May 21, 2017
If anyone thought that Republicans believed in local rule or protecting the public from criminals, the Texas legislature is working hard to correct this misunderstanding. It just passed a new law that prohibits Texas’ cities from imposing requirements on taxi services like Uber or Lyft.
The law was passed in response to a measure by Austin that required that drivers for Uber and other services undergo a background check that included fingerprints. Uber and Lyft claimed that they were too incompetent to administer the same sort of background checks as their competitors. After spending millions of dollars on a city-wide initiative, which they lost, the two companies chose to end service in the city rather than comply with the ordinance.
They then turned to lobbying the Texas legislature where their millions in lobbying fees paid off. The new law could also override a measure in Houston that requires these companies to service people with handicaps.
Anyhow, this action by the Republican-controlled legislature should make it clear that the core Republican principle is giving more money to those who have money. Anything else is secondary.
Correction:
I wrote this post in haste and likely gave the readers the impression that I thought people who had been convicted of felonies should not be able to drive cabs and should possible be denied other types of employment. I very much regret that. We have had far too many people, disproportionately people of color, go through our prison system. Most have enormous difficulty being employed after they have completed their sentence.
It is entirely reasonable that people convicted of crimes in the past would be allowed to drive Ubers or cabs, if it can be determined that they do not pose a danger to passengers. The key is the ability to do a proper background check of the person, which likely would include fingerprint checks, which was the issue with the Austin regulation.
I wrote the post because it is not plausible that the Texas legislature was motivated by a concern about the employment prospects of people who had been convicted of crimes. They were obviously responding to Uber’s high dollar lobbying campaign. I should have been more careful in writing this post, recognizing the difficulty that many convicted of crimes face in getting jobs.
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