OPINION

There is a dirty little trick in local government that deserves far more scrutiny: tell an elected official that he has no choice, then call the vote “administrative.”

It sounds legal. It sounds technical. It sounds like something citizens are simply supposed to accept. But a compulsory vote isn’t really a vote…It’s coercion.

If elected officials are legally forbidden from voting according to their own judgment, then we have to ask a rather uncomfortable question: what exactly are we electing them to do?

That question is playing out in McKinney, Texas, where the City Council unanimously approved a proposed Islamic center despite significant opposition from residents who packed City Hall to protest the project. The council approved the site plan Aug. 4 after a meeting that reportedly lasted about five hours and included more than 100 speakers. Residents have since launched an effort to recall the mayor and council members, although whether enough valid signatures will ultimately be collected remains to be seen.

Mayor Bill Cox of McKinney characterized the council’s role as “administrative” or “ministerial”. Dumbing down the vote to a simple question, “Did the proposed site plan satisfy the City’s established development requirements?” Says Cox on a Facebook post this past Sunday.

And that’s where things get interesting.

McKinney’s own staff report says site plans are generally approved administratively by city staff. But this particular planned development ordinance requires the project to go before both the Planning and Zoning Commission and City Council.

In other words, the city itself established a process requiring elected officials to vote. Then, after bringing the matter before those elected officials, residents were essentially told those elected officials had no choice but to approve it.

That’s an awfully strange definition of representative government.

Texas law absolutely recognizes ministerial duties. A ministerial act is one where the law leaves the official with no discretion and prescribes what must be done. Texas courts can compel performance of a clear ministerial duty through mandamus. They generally cannot use mandamus to dictate the exercise of genuine governmental discretion.

But here’s the question that local governments should have to answer:

Why put a truly administrative decision before an elected body in the first place?

If an application meets every objective requirement and approval is mandatory, let the administrator approve it. That’s what administrators are for.

Let the city manager, planning director, zoning administrator or other properly designated official perform the administrative function. There is no reason to drag an elected council into a decision that supposedly contains no discretion, then tell council members they are legally obligated to cast a particular vote.

Because once you require an elected representative to vote, you have entered the political process. And a vote that can only legally be “yes” isn’t really a vote. It is an order.

This is where I believe Texas municipalities need to rethink the way they use the term “administrative.” A city council member is not a city manager.

He isn’t a bureaucrat whose job is simply to process paperwork according to a checklist. He is an elected representative. His constituents elected him to exercise judgment, to deliberate and, when necessary, to say no.

And that includes saying no to something that city staff believes complies with an existing ordinance.

Now, that does not mean a council member gets to ignore the law. Obviously he doesn’t. An elected official cannot simply declare that an ordinance doesn’t exist because he doesn’t like its consequences. But there is a vast difference between saying, “I don’t like the law,” and saying, “I don’t believe this application is legally entitled to approval.”

The former is political disagreement. The latter is a legal position that can be tested in court. And that is what courts are for.

If an applicant believes a council unlawfully denied an application, let the applicant sue. Let a judge determine whether the council had a ministerial duty to approve it. If the court orders approval, the city would comply. If someone believes the trial court got it wrong, the appellate process exists. That’s the legal system. Avoiding it doesn’t help a community…it supercharges distrust in the system.

What isn’t healthy is telling an elected official that he MUST vote for something because somebody else has decided his vote is merely “administrative.”

A compulsory vote is not representative government. It is coercion dressed up in municipal jargon. And here’s the simple rule I would like to see every Texas city follow:

Keep administrative acts with administrators.

If the City Manager can approve something because the law requires approval upon satisfaction of objective conditions, let the City Manager approve it. But if the city charter, ordinance or municipal process puts the matter before an elected council for a vote, then the council must retain the ability to vote yes or no.

Otherwise, it’s not a vote, it is compelled consent.

A representative republic depends upon elected officials exercising judgment on behalf of the people who elected them. They can make good decisions. They can make bad decisions. They can be reelected. They can be defeated.

What they cannot meaningfully be is representatives who are told they have no choice.

Because once you remove the ability to say no, you’ve removed the very thing that makes the exercise of political judgment a vote.

And if McKinney’s residents don’t like how their elected officials exercised that judgment, they have every right to make their own judgment at the ballot box, or through the recall process the city’s charter provides.

That’s accountability.

And accountability is supposed to be the whole point. The McKinney City Council has failed to uphold its obligation to the citizens who elected them … and they deserve to be recalled for no other reason than that they were gutless when faced with adversity.

Austin, TX – Texas Republicans spent years demanding control of their own primary. Now they have a new Secretary of State, Robert S. Howden, appointed by Republican Governor Greg Abbott, and the man taking over the state’s election machinery is inheriting a lawsuit in which his office is expected to defend the very open primary system the GOP wants to dismantle.

The Republican Party of Texas filed the federal lawsuit in September 2025, arguing that Texas’ open primary system violates the party’s First Amendment right of association. Under the current system, Texas voters do not register by party and may choose which party’s primary to vote in during an election cycle. The GOP wants only registered Republicans participating in Republican primaries.

The case is pending in federal court in Amarillo before U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk.

And Robert S. Howden has now inherited it.

Howden Steps Into the Fight

Gov. Abbott appointed Howden as Texas’ 116th secretary of state on July 17, effective July 18. Howden previously served as Abbott’s senior adviser and director of legislative affairs and has worked in the administrations of four Republican governors. As secretary of state, he is Texas’ chief elections officer.

Abbott has been quite clear about where he stands.

At the 2026 Republican Party convention, he said Texas would eventually make clear that “only Republicans vote in Republican primaries.” Abbott has also said lawmakers “can and should be more responsive to Republicans than a judge may be,” indicating that he expects the Legislature to address the issue during the 2027 session.

But that doesn’t mean the Secretary of State’s office is supposed to simply surrender in court.

That was the position taken by Howden’s predecessor, Jane Nelson.

Nelson argued that changing Texas’ primary system was a job for the Legislature, not a federal judge. In an October 2025 statement, she said it was her responsibility to defend existing election laws and that she would implement whatever changes the Legislature lawfully enacted.

The Attorney General’s office took the opposite position.

Attorney General Ken Paxton sided with the Texas GOP, asking the federal court to strike down portions of the Texas Election Code governing open primaries. According to reporting by The Texas Tribune, Nelson’s lawyers said Paxton’s office gave them less than an hour’s notice before taking the opposing position.

So the Republican Party sued the Republican-controlled state government. The Republican Attorney General joined the plaintiffs. And the Republican Secretary of State fought the lawsuit.

That’s not exactly the tidy party unity politicians like to advertise.

The Real Fight Is Over Who Controls the Nomination

The GOP argues that crossover voting allows Democrats and independents to influence Republican nominations, potentially helping candidates who are less conservative than the party base.

The lawsuit specifically pointed to the 2024 Republican primaries involving former House Speaker Dade Phelan and Rep. Gary VanDeaver. Both won their races by fewer than 800 votes, and the party argued that crossover voters helped determine the outcomes.

The party has already made closing primaries an official priority. Republicans adopted rules supporting closed primaries in 2024 and renewed that push at their 2026 convention.

But changing the system is not as simple as flipping a switch.

Texas has more than 18 million registered voters, and the state’s registration system was never designed around party registration. Moving to closed primaries could require new registration procedures, computer-system changes and a method for existing voters to establish party affiliation.

The GOP wants the courts to clear the way, preferably in time for 2028.

OPINION

The United States of America – The framers of our Constitution weren’t building a pure democracy; they were building a balancing act. And they knew exactly what they were doing.

The original Constitution divided political power among different interests. The People elected the House of Representatives. State legislatures selected Senators. The Executive branch was headed by a President chosen through the Electoral College. Everybody had skin in the game. Everybody had a seat at the table. And nobody got all the power.

That arrangement wasn’t some accident buried in old parchment. It was deliberate.

Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution plainly stated that senators would be “chosen by the Legislature” of each state. According to James Madison in Federalist No. 62, appointment by state legislatures was designed to create a direct connection between the states and the federal government. He wrote that this method would “form a convenient link between the two systems.” The Senate was never intended to represent the passions of the public. The House already did that. The Senate represented the states themselves.

And that’s because the United States was formed by sovereign states entering into a union, not by Washington handing power down from on high.

During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, delegates spent weeks fighting over representation. Large states wanted population-based representation. Smaller states feared being steamrolled. The eventual Connecticut Compromise created two chambers, one representing the People and one representing the States. It was a compromise that helped save the convention from collapse. Benjamin Franklin himself urged concessions to preserve the union.

Madison argued repeatedly that the Senate’s structure would act as a stabilizing force. The upper chamber would provide experience and continuity while insulating the country from sudden swings in public opinion. The U.S. Senate’s own historical records note that senators were intentionally made older and selected by state legislatures to provide stability and restraint.

Then came 1913.

The Seventeenth Amendment fundamentally changed the arrangement by transferring the election of senators from state legislatures to popular vote. Supporters argued it would reduce corruption and legislative deadlocks. It certainly changed things, but it also removed the states themselves from direct representation in Washington. The National Constitution Center describes the amendment as the only major constitutional change affecting the structure of Congress since the Bill of Rights.

Since then, senators have become national politicians rather than ambassadors of their state governments. Their incentives changed. Governors and legislatures may protest federal mandates, but their senators often answer first to national donors, party leadership and television cameras.

That’s a very different system than the one the founders designed.

State governments today have no institutional voice inside Congress. They sue Washington. They lobby Washington. They beg Washington. But they no longer possess representation within Washington itself, which is exactly what the original Senate provided.

Supporters of the Seventeenth Amendment point to corruption scandals that occurred before 1913. Those problems were real. But replacing one flaw with another doesn’t necessarily count as progress, history is full of reforms that created new problems while solving old ones.

The Constitution was built on competing interests checking one another. The House represented the people. The Senate represented the states. The president represented the nation as a whole. It wasn’t complicated.

We’ve drifted far from that arrangement.

Today Washington treats states less like partners and more like administrative districts. Federal agencies dictate policy, Congress spends borrowed money with abandon, and senators spend more time chasing campaign cash than defending state sovereignty.

Maybe the old system wasn’t perfect. Nothing designed by human beings ever is. But the framers understood something modern politicians often forget… Power needs rivals.

Repealing the Seventeenth Amendment wouldn’t weaken democracy. It would restore federalism. It would give state governments a genuine stake in the game again and force Washington to remember that the states created the federal government, not the other way around.

We shouldn’t expect the people who benefit from the current arrangement to voluntarily surrender power. Congress is not likely to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment, and senators certainly aren’t inclined to vote themselves out of their present status. The framers anticipated moments like this.

That’s why Article V of the Constitution gives the states another path, a convention for proposing amendments called by two-thirds of the state legislatures. If Americans truly want to restore federalism and return the states to their rightful place in the constitutional order, the answer probably won’t come from Washington. It’ll have to come from the states themselves, from the People. The people created the states, the states created the federal government, and sometimes it’s necessary to remind Washington who’s really supposed to be in charge.

For those who believe the time has come to restore the constitutional balance our founders envisioned, organizations like Convention of States Action are already leading the fight. Visit https://conventionofstates.com/, get informed, and get involved, because Washington isn’t going to limit itself unless the states and the people demand it.

Sources: Article I of the Constitution, James Madison’s Federalist No. 62, Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention, and historical material from the U.S. Senate and Library of Congress.