By Alex Wukman

Imagine this scenario, if you can: it’s 10:30 at night and you’re walking to a store for whatever reason. A cop pulls up and flashes his lights. Like a good boy or girl you stop and 5-0 rolls on up and demands your name. Now, since you weren’t doing anything but minding your own business you don’t particularly feel the need to tell the po-po who you are; so you give the cop some variation of “get lost.”  Next thing you know you are arrested, charged with a Class C misdemeanor for failing to identify yourself and then, because of overcrowding, you’re carted off to a tent city to await your day in court.

Sadly if two bills that have been presented in the Texas Legislature pass the above scenario won’t be fiction, and worst of all is that the fact that these bills were even filed isn’t that surprising. In the ongoing race to the bottom that Texas entered into with Arizona this year lawmakers have already passed a voter ID bill that is guaranteed to do nothing but disenfranchise thousands of Hispanic immigrants, proposed bills that would make it a felony to hire an illegal immigrant except as your maid and dozens of other bills that seek to do everything from making it impossible for illegal immigrants to get probation or indigent health care.

Now on top of all that our enlightened elected representatives want to make it an arrestable offense for failing to tell a cop who you are, even if he or she has no reason to ask and then they want to allow County Sheriff’s to house inmates in tent cities in the middle of Texas summers.

I’ll just leave this here as a message to the assclowns in Austin:

By Alex Wukman

I wish I could say we were making this up, I really do. I wish that this was an unfunny joke we thought up one night after a few too many Lone Stars, but its not. State Representative Debbie Riddle (R-Tomball) who made her name in the Free Press for her vow to introduce a copycat to Arizona’s “Papers, please” law has decided to double down on the crazy. A bill she proposed on March 2, Texas Indepedence Day, would make the penalty for knowingly hiring an undocumented immigrant a State Jail Felony.

The proposed for hiring someone without a legal immigration status would go up to two years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Riddle included one glaring exception in House Bill 1202, domestic servants. This is not a joke, Riddle’s bill exempts anyone who hires an undocumented immigrant “for the purpose of obtaining labor or other work to be performed exclusively or primarily at a single-family residence.” The reason for the exemption, according to Riddle’s chief of staff John English, is to avoid slowing down Texas’ economy.

Representative Aaron Pena, another state Republican, told CNN that the execption is necessary because otherwise “a large segment of the population would go to jail.” “When it comes to household employees or yard workers it is extremely common for Texans to hire people who are likely undocumented workers, it is so common it is overlooked,” said Pena.

I try not to get emotional when I’m writing these. I really do, but I have to because rarely does a bill so perfectly encapsulate the GOPs racist, upper class agenda. After all the only inference that can be drawn from this piece of legislation is that Republicans believe it’s ok for Hispanics to clean their pools, cook their food and fold their laundary but once they want to work somewhere else, once the brown people want to work somewhere where they aren’t wiping massa’s ass, they have a problem.

Riddle me this....

By “Alan Smithee”

It’s been a month since Arizona passed their infamous anti-immigrant bill and almost as soon as it was passed rightwing copycats decided to jump on the band wagon. Two Texas State Representatives, Debbie Riddel (R-Tomball) and Leo Berman (R-Tyler), have each vowed to introduce bills similar to Arizona’s.

Riddel and Berman have been telling everyone who will listen, including KPFT’s Partisan Gridlock, that the bill they want to introduce will be exactly the same bill, except of course there won’t be any racial profiling. Berman told Austin TV station KVUE that “It will be the same bill except that we will completely eliminate any verbiage of profiling. There will be no profiling whatsoever.”

He claims that the bill will allow law enforcement to ask about immigration status ”only if the people they stop or arrest can’t show an official ID, such as a driver’s license.” Riddle went a little bit further in her interview with Partisan Gridlock.

When Riddle was asked why she thinks that minorities might be opposed to laws requiring them to show their identification papers to local law enforcement she said “(W)hen you have people that are used to entitlements, then they like the entitlements and they want the entitlements to keep coming.”

Needless to say that in an interview with ABC news in April Riddle kept her one woman show going.  ”The people who are saying [these laws] are racially motivated are trying to divert attention for their own selfish greed,” said Riddle.

This is not the first time that Riddle has made statements that could be considered “questionable.” In 2024 Riddle made this classic statement:

“Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care, free whatever? It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell. And it’s cleverly disguised as having a tender heart. It’s not a tender heart. It’s ripping the heart out of this country.”

Riddel’s statement about public education won her a Joseph McCarthy award from Texas Monthly, who also routinely name her to their worst legislators list. Like everything else on the internet Riddle’s proposal to give local law enforcement the power to demand proof of a person’s immigration status has spawned a Facebook group.