Trump has been back in the news, thanks to revelations from testimony in the House’s January 6th hearings; the F.B.I. search of Mar-a-Lago, for classified documents improperly taken from the White House; and endless speculation about whether Trump will be indicted or run again for President—or both," Glasser wrote. "Rosenberg sees this fall as a genuinely competitive election, not a foregone conclusion."
Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report disagreed.
“All the fundamentals are telling us not that much has changed,” Walter said. “There is not a blue wave, no. The question is: How big is the red wave?”
However, also on Thursday, the Cook Political Report shifted their forecasts towards Democrats in two senate races.
In Pennsylvania, the forecast was shifted from a tossup to leaning towards Lt. Gov. John Fetterman beating Dr. Mehment Oz. And it Utah, where GOP Sen. Mike Lee is facing independent Evan McMullin after Dems refused to nominate a candidate, the forecast was shifted from solid for Lee to leaning towards him.
"GOP fears a repeat of 2010/12 when weak candidates cost them winnable races," Cook Political's Jessica Taylor reported.
Veteran Democratic strategic Joe Trippi predicted, "it’s gonna be a lot worse than 2010."
"2010 crazy just infected Senate races. 2022 it’s even crazier in the House," Trippi wrote. "2010 was just the Tea Party. We’re talking Ultra MAGA in 2022."
ALSO IN THE NEWS: Republicans 'blew it': Here's how Dems could maintain Senate control in 2022
On Thursday's edition of CNN's "OutFront," election forecaster Harry Enten laid out why Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is trying to tamp down expectations for Republican performances in Senate contests this cycle — and why he particularly knocked his party's "candidate quality."
"Just go to Pennsylvania, for example," said Enten. "Mehmet Oz, 20 points underwater on his favorability. In Georgia, Herschel Walker, minus 5 points. Arizona, Blake Masters, 4 points underwater. And you see that in all those races that we mentioned where the Democrats are ahead, the net favorability of the different Republicans is underwater. Their unfavorable ratings are higher than favorable ratings. This is a long-standing problem with Republicans. We saw it in 2010 as well. They blew it then because they nominated bad candidates in the minds of the voters."
"You've got [Wisconsin's Ron] Johnson, an incumbent, but Oz, that was completely discretionary. That was their choice. Walker, completely discretionary, that's their choice," noted anchor Erin Burnett. Enten concurred, pointing out that Trump himself picked most of these candidates through his endorsements.
Another point to note, said Enten, is that while President Joe Biden's approval rating remains low, that has historically had little impact on the result of Senate elections in midterms.
"If you go back over time and say let's look at the Senate races or the Senate years in which the incumbent, the White House party did not in fact lose any seats or in fact gain seats and look at the president's approval rating in those years, we don't actually see that much of a relationship," said Enten. "You look at 1982, for example, Ronald Reagan was not anywhere close to 50 percent. In fact, Republicans held their grounding. You look just four years ago, Donald Trump was well underwater. What happened? Republicans actually gained two senate seats."
"There are years where the president's approval rating is high and the White House party holds or gains seats, but the relationship is not as straight as you might expect it to be," Enten continued. "At this point, even though Biden's approval rating is low, it's not shocking to me that Democrats are not only holding their grounding but if the election is held today, they might gain some seats."
Harry Enten on Republican Senate chances www.youtube.com
Copyright © 2022 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 | Masthead | Privacy Policy | For corrections or concerns, please email corrections@rawstory.com.
