Dr. Brad Buckley has spent the last two legislative sessions working against the people of his district. It’s time for him to go!
Dr. Brad Buckley is an all-American guy with an all-American story. He was a high school football star, became a veterinarian, married the perfect woman, and had three perfect kids. Now, he lives in a million-dollar colonial estate nestled on 21 acres where he can spend time with his horses and enjoy the great outdoors. Dr. Brad Buckley is an all-American guy who has never had to want for anything in his life.
Buckley also lives in a county where Anglo people are a minority, 17% of the county are uninsured, and the poverty rate is 4% higher than the national average.
Why is it important to compare Brad Buckley with the community he represents? So that we can know whether or not he’s spent his time in office working on behalf of his constituent’s best interests. Let’s look at what he’s done since he was elected in 2018.
[mepr-hide] https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); [/mepr-hide]Brad Buckley has consistently voted on issues that will cost Texans more money and raise tax dollars.
In Texas, it’s estimated that we spend roughly $311 million in tax dollars every year on low-level cannabis possession offenses. In addition, countless studies have shown that Texas would earn up to $1.1 billion per year in tax revenue if cannabis was decriminalized.
Yet, in 2019, when Representative Buckley had the chance to vote on decriminalizing cannabis, he voted against it. Not only is that costing us millions in tax revenue, but it’s also a way we could better fund education, and substantially reduce our property taxes.
In 2019, Buckley also voted in favor of the “Choose Life Grant” funds. This fund spends about $100 million annually of Texas’ money on religious anti-abortion centers. Besides the blatant violation of our first amendment rights, we need to talk about how many children are starving in Brad Buckley’s district.
There are 106,000 children under the age of 18 living in Bell County.
One in five children in Texas is hungry and lives in a food-insecure household. That means that about 21,000 children in Bell County miss meals or go to bed hungry. Yet, Dr. Brad Buckley votes to spend our money on keeping low-level cannabis possessors entangled in the legal system and on funding the hundreds of fake abortion centers that plague our state.
Wasting our tax dollars while kids are starving is not the only thing Buckley has done to keep food away from people in Bell County.
In 2021, he voted against reducing the barriers for senior citizens to qualify for food stamps (SNAP).
There are 42,000 senior citizens who live in Bell County. Unfortunately, Texas has the fifth-highest ranking for senior hunger in the United States, and 10% of elderly Texans are food insecure. That means roughly 4,200 grandparents are going to bed hungry in Brad Buckley’s neck of the woods, yet he voted against helping them get food.
In 2021, when Dr. Buckley had the opportunity to vote for prohibiting state agencies from requiring a fee for low-income students to have access to broadband internet, he voted against it.
[mepr-hide] https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); [/mepr-hide]It isn’t only poor people that Brad Buckley seems to hate.
In HD54 lies the majority of the town of Killeen. The demographics of Killeen are 35% Black and 27% Hispanic, and 24%white. One would think that Buckley had all of his constituents in mind when he voted. However, during the last legislative session, he voted for the so-called “anti-CRT” bill.
The bill was a white supremacist agenda packaged with a bunch of words put in by people who didn’t understand what “Critical Race Theory” was. As a result, Black history and America’s history regarding white supremacy have been banned from Texas public schools. Teachers aren’t allowed to tell students about the writings of Fredrick Douglas or how white supremacy contributed to the founding of this nation.
All of the white Republicans in the Texas legislature voted for this. Knowing that Brad Buckley’s district is so diverse makes you wonder why he voted for it.
Erasing Black history from schools wasn’t the only white supremacist bill Buckley voted for last year.
Although Killeen is only 24% white, its police force is 68% white. Studies have proven that when predominately Black towns have all-white police forces, incidents of police violence skyrocket.
Killeen has 64% more police shootings than other Texas towns. They use force more often than 61% of other police departments. Of all complaints against Killeen PD, 89% ruled in the department’s favor. 68% of homicides in Killeen, where the victim is Black remain unsolved.
If you’re Black in Killeen, you are 2.7x more likely to be arrested for a low-level crime than your white counterparts.
Knowing this, Brad Buckley voted to punish communities (like Killeen) that invested in the community and mental health programs to lower crime rates. So while Republicans will use terms like “defund the police,” what they mean to do is keep police violence high and not offer better solutions to lower crime.
[mepr-hide] https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); [/mepr-hide]Because Killeen is predominantly Black, we have to also talk about how Dr. Buckley has voted regarding the school-to-prison pipeline.
In Texas, students of color, particularly Black students and males, are disciplined disproportionately in Texas public schools. It has long been a problem that experts have been bringing attention to for years. There has long been a criminalization of student behavior, and we know that Black and brown students bear the brunt of that criminalization.
Yet, Representative Buckley voted to arm cops on campus. After Uvalde, we all know that this doesn’t keep kids safe, but it does increase police violence in schools with children of color.
He also voted for a bill that allows people to keep weapons in their cars while on school campuses so that an 18-year-old with the shiny new AR15 has somewhere to keep it between classes. What could go wrong?
Dr. Buckley has also been pro-violence and pro-homicide.
Gun homicides in Texas have increased 90% over the last decade, we have the 26th-highest gun death rate among all the states. Additionally, 61% of all suicides in Texas occur with firearms. The gun violence epidemic costs our state about $16.6 billion per year.
During the last legislative session, Buckley voted several times to remove gun safety measures. He voted for permitless carry, so now anyone can carry around a gun without training, without a permit, and it doesn’t matter if they are a danger to themselves or others. He voted to allow guns in churches and hotels. And he voted to prohibit the enforcement of federal gun laws. Bell County already has high rates of gun deaths, and because of Buckler’s votes, these rates will continue to rise.
Unfortunately, the only thing Buckley likes more than gun violence is forced-births.
Representative Brad Buckley was a co-sponsor of the bill that banned abortion in Texas, even in cases of rape and incest. Nothing says Christian like forcing a 10-year-old rape victim to have a baby.
[mepr-hide] https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); [/mepr-hide]All Texas Republicans, including Brad Buckley, have worked tirelessly to hurt the people and strip away their rights. They know it’s wrong, which is why they’re trying to stop you from voting.
While employers are supposed to let employees go to vote during work hours, they are not required to pay employees for not being at work while they voted. Four out of five Texans live paycheck to paycheck, and millions cannot afford to take off work and stand in line for hours at a polling site.
During the 2020 election, Harris County offered its residents 24-hour voting and drive-thru voting. In turn, Harris County set record voter turnout numbers.
This sent Texas Republicans into panic mode since 71% of Harris County is non-Anglo. During the last legislative session, the GOP found a myriad of ways to stop Black, brown, and low-income people from voting, and Brad Buckley voted for it all.
He voted to prohibit 24-hour voting or drive-thru voting anywhere in Texas. He voted to completely disenfranchise houseless people in Texas by prohibiting anyone without a permanent address from registering to vote. And he voted against establishing mobile or “rolling polling places,” so that underserved areas won’t have an opportunity to shorten voting lines.
[mepr-hide] https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); [/mepr-hide]Texas has long been using voter roll purges to stop people of color from voting.
If local election officials aren’t purging common names (like Juan Garcia) from their voter rolls because a person with a similar name died or moved, the state will fine them. That’s what Brad Buckley voted for.
We’ve all seen the videos coming out of Florida, people arrested for election fraud from making simple mistakes on an application or a ballot. They’re doing this to scare people away from voting, and it’s what’s coming next in Texas.
If you don’t vote in this election, you may not have a chance to vote in another election again. As bad as things are in Texas, they will get worse. The GOP has already laid out the roadmap to make things worse if they win again.
That’s why you have to go vote!
Get to the polls now and vote for Jonathan Hildner. We can make Texas a better place, but the first step is to get the people who want to make it worse out of office.
In Bell County, here are the early voting locations. Early voting goes through November 4.
If you can’t vote by then, election day is November 8, here are the voting locations for election day.
Do you need a ride to the polls? Get a free ride with Rideshare2Vote.
Want to do more? Join the 2 Million Texans Project.
It’s time for a change, get to the polls!
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