A battle for the future of democracy is raging in Greg Abbott’s Texas. In the summer of 2023, amid a deadly, record-breaking global heatwave, Republican Gov. Abbott signed a bill that eliminated mandated water breaks for outdoor workers. When TRNN’s Marc Steiner traveled to Texas to investigate this shocking story, he quickly learned that eliminating water breaks was just the tip of the iceberg. What House Bill 2127—known by opponents as the “Death Star Bill”—actually does, and what it will actually mean for the people of Texas, is much more sinister. And people across the state, from unionists and migrant justice advocates to Democratic legislators and Republican mayors, are pissed. In this special documentary report, ‘Death Star’ State: The GOP’s War on Democracy, Steiner reports from Austin and San Antonio on the state GOP’s massive, authoritarian, corporate-serving power grab, stripping the people’s right to govern themselves and consolidating power in the Statehouse, the Governor’s Office, and the Chamber of Commerce.
Hosted and Narrated by Marc Steiner
Directed by Maximillian Alvarez, Alexander Koffler, and Kayla Rivara
Written by Maximillian Alvarez and Marc Steiner
Filmed by Alexander Koffler
Post-Produced and Edited by Alexander Koffler
Audio Mastering by David Hebden
Special thanks to Jocelyn Dombroski, David Griscom, and Dharna Noor for providing additional production support.
Transcript
Speaker 1: Tonight, an already sweltering summer getting even hotter, breaking records, and threatening lives for millions. Dallas bracing for a possible record.
Speaker 2: We’ll be up around 108 to 109, and the record high, as it stands, 110.
Speaker 1: 60 million Americans are facing heat alerts from North Dakota to Texas, and officials in Texas are hoping the power grid can hold as they forecast today to be an all-time high for demand. With much of the state recording no measurable rain in the past several weeks, they’re now asking families to conserve water too.
Marc Steiner: Texas is hot, brutally hot, and with man-made climate change making things worse, it’s getting even hotter. In 2023, Texas experienced its second-hottest summer on record, and people died, and many, many others were put at risk.
Speaker 3: Now we know the unfortunate news is 11 deaths reported here in Webb County, and here at the fire department they responded to over 70 calls related to heat this month — That compared to 19 in June of 2022.
Speaker 4: Ring Camera footage from Cypress near Houston shows an Amazon delivery driver nearly collapsing from the heat. This happened yesterday afternoon when the heat index reached 108 degrees.
Speaker 5: Federal data shows more workers die of heat related causes in Texas than any other state.
Speaker 6: [Interpreting from Spanish] You start to feel dizzy, people start to vomit, you get chills. You see someone unwell, you have to take them to the hospital.
Marc Steiner: And yet, during a record-breaking heatwave that spanned the globe in the summer of 2023, with people across Texas reeling from the heat, Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, signed House bill 2127, known by its opponents as the Death Star bill, a bill that stripped away mandated water breaks for outdoor workers in cities like Austin.
Speaker 7: Governor Greg Abbott approved a law that would eliminate city and county ordinances that bog down businesses. The law’s scope is very broad, but ordinances that establish a minimum number of water breaks in the workplace will soon be nonexistent.
Speaker 8: This law would also ban cities and counties from issuing local ordinances to other state codes like labor, agriculture, natural resources, and finance. Protections and rules like nondiscrimination policies and worker protections are set out in those city and county ordinances that will soon be nonexistent.
Daniela Hernandez: Governor Abbott signed this bill in June, as we were entering triple-digit weather. Texas had over 70 days of triple-digit weather this summer, which was horrendous. Even when you were inside it was like I could still feel the heat somehow.
Our workers that labor outside had to work in that weather without a statewide heat safety guideline. There are no federal heat safety protections, no mandated rest breaks. So the danger here is that cities in Texas have been able to pass really pro-worker ordinances that protect workers at different levels, giving them rest breaks, protecting them against wage theft, et cetera.
Essentially what the legislature has done is taken 2127, which, again, is a huge transfer of power, and saying that localities can’t do that anymore. They can’t protect their workers.
Ryan Pollock: When I explained that this was an ordinance that we have, people are shocked to even hear that was a thing that was necessary. They don’t believe that it was necessary, and they say, there’s no way that people aren’t getting water breaks. Yeah, they aren’t.
We did not preempt with this bill or with that ordinance. We put a lot of resources into this. I’m in a union, and we have in our agreement that we have a right to water. I don’t even have to ask for it, I just go get it. If I’m thirsty, if I’m trying to defend myself against the heat, I go get some water. But there are employers and there are job sites and workspaces where they don’t have that access, and if they’re saying they’re too hot, I need to take a break, they’re accused of just being lazy.
Especially workers who are in very precarious positions like undocumented workers who are doing a lot of stuff outside in agriculture and warehouses, in construction especially, where their whole livelihood, their whole community, their families are threatened if they’re seen as being lazy for taking a water break and making sure that they’re not getting heat stroke.
Marc Steiner: How could this happen? How could Governor Abbott and the Texas GOP possibly justify stripping water breaks from workers in deadly heat conditions?
For The Real News, I went down to Texas to investigate, and I quickly learned that stripping water breaks was just the tip of the iceberg. What the Death Star bill actually does and what it will mean for working people across the state, and their democratic ability to govern themselves, is really much more sinister.
Daniela Hernandez: So House Bill 2127, what we call the Death Star bill, is a sweeping piece of preemption that passed during the regular legislative session that ended in May. It is the biggest transfer of power that we’ve ever seen from local governments to states. It essentially takes an agriculture, business and commerce, insurance, labor, local government, natural resources, property and occupations, and it says local governments are not allowed to legislate in these areas unless the state gives them explicit permission to do so.
Jim Hightower: So the bill, known as the Death Star bill, it’s not just about the fact that the state has usurped the power of every city and county in our state to be self-governing, to set their own regulations about environmental impacts, about corporate money in politics, about loan sharking, et cetera, but it’s fundamentally a bill that usurps democracy. It takes away your right to be a self-governing people.
We are constitutionally a home rule state, meaning that cities have the right and the preference to be the first source of legislation, the primary source of legislation, because this government is closer to the people than going to try to find your state senator or something or another.
So that’s why this bill is loved by the corporate powers and by the lobbyists, because it concentrates power in just a few people. If you only have to talk to the governor, then you’re doing fine. But if you’ve got to talk to city councils and county commissioners all around the state, then you’ve got a problem. You’ve got to make sense to them, and this legislation makes no sense whatsoever.
The people are overwhelmingly against it. And I don’t mean just the progressives are against it — The conservative mayors and city council people are wildly against this and fighting it, filing suit against it.
David Griscom: The irony is very clear, I think, to most folks, is that this bill is something that basically preempts local governments from being able to do local government. As we all know, conservatives like to talk about small government.
And the fact is this home rule in Texas is something that was developed because Texas, our legislature only meets every two years. It’s absurd to think about a state that is seeing so much activity economically, politically, culturally, et cetera, basically having governments that aren’t able to govern.
But really, all of this is a part of a longer story of GOP dominance in the state. And the response that we’re seeing from the Texas Legislature and from the Abbott administration has really been an attempt to try to strangle some very exciting progressive and grassroots movements that we’ve seen in the state.
But most notably I think, when you’re thinking about the right in Texas today, has been the centralization of power in the hands of the governor and the executive branch of the government, and the complete dominance of the Republican Party on the state level.
Marc Steiner: Today’s right may dress its politics up in the language of populism, but if you look at what the GOP is actually doing at the policy level, how they’re systematically stripping power from people and concentrating it in boardrooms and behind closed doors, cutting taxes for the rich and slashing regulations on businesses, you can see the naked machinery of authoritarianism and oligarchic rule at work.
As activists and concerned citizens on the ground in Texas told me, in many ways, this naked power grab is actually a sign the GOP fears that changing political attitudes are among the electorate, even in a state like Texas. And the push to severely limit local governments with the Death Star bill is a desperate response to halt the progressive momentum and policy wins happening at the local level.
Jalen McKee-Rodriguez was elected to serve District 2 on the San Antonio City Council. He’s a Democratic Socialist, and the first openly gay Black man to hold office in the state of Texas.
Jalen McKee-Rodriguez: I represent about 143,000 people in the east and northeast side of San Antonio, a historically Black community that’s been under-invested in, marginalized, and exploited for the past several decades. I consider it my charge to come to City Hall and get as many much needed resources for our community as possible, and also raise a little hell along the way. I look fairly different and operate a little bit differently than the average person who walks through City Hall.
So when I was first elected in 2021, before 2127 was written or passed, there was still this fear of preemption. I think we saw our leaders at City Hall and in our community wanting to toe the line between making our constituents happy and not causing too much ruckus with the state, and not creating any animosity or feeding into it. I think we were operating out of a place of fear then.
And so I think now that 2127 has passed, it’s important that we no longer cower and we no longer fear, we challenge that, and we challenge and protect our right to govern. I think that’s the biggest thing, and our constituents expect that. They’re not going to accept, oh, we can’t do this because of the state as an answer.
Usually when you see a lack of support for bills and for laws like this from both sides of the aisle and all ranges of political belief, usually those things tend to fail. This time it didn’t. It did end up passing, and I think a part of that is like those powers that be that I acknowledged earlier, when you have a city like San Antonio where our chambers of commerce go and they’re rallying in support of the bill in counter to our partnership, I think that muddies the water of, is this city in support of it or not?
Because if a Democratic city government is saying, no, we don’t want it, but their chambers of commerce and their developers and the police association, if they’re all saying yes, then it’s not as clean and clear as Republican versus Democrat anymore. It’s going to take multiple fights happening at the same exact time.
So right now we have the City of San Antonio in partnership with other cities throughout Texas who are suing the state. I think that’s an important fight that needs to happen, and I’m supportive of it. Our council, my colleagues are largely in support of it.
It’s easy to talk about big things like abortion access or climate change or public safety, all of those things are topics that we talk about in our household. But we don’t talk about at family dinner the powers of each government and how certain laws can limit the power. We don’t talk about that enough.
And so I think the challenge that has been placed before us is educating our communities, letting them know, hey, these are the things that you come to me on a daily basis with, these are the calls that I receive to my office, these are the things that you want me to do, and if the state gets its way I will no longer be able to do that for you, so I need you to join me along this fight. And that takes a lot of one-on-one education. So I think that’s our fight right now.
Marc Steiner: So how did we get here? How could Texas, a state founded on the principle of home rule, local control, and a weak executive branch, with a deep suspicion of big banks and big businesses, become the state leading the charge to strip power away from local governments down to virtually nothing, then concentrate that power into the governor’s office and the statehouse? Well, they prioritized the greed of corporate America over the needs of everyday Texans, be they Democrats, Republicans, or nonvoters.
Jim Hightower: What fundamentally has happened is that in the 1980s in my party, the Democratic Party, quit being little-D Democrats. They decided, the powers that be within the party decided that they could get some of the corporate money too, and not just let the Republicans have it all. We could get money from those corporations because those corporations have no ideology except money. So they shifted their policy from grassroots politics to money politics and began to solicit those corporate checks.
I can tell you from my own political life in office here in Texas, I’ve seen it happen, that when you get one of those corporate checks, written on the back is the corporate agenda. So what resulted was not that Texas turned right wing; it quit voting. We have had the lowest voter turnout in Texas consistently in the last 20, 30 years of any state in the country.
David Griscom: So a lot of people sit out of politics because politics doesn’t seem like it’s a place where you can fight and win. It seems like a thing you can get really worked up about and upset about, but it doesn’t seem like a place, a vehicle that can get you to where you might want to go.
The Republican Party, I think, has been able to take tremendous advantage of this, and you’ve seen the shift in even the way that they have to govern, even the way that they have to sell their policies. Because they talk one way to the public, and they pass and do really horrific things on trans rights, certainly on abortion and all of these other social issues. But if you look at the vast majority of what the Republican Party is doing right now, it is just big pro-business politics.
Ryan Pollock: It’s deregulation of everything: labor, environmental standards, all kinds of things that are friendlier to business, so that they can operate at the cheapest possible point at the expense of the workers and the locals, people who live in these communities, the environment, all of these things. The state believes that it’s in their interest to undermine all that because that’s how they attract all this business here.
Marc Steiner: This is not just something Republicans are trying to do in Texas, as I’ve covered for years here at The Real News in our special series Rise of the Right. This is merely a new front on the right’s long systematic assault on what’s left of our fledgling democracy. It’s happening in other states as well.
As Harold Meyerson writes for The American Prospect, “This summer, on a party line vote, the Florida Legislature passed and DeSantis signed into law a bill that its sponsors were calling ‘The preemption to end all government preemptions.'”
Article 1, Section 1 of the Texas State Constitution states, “The maintenance of our free institutions and the perpetuity of the union depend upon the preservation of the right of local self-government, unimpaired to all the states.”
Now the big business interests and their buddies in the statehouse and the governor’s office, the same ones who use culture wars and bigotry to divide the public while preaching they represent the “real Texans”, they’re the ones who are taking a sledgehammer to the people’s right to govern themselves. Conservatives, liberals, socialists, nonvoters, they’re trying to take the right away from everyone. The hardworking folks we talked to in Austin and San Antonio say it’s going to take everyone fighting back to stop them.
David Griscom: Now when it comes to the fight against HB 2127, it’s a very difficult question. Because if you look at the law, not only does it preempt cities from being able to pass a lot of different legislation or being able to pursue ballot initiatives, it also puts cities under threat of lawsuits from people in counties next to the county.
So if you’re a city council member in Austin, somebody from a county next to Austin can sue you against whatever policy that you put forward. And they got rid of qualified immunity for politicians, meaning that individual politicians can be personally liable. That’s a huge roadblock, and we’ll see what happens in the courts if that’s able to hold up or not, but it’s a huge threat to these city council members.
But the fact of the matter is — And it’s very simple in politics — You have to fight. You have to fight, and you need city council members, and you need elected officials in the state who are representing these local communities to say, I was elected by the people of my community to pass legislation and to get the changes that they demanded, and I will come up against the state government, and we will come up against the courts if need be.
You can’t just sit around and say, oh, our hands are tied. We’re not going to be able to do politics in this state anymore. That’s a disastrous plan, and it’s also the plan that the Republicans are hoping people do in this state.
Jalen McKee-Rodriguez: I think a larger fight has to happen that involves organizations, community leaders, folks outside who are not affiliated with the government who can organize and rally people power. Because the strongest of the three fights is going to be those that’s led by people. We need to be at the Capitol, we need to be at city halls, we need to be in these meetings where things are being decided without us.
Jim Hightower: It’s not going to get better until we put together that grassroots politics again that appeals on the issues of economic fairness, social justice, equal opportunity, that the Democratic Party was built on. If we get back to that, then we will begin to regain power. Because the Republican powers and the corporate powers are a minority in the state, so we don’t have to… They fear the majority. We are the majority, but we have to rally it.
Daniela Hernandez: The solution is workers fighting back, being on the front lines, advocating for their basic protection. We have our Better Builder program that provides high quality standards on construction sites for workers across Travis County, and we’re also looking to expand. But that set of standards was created by construction workers in Texas, and so they set their own standards and construction workers know what they need to be safe. So this is one of the ways in which we continue to fight back against this and just continuing to organize and building that worker power.
At the end of the day we just want workers to be able to go to work and then be able to go home to their families, and that’s all we’re really asking for. So the policies that we were pushing like the Heat Safety bill, statewide rest breaks, helping end this classification, giving workers workers’ compensation, all of those policies were really pushed by our members.
And that goes within the organizing that we do here at Workers Defense, trying to base build and trying to grow our membership and ensure that workers know the rights that they have, and that these rights need to be protected.
Marc Steiner: The struggle continues always. In late August, just before House Bill 2127 was set to take effect, State District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble ruled the bill unconstitutional. Immediately after that, the Texas Attorney General’s Office announced that the state was appealing the ruling, and things are in an uneasy limbo for the moment.
David Griscom: These are questions about power and who should be able to decide the future of Texas. Should it be everyday working people who get to decide what happens in their communities, in their neighborhoods, in their towns and counties? Or should it be people who are working at the beck and call of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world?
Jalen McKee-Rodriguez: It’s bad, and people are… I’ve seen a lot of people just leave and say, I just need to get out of this state. But you can’t, you can’t just leave, it’s going to follow you. These are experiments from the GOP. They’re trying similar things all around the state. They’re throwing shit at the wall to see what will stick, and what’s going to be the most effective so they can do this here, they see that it works, and then they can replicate that in other states around the country.
That’s why I still live here, that’s why I’m not planning on going anywhere. A lot of people have one foot out the door, but this is where the fight is. You can’t run away from this. You’ve got to turn and face it and put a stop to it right now. It’s just going to get bigger and stronger. It’s even beyond this country, it’s all over the world. All that’s just a legacy of a battle that’s been going on for a very long time.
Marc Steiner: Texas is not just one story, Texas is many stories. This monument behind me, this gorgeous, beautiful monument, this powerful monument to Black folks in Texas, the Texas African American History Memorial, I’m glad they put it up, it needed to be put up. However, it only tells part of the story. On the other side of this monument is a memorial to a man named Joe.
Who’s Joe? It was Travis’s slave at the Battle of the Alamo. They made it seem as if he fought for freedom for them. Yes, he did, he fought for freedom for himself as well, and fled. They don’t write about that on that statue. He fled to say, no, I’m not going to be here. He actually went to the other side. Do they say that here? No.
They talk about Reconstruction. They don’t tell the horror of Reconstruction here, of the battle that people in this state, that Black folks in the state made for absolute freedom, and how it was stripped from them, taken away. Texas was the center of lynching in this country, lynching Black men and women who fought for their freedom. I don’t see much up here about those folks.
But Texas is the story of many people. Texas is a story of folks who came here as settlers, white folks for the most part. Texas is a story of people who were brought here enslaved, Africans and Black folks brought here enslaved and the battles they fought for freedom.
It’s the story of the Indigenous people in this state who have fought for freedom while [settlers] tried to annihilate them. They have a statue of the Texas Rangers over here. Do you know Texas Rangers were created? To kill Indigenous people, to take the land away from them. That’s not on that monument.
It’s a story of the Mexican people, obviously, this was their land, until it was taken away. It’s the story of many peoples, the story of labor struggles, whether it’s Galveston, Texas or San Antonio or Austin or wherever those struggles were. Texas is the story, is a place of many stories that belong to many people, and The Real News is here again in part to tell that story, to tell the whole story about what Texas is, the dangers it poses for the rest of the country, and the hope that exists in struggles like the people behind me.
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