Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

With a little surplus money to play with and no federal judge breathing down their necks, Texas legislators are taking advantage of the lull to fix things that aren't broken.

If you wonder about the rush to celebrate guns, honor God and dump on people who can't dump back, look at a calendar. We're almost halfway through 2007, so we're burning daylight before the 2008 elections.

Social issues are to modern politicians what bread and circuses were to Roman ones — a cheap and easy way to distract the populace with political and intellectual trinkets.

The justification for one voter identification bill, authored by state Rep. Betty Brown, R-Athens, was deterring voter fraud by demanding that voters present a form of photo ID.

Never mind that what voter fraud there is involves mailed ballots. So, the real fix to the problem would have been a demand that mail-in voters put photo IDs in the envelope. Right?

Well, that makes just as much sense as this bill.

The bill perpetrates a myth that illegal immigrants — and we all know from where — are storming polling places and stealing elections.

Pardon me, but I vote in a precinct that has more than its share of immigrants in its boundaries and I vote every time there's an election.

You know, I haven't seen that phenomenon I've heard described. Maybe there was outbreak of illegal voting in the Woodlands or the Lake Travis boxes that went unreported, but I haven't seen it in my precinct.

In fact, my precinct has a fairly low turnout, so red-blooded Americans don't bother to show up to vote, fraudulently or otherwise.

Then there was the bill, sponsored by state Rep. Patrick Rose, D-Dripping Springs, that expanded the so-called "castle doctrine." The castle doctrine offers Texans who use deadly force to protect themselves or their homes a defense if criminal charges are filed in the aftermath of a fatal encounter.

Rose's bill would extend the castle doctrine to cover automobiles. Texas juries — grand and petit — have historically been sympathetic to self-defense claims, so what are we fixing here?

What we're fixing is a Democrat's political grip in a gun-friendly district.

What we're fixing with voter ID proposals is a problem perceived by Republican diehards who may honestly believe that illegal immigrants are dropping their hammers to storm polling places but can't muster proof of that.

The bill's prospects in the Senate are gloomy, but don't order the funeral flowers just yet because anything can happen.

My favorite of the session is the bill, authored by state Rep. Debbie Riddle, R-Tomball, that would insert the words "under God" into the Texas pledge of allegiance.

Few adult Texans know that there's a pledge, much less what it says, so here it is: "Honor the Texas flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one and indivisible."

Inserting the words "under God" sure makes me feel safe in this age of terrorism. Yeah, I know, it's not the Legislature's job to protect me from terrorists. Thank God for that because its attempt at a border security bill was sent back to committee on a point of order.

Instead of using the lull to address real challenges — an outmoded taxation system is one example, and horse-and-buggy county governments is another — legislators tackle what plays to a shrinking primary voter base.

Political operatives are fond of noting that neither Republican nor Democratic primary voters reflect the sentiment of the populace at large, but they show up wanting what they want.

Democrats lost their statewide political dominance when they embraced special interest politics.

Republicans face the same peril — a peril magnified by the implosion of the Bush administration.

Republicans are reaching in, not out, just as Democrats did and do.

What we're seeing is a preview of the 2008 election in which Republicans will be defending the White House as well as congressional and legislative seats.

That, in turn, will be a preview of 2010 when the major statewide offices are up for grabs.

There is still time for somebody in the cast to exert leadership and vision instead of just talking about it. Such leadership would be most welcome because once you've seen one chariot race, you've seen them all.