John Washington III Asks Who Really Controls Texas: The People or the Government?

John Washington III is putting a founding question to Texas. In an investigative analysis published Monday under the title "Who Really Controls Texas: The People or the Government?", he argues that government was created to serve the people — and asks what happens when people begin questioning whether their own government is using its lawmaking authority to restrict the very rights it was established to protect.

The analysis surveys the ground the Texas Legislature has covered: laws affecting voting, freedom of expression, immigration enforcement, and the authority of local communities to govern themselves. Those laws have met mixed fates in federal court, he notes — some provisions blocked, others upheld, and some cases dismissed without the courts deciding whether the challenged laws are constitutional. Together, he argues, the disputes raise the question his title poses in practical form: when does government regulation become government overreach, and who has the ultimate authority to decide?

His answer starts in 1776. The Declaration of Independence, he writes, establishes that governments derive their legitimate authority from the consent of the governed, and it recognizes the people's right to change or abolish a government that becomes destructive of the purposes for which it was created. He is careful about the document's limits: its reference to dissolving "the political bands" was a declaration of the American colonies' separation from Britain, he writes, not a modern legal procedure allowing an individual state to leave the United States. The principle he draws from it is the one his analysis returns to — government is an institution created for the people, and its legitimacy depends on serving them. For Dallas–Fort Worth readers, the argument lands close to home: the local self-government he names is the authority of the Metroplex's own cities and counties, exercised under laws written in Austin.