The fight is on.
When polls closed in Texas tonight, our opponent was clear: Tea Party favorite Donna Campbell backed by the entire Koch Industrial-Political apparatus.
In case the name Donna Campbell is unfamiliar to you, she is the Texas State Senator who garnered a “Courageous Conservative” award in 2013 from the Texas Conservative Coalition for calling out the point of order that attempted to end State Senator Wendy Davis’s filibuster that stood up for reproductive choice for Texas women and women across America.
According to the Texas Observer, "Campbell had a quixotic legislative session in which she strongly supported abortion restrictions (she called the point-of-order that ended Wendy Davis’ June filibuster) and managed to accomplish little else." Except, of course, to fail San Antonio, her largest constituency by far, by withholding support on a number of bills because she “didn’t understand it or support it,” according to a Republican state rep.
Campbell then violated her own promise to oppose toll roads by voting for a bill that actually made it easier to build them, a move that has caused her Tea Party loyalists to bend logic into pretzel-like contortions.
These battles are not over, by far.
Texas women have been Campbell's primary target, as she has worked to strip them of their healthcare choices and inserted herself into their very private health decisions that should be contained between a woman, her doctor and, if she chooses, her family.
As an emergency room physician, Campbell co-sponsored Senate Bill 537, which resulted in the closure of the Rio Grande Valley's only two clinics. Not having those facilities now means a woman from The Valley needing an abortion must travel about 150 miles to a Corpus Christi clinic.
Campbell pushes her own credentials as a doctor -- with all the training and acquired knowledge that entails -- yet dismisses the bona fides of the surgeons who perform these procedures, as though they inexplicably have less understanding or experience. In fact, Campbell ridiculously said she "jumped on" the bill because ER surgeons aren't prepared to treat "a lady who is hemorrhaging in the uterus" from an abortion but stand prepared to treat a man who "comes in bleeding ... from the rectum" after a colonoscopy.
The Senator not only runs away from debating her opponents on this nonsense, she ignores her own constituents. During a highly-contentious (with nearly unanimous opposition) town hall meeting over a municipal utility district in Wimberley, Campbell left her voters high and dry, sending instead an aide to face the heat on her behalf.
So here we are -- a scrappy little campaign about to take on The Big Guys with the Big Bucks. No number of front guard gatekeepers can help her escape us.
Now we need your help to defeat a highly-funded Tea Partier whose coffers will be flush with outside money. Will you help us beat Goliath? Join the Daniel Boone campaign on Daily Kos fundraiser tonight. Donate! Tweet! Do what you can!