Image: Zi Xu

Tim Murphy of Mother Jones reports: “When Jon Rosenthal announced his campaign last fall for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, he never expected to talk about the short-lived Republic of Rhodesia.

Rosenthal, a 63-year-old mechanical engineer and Democratic state representative from northwest Houston, is the kind of politician you might expect to show interest in the influential but little-understood three-member board that, despite its antiquated name, regulates the oil and gas industry. He is an earnest, bald father of two—the kind of guy who uses phrases like “subsea production” and “deep-water intervention systems” in casual conversation. The Republican chair, he believed, was too cozy with the industry, and Rosenthal prepared a pragmatic slate of ideas to weatherize natural gas networks and clean up abandoned wells. It was shaping up as an important but low-profile race.

But Rosenthal is not facing that incumbent. In a bitter May runoff, Republicans instead nominated Bo French, an investor and former county GOP chair with only the vaguest glimmer of industry experience and a mostly irrelevant and racist political program that calls for deporting 100 million people, purging the nation of Muslims, and emulating a defunct apartheid state. Now Rosenthal is the only man standing between one of the most notorious bigots in North Texas and one of the country’s most powerful regulatory positions…”