Opinion

AUSTIN—Texas school districts must send nearly $3 billion in local taxpayer funding to the state by Sunday under the state’s school finance law—a record amount that puts a crushing burden on taxpayers throughout the state while taking needed dollars away from their local schools.

SCHOOL STARTS IN AUGUST, just as what could have been a return to normal has become the resurrection of the pandemic in the new guise of the delta variant. Texas back-to-school preparations once again include debate over in-person or virtual classes, over crowds at games and other big events, over masks and vaccinations.

THERE IS AN OLD ADAGE that the American people will always do the right thing—once all other options have been exhausted. This has never been more true than during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, when a large segment of the population seemingly had a death wish in the way they responded.

At this time last year, we were at what was then a peak in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths, facing a pandemic that could hit every person in the state. Now, Texas and the U.S.

A year ago tonight, Georgia Representative John Lewis passed away from pancreatic cancer at 80 years old. As a young adult, Lewis was a “troublemaker,” breaking the laws of his state: the laws upholding racial segregation. He organized voting registration drives and in 1960 was one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders, white and Black students traveling together from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans to challenge segregation. “It was very violent. I thought I was going to die. I was left lying at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery unconscious,” Lewis later recalled.

“Are you on the side of truth or lies; fact or fiction; justice or injustice; democracy or autocracy?” In a speech at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia today, President Joe Biden asked his audience to take a stand as he called defending the right to vote in America, “a test of our time.” Biden explained that the 2020 election has been examined and reexamined and that “no other election has ever been held under such scrutiny and such high standards.” The Big Lie that Trump won is just that, he said: a big lie. Nonetheless, 17 Republican-dominated states have enacted 28 laws to make it harder to vote.