The Harris County Republican Party is making damaging errors

The Harris County Republican Party has many of the same problems exhibited by the state and national parties. Take for example their response to being publicly corrected on an email they sent out to all precinct chairs with erroneous facts. They made the following assertions in an email sent out on March 1, 2019 that I looked into:
“Here are key points to help drive the conversation this week as you engage with your network, and talk about the issues with those around you.”

A) “In a stark contrast [to Ms. Ivanka Trump], Rep. Ocasio-Cortez has proposed legislation that would require extreme taxes on middle-class families.”

B) “Ivanka Trump helped create an initiative on workforce development that pledged on-the-job training for 6.5 million Americans and expanded the federally funded apprenticeship program.”

C) “Instead of helping low-income parents secure the well-paying jobs they deserve, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez has proposed legislation rejected by unions because it promises to kill more than a million jobs.”

Other assertions were made in the email that vaguely sounded true (Ms. Trump is not very detailed). However, the three above sounded extraordinary, so I had to take a closer look. Unfortunately, no references were provided [1]. (A) was easily dispelled as the only tax that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez has proposed which I consider “extreme” is the one on billionaires [2]. In response to this assertion, I jokingly replied on twitter asking if the HCRP considered “billionaires” to be “middle class” [3].

As Ms. Trump tends to be vague in discussing priorities, policies, and tasks, I was interested that there was some detail provided associated with her activities: “...on-the-job training for 6.5 million Americans.” Researching this assertion fortunately has been undertaken by others, as it is quite challenging to prove a negative. CBS found that, “There does not appear to be a mechanism for tracking fulfilled jobs or training opportunities on the White House website” [4]. That instantly raised red-flags for me as the last federally-funded program that suspiciously did not collect statistics was the failure-performance of abstinence-only sex education [5], which I pointed out to HRCP [6]. Perhaps the keyword here is “pledged”, which is a subtlety that is guaranteed to get lost in the conversational engagements.

Where the assertion in (C) came from required a bit of time to search for the proper keywords. Ultimately, I discovered that when Rep. Ocasio-Cortez announced her “Green New Deal”, the majority of unions neither endorsed nor rejected its content [7]. One small pro-Trump union, Laborers’ International Union of North America, has rejected the non-binding resolution.

Having spent half an hour on looking up references that should have been made available as soon as these “key points” were determined to be distributed, I gave up and criticized the communications people for not doing the fact-checking themselves [8]. In the end I finally asked them why we’re talking about Rep. Ocasio-Cortez in the first place as she doesn’t represent Texas [9]. As far as I know, she hasn’t come to Texas in any official capacity.

The HCRP’s erroneous conversational key points in no way help the party legitimize itself...Quite the reverse. If I go out there and make provably false statements, I will lose credibility with my constituents. Their response to my complaints?

I’m now blocked from their twitter feed [10]. The HCRP has made the decision that the primary lesson learned from their losses in 2018 is that they need to fix their messaging, not their priorities and practice of principles. I completely disagree.

References

[1] https://twitter.com/txrepconvnoob/status/1102013048058007553

[2] “Billionaires Hate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's 70% Tax. Could It Help the Economy?” By Erin Corbett, February 7, 2019 (http://fortune.com/2019/02/07/billionaires-hate-aoc-wealth-tax/)

[3] https://twitter.com/txrepconvnoob/status/1102011301574914049

[4] “Is it true that Ivanka Trump created "millions" of jobs?” By Emily Tillett, February 26, 2019 / 4:20 PM / CBS News (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-touts-daughter-ivanka-as-creating-millions-of-jobs-ivanka-slams-guaranteed-minimum/?ftag=MSF0951a18)

[5] “Abstinence-Only Education and Teen Pregnancy Rates: Why We Need Comprehensive Sex Education in the U.S” by Kathrin F. Stanger-Hall and David W. Hall, 2011 Oct 14 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194801/)

[6] https://twitter.com/txrepconvnoob/status/1102206092585697280

[7] “Labor Unions Are Skeptical of the Green New Deal, and They Want Activists to Hear Them Out” by Rachel M. Cohen, February 28 2019, 11:32 a.m. (https://theintercept.com/2019/02/28/green-new-deal-labor-unions/)

[8] https://twitter.com/txrepconvnoob/status/1102210453806174208

[9] https://twitter.com/txrepconvnoob/status/1102212274150932480

[10] https://twitter.com/txrepconvnoob/status/1103650679393042433