Last week, the Top ‘O Texas Republican Women held their monthly meeting with guest speaker, Caroline Fairly, Texas State Representative of District 87, where she shared her experience during the January 6 incident and what she has learned during her first session as State Rep.
“I just finished my first session in the Texas House, and I would like to share a quick story about my time in D.C. So I worked for Congressman Jackson during his campaign and when he won, he asked me to come work for him in D.C. I moved and finished my last year of college online, and this was around the time during Covid, I was actually at the Capitol on January 6th. January 6th has obviously turned out to be this whole thing, and it’s been ridiculous how these poor folks have been in jail. So I’m 21 or 22 years old, it’s my third day on the job, I’m very new to D.C. and I remember that day Ronnie Jackson was on the floor and I was in my office. I had been sent this YouTube link of one of the rioters who was trying to vlog as they walked in the Capitol. I’m watching this video and at the same time, and I’m thinking that all these people look like they’re just wanting to check out what’s happening on the floor. We had no clue what they were doing, so it was a little frightening. They start to approach the Capitol steps and I test Ronnie and tell him there’s people outside and wasn’t sure if it was a riot or not. I don’t get a response and then they make it inside, so I text him again. Then I noticed they’re approaching the chamber and I text him again. The CSPAN where you can see the numbers goes black and says they were in recess for the time being. After that, I really didn’t know what was happening. At the time, we were concerned because we didn’t know who they were or what they were doing. The video footage was just of them wandering the halls as if they were taking a tour. Thirty minutes had passed and I’m waiting in the office for Ronnie, and by that time it had already made national news. Who are these people? What are they doing? Stories had already started to develop and Ronnie shows up. On the House floor, there’s these wooden dispenser with sanitizer that members can use to clean their hands, so he has ripped the dispenser off the House floor because he didn’t know if he was going to have to defend himself. He shows up and says it wasn’t anything. It was something that got blown out of proportion and didn’t need to be. That was an interesting third day on the job!”
“I really enjoyed my time in D.C., but I found out quickly that as a staffer you really just climb the chain. You either become a lobbyist or maybe chief-of-staff, and I really didn’t want to do that. So I moved back home to Texas and worked in negotiating medical bills in the private sector and this seat opened up and people reached out to me about it. I did not want to run for office-I left D.C. thinking I would never be in politics again. It was a great experience, but I wasn’t interested. One thing lead into another and I spent three or four months traveling around the state to meet with other people who are involved in the state house involved with Texas politics. Could I do the job well? Could I be impactful and be effective? Could I handle the pressure at such a young age? I knew that through prayer, it would either become a conviction that I had to do or very clear that it wasn’t for me. I came to a point where I could not run for office and decided not to do it. Now fast forward two years. My first session was really great and I really enjoyed it.”
“Every freshman is at the bottom of the totem pole and everything is by seniority. Your parking space, your office and your seat on the floor are all based on seniority, so if you are a John Smithy, who has the best seat, he has an amazing office, and an incredible parking space in front of the Capitol. Well I was a freshmen-I had only served 10 days at that point, and how you figure out your seniority is you draw a pingpong ball. There were 30 freshmen, and we each drew a pingpong ball to see what number we were and I was 13 out of the 30, so I was 137 out of 150 in seniority. That means my office is in the basement and a five-minute walk to the House Floor, my parking space is very far away, so I just walk to work, but my seat turned out pretty great. But that was something I didn’t realize-you draw a pingpong ball to figure out seniority. If that doesn’t tell you how government works, then I don’t know what does!”
“Some of the things I learned that were surprising to me were last summer when I won my primary, I made it a goal to meet with over 80 Republican State Reps in the House. I spent three full months traveling the state. I would go to their district, have coffee and lunch with them. I did this because being so young and so new to this, I need to understand how the job worked. What did it take to be successful? I wanted to learn the members who I could maybe trust and maybe not trust, and just get a lay of the land before I was sworn into office. It was really wonderful and I learned so much, but what I didn’t realize was that because I had already met these people and built these relationships with these members-if I had questions about passing bills or needing help getting something out to the committee or negotiating a bill, I knew who to go to because there are experts on different kinds of policy like healthcare, water, immigration, whatever it may be. I knew who they were because I spent time with them on their home turf, and I didn’t realize just how valuable that would be. The second thing I took away was I questioned if hard work really mattered. Often times you think as a politician you show up to Austin, you click a button and get bills done. How does it work and does hard work really matter? I had a bill-a very Conservative piece of legislation about protecting kids and it involved big tech. So we had Tim Cook who is the CEO of Apple who was very against the bill, and Mark Zuckerburg who is the CEO of Google and he was for the bill. So you had these two big money guys against each other and I was in the middle. I’m working this bill and I didn’t realize how controversial it was going to be, and it was being introduced in Congress by a very conservative member of Congress at the time. I’m finalizing the bill, and Apple who is against the bill has started spending money to kill the bill. They hired all these lobbyists-I think we counted over $1 million they spent hiring lobbyists to kill this bill. They would put doubt in members’ minds about the bill, and they started running ads on Facebook and television and social media saying the bill was backed by the porn industry which was a blatant lie because this was a very conservative piece of legislation that prohibited people looking at porn. I was getting a lot of heat with the bill and this went on for two weeks. It comes time for me to lay the bill down on the House floor. You sit in the front and there’s 150 members in their seats and people can debate and ask questions on my bill. Right before the bill is set to be laid out, I get a notification that Donald Trump, Jr. has tweeted against the bill. I was baffled because President had been in support of this and Congress, but obviously we didn’t really want to pass a bill that wasn’t endorsed by the president’s son. We waited about 30 minutes because I wanted to figure out why he was against the bill. I’m calling everyone in D.C. that I know trying to understand what is going on, and I find out that he’s actually in Alaska and doesn’t even have his phone on him. So it was either a mistake that either someone on his staff or something happened that was miscommunication. But I needed to know because we were all confused and there were a lot of members questioning if they can support this if he’s against it. Well sure enough, he tweets out something positive about the bill. It became clear that the first tweet had been a mistake and I think he even deleted it. So we get back on track and I’m fixing to lay out the bill and it was probably about three or four hours of debate. What was new for me was I didn’t realize how when you lay out a bill, there’s more to it than you think there is. You have to know every part of your bill, and I’m talking about the parts that reference different codes or statutes or law, how it’s going to be implemented and how these big tech companies will be impacted-just numerous things about this 15-page bill. I had done a lot of prep work to be sure I understood what my bill did and that it made sense and I could defend it. After three or four hours of debate, it came down to the vote. Thankfully it passed 134 yeses to 16 nos. It was definitely a bipartisan vote. I was so thankful, but then it goes to the governor’s desk and I thought surely he would sign it and everything would be fine. I get wind that Tim Cook who doesn’t like the bill has called the governor. He told him something along the lines of, ‘I would love to keep investing in Texas and in your infrastructure and technology, and I would hate to pull my business if you pass this bill.’ At that point he was essentially threatening the governor saying if he signed the bill, they wouldn’t work with Texas. The Wall Street Journal wrote about it, it was all over the news that he had made that call. I’m calling his staff and asking if they think he is going to sign the bill, and they say, ‘look, we can suggest what he should do, but he gets to decide.’ He reads every single bill he signs into law, and there’s about 1,300 bills, so he has a lot. A week or two passes and the more time passes, I’m nervous. I remember it was a Thursday and it was 10 or 11 PM and we were on the House floor, we had been there all day, and I get a call and it’s the governor. He said, ‘I want to let you know I just signed your App Store bill into law. I’m so proud of you, you worked so hard on this, but we want to pass legislation that protects kids.’ There were a lot of people that worked hard to pass that bill, and I was encouraged to know that even though big money can be involved for lobbyists with millions of dollars spent, when you work hard and have people believe in good policy that’s conservative and good for the future of our kids in Texas and protecting them, you can get it done, and hard work does matter. I’m just thankful that we have a governor that cares about the future of our children and cares about Texas and is thinking about a policy that is long-term, not just where we are now.”
“The bill was called the App Store Accountability Act. It essentially allows parents to approve or deny apps that their kids are downloading. Apple and a lot of these big tech companies put out a lot of these family plans that say, ‘we want to be pro-you protecting your kids.’ They set it up by age range that say for 14 and under, this is what is appropriate for kids or 12 and under, but what they deam as appropriate for kids is absurd-mild nudity, alcohol, fantasy, things that we could all objectively say a 7-year-old shouldn’t be looking at. So the issue was big tech was saying they’re protecting kids, but they weren’t being transparent with parents. The parents didn’t know. so we started educating parents telling them what was happening. Apple and big tech wasn’t protecting them, so we passed a bill that held them accountable. We don’t want to prohibit parents-they can decide whatever they want their kids to look at, but at least let’s be transparent about what they see online and put parents in the driver’s seat.”
“I do want to thank you for letting me be here today and doing what you’re doing. I love going to Republican Women groups mainly because it’s all different women wanting to be involved in the community and caring about all the conservative things in their hometown and all in Texas. I do think it is so important and impactful and I’m encouraged just by being here today.”
