Fifth Circuit leaves SB4 block in place

Good.

A federal appeals panel late Tuesday night declined to put Texas’s migrant deportation law back in effect, saying the state law seizes powers that are “likely reserved to the United States.”

The 2-1 opinion from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals keeps the law on hold while a broader legal battle plays out over the constitutionality of the state’s new immigration enforcement scheme. The appeals court is scheduled to hear arguments in the case next week.

But the lengthy early ruling from the conservative appeals court is a sign of the uphill battle Texas Republicans face in convincing the courts the law, known as Senate Bill 4, does not run afoul of more than a century of precedent leaving immigration enforcement in the hands of the federal government.

Chief Judge Priscilla Richman wrote that even as the state is “nobly and admirably” trying to fill a “gaping void” in immigration enforcement left by a lack of funding and political will in D.C., “it is unlikely that Texas can step into the shoes of the national sovereign under our Constitution and laws.”

“For nearly 150 years, the Supreme Court has held that the power to control immigration — the entry, admission, and removal of noncitizens — is exclusively a federal power,” Richman wrote. “Despite this fundamental axiom, SB4 creates separate, distinct state criminal offenses and related procedures regarding unauthorized entry of noncitizens into Texas from outside the country and their removal.”

The one judge on the panel to rule in Texas’s favor said the decision likely means the law will never take effect.

“We’ll likely never know how Texas’s state courts and its state law-enforcement officers would have implemented SB4,” Judge Andrew S. Oldham wrote.

[…]

Richman repeatedly pointed to a 2012 Supreme Court ruling that held that only the federal government has the power to enforce immigration laws. In that case, the high court struck down portions of an Arizona law that authorized police to arrest anyone suspected of being in the country illegally.

Richman said the Arizona ruling provides “considerable guidance” on whether Texas can succeed. She wrote that the Supreme Court in that case explained that a “principal feature” of the federal removal system is the broad discretion exercised by immigration officials. Those officials can decide whom to deport, and migrants can seek asylum or other forms of relief at any point in the process.

SB4’s provisions empowering state officials to make those decisions, Richman wrote, “significantly impair the exercise of discretion by federal immigration officials.”

“The broadest exercise of federal discretion is the Executive’s decision not to pursue either civilly or criminally the very noncitizens whom Texas has drawn a bead upon in enacting new state laws,” she wrote. “The discretion to pursue these same noncitizens likely lies exclusively with the Executive.”

See here for the previous update. This is what we’ve been saying all along, and at this point I’d expect the upcoming hearing on the merits of the initial injunction go along similar lines. The question as ever is what SCOTUS will do with it, whether they’ll respect this precedent, barely a decade old, or throw it out because there are different Justices on the bench now and the Republican Party really cares about this. We’ll find out eventually. The Associated Press, Law Dork, and the Current have more.

Posted in La Migra, Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Controller Hollins puts firefighter settlement tab at up to $1.3 billion

That’s once you factor in interest payments over the life of the bonds that will be issued to cover this.

Mayor John Whitmire

Houston Mayor John Whitmire’s proposed settlement with the firefighters union could cost significantly more than previously advertised, City Controller Chris Hollins said Tuesday.

The total cost of a back-pay settlement with the city’s firefighters could be $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion after taking into account interest and fees, Hollins said.

In addition, the total extra cost of a forward-looking, five-year contract with the firefighters’ union could exceed $140 million, according to the controller.

Hollins declined to weigh in on whether he thinks the settlement is fair, but his take on the settlement cost underscores the heavy hit to taxpayers from the deal that Whitmire struck earlier this month.

[…]

Hollins said his assessment of whether the deal is sound will hinge on a comparison of Houston firefighter pay to counterparts in other cities in Texas. He still is waiting on that analysis from the Whitmire administration, he said.

Whitmire has yet to release a detailed plan of how to pay for the firefighter settlement. Administration officials have broached the idea of instituting a garbage collection fee or creating an exception to the city’s property tax revenue cap to pay for the Houston police and fire departments, which make up the lion’s share of the city’s operating expenses.

Both of those ideas are worth exploring, Hollins said at his Tuesday news conference. He said the city cannot meet its mounting obligations through cost-cutting measures alone.

Adding the firefighter settlement to the city’s structural deficit, Houston soon will be on the hook for an extra $230 to $280 million dollars in expenses per year, Hollins said.

See here for the previous entry in this series. Mayor Whitmire still hasn’t provided a plan, and while it’s reasonable to give a topline figure for the total cost, there really will be a lot paid out in interest over the years. A million bucks twenty years from now is worth less than a million bucks today, but it still has to be paid. I don’t have a problem with that, but the line that this settlement was needed because the cost of losing to the firefighters in court would have been a lot more is at least a little disingenuous, in that the city could have prevailed in that lawsuit. I don’t know enough to know what the chances are of that or what a decent risk analysis would look like, the point is that the firefighters didn’t agree to a settlement out of a sense of civic duty, they did so because their risk analysis suggested the city made a worthwhile offer to them, taking into account the possibility they could lose or just not get as much if they won. It’s all a calculation.

It’s fair to say the city was going to have to pay something when the court case was done, and whatever you thought of the merits of the case there’s value in knowing what that amount is so a plan could be made for it. It’s just that, you know, now we have to make those plans. And they have to be made in the context of a budget outlook that is now worse because of it.

Houston Controller Chris Hollins has projected a budget shortfall of $230 to $280 million for the upcoming fiscal year, warning that the city’s savings cannot sustain the extra costs from the latest firefighters’ deal beyond another year.

[…]

Combining debt repayments, interest and planned salary hikes, the city’s budget is bracing for an additional cost of $70 to $80 million in the next fiscal year that starts in July. This is on top of an already projected deficit of $160 to $200 million that does not account for the impact of the firefighters’ agreement, Hollins said.

“This is a long-standing pattern that the city for years and years has been spending on a recurring basis more than is brought in,” Hollins said during a Tuesday press conference. “You start to look at the numbers and they pile up, and it’s my job to at some point say, ‘hey, we can no longer foot this bill.’”

Whitmire’s team has proposed potentially adjusting the city’s property tax revenue cap, charging a garbage fee and implementing 5% budget cuts across most city departments as potential ways to cut down expenses and generate new revenues.

Hollins said he has long advocated for removing the revenue cap and is open to exploring the addition of a garbage fee, noting Houston is the only major city in Texas without one. He said, however, that he does not support large-scale budget cuts or layoffs that would undermine essential city services such as water provision, trash collection and road safety projects.

“These are fundamental necessities that residents expect, depend on and pay for with their tax dollars,” he said. “We were elected with a mandate to not only maintain but to improve the quality of critical city services…and we must uphold that responsibility.”

I too have long advocated for getting rid of the stupid revenue cap, and I look forward to Mayor Whitmire making that case. It’s just too bad this has to wait until 2026, because we could use it now. Or, really, anytime in the past. But here we are.

Posted in Local politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

House Ethics Committee investigating Rep. Troy Nehls

Could be something. We’ll see.

Rep. Troy Nehls

U.S. Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Richmond, is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, the bipartisan panel announced Tuesday. It did not specify the focus of the investigation, but Nehls said it was related to his campaign’s finances.

The committee announced it was digging into a matter reported to its members on Dec. 11 and it will announce how it will proceed by May 10. Investigations do not indicate that there have been any proven violations of ethics rules.

Nehls said in a statement Tuesday that he would cooperate with the committee.

“My campaign has complied with every Federal Election Commission (FEC) law, and my books are open,” he said.

The committee is made up of five Democrats and five Republicans, with U.S. Rep. Michael Guest, R-Mississippi, serving as the chair. U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, is the only Texan on the committee. Guest and ranking member Susan Wild, D-Pennsylvania, jointly agreed to pursue the investigation.

Nehls is known for his colorful personality on Capitol Hill, which has often led to controversy.

[…]

Nehls’ campaign reported losing over $150,000 last year in wire fraud last year, prompting an investigation by the Federal Election Commission. The campaign was able to recover over $130,000 of the stolen funds, which were reportedly sent to a mysterious entity, “Misty J Productions.”

Before Congress, Nehls was fired in 1998 as an officer with the Richmond Police Department after several violations to department policy, including mishandling evidence and disobeying orders.

That bit about him having a “colorful personality” is a polite way of saying he’s a huge asshole. Whatever this investigation is about, we’ll know more in May. Recent such cases have ranged from George Santos, who famously ended up being ejected from Congress for sins too numerous to mention, to Pat Fallon, whose case was closed with no action being taken. We’ll see where this one ends up.

Posted in Show Business for Ugly People | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Texas blog roundup for the week of March 25

The Texas Progressive Alliance doesn’t want to think about California bookies as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Continue reading

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Paxton gets his deal

Welp.

Still a crook any way you look

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will have his felony securities fraud charges dismissed in exchange for doing 100 hours of community service and meeting other requirements, according to a last-minute deal announced Tuesday.

The agreement requires Paxton, 61, to complete 15 hours of legal ethics classes and pay about $300,000 in restitution to the victims. Over the coming 18 months, Paxton cannot violate the law or he could again face trial, and he will have to check in with special prosecutors every 60 days in a virtual appointment.

The resolution — altogether announced, signed and entered within a seven-minute hearing in a Houston court — marks a sudden conclusion to a nearly decade-long legal battle that has clouded the third-term Republican’s tenure as the state’s top lawyer and threatened to scuttle his political ambitions. And it comes less than a year after he survived an impeachment attempt on unrelated corruption claims that the FBI is reportedly still investigating.

Paxton was present Tuesday alongside his lawyers, and calmly watched as the Harris County judge agreed to the terms, saying nothing other than to confirm his signature. The deal does not require him to admit any wrongdoing.

“I am grateful to reach this agreement, to get this matter behind me, so I can get back to the work representing the state of Texas,” Paxton said in a statement Tuesday.

The culmination of one of the longest-running cases in Texas history came roughly three weeks before Paxton was set to go to trial on April 15.

[…]

“At the end of the day, it’s not a plea bargain,” Dan Cogdell, one of Paxton’s defense attorneys, told reporters after the hearing. “There is no admission of guilt and there will never be an admission of guilt because he is not guilty.”

Cogdell said it was a case “we knew, from day one, they couldn’t prove,” adding that the restitution Paxton will pay is less than he’d pay for his defense team to go to trial.

Special prosecutor Brian Wice said he agreed to a deal because it would bring justice to the victims, and his obligation was always to find a fair resolution, not necessarily to convict Paxton.

“While I think the case could be made that justice was certainly delayed,” Wice said, “I think the agreement that we’ve reached today underscores the fact that justice was not denied.”

[…]

The same allegations of bribery and abuse of office that spurred his impeachment are reportedly being investigated by a federal grand jury in San Antonio. Paxton also continues to face a whistleblower suit filed by four of his former top aides who claim he fired them out of retaliation for reporting him to the FBI for those allegations.

In another case still winding its way through the courts, a committee of the State Bar of Texas is seeking to take disciplinary action against Paxton for filing a “dishonest” petition before the U.S. Supreme Court that sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election result.

[…]

Paxton’s community service, the particulars of which prosecutors and defense attorneys will decide together, will be completed in Collin County, where Paxton lives. Wice said it will likely involve a soup kitchen or food pantry.

Paxton will take 15 hours of continuing legal education as part of the agreement — five times more than what an attorney licensed in Texas is required to do, Wice said.

“You can never get too many hours of ethics.”

See here for the update that let us know this was coming. After all these years, I confess I didn’t expect this to end with such a whimper, but here we are. I’ll be rooting very hard for that grand jury in San Antonio to give us something, that’s for sure. And however this ends, I’ll never stop referring to Paxton as a crook. Some things don’t require a conviction.

I’ll have some links for more reading in a minute, but first there’s this Trib story that maybe could have been run before now.

Cases like Paxton’s are typically prosecuted in civil court and would not result in jail time, said lawyers specializing in securities fraud. But state prosecutors have, for nine years, been pursuing charges against Paxton that held a maximum penalty of up to 99 years in jail.

“This is not really what people think of when they hear securities fraud,” said James Spindler, a professor of law and business at the University of Texas at Austin. “This is not Bernie Madoff or Sam Bankman-Fried,” who were both convicted of perpetrating billions of dollars worth of fraud.

[…]

Christine Hurt, a securities law professor at SMU Dedman School of Law, likened Paxton’s behavior to that of celebrity influencers like Kim Kardashian, who settled with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2022 after she promoted certain cryptocurrencies on social media without disclosing that she was receiving compensation to do so.

Paxton’s charges are expected to be dropped, based on a pre-trial agreement reached Tuesday, in exchange for community service, paying restitution to the alleged victims and other fulfillment of obligations laid out in the deal.

Lawyers who study securities law said that people accused of similar crimes often settle before trial by agreeing to pay a fine. They said it was highly unusual for the state to pursue criminal penalties for technical violations that one could feasibly commit unintentionally.

“We can hold you civilly liable, but typically if you weren’t doing something you thought was bad or wrong or reckless, you don’t have the requisite standard to be deprived of your liberty,” Spindler said. “That’s why this never really gets prosecuted in a criminal manner.”

[…]

Securities fraud refers to a broad range of behavior that can include running a Ponzi scheme, encouraging people to invest in a sham company, recruiting investors by telling them lies about a company, or insider trading.

Hurt, the SMU professor, said she moved to Texas about two years ago and when she heard Paxton faced securities fraud cases, she assumed the charges were more egregious. She was surprised to learn what the charges were when she looked into the case this week.

“I don’t want to downplay the severity of this,” Hurt said. “But these types of cases are usually settled for just a fine and are not career-ending sanctions.”

I mean, when every story that ever ran about Paxton’s state securities fraud charges includes the note that these charges can result in prison terms of 5 to 99 years if convicted, it’s hard for a layperson to recognize that in reality these things are often settled in the same manner as speeding tickets are. Perhaps that’s an unintentionally trenchant comment about how wildly punitive our laws are in general. Be that as it may, I presume that if that Paxton does get popped by that federal grand jury the “deferred” part of his prosecution comes back into play. (How it would be handled and by whom is a hypothetical best left unexplored at this time.) Of course, if that does happen he’ll have much bigger things to worry about. We can only hope.

For what it’s worth, the restitution Paxton will have to pay will go to the people he duped into buying Servergy stock on his say so back in the day. One of those people is now dead, so his estate will get the money. Here’s another question to ponder: What if any laws exist on the matter of campaign donors or other close personal friends of Paxton paying that restitution for him? We all know he’s not going to write those checks himself. I’m just putting it out there.

So that’s it for this saga. Whatever else I thought about this case over the last eight or nine years, this was not how I expected it to end. The Trib, Reform Austin, Daily Kos, Texas Public Radio, the Dallas Observer, and the Press have more.

Posted in Crime and Punishment | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

SCOTUS seems likely to dump the mifepristone ban case

Some good news.

For this Supreme Court to reject abortion restrictions, the argument has to be pretty bad.

“That it?” Justice Amy Coney Barrett cut in tersely as anti-abortion group lawyer Erin Hawley (yes, that Hawley) enumerated the supposed harms to a group of doctors from the Food and Drug Administration lifting restrictions on abortion drug mifepristone.

Hawley on Tuesday was at times buried by a bipartisan dogpile as the likes of Chief Justice John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Barrett and even Clarence Thomas joined the liberals in questioning the group’s standing to bring the challenge and the nationwide restrictions it’s seeking.

Justice Samuel Alito, one of the most doggedly devoted members of the bench to reverse engineering even doily-like arguments into his preferred outcome, tried valiantly to put a gloss on the anti-abortion case.

Is the FDA “infallible?” he challenged the government. Isn’t it “obvious” that lifting multiple restrictions at once may have a different effect in combination, he mused, parroting the anti-abortion group’s argument. He sneered that the manufacturer of branded mifepristone’s injury is just monetary — a refreshingly dismissive take on corporate interest from a right-wing judge.

“So your argument is it doesn’t matter if FDA flagrantly violated the law, it didn’t do what it should have done, it endangered the health of women, it’s just too bad, nobody can sue in court?” he asked U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar.

But the fight went out of Alito as the arguments went on and it became clear that his peers were, at the least, highly suspect of the legal underpinnings of the challenge.

The other right-wing justices too, initially eager to at least throw a bone to the anti-abortion movement, had largely abandoned that posture by the time Hawley took the stand.

See here for the previous update. I’m just going to post a bunch of links at the end of this, but the one other piece I want to highlight is this one, in which we talk about what might be next.

There are always a couple of tells when the most conservative Supreme Court in more than a century finds itself adjudicating a truly mortifying and meritless case. One is that it’s coming up by way of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, a court that so consistently shovels its worst constitutional garbage upward that the high court conservatives are often forced to reluctantly lob it back. Another tell is when the facts of the case are so laugh-out-loud insane that even conservative justices can’t bring themselves to adopt them or the underpinning legal reasoning with a straight face. There’s yet a third tell: when the conservative justices start injecting a bunch of nonsense and randomized pet peeves into oral argument to distract from how embarrassing it would be to discuss the merits of the actual case.

All three tells were present Tuesday morning, when the court heard FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a challenge to the current medication abortion regime nationwide. This case is about a handful of physicians seeking to wield their “conscience objections” to abortion as a cudgel against everyone’s access to safe reproductive care throughout the country. So, it was heartening to see that the majority of the Supreme Court doesn’t have the conscience to take it seriously. It was harrowing, however, to hear at least two justices embrace the plaintiffs’ foundational theory: that a long-defunct federal law already bans medication abortion, and maybe procedural abortion as well—and that the courts can revive this ban once they get their hands on the right case.

[…]

Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas are never ones to let an embarrassment of a lawsuit go to waste. And they were openly eager to embrace the chilling argument at the heart of ADF’s case: the notion that the Comstock Act of 1873 prohibits the distribution of abortion pills and perhaps even equipment used for procedural abortions. Under this theory, abortion is already a criminal offense under federal law, and every abortion provider in the country may be prosecuted and imprisoned immediately. Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation are already urging Trump to issue an executive order on Day 1 banning medication abortion. Republican lawyers are preparing to use the Comstock Act to prohibit all abortions, not just pills. This reading of the zombie relic is so broad that a Justice Department and judiciary hostile enough to reproductive freedom could contort it to make all abortion care a felony.

Predictably on Tuesday, and with a case built of vapors to work with, Alito and Thomas went full Comstock. Alito scolded the FDA for letting providers mail abortion pills despite the existence of the law. “This is a prominent provision,” the justice told Prelogar. “It’s not some obscure subsection of a complicated, obscure law. They knew about it. Everybody in this field knew about it.” Thomas warned Ellsworth that her client, the maker of mifepristone, lacked a “safe harbor” from prosecution over Comstock. “It’s fairly broad, and it specifically covers drugs such as yours,” he told her. (That claim is very much in dispute.) Alito and Thomas know they will likely lose this case, so they’re preparing for the next one. Maybe Trump will win and commence Comstock prosecutions. Maybe Kacsmaryk will issue a new ban on mifepristone at the behest of red states, as he is currently threatening to do. Either way, Comstock is racing toward the Supreme Court. And two justices have already aligned themselves with a sweeping interpretation of its puritanical prohibitions.

The FDA looks poised to win this silly case at the Supreme Court in June, but we cannot let the case’s silliness obscure all the future damage it tees up—to the practice of medicine, to women’s health, and to the credibility of a Supreme Court that once cared about credibility. Whenever a door closes on the worst MAGA toxins at this court, an Overton window opens to something so much worse. Health care professionals, biopharma companies, and reproductive rights advocates can cheer the probable outcome of Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. But they can spare only a moment’s rest because Thomas and Alito, with the help of bad actors like ADF and Kacsmaryk, are already bringing the next battle to their doorstep.

As that last link notes, it ain’t over till it’s over. And before you can draw a breath, it will be time for the EMTALA appeal. Gird yourselves. NBC News, SCOTUSblog, Mother Jones, and The 19th have more.

Posted in Legal matters, National news | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Secretaries of State and AI

I sure hope our SOS is ready for this.

A false call from a secretary of state telling poll workers they aren’t needed on Election Day. A fake video of a state election director shredding ballots before they’re counted. An email sent to a county election official trying to phish logins to its voter database.

Election officials worry that the rise of generative AI makes this kind of attack on the democratic process even easier ahead of the November election — and they’re looking for ways to combat it.

Election workers are uniquely vulnerable targets: They’re obscure enough that nobody knows who they really are, so unlike a fake of a more prominent figure — like Joe Biden or Donald Trump — people may not be on the lookout for something that seems off. At the same time, they’re important enough to fake and just public enough that it’d be easy to do.

Combine that with the fact that election officials are still broadly trusted by most Americans — but don’t have a way to effectively reach their voters — a well-executed fake of them could be highly dangerous but hard to counter.

“I 100 percent expect it to happen this cycle,” New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver said of deepfake videos or other disinformation being spread about elections. “It is going to be prevalent in election communications this year.”

Secretaries of state gathered at the National Association of Secretaries of State winter meeting last month told POLITICO they have already begun working AI scenarios into their trainings with local officials, and that the potential dangers of AI-fueled misinformation will be featured in communication plans with voters.

Election officials have already spent the last few years struggling to figure out how to combat an increasingly toxic election environment in which misinformation has fueled public distrust of the electoral system and physical threats. Now they’re worried AI will make that challenge even more unmanageable.

“Our staff is in conversation with a lot of folks around the country,” said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who publicized a training late last year that included a deepfaked version of himself spreading false information. “It has a lot of potential to do a lot of damage.”

The technology has improved so rapidly that people often don’t realize how easily and effectively someone can be impersonated by AI. When the good-government group Brennan Center for Justice runs its election AI trainings — it helped arrange the one in Arizona — it shows them a tangible example of AI misinformation. After recording participants in the tabletop training exercise, the group then created and displayed deepfakes later in the training of the participants giving misleading messages to the public.

“To see it, as opposed to hearing about it, and to see it with people that you know or maybe even of yourself, brought home that this isn’t some science fiction,” said Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the group’s elections and government program.

[…]

One of the particular threats of AI impersonations of election officials is that they’re used to mislead other election workers. For example, a faked secretary of state could push out wrong last-minute changes during the organized chaos of Election Day, confusing local election administrators or poll workers and disrupting voting. Or AI can be used to mimic a colleague to try gaining unauthorized access to important systems.

“We’re seeing a little smarter phishing emails because AI does make it a bit more advanced,” said Carly Koppes, the clerk and recorder of Weld County, Colorado. “They may be trying to test some waters and ramp it up for later this year.”

For a lot of reasons, there’s plenty to be worried about. At least we’re more aware of what the potential attacks might look like, and we all know there are plenty of bad actors and willing dupes out there. I would just like to know what our Secretary of State is doing, and how that office is working with the hundreds of county election officials. The real fear I have is that whatever Jane Nelson and her staff may prepare for and be ready to do, they’ll get as much trouble from various Republicans as they do from the attackers. I sure hope I’m wrong about that.

Posted in Show Business for Ugly People | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

PFLAG wins injunction against Paxton’s intrusive data requests

From the inbox, as I have not seen any news stories about this yet:

The Travis County District Court today granted a temporary injunction blocking the Texas Attorney General’s Office’s latest effort targeting transgender Texans — its demand that PFLAG National turn over information and documents about the organization’s support of families in Texas seeking gender-affirming medical care for their transgender youth.

“PFLAG families in Texas gained further protection today when the court reaffirmed that the Attorney General can’t two-step around the law with an outrageous demand for private information,” said Brian K. Bond (he/him), CEO of PFLAG National. “PFLAG National will continue to fight to protect our families, because trans youth and their loved ones deserve better, and loving your LGBTQ+ kid is always the right thing to do.”

The organizations Lambda Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, the ACLU, Transgender Law Center, and Arnold & Porter, who earlier secured a temporary restraining order on PFLAG National’s behalf, this past Monday asked the court to issue an injunction blocking the Attorney General’s investigative demands while the legal advocates pursue their challenge in court. The court agreed and issued the order upon completion of the hearing.

“PFLAG National has consistently protected Texas families with transgender youth in the face of the State’s persecution,” said Chloe Kempf (she/her), attorney with the ACLU of Texas. “This court ruling is a critical step in allowing PFLAG National and its members to join together and advocate for each other, free from the threat of the attorney general’s retaliation and intimidation. But we know that this isn’t over, and Texans of all races, genders, and backgrounds must be able to continue to engage in civil society to advocate for their safety, equality, and constitutional rights.”

“We’re so thankful the court saw through this transparent abuse of power by the Office of the Attorney General,” said Elizabeth Gill (she/her), staff attorney for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project. “The directives sent to PFLAG are baseless intimidation tactics, clearly aimed at silencing protected speech and preventing the organization from advocating on behalf of families with transgender youth. We remain committed to ensuring the right of PFLAG and its Texas membership remain protected.”

“While the current TRO protected PFLAG National and its Texas member families, the threat from the Attorney General’s outrageous demands continued to loom,” said Karen Loewy (she/her), senior counsel and director of constitutional law practice at Lambda Legal. “The court appreciated the burden that the threat of the Attorney General’s demands imposed on PFLAG National and its Texas members and quite properly concluded they warranted protection as we pursue our challenge in court. We applaud the court’s decision. Texas families need to know they can continue to support their transgender children without fear of retaliation.”

“Transgender Law Center celebrates alongside our partners and PFLAG families who can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that their privacy and constitutional rights remain protected in the state of Texas,” said Lynly Egyes (she/her), legal director at Transgender Law Center. “PFLAG, and the loving families who are the heart of that great organization, know that all young people deserve the freedom to grow and thrive.”

On February 9, PFLAG National received civil demands from the Attorney General’s Office to turn over documents, communications, and information related to PFLAG National and the organization’s work helping families in Texas with transgender adolescents. PFLAG National is a plaintiff in two lawsuits filed against restrictions on gender-affirming medical care for adolescents in Texas: one lawsuit Loe v. Texas, challenging S.B. 14, the state’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for minors, and PFLAG v. Abbott, challenging the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services’ rule mandating investigations of parents who work with medical professionals to provide their adolescent transgender children with medically necessary healthcare. Lambda Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, the ACLU, Transgender Law Center, and the law firm Arnold & Porter represent PFLAG, Inc. in this newly filed case.

See here for the background on this case, here, here, and here for more on the lawsuit over the ban on gender affirming care, here and here for more on Paxton’s harassment of out of state clinics and hospitals, and here for more on the litigation to stop DFPS investigations into the families of trans kids. More from PFLAG on this case is here. A court date of June 10 was set for the trial on the merits of the case. As with anything involving Ken Paxton, it ain’t over till all the appeals have been exhausted, so it’s possible that this injunction could be put on hold, most likely if it happens by the Supreme Court. As this is a state case, we at least have the blessing of no Fifth Circuit involvement. But stuff can still happen. I’ll look for news coverage of this and will update as needed.

UPDATE: KXAN is the first that I see to have a story about this.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Some AstroWorld defendants try to get out

Lots going on here.

Apple, Drake and other defendants targeted have asked a Harris County court to dismiss them from a sprawling lawsuit filed by victims of the 2021 Astroworld disaster.

A flood of new motions and documents filed in Harris County’s 11th Civil District since the end of 2023 show efforts by attorneys to define just who is responsible for the failures at the Travis Scott concert that killed 10 people and injured scores more.

At the same time, filings from the plaintiffs’ lawyers reveal expert testimony, expected to play a part in any upcoming trial, that employees from two concert’s organizers — NRG Park operator ASM Global and Live Nation — knew the expected crowd size would exceed safe levels days before the concert and failed to heed lessons learns from previous Travis Scott concerts in 2018 and 2019.

“It is an industry accepted principle that elements of crowd behavior can be predicted and that a crowd can be managed if handled properly,” wrote Larry Perkins, of Perkins Crowd Management Group, a consultant on crowd safety. “However, in the case of the Nov. 5, 2021, event, the festival was not properly planned and staffed resulting in the inability to manage the ingress and crowd flow.”

The planner failed to meet industry standard, he wrote.

[…]

In a March 8 filing, attorney for Drake, whose real name is Aubrey Drake Graham, said despite a meticulous complaint filed by the plaintiffs lawyers, developed over the course of two years, they did “not attribute any direct conduct, activity, omissions or obligations” to Drake that caused the disaster. The rapper performed for about 14 minutes, and only got on the stage after many of the injuries had already occurred, his attorney wrote. He was not involved in the planning of the festival, his attorney said, and was an invitee “much like the festival patrons.”

In its filings, Apple also said it didn’t have anything in to do with planning the concert.

“Apple’s involvement was limited to Travis Scott’s performance — one performance out of dozens during the planned two-day event,” Apple wrote, saying the plaintiffs lawyers didn’t have a “scintilla of evidence” to claim the concert was a joint venture between the tech company and Scott.

In a different motion, Apple also pushed back at a claim made by ASM that the tech giant was to blame to disaster because one of its livestream cameras “may have created obstructions that would have further reduced the usable square footage for accommodating the audience.”

Apple was contracted to livestream the concert on Nov. 2, 2021, just three days before the show, lawyers wrote.

See here for previous coverage. I don’t have any opinion on these motions, which seem like normal lawyering to me, but I am interested in the expert testimony that this tragedy was foreseeable. There’s more on that in the story, and in this Houston Landing piece.

Ten days before the 2021 Astroworld music festival, the event’s safety director was worried about whether organizers could cram throngs of fans in front of main act Travis Scott.

“I feel like there is no way we are going to fit 50k in front of that stage,” Seyth Boardman wrote to the festival’s operations director. “Especially with all of the trees!”

Boardman’s fears became deadly reality on the night of Nov. 5, 2021, when 10 young fans packed into a section near the stage suffered fatal injuries from a crowd crush during Scott’s musical set.

Boardman’s message was one of several high-level conversations about crowding at the festival in the days and hours leading up to the festival’s deadly climax, according to a review of hundreds of pages of court records filed in recent weeks.

Those documents, submitted in connection with the mass of civil litigation from victims, contain the most detailed information yet about the lead-up to the festival, which has never been the subject of an independent investigation. Harris County commissioners rejected Judge Lina Hidalgo’s request for one after the tragedy.

In the absence of an outside review, contract experts for the plaintiffs have authored their own attempts to make sense of the disaster. They contend festival planners relied on a fundamental misunderstanding of how many people they legally could pack into its grounds – and they did not have enough space even by their own, generous estimates.

That error, the experts allege, was compounded by security lapses on the day of Astroworld that allowed gatecrashers to swarm the festival grounds, and a failure to monitor the crowd for the tell-tale signs of crowd crush.

There’s more, so read the rest. This all sounds bad, but it’s evidence being put forth by the plaintiffs. The defense still gets to have a say, both in terms of questioning this evidence and presenting their own. There will be a lot more to come in this case.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hope we have enough water this summer

Not looking great for some parts of the state right now.

Two consecutive summers of brutal heat and drought have left some parts of Texas with notably low water supplies going into 2024.

A wet year or a well-placed hurricane could quickly pull these regions back from the brink. But winter rains have disappointed so far. Recent downpours are the first in weeks for parts of the state, and they won’t hit the watersheds that need them most.

Looking ahead, forecasters increasingly expect another scorching summer here this year.

That’s bad news for places like far South Texas, where big reservoirs on the Lower Rio Grande fell from 33% to 23% full over the last 12 months. A repeat of similar conditions would leave the reservoirs far lower than they’ve ever been, triggering an emergency response and an international crisis.

Worries stretch beyond the Rio Grande. In Corpus Christi, on the South Texas coast, authorities last month stopped releasing water aimed at maintaining minimum viable ecology in the coastal wetlands, even as oil refineries and chemical plants remain exempt from water use restrictions during drought.

Also last month, in the sprawling suburbs of Central Texas, between Austin and San Antonio, one groundwater district declared stage four drought for the first time in its 36-year history.

Texans don’t usually talk about drought in the winter. Damp soil and green grass may conceal the impending predicament today, but water planners in regions with low reserves nervously await what summer may bring.

“Signs are not favorable,” said Greg Waller, a coordinating hydrologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Fort Worth. “Expect warmer and drier, again.”

“Pretty scary times,” said Jim Darling, president of the Rio Grande Regional Water Authority and former mayor of McAllen. “We’ll see what happens.”

Winter and spring rains offer the best hope for relief, he said, but weather patterns so far haven’t produced the sustained downpours needed to refill reservoirs.

Drought conditions in 2022 and 2023 struck with markedly acute severity. Last year was the hottest on record for Texas — and the Earth, according to NOAA — after a global heatwave shattered temperature records around the world.

These patterns, Waller said, are consistent with scientific understanding of climate change caused by carbon emissions.

“Climate change means the extremes are going to get more extreme,” he said. “The heat waves are going to get more heat. The droughts are going to get droughty-er and the floods are going to get floody-er.”

Texas rainfall typically peaks in May. If relief doesn’t come by then, some places will need to start bracing for impact.

You can read the rest for more details about those places and the challenges they face. We were just talking about this, and I’m sure we’ll be talking about it a lot more. The Lege did take some action last year, as they had done a decade ago following the previous big heat wave and drought. They’re going to have to increase that pace, and maybe talk to some of their colleagues in Washington DC about doing some things as well. Or, you know, we could vote in some better legislators and Congressfolk. Just a thought. And so we don’t end on such a bummer, here’s a song:

That’s an old song and there are many versions of it. I just like that one.

Posted in The great state of Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Mexico asks Fifth Circuit to keep blocking SB4

They definitely have an interest in this.

The Mexican government is urging a federal court to block Texas’ migrant deportation law, arguing it will trample the country’s right to regulate its own borders, terrorize the 2.4 million Mexican nationals living in Texas and threaten crucial cross-border trade.

“The unforeseen ramifications of this law would have a substantial impact and hardship on the Mexican community,” the nation wrote in a brief submitted Thursday as a federal appeals court weighs whether to keep the law on hold.

[…]

Mexico’s brief said the law “wholly eviscerates” the long-standing principle that immigration should be handled solely by the federal government. It cites a U.S. Supreme Court ruling from 2012 that struck down portions of an Arizona law authorizing police to arrest anyone suspected of being in the country illegally.

“The U.S. Supreme Court provided the most definitive statement yet on this principle, declaring that it ‘is fundamental that foreign countries concerned about the status, safety, and security of their nationals in the United States must be able to confer and communicate on this subject with one national sovereign, not the 50 separate States,’” the brief said.

The brief also said Mexico is “deeply concerned that enforcement of SB 4 by Texas’ officers could lead to improper harassment, detention, removal, and criminalization of Mexican citizens and individuals of Latino appearance.”

And it said those concerns could put a damper on the $285.6 billion trade relationship between Texas and Mexico, which is the state’s top trading partner.

“If SB 4 is ever fully implemented, Mexican citizens, regardless of their immigration status and country of residence, will be rightly afraid to visit Texas, engage in commercial trucking through Texas, or travel on rail through Texas, for work or pleasure, out of concern that they will be subject to unlawful police scrutiny and detention,” the brief said.

See here for the previous update. Hard to argue with any of that, though there are plenty who will strive to deny it. I don’t know how much weight an amicus brief from Mexico will carry, but they can hardly stand by and not say anything. Mexico has already said that they “will not accept repatriations from the state of Texas”, which adds another level of chaos and uncertainty if this law were allowed to take effect.

It’s also the case, and this has not been extensively discussed so far, that Texas law enforcement agencies themselves aren’t sure what to do with SB4.

“We intend to advise our members to consult with their local legal counsel for guidance,” said Albert Garcia, president of the Texas Police Chiefs Association, a group that aims to advance the development of police executives. “Since Senate Bill 4 grants discretion, it is imperative for each jurisdiction to assess the best course of action based on their unique circumstances.”

Some police entities operating hundreds of miles from the border, like sheriffs in Tarrant and Montgomery counties, have indicated they will enforce S.B. 4. The sheriffs of Tarrant, Collin and Smith counties met with Abbott Wednesday in the Capitol and presented him with a letter signed by 139 sheriffs expressing support for the law and arguing “our unsecured border is directly responsible for numerous criminal victimizations of citizens and non-citizens as well as numerous human rights violations.” Many of those sheriffs were from counties far from the border, where it’s less clear how they can make arrests under the law.

Skylor Hearn, executive director of the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas, said it would be “impossible” for local police to enforce S.B. 4’s illegal entry charge in counties away from the border. The more severe charge for repeat offenders, illegal reentry, could come into play in non-border counties, Hearn said, though he insisted it would take more than a simple traffic stop.

“There’s no way to get probable cause on the side of the road,” Hearn said. “The only way the second offense will ever be filed is someone who was arrested for something else — DWI, burglary, fighting in public, whatever. They go to jail, they’re fingerprinted, and that biometric record makes it up to the federal government and then comes back down. … That’s the only way you can make that case.”

The law may potentially give those agencies farther away from the physical border a law with “more teeth” that could be used strategically, for instance in a situation where a specific suspect not yet arrested is identified as an undocumented person, said Tyler Owen, of the Texas Municipal Police Association, an organization that provides legal services to members who work in all sorts of law enforcement.

Just as tricky as navigating the new law’s enforcement will be ensuring that crime victims who may be undocumented still feel comfortable reporting those crimes — not avoiding police out of fear, Owen said.

“It’s gonna be a balancing act and it’s gonna be something that we’re going to have to tread through together,” Owen said. “Yes we’re cops. But before they’re putting that badge on, they’re human beings.”

There’s no question that one significant effect of SB4 would be a lot of racial profiling and illegal stops and searches of people of color. There would eventually be lawsuits and other responses to all that, but not until a whole lot of harm has taken place. It’s a virtual certainty that other states would follow in our cursed footsteps if this law is allowed to be enforced. And all this is happening as Republicans turned on a very friendly to them bipartisan bill because their lord and master demanded they oppose it because the current status serves his purposes. The cruelty, as ever, is the point.

Posted in La Migra, Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The ITC fire five years later

We learned some things from this.

The Intercontinental Terminals Co. fire that broke out March 17, 2019, did not just lead to a massive black plume of smoke lingering for days over east Harris County, before spreading 20 miles to downtown Houston and other parts of the city.

It also led to Harris County officials rethinking their emergency notification systems, after hearing from deeply concerned residents who said they hadn’t received timely information about what was happening at the chemical plant near their homes.

Five years later, they have results to show for their efforts, but staying informed during an incident can still be a complicated challenge for residents.

The fire at the ITC Deer Park facility was the first test for the new Harris County Commissioners Court. County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia, who represents east Harris County, had taken office less than three months earlier, flipping the court to a Democratic majority. They were quickly thrust into the complexities of a chemical fire – a not uncommon occurrence in east Harris County, where the economy is anchored by an expansive petrochemical industry.

[…]

Kristen Lee, the senior director of legislative affairs in Garcia’s office, experienced the incident as both a resident living near the facility and a newly-hired member of the Precinct 2 team. On the Sunday morning of the fire, her first notification about the incident came first hand when she saw the smoke on her way to church.

“The size of the plume, I just felt very uneasy,” Lee said.

As the day unfolded, there were signs that the fire was serious. But Lee also recognized there were many reasons why she wasn’t getting information as quickly as she wanted.

There’s nothing simple or straightforward about emergency communications during a chemical incident, she said. East Harris County is made up of numerous cities – including La Porte, Deer Park and Pasadena – each with their own emergency management team and communication system. Plus, getting the information right doesn’t happen immediately.

“It’s very hard to do,” she said, “to calculate risk in those first hours of an event.”

Ultimately, local officials must rely on cooperation from industry leaders in order to have information to share. Sometimes government officials are fighting for the same details as the public, trying to get answers from private companies that treat the information as proprietary.

Despite these challenges, strengthening public alerts during these incidents has been a major priority in the years since the ITC fire, she said.

“It’s like teaching industry how to communicate from scratch,” Lee said, “because the old way of doing things where they tighten up and don’t let any information out just isn’t going to work anymore.”

See here, here, and here for some background, and here for an initial assessment of the problem. There sure were a lot of big industrial fires in the county around that time, and being able to communicate with the various agencies involved and the general public, which wanted to know as much as it could as quickly as possible, was a real challenge. There are still issues to work through, but a lot of progress has been made.

Posted in Local politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Are you ready for some World Cup cricket?

It’s here for you if you want to see it.

The United States men’s national cricket team will play two series this spring at Prairie View Cricket Complex ahead of June’s historic 2024 ICC Men’s T20 World Cup.

The U.S. will play five matches vs. Canada’s national team over a week in early April before returning in May for three matches against the Bangladesh national team.

The ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, which will be hosted by the United States and the West Indies, starts play June 1 and ends with the championship game June 29.

It is the first time the U.S. is hosting a cricket world cup.

“Ahead of the important Men’s T20 World Cup, these games will be vital for our team to get their working combinations, build team cohesion, and fine-tune strategies,” USA Cricket chairman Venu Pisike said in a statement. “I’d also like to thank ICC, Cricket Canada and the Bangladesh Cricket Board who offered their full support in scheduling of the matches.”

Information about start times and tickets was not made available following the announcement. The U.S. will play Canada on April 7, April 9, April 10, April 12 and April 13. The team will then play Bangladesh on May 21, May 23 and May 25.

[…]

T20 is a variation of cricket created just over 20 years ago as a way to shorten matches, which in cricket can last for multiple days depending on the variation. In T20, the matches last just a few hours as teams are allowed just 20 overs. One over features six legal pitches.

This year is the first time the United States has qualified for the Men’s T20 World Cup. The team kicks off the tournament with the competition’s opening game versus Canada in Grand Prairie.

Grand Prairie Stadium, which hosts Major League Cricket in the summer, is one of three stadiums in the United States being used for the tournament. Games are also being held in Broward County, Florida, and Nassau County, New York.

See here for more on the Prairie View Cricket Complex, which has been in operation for a few years, and here for more on Major League Cricket, which is played at Grand Prairie Stadium and which debuted last year. More on the tournament itself is here. Seems like a pretty reasonable opportunity to find out more about the sport if you have some interest or curiosity.

Posted in Other sports | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Weekend link dump for March 24

“The sweeping digitisation of music—both from a distribution standpoint as well as a production and composition perspective—has had some devastating effects on the industry and the art form. That’s not to say it’s all black-and-white, of course, as there have been some positives, like the diversification and democratisation of certain areas that have come with it, but in so many other ways, the transition from analogue to digital in music has proven to be a rot.” Speaking as a fellow Old Man, all I can say is that while I like plenty of engineered electronic music, I will always favor bands that feature people playing instruments. Sue me.

“Instead of going after minority voters, the RNC apparently plans to remake itself even more in Trump’s image.”

“A new poll by HarrisX, exclusive to IndieWire, found that 34 percent of U.S. adults prefer to watch movies in theaters, which means a solid two-thirds would rather wait for them to be released on streaming.”

“The Left Behind novels were embarrassingly out of date by the time I started blog-reading them in 2003. And that’s even more so today. That ain’t because they failed to forecast cell phones or Uber. It’s because there hasn’t been a Rapture.”

“Private reserves of privately owned, never-before-seen creatures may be an inevitability, and I can’t say I’m optimistic for what happens when those creatures meet a natural world that has no familiarity with what they are or what change they might bring.”

Why are hummingbirds staying in Kansas instead of migrating south for the winter? The answer may or may not surprise you.

RIP, Paul Alexander, the “Iron Lung Man”, who lived a truly remarkable life.

“MLB sees slowly improving diversity in its youth pipeline, despite record-low number of Black major leaguers”.

“US health officials are warning doctors about the dramatic rise in measles cases around the world, and advising families traveling to a measles-affected country to get babies as young as 6 months vaccinated before they go.”

“In the decades that I have been a lawyer, this is the most bizarre order I’ve ever seen issued by a federal judge. What makes that all the more amazing is that the second and third most bizarre orders I’ve ever seen in federal court were also issued by Judge Cannon in this case.”

Enjoy your stay!

“Donald Trump does not have enough cash to obtain an appeal bond that would prevent New York’s attorney general from seizing his real estate assets to satisfy a $454 million civil fraud judgment, his lawyers indicated in a court filing Monday.”

Wishing Leon Coffee a happy retirement.

“Giant redwoods – the world’s largest trees – are flourishing in the UK, a study has found.”

“There are several recent signs that the federal judiciary’s center right is losing patience with its far right.”

“Trump’s predicament is also the latest reminder that his financial challenges make him a national security threat — something that has been a reality ever since he was elected president in 2016. He’s always been willing to sell his name to the highest bidder. There’s no reason to believe that Trump, whose businesses collected millions of dollars from foreign governments and officials while he was president, won’t have a for-sale sign out now that he’s struggling with the suffocating weight of court judgments.”

They’re coming for birth control.

“Donald Trump lost over 500,000 votes to Nikki Haley during Tuesday’s GOP primaries, despite the former South Carolina governor dropping out of the race, with tens of thousands of other votes going against the former president.”

“The Los Angeles Dodgers interpreter for Shohei Ohtani was fired Wednesday afternoon after questions surrounding at least $4.5 million in wire transfers sent from Ohtani’s bank account to a bookmaking operation set off a series of events.” Yikes.

“Until we do hear anything from Major League Baseball, those of us with some basic reasoning ability are all but obligated to walk through what is known, to make reasonable inferences, and to apply Occam’s Razor to this matter to the extent possible. So let’s just throw some observations out there and see what sorts of conclusions we can draw, shall we?”

RIP, M. Emmett Walsh, versatile character actor known for roles from Blood Simple and The Iron Giant to Knives Out and The Righteous Gemstones.

“But as a friend reminded me yesterday evening, Trump doesn’t own Trump Tower.”

“The Justice Department on Thursday announced a sweeping antitrust lawsuit against Apple, accusing the tech giant of engineering an illegal monopoly in smartphones that boxes out competitors, stifles innovation and keeps prices artificially high.”

RIP, Shigeichi Negishi, entrepreneur who invented the world’s first karaoke machine.

RIP, Peter Angelos, attorney and longtime owner of the Baltimore Orioles.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged | 2 Comments

Teare says he will recuse the DA’s office from the Hidalgo aides case

I’ve already said this was the right thing to do, so I obviously agree with it.

Sean Teare

Whether politics played a role in the criminal indictment of three of Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo’s former aides was hotly debated during the Democratic primary race between District Attorney Kim Ogg and challenger Sean Teare.

The race is over, but politics almost certainly will arise in the eventual prosecution of the case. Or whether it even goes to trial.

The accused — former Hidalgo Chief of Staff Alex Triantaphyllis, former policy aide Aaron Dunn and former policy director Wallis Nader — have not appeared in court since December and multiple hurdles remain before the case can proceed to trial.

Any trial would need to begin quickly if they are to be prosecuted by Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg. That is because Sean Teare, the former county prosecutor who ousted Ogg in the Democratic primary earlier this month, said he plans to take the district attorney’s office off the case.

Teare easily defeated Ogg in the primary following a campaign largely focused on the case against the former Hidalgo staffers. Teare accused Ogg of weaponizing her office against Hidalgo, who she previously had clashed with over policy differences and budgetary disputes.

Ogg denied the claims, but voters preferred Teare by more than 55 percentage points.

Teare said he will request on his first day in office that state District Judge Hazel Jones remove the Harris County District Attorney’s office from the Hidalgo staffers’ case and hand it off to a nearby county’s district attorney.

“I want to remove politics from it by getting a completely independent DA’s office that has no relationship with anyone involved to look at it and just make a determination,” Teare said. “I think that is the way you can ensure we are not dealing with any type of political malfeasance.”

[…]

Harris County District Clerk records show the parties are next due in court May 13 for a hearing on a motion to suppress evidence. Jones also still needs to hold a hearing and rule on a defense motion to disqualify Ogg’s office from the prosecution that was filed in June 2022.

Ogg’s office said Tuesday the case is proceeding, but was unable to estimate when it would reach trial, blaming the delay on the defense’s need to review evidence.

Derek Hollingsworth, an attorney representing Dunn, still is reviewing evidence, but said that is because the district attorney’s office provided more than three terabytes worth of data, all of which must be reviewed. A series of “case reset” requests have been filed by defense attorneys and granted by the judge over the past year to allow more time for that review.

Because of Teare’s comments and his belief that the prosecution against his client is baseless, Hollingsworth said he believes the case should be suspended until a new district attorney takes office.

“If Sean Teare is going to get a new one in on it, I’m sure that a rational human being with no ties and vendettas will dismiss the case,” Hollingsworth said.

[…]

Teare said he has no idea what evidence Ogg’s office has gathered, and that the office may have a solid case against Hidalgo’s staffers. Regardless, he said the case is tainted because of how the evidence was gathered and the political questions swirling around the case.

“I want the right thing to happen, whatever that is,” Teare said.

The indictments were handed down in April 2022, so that motion to recuse Ogg’s office is almost as old as the charges. Cases like this don’t automatically have to be handed off to another prosecutor, but given the politics of this one, it was the best course of action and probably would have benefitted Ogg in the long run. Teare still has to win in November to take this action, but even if he loses, I’d tell his opponent the same thing: Let another DA handle this one. Some cases are just better off that way.

Posted in Crime and Punishment, Election 2024 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Paxton sues two more adult websites

I’m sure he’s got a list.

Two more adult websites are facing lawsuits from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office over accusations they’re not following the state’s age verification law, the latest effort to legally go after internet porn providers.

The Office of the Attorney General filed two civil lawsuits Tuesday afternoon in Travis County against the respective companies that own the websites xHamster and Chaturbate. Paxton said they’re not doing enough to stop those younger than 18 from looking at the adult content.

Paxton’s office would like a court to issue a permanent injunction against the two websites and force them to pay hefty fines if they don’t come into compliance with House Bill 1181, which went into effect on Sept. 1 last year. It requires age verification measures to protect minors from what the law’s supporters called exposure to sexually obscene materials.

KXAN reached out Wednesday afternoon for comment from Hammy Media and Multi Media, the two companies that own the websites in question and are named in the lawsuits. This story will be updated once any responses are shared.

[…]

The state’s latest lawsuit notes visitors to the xHamster website are met with a pop-up message where they have to click a button confirming they’re older than 18. However, Paxton’s office claims that’s not enough to follow the new law.

“Minors can simply click almost anywhere on the webpage away from the ‘I’m 18 or older’ button, including the ‘X’ in the top right corner of the message, to dismiss the pop-up message
and proceed to the Defendant’s pornographic website,” the lawsuit explains. “The age verification methods used by the Defendant on its websites cannot be said to verify anything at all, and they wholly fail to comply with the requirements of Chapter 129B.”

The state is asking the court for xHamster to pay a civil penalty of up to $1.67 million as well as an additional $10,000 a day since the lawsuit’s filing.

Texas is seeking a higher civil penalty from the company that owns Chaturbate — $1.78 million along with the $10,000 a day for every day after the filing of the lawsuit.

See here and here for some background. One may reasonably ask, what is the definition of “adult” website that Ken Paxton has in mind as he pursues these lawsuits, and how might that compare with one’s own definition? What’s to stop him from filing suits against, say, sites that host erotic fanfiction like An Archive Of Our Own, or sites that provide sex education to minors like Scarleteen? Or just about any site that primarily hosts LGBTQ+ content? In other words, how will this be different than the plague of attacks on school libraries? Sure, Paxton could run into some losses in court if he pursues this strategy, maybe even get counter-sued in federal court, but look at what these hypothetical defendants would be risking to engage in that fight. How much easier it would be to just make like Pornhub and shut down access in the state.

Especially since the already-existing age verification that xHamster has is deemed insufficient by our new state censor. Sure, other age verification services that might satisfy Texas’ new law exist, but that’s a disruption to their businesses and who even knows if Paxton would accept them. Plus, the law also demands that these sites display a message about how porn is bad and Texas doesn’t approve of it and blah blah blah. This isn’t just about age verification, it’s about compelled speech too. Do we really want this on our Internet? I sure don’t. Get yourself a VPN for until this is over, and fight back. The Current has more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Clemson sues ACC over exit fees

Conference realignment is always in season.

Clemson on Tuesday became the second ACC member to take legal action against the conference in hopes of potentially getting out of the league. The university filed a lawsuit in Pickens County, S.C., arguing that the ACC’s grant of rights agreement should only apply to members while they’re in the conference and that the league’s withdrawal fee should not be enforceable.

“Each of these erroneous assertions separately hinders Clemson’s ability to meaningfully explore its options regarding conference membership, to negotiate alternative revenue-sharing proposals among ACC members, and to obtain full value for its future media rights,” the lawsuit reads.

Clemson’s case is similar to Florida State’s filing against the ACC in December, when the FSU Board of Trustees sought court guidance to determine whether the ACC’s exit fee and/or grant of rights are legally enforceable against Florida State. The ACC has taken to court to negate Florida State’s complaint — the next hearing between the two parties is set for Friday in Charlotte, N.C. — but had not filed a lawsuit against Clemson as of early Tuesday afternoon.

“The ACC’s position regarding the Grant of Rights, the exit penalty, and obligations owed by members to the conference, as detailed in its public statements and other court filings, leaves Clemson with no choice but to move forward with this lawsuit,” the school said in a statement. “Clemson has not given notice that it is exiting the ACC and remains a member of the conference.”

The ACC’s grant of rights agreement binding conference members together runs into 2036, deterring outside speculation that the conference’s biggest brands were attainable in future rounds of conference realignment for years to come. FSU estimated the total cost of getting out of the grant of rights to be $572 million between the league’s exit fee and the school’s forfeiture of future media rights revenue. But while FSU has asked a court to determine whether the grant of rights is enforceable at all, Clemson’s lawsuit argues it should only be enforceable while the school is a member of the conference.

“Properly understood, ‘the contractual obligations of the Conference’ did not include providing media rights to games played by a school after that school exits the Conference,” Clemson’s lawsuit reads. “The media rights to games played while Clemson is a member of the ACC are the only rights necessary for the ACC to perform the Conference’s obligations under the ACC’s media agreements with ESPN. The media rights to games played at a time when Clemson is not a member of the ACC were never a part of any grant of rights.”

A court ruling in Clemson’s favor on that point could lower the ACC’s withdrawal fee to around $140 million. (It could also make it easier for any power-conference school to leave its current grant of rights.)

See here (at the bottom) for some background. The ACC has now sued Clemson back, so we’ll see how that goes. I have no idea what the endpoint of all this is, or even if there will be a place where there’s some sort of even temporary equilibrium. I do think we will get to a place where interests other than Big Ten and SEC football will be the sole or main driver of all the action. When that will be and what it will look like when we get there, I have no idea. All I know is that everyone’s house is built on sand right now. It’s just a matter of when it falls over.

Posted in Other sports | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Texas Medical Board issues some guidance on abortion exceptions

Sort of.

The Texas Medical Board proposed a broad definition for what constitutes an emergency medical exception under the state’s otherwise strict abortion ban at its meeting Friday, disappointing some abortion rights advocates who were seeking a specific list of conditions that would qualify.

The board’s proposal follows pressure from the Texas Supreme Court — in addition to doctors and patients across the state who have been calling for guidance in navigating the abortion ban as cases of Texans forced to carry to term nonviable pregnancies have emerged over the past year in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

The board’s proposed rule defined “medical emergency” as “a life threatening condition aggravated by, caused by or arising from a pregnancy that is certified by a physician places the woman in danger of death or a serious impairment or a major bodily function unless an abortion is performed.”

Reproductive rights advocates hoped the board’s draft rule could provide a shield for doctors at risk of being sued for performing abortions. However, the board said its process would be “separate and independent” from any in a criminal trial.

“You got people that are scared, and they’re facing death,” said Steve Bresnen, one of the lobbyists who initially petitioned the board for guidance. ”We think that you can do more than it seems that your proposed rule was. In that sense, we’re disappointed.”

[…]

The board listed several ways a doctor could document why an abortion was necessary, including using tools like “diagnostic imaging test results, medical literature, second opinions and or medical ethics committees that were used or consulted.”

The board also said they could not reference rape or incest, as they were “out of the board’s jurisdiction.” The Texas Legislature did not cite that as an exemption for a legal abortion in the law.

For at least 30 days, there will be space for public comment before the board puts a final rule into place. The board most likely will address the rule again in June at the earliest, said Dr. Sherif Zaafran, president of the Texas Medical Board. Zaafran said Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office was consulted and weighed in when making the rule.

[…]

Many advocates hoped the rule would address three main issues: at what point in a medical emergency can a doctor perform an abortion, how can doctors ensure their medical judgments meet the standard of “reasonable medical judgment,” and what legally sufficient evidence must be present to show that an abortion was or wasn’t necessary.

The last one would have helped doctors faced with legal repercussions for performing an abortion — something the medical board can’t protect them from, said Bee Moorhead, executive director of Texas Impact, an interfaith organization that advocates on behalf of some of the state’s largest religious groups.

“It’s not sufficient to fully protect doctors,” Moorhead said. “There’s nothing the board can do to fully protect doctors because of the way jeopardy for doctors is baked into the bill.”

But Moorhead has hope because the board seems open to public comment going forward, and is “obviously making a very deliberate effort to facilitate public participation in this rule making, which is exactly what we had hoped,” she said.

See here, here, and here for some background. This is more or less what one might have expected. The TMB isn’t normally in this kind of business, they really don’t want to be involved in this business, and of course they consulted Ken Paxton (I do mean that sincerely, there’s no way they couldn’t have done that) who of course was happy with guidelines that are extremely general and non-specific, as that serves his aims. Realistically, there was no other way for this to go.

Might it make a little bit of difference for doctors? Perhaps. As this story notes, there have been a few abortions in Texas, presumably all under the “life of the mother” exception. We just haven’t heard about them, which is to say that Ken Paxton hasn’t tried to torment anyone over them, for whatever the reason. I don’t know how sustainable that is. The point is that right now, Ken Paxton and the zealot brigade don’t have to do much to make abortion exceedingly scarce in Texas. The law as written, a couple of high-profile threats by Paxton against doctors and hospitals, and the very understandable extreme reluctance by doctors and hospitals to be made an example of are doing all the work for them. The TMB’s guidance is unlikely to change any of that. The only thing that will is for these guys to start losing some elections. The Chron has more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Miles backtracks on firing principals

Good.

In a major reversal, Houston ISD’s state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles said early Friday that the district’s principal proficiency screener ratings will not be used “in any adverse employment decisions” for campus administrators for the current academic year.

As part of its mid-year proficiency screenings, HISD notified about half of its principals earlier this month that they had not yet met the requirements to guarantee their jobs next year and would have to achieve proficiency under a second screening if they want to guarantee their spot during the next academic year.

[…]

While the district’s principal screening was not on the public agenda of the monthly meeting of the HISD Board of Managers, that did not stop parents, teachers and students from giving one-minute speeches for about three hours,

After hearing from the community, the HISD Board of Managers spent about four hours in closed session before returning to the meeting room at about 2:15 a.m. Friday. Miles then read a brief statement saying he would not use the controversial proficiency screener ratings to evaluate principals or make “adverse employment decisions” this academic year.

However, Miles said the district would continue to use instructional data, student achievement data, written evaluations of performance, and any other appropriate and relevant information in decisions affecting someone’s contract status.

The dozens of parents who defended their school principal’s performance and urged the board to halt the implementation of the screening had left by the time the decision was announced.

“My principal cares and inspires all of us to care. Our school was like this before you came to our district and I hope that it can withstand your policies,” said Brynn Cabe, a seventh grader at an HISD magnet school. “The success of all of our schools depends on you taking a more understanding approach with your job. … Don’t punish high-achieving principals with some inconsistent rubric.”

See here and here for the background. It’s not clear what caused the reversal – who even knows with this guy – but it’s the outcome I wanted, perhaps brought about due to pressure from HISD parents, so I’m not going to question it too closely. One of the principals who was apparently on the “shape up or else” list was the principal at Hogg Middle School, where both my daughters went. (Hogg got a B on the unofficial accountability ratings for this past year.) I know this because I’m still on some email lists for the Hogg PTA, and the parents were rallying in support of their principal. Turns out that parents who like their kids’ schools get upset when they feel their schools are being threatened. Who knew? Well, FAFO and all that. We’ll see if he left himself some weasel room or if this is the end of it. The Press has more.

UPDATE: From the Houston Landing:

The Houston Landing asked HISD and board president Audrey Momanaee, who is an attorney, whether the district reversed course on the principal proficiency screening this year because the plans could have violated the law. Neither immediately responded to requests for comment.

Last Saturday, community members sent a legal memo to HISD’s board of managers and Texas Education Agency leadership, alleging the principal rating measure violates state law because it was not approved by the board and was not in place when the school year began.

On Monday, Miles dismissed those points as “misconceptions,” drawing a distinction between the proficiency screening tool and the board-approved formal evaluation process for principals.

However, attorney Christopher Tritico argued that if the district planned to use the proficiency screening to make employment decisions, it would have to go through formal approval measures outlined in state law and local policy.

Tritico successfully litigated a similar case for the Houston Federation of Teachers last August, arguing Miles’ new teacher evaluation scheme had not gone through the proper legal processes. The lawsuit ultimately blocked Miles from implementing his planned teacher appraisal tool this school year.

“He’s doing the exact same thing that he already lost a lawsuit over,” Tritico told the Landing on Monday. “If (principals) are going to be fired if they don’t pass the proficiency, then that is the evaluation process, and you can call it whatever you want.”

This sounds plausible to me, and very much in character for Miles. Insert shrug emoji here.

Posted in School days | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Paxton could be getting a plea deal

I don’t know what to say.

A crook any way you look

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is nearing a resolution to the 9-year-old securities fraud charges that have dogged his tenure as the state’s top attorney through a special agreement with prosecutors, the American-Statesman has learned.

Under a draft agreement, prosecutors would dismiss felony charges against Paxton if he successfully completes the terms of the deal, according to three sources familiar with the negotiations.

The sources, with knowledge of the discussions between Paxton’s legal team and prosecutor Brian Wice, a Houston attorney appointed to handle the case, said the terms could include community service, advanced legal education classes and a six-figure restitution, among other possible punishment. Two sources said the restitution could be between $300,000 and $400,000.

Under the conditions, Paxton likely would not have to formally enter a plea but must not violate any law for an extended period. Paxton, a 61-year-old Republican, could have faced up to 99 years in prison if convicted.

Such agreements generally do not require a judge’s approval, underscoring the wide authority that Texas prosecutors have to resolve cases.

The sources could not be named because they are not authorized to speak about the deal.

Contacted Friday, Wice declined to comment.

Paxton attorney Dan Cogdell said in a text message to the Statesman and KVUE-TV that “I’m not going to comment on something that hasn’t happened and may well not happen.”

Particularly in urban Texas counties, felony cases are frequently worked out through similar agreements, sometimes referred to as “conditional dismissals,” “pretrial intervention” or “deferred prosecution agreements” that are outside the traditional path of a case and keep a conviction off a defendant’s record without approval from a judge.

Wice and Cogdell have been working in recent weeks to resolve the charges before an April 15 trial date in Harris County state District Court in Houston. This week, Wice announced that a final pretrial hearing that was set for this past Wednesday had been rescheduled for Tuesday.

It is expected that the attorneys will inform District Judge Andrea Beall of the agreement and the resolution to the case at the Tuesday hearing.

The agreement would allow Paxton to avoid a public airing of facts and evidence against him in the legal saga that has seen fights over the pay of special prosecutors, jurisdiction and other disputes that have prolonged the matter. The resolution of the case also would not affect Paxton’s law license.

It is unclear what prompted both sides to attempt to resolve the case at this stage.

I can’t say that I’m happy about this. After all this time, after all these delays, and after showing himself to be such a giant contemptible piece of shit, Ken Paxton deserves no mercy. I will admit that for a non-Paxton defendant, a resolution like this would be unremarkable. But this is Ken effing Paxton, and he has earned every bit of legal trouble that can come his way. I’m going to have to find some peace with this, because it sure sounds like this is a done deal, but it will take me awhile to get there.

At least there’s this:

However, the finale of Paxton’s securities fraud case does not conclude all his legal troubles. A federal probe that began in 2020 – based on whistleblower complaints that Paxton had abused his authority and curried favor in a mutually beneficial relationship with former Austin real estate developer Nate Paul – is ongoing after a grand jury was impaneled in San Antonio last summer.

Additionally, a dispute with four former agency employees turned whistleblowers — who were involved in bringing their concerns to the Texas House and forming the basis for the May 27 vote overwhelmingly to impeach Paxton on 20 charges, including bribery and abuse of office — is still being considered in front of the state Supreme Court after the former employees opposed Paxton’s efforts to have a final judgment entered in the wrongful termination lawsuit.

Paxton also faces an active complaint before the state Supreme Court from the Commission for Lawyer Discipline on behalf of the State Bar of Texas based on his effort to propagate concern over the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Let’s get that grand jury going, and let’s get that whistleblower case into a courtroom. If I can’t have this, then I will want those even more. I’m going to go stuff my face and do some deep breathing now.

Posted in Crime and Punishment | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Rep. Oliverson files for Speaker

Something like this was inevitable.

Rep. Tom Oliverson

State Rep. Tom Oliverson on Thursday announced a surprise challenge to Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, condemning his fellow Republican’s “dysfunctional” leadership as he fights for political survival in a May runoff.

Oliverson, an anesthesiologist from Cypress in his fourth term, pitched himself as the right man to realign the lower chamber with the priorities of the Republican party, which he said Phelan too often ignored. He criticized Phelan for appointing Democrats to chair some House committees and pledged to end the longstanding tradition if elected speaker.

“The Texas House is a collegial body, but there is a difference between collegiality and capitulation,” Oliverson said. “The majority must not be held captive by the will of the minority.”

Phelan has defended the practice, arguing that it allows the Legislature to function free of the gridlock seen in Congress. His defenders also say that Democrats — who chair eight of the House’s 34 standing committees — have not used their positions to hold up conservative priorities, most of which flow through committees overseen by Republicans.

Oliverson also slammed Phelan’s “secretive” handling of the impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton, which he said was sprung on members with insufficient notice. It was Oliverson’s first major broadside against Phelan on the issue: the day before the impeachment vote, he told the Dallas Morning News that “nobody is above the law” and said “we need people of high moral and ethical standard serving in public office.”

Oliverson was the only House Republican who did not cast a vote on Paxton’s impeachment on corruption and bribery charges last year, sidestepping an issue that has driven a wedge between Phelan’s allies and the party’s right flank.

Phelan, who received no forewarning of Oliverson’s bid, said in a statement that his attention will remain on helping his House incumbents prevail in their runoffs and winning his own race.

“That’s the job of the Texas Speaker, and that’s where my focus is and will continue to be,” Phelan said.

I’m not going to get too invested in this. We’re long past the point where it matters in some significant way who the Speaker is, at least while we have the government we have or the worse version of it we’re going to get. Having Dems as committee chairs is more illusion than anything, as there’s no mechanism to get anything they prioritize passed in the Senate if it makes it through the House. Dade Phelan may survive his runoff – I don’t think he will, but stranger things have happened – but he won’t be Speaker again. Oliverson or some other Republican will beat him, it’s just a matter of who. The one thing that could affect the outcome in a positive direction is if Dems can pick up enough seats to collaborate with a non-voucher-pilled Republican to support as Speaker; I figure they’d have to net at least five seats, which is a lot to ask but not out of the question. Better a longshot than no shot, as I see it. Whatever the case, there will be a new Speaker next January. You had your time, Dade. The Republican Party hates you now. Go sit with that for awhile.

Posted in Election 2024, That's our Lege | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

We return to the question of “how will we pay for the firefighter agreement” question

Gonna keep asking it until we get a full answer.

Mayor John Whitmire

Mayor John Whitmire’s administration is weighing all options, including hiking the city’s property tax rate and charging residents a garbage collection fee, to help pay for its landmark settlement with the Houston firefighters union, according to the City Attorney Arturo Michel.

“I think everything is on the table,” Michel said after a court hearing Monday, specifically mentioning the garbage fee and property taxes. “Nobody has said we’re going to take this route or (that route).”

[…]

Administration officials expect the city’s hefty reserves, built up using federal COVID-19 relief money under former Mayor Sylvester Turner’s administration, will be enough to get through Whitmire’s first budget season this summer, Michel said.

The city currently has about $428 million in reserves, about $241 million more than the minimum amount it must maintain. Budget Director Melissa Dubowski projected the city will face a $160 million deficit in its next budget, without accounting for the firefighters’ deal. She suggested the city could draw down on its reserves to help cover the gap, and she alluded to some of the same policy proposals Michel mentioned, including new fees and “enhancements to property tax.”

The administration likely will have to weigh policy solutions to help free up resources in future years. That could include potentially charging residents a monthly fee for garbage collection and asking voters to approve a higher property tax rate.

Houston is the only major city in Texas that does not charge residents a fee for garbage and recycling collection. That idea has been kicked around City Hall for decades, both as a tool to stabilize the undermanned Solid Waste Management Department, and as a way to free up the tax dollars that currently support its budget of about $97 million.

See here and here for the background. The article gets into the details of the pay agreement and the two named options; you can read that if you want, I was mostly interested in seeing if other ideas were being floated. I approve of Mayor Whitmire pursuing these items – with the caveat that the revenue cap can’t be addressed until 2026 because of the charter amendments that were passed last November – if in fact he does, because new revenue is absolutely going to be needed, and there are only so many ways to achieve that. I’m sure there will be cuts and more joint ventures with the county proposed to trim expenses, but the reality is there’s only so much available there. The heavy lifting will come from new revenue, if we really go for it. We’ll see.

Posted in Local politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Dispatches from Dallas, March 22 edition

This is a weekly feature produced by my friend Ginger. Let us know what you think.

This week, in news from Dallas-Fort Worth, some more election news, Johnson and Broadnax and various police and environmental stories along with the usual grab bag. Also two stories from the Fort Worth Zoo, one of which is sad but doesn’t involve any animals dying.

This week’s post was brought to you by the music of the Electric Light Orchestra, to whose Dallas concert I just bought presale tickets. Supposedly this is their last tour so check out their show nearest you.

Let’s start with a few items closing out the primary election. First, Bud Kennedy of the Star-Telegram would like you to know that the big losers in Tarrant County and Texas are women, and not just in the “those dudes will tear your rights away” way. The lurch to the far right has tossed a bunch of women out of office. In a surely unrelated story, the DMN reports that Dallas suburbs (Frisco, McKinney, and Plano) have some of the largest pay gaps in the country. Quelle surprise. Meanwhile, if you want the DMN analysis, Gromer Jeffers has analyses of the important races for the Dallas area: the runoffs that may drag the Texas House further right, the Senate race, and our runoff for county sheriff.

A few one-off items from the election:

  • In an unsurprising dénouement, the judge dismissed the residency case against Tarrant County Constable candidate John Wright, who lost to the incumbent in the Democratic primary.
  • If you were wondering why Tarrant County didn’t have joint elections, we now have a reason: GOP Chair Bo French thinks the Democrats cheat.
  • Speaking of French, he arbitrarily decided that an elected precinct chair was secretly a Democrat, so he denied a certificate of election to the victor because he’d been a Democrat in the past. Of course, there will be an appeal to the Election Integrity Unit, but since the unit’s chief prosecutor endorsed the other guy in the election, my hopes are not high. Click through and read the whole thing. In a county where Republicans won’t work on elections with Democrats because Democrats supposedly cheat, this sure looks like putting a thumb on the scale.
  • Not so funny: Matt Rinaldi’s handpicked successor as GOP Chair, who lives in Collin County had a domestic violence call as he was trying to leave his house with a loaded gun to confront the man he thought was having an affair with his wife. Apparently one of his kids called it in. I wish his wife and kids safety and the Republicans a less violent leadership.
  • And a few reports on big money folks pushing Texas to the right: Texas Public Radio on Time Dunn and the Wilks brothers; The Texas Tribune on Wilks and Dunn and their turnaround in this election; and TNR on hometown Houston favorite Mattress Mac. All depressing.

The next story I have for you is the mess of developments surrounding our mayor and (ex) city manager. T.C. Broadnax said relatively nice things about the mayor at a LULAC breakfast at the end of last month. He’s one of the top applicants for the City Manager job in Austin, which he apparently applied for four days after he quit his job here in Dallas. Good luck to him and to my friends in Austin.

Meanwhile, Mayor Johnson has a lot of opinions about things and he’s interested in telling you about them. He and his allies think the council appointed Deputy City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert to hold the fort as Interim City Manager too quickly. He gloated over the unsurprising failure of the mayoral recall effort. It’s basically impossible to recall the guy; it would have taken more than 100,000 signatures to get started. It’s like gloating that you won a race with a turtle. Johnson also wants us to know he voted for Trump for President, which throws some of my theories about what he’s doing in the air. Unsurprisingly, the DMN issued a testy editorial telling Johnson to be less partisan, which he’s going to ignore.

In other news:

  • Former mayor Mike Rawlings is working with No Labels. If you’re more interested in current Dallas politicians, there’s also a video interview with Julie Johnson, who won her primary in CD 32.
  • The Star-Telegram has an explainer on why Fort Worth’s water bills spike in April. The Fort Worth Report also has a piece on how Fort Worth’s water authority switched to a new portal and the consequences for water customers.
  • Two Dallas explainers for you: What’s going on with Dallas city charter and what’s going on with the ForwardDallas land use plan.
  • The Supreme Court wasn’t feeling the review of the sexually oriented business ordinance here in Dallas. More from the DMN.
  • More from the ongoing saga about the disabled veteran and the DPD: they got a reprimand, which is a step below a suspension, and some people think it’s not enough, especially given the delay in dealing with the case. That said, the other story that’s come out of this case is that there’s a secret legal opinion that may limit the board’s oversight powers. I suspect we’ll be back to this one.
  • Also on the police beat: how are Dallas and Fort Worth police going to deal with SB4?. The headline says they differ in what they’re going to do, but reading the article, it’s pretty clear both of them are putting off actually dealing with the question for now. The article mentions that SB4 isn’t designed for enforcement in the interior, according to one of its authors, which sounds like a Shirley Exception moment to me.
  • Tarrant County is having trouble recruiting detention officers and they’d like some federal money to upgrade their training center, please.
  • A few environmental updates from around the area: Shingle Mountain; Tarrant County and its concrete plan; the West Dallas shingle plant. And a new story: because of a mechanical failure, Plano dumped 1.5 million gallons of sewage into White Rock Lake, a couple of miles from where I live. That’s a big lake but it’s also a lot of sewage. There are normally boats and other water activities on the lake, but all that is banned right now for safety reasons.
  • Dallas County’s IT department, which you may remember from greatest hits last year like “we didn’t pay people because our new system is busted”, still has no permanent leader. And the county commissioners just gave them $600,000 to get all their software working and working together.
  • Tarrant County, meanwhile, had a lot of trouble with their appraisal district website during the protest period last year, so they decided to replace it. The new website crashed a week after rollout. The good news is that this time the appraisal district folks admitted they had a problem, unlike last year.
  • UT Southwestern, where I had my cancer treated, had a data breach. If I was affected, I haven’t heard from them yet.
  • USA Today says that if you’re moving to Texas, you should move to Tyler. If you’re inclined to laugh about that, we have friends in Tyler; apparently they think that all the people who are getting priced out of Austin and Dallas are about to descend on their city.
  • The plan to run high-speed rail from Houston to Dallas to Fort Worth has run into opposition from Dallas developer Hunt Realty which says the proposed route through downtown to Fort Worth would doom Reunion Tower.
  • Meanwhile, if you want to know how to get around Dallas without a car, read this interview with the Dallas Urbanists.
  • Do you remember the “affluenza” drunk driving case from about ten years ago? It’s back in the news, with the mom who helped her son run to Mexico making a plea bargain eight years after she was charged. The deal let her out of jail with credit for time served.
  • RIP Paul Alexander, a Dallas resident who was one of the last Americans living with post-polio syndrome and using an iron lung since 1952. The NY Times has more.
  • This month will see the dedication of public art dedicated to the victims of lynching in downtown Dallas. The ceremony will take place at the Sixth Floor Museum nearby because of the noise level at the park (it’s by a major downtown underpass). Unfortunately the mayor has a conflict and cannot attend.
  • Interested in the history of queer movie in Dallas? Read up on CineWilde, Dallas’ queer film series.
  • This investigation into casting bias in DFW theater is the kind of story where the DMN shines. I complain about the DMN a lot, but this is good work and I’m glad they’re doing it.
  • McKinney is about to get an outside open-air music venue that will seat 20,000, rivalling the American Airlines Center for size. It’s expected to open in time for the 2026 concert season, and I hope to review it for you.
  • You may remember that Dr. Phil is basing his new network here in the Metroplex. He just signed Steve Harvey not only as talent but as an equity partner.
  • Have you wondered what it’s like to get deliveries by drone? This instagram reel shows you what happens when you order from WalMart for drone delivery. I was impressed that the eggs didn’t break.
  • Maybe you saw a viral video of zookeepers and a silverback gorilla from the Fort Worth Zoo recently. It’s from last October. Nobody was injured.
  • Last but not least, a sad but non-fatal story from the Fort Worth Zoo. Baby Jameela, the premature gorilla born by Caesarean section, has been rejected by the zoo’s first choice of surrogate mom. They’ve got a second surrogate in mind and hope she’ll warm to Jameela the way her mother and their first choice did not.
  • Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

    Fifth Circuit has its SB4 hearing

    More whiplashing.

    The chief judge on an appeals panel weighing whether to block Texas’ new migrant deportation law appeared skeptical that it does not run afoul of longstanding precedent leaving immigration enforcement solely to the federal government.

    Questioning the state’s solicitor general, Priscilla Richman, the chief judge on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, read from a landmark Supreme Court decision from 2012 that held only the federal government has the power to enforce immigration laws. In that case, the high court struck down portions of an Arizona law that authorized police to arrest anyone suspected of being in the country illegally.

    “Decisions of this nature touch on foreign relations and must be made with one voice,” Richman said, reading from the ruling.

    “It goes on and on and on,” she continued. “It talks about the discretion — even if they’re here unlawfully, the United States can decide not to remove them.”

    “It seems to me this statute washes that away,” Richman said of the new state law, known as Senate Bill 4.

    The exchange came during a last-minute hearing before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which quickly sprung to action after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to further delay SB4, allowing it to briefly take effect Tuesday afternoon.

    […]

    Texas argued Wednesday that it is not trying to seize immigration enforcement powers. Texas Solicitor General Aaron Nielsen said the state is seeking to work cooperatively with the federal government to enforce immigration laws Congress has written, and that the state has tried to mirror those laws with SB4. The federal government is suing the state to block the law from taking effect.

    “SB4 is a modest but important statute,” Nielson argued. “It’s modest because it mirrors federal law. It’s important because it helps address what even the president has called a border crisis.”

    But Nielson repeatedly acknowledged that the state does not yet know how the law will play out, because no arrests have been made and no removal orders have been issued.

    Richman, a George W. Bush-appointee, posed a series of hypothetical scenarios: What if the Border Patrol says it will release migrants with state removal orders back into Texas? What if someone who entered the country illegally in Arizona moves to Texas after living there for five years? If an asylum seeker arrives in Brownsville and is given a notice to appear in federal court, would they be exempt from arrest under the law?

    Nielson referenced sworn statements submitted before the court in which a Department of Public Safety director overseeing operations in South Texas described how the agency plans to carry out the law.

    But, Nielson acknowledged: “This is uncharted because we don’t have any cases on it.”

    […]

    The U.S. Department of Justice argued SB4 is anything but modest and clearly runs afoul of more than 100 years of Supreme Court precedent.

    Daniel Tenny, an assistant attorney general, argued Texas was trying to go even further than Arizona did, stressing that state judges would now have the power to decide if someone legally entered the United States.

    “This entire scheme is exactly what the Supreme Court warned against in Arizona,” Tenny said. “The Supreme Court said the federal government has to have control over the immigration system.”

    See here for yesterday’s chaotic turn of events. The three main takeaways here are that the law remains blocked, the Fifth Circuit panel will take however long they feel like taking to rule – could be days, could be months – and it’s possible they could block some or most of the law but not all of it going forward. Oh, and this is just about whether to keep the law paused pending further appeals; this is not yet a hearing on the appeal of the lower court’s ruling. There’s a hearing for that on April 3, per Law Dork.

    I’m going to quote from some other coverage to give you a fuller picture of what happened. Here’s the Washington Post:

    Circuit Chief Judge Priscilla Richman wondered during the hearing how the Texas law would work in practice, listing scenarios that could quickly lead to confusion.

    “This is the first time, it seems to me, that a state has claimed that they have the right to remove illegal aliens,” Richman said. “This is not something, a power, that historically has been exercised by states, has it?”

    State officials said they would not deport migrants directly but would hand off detainees to federal officials or take them to border crossings with Mexico.

    Richman wondered: What if federal officials, as they have said, refused to carry out an order? What if a foreign national entered the United States via Canada and crossed through several states on their way to Texas. Could they be arrested and deported under Texas’s new law?

    […]

    The brief order late Tuesday once again blocking the law did not explain the reasoning of the two judges — Richman, a nominee of George W. Bush, and Irma Carrillo Ramirez, a Biden nominee. The dissenting judge — Andrew Oldham, a Trump nominee — said only that he would have allowed the law to remain in effect before Wednesday’s hearing.

    “It’s ping-pong,” Efrén C. Olivares, director of strategic litigation and advocacy at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said in a phone interview, describing the back-and-forth rulings.

    Olivares said it is unclear how soon the three-judge panel will rule, since a preliminary injunction from a lower court halting the law remains in place.

    The law makes it a state crime for migrants to illegally cross the border and gives Texas officials the ability to carry out their own deportations to Mexico.

    How they will do so remains unclear. The Mexican government has said that it would not accept anyone sent back by Texas and condemned the law as “encouraging the separation of families, discrimination and racial profiling that violate the human rights of the migrant community.”

    Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on Wednesday referred to the Texas law as draconian.

    “It disrespects human rights. It’s a completely dehumanizing law. It’s anti-Christian, unjust. It violates precepts and norms of human coexistence,” López Obrador said. “It doesn’t just violate international law but [the teachings of] the Bible. I say this because those who are applying these unjust, inhumane measures go to church. They forget that the Bible talks about treating the foreigner well, and of course, loving your neighbor.”

    CNN:

    After an hour of oral arguments, it seemed clear that the main question was whether a key swing vote on the three-judge panel at the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals could be persuaded to join her more conservative colleague in allowing some of the law to take effect – even if other parts remain blocked.

    The debate over whether to “sever” part of SB 4 featured most prominently when Circuit Judge Andrew Oldham, a conservative appointee of former President Donald Trump, suggested to an attorney for the Biden administration that there are parts of the law that do not overlap with federal authority on immigration. Oldham hinted that he disagreed with a district court’s move to block the entire Texas law instead of just parts of it.

    Fifth Circuit Chief Judge Priscilla Richman, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush, picked up on that point later with Texas Solicitor General Aaron Nielson. She suggested that even if a federal judge was wrong to block the entire law from going into effect, the appeals court might not have to permit the state to begin enforcing every provision of the law.

    “Yes, your honor, if you if you think that the removal provisions are problematic, and that maybe even some applications of the arrest provisions are problematic, the court would have the power … to modify the injunction going forward,” Nielson said. “At a minimum, I respect your honor, you should do that.”

    […]

    A Justice Department lawyer said during Wednesday’s hearing that immigration policy is “fundamentally an international exercise” as he pressed to keep the law frozen.

    DOJ attorney Daniel Tenny said implementing immigration policy involves collaboration with other countries. He was responding to a question from Richman, who asked him to address Texas’ assertions that the state law should be allowed to go into effect because the federal government is not doing a sufficient job carrying out US immigration laws.

    Tenny said those claims were flawed both legally and factually.

    You get the idea. Now we wait and see what the Fifth Circuit does, and what SCOTUS does after that. If you still want more, here’s Reuters, NBC News, KXAN, and the Trib.

    Posted in La Migra, Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

    Gillespie County hand count riddled with errors

    Oopsie.

    An hour after Gillespie County Republican Party Chairman Bruce Campbell declared the hand-counted primary election results completely accurate and certified them as final, he found another discrepancy.

    “It’s my mistake for not catching that,” he said, sitting in front of his laptop inside the Gillespie County election administration office Thursday. “I can’t believe I did that.”

    The late catch meant that Campbell had to ask the early voting ballot board chair, who had already left and lives 30 minutes away, to return to the elections offices, figure out how the error happened, and fix it.

    […]

    At least one precinct judge acknowledged mistakes were made during the count but said they were caught and corrected that night. Campbell said he has full confidence that the tallying of the votes was accurate, and the party will not voluntarily conduct an audit or recount to verify the results.

    But not everyone feels that way. Scott Netherland, the election judge for Precinct 6, turned in all of the necessary paperwork to the elections office just before midnight on election night, believing it all checked out. When he woke up the next day, he decided to double-check the results. He told Votebeat that 197 voters had cast ballots at his precinct on election day. For each race on the ballot, the total number of ballots cast should have totaled to 197, including, for example, instances when a voter skipped a race. But in one race, he’d reported only 160 votes. In another, 157. As he went down the list, he noticed he had 207 votes reported for a third race.

    “My heart sank,” Netherland said. He’d miscounted the totals in seven separate races.

    Netherland said he immediately contacted Campbell, then rushed to the elections office to review tally sheets. In doing so, he realized that multiple other precincts also had reported clearly inaccurate totals.

    If he hadn’t done that, “we’d be still sitting on mistakes,” Netherland, who’s been working elections in Gillespie for more than a decade and did not support the hand count effort, told Votebeat.

    Netherland said he still isn’t confident the election results are accurate, based on the errors that he and others have found.

    On Thursday, Netherland said the Republican Party in Gillespie has introduced human error into the election process with the hand count.

    “We took something that worked and now broke it,” Netherland said. “We failed to guard the purity of the election with this hand count. What we just did is evidence that this hand count was not accurate.”

    Other Republicans continue to tout the effort as a success.

    One of them was David Treibs, a member of the Fredericksburg Tea Party who helped lead the effort to hand count. In a video interview posted on a social media platform created by Mike Lindell — a well-known election conspiracy theorist and the CEO of bedding company MyPillow – Treibs acknowledged he’d made errors but said they weren’t a problem.

    “So there were two ballots, and I just didn’t add them up. So I would have had to add 450 and two, and it would have been 452 and I didn’t. I just forgot to fill it in,” Treibs said in the video posted last week. “So I don’t really think that’s something that’s going to shut down the election and it’s like, ‘oh my gosh, he didn’t add 450 and two and come up with 452 and now that means the whole election was a failure.’ Well, that’s ridiculous.”

    For his part, Campbell said he spent all weekend before the canvass going over tally sheets and double-checking vote totals on documents called precinct return sheets — reconciliation forms that election workers fill out with the number of votes cast for each race on election day. He repeatedly found errors. All but one of the county’s 13 Republican precincts had reported incorrect totals on the official reconciliation forms.

    See here for the background. The types of errors that occurred according to the story were the result of bad penmanship, transposing digits, mis-adding the totals, and so on. You know, exactly the sort of errors you don’t get with a machine count. Luckily for Gillespie County Republicans, none of the races there were close enough to be potentially affected by these shenanigans – well, unless you apply Harris County Republican logic, where literally any aberration is enough to overturn a result no matter the margin – and no candidate has filed a challenge. Maybe they’ll get “randomly” audited by the Secretary of State and we’ll find even more errors, but for now at least they can close the books on this experiment and hand out trophies to everyone for participating in it.

    The actual good news is that as things stand right now, they can only engage in this kind of foolishness in their primary, where the vote totals are relatively small and Democrats aren’t affected. I for one can’t understand how these dum-dums who can see conspiracy theories in a takeout menu can call such a clown show a success, but clearly I just don’t get it. It’s all fun and games until someone sues. Good luck when that happens.

    Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

    The Hardy Toll Road Connector is back

    This has been in the works for a long time.

    The plan for the Hardy-Downtown Connector began in earnest in 2003, but the project stalled for many years due to budget concerns. The basic plan is a four-lane highway that would cut through the Near Northside community, elevated in some areas and entrenched in others. The expansion would start at the Interstate 610 interchange with the current toll road and be built west of Elysian Street, running south past Interstate 10 and connecting with Interstate 69.

    While work continued in various forms in the interim years, the Harris County Toll Road Authority received a directive from Commissioners Court in 2020 to provide better integration of a “north-south connection into the surrounding neighborhoods the project will be part of” according to a statement from the agency.

    “Back when it was originally conceptualized in the early 2000s, the Hardy downtown connector project was just a road, with no exits or consideration for how it would impact folks living in the area,” said Harris County Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia in a written statement. “I expect the version of the project that will be considered now will look much different, now with community concerns in mind.”

    When looking at the plans put out by HCTRA, those differences come most obviously in the form of enhanced landscaping and green spaces throughout the project. These include multi-use trails, sports facilities, and community spaces throughout the footprint of the project.

    […]

    HCTRA issued a statement that said that a “Final Visioning Report” on the project is currently under development and will consolidate the community input officials have received in the last 14 months.

    According to organizers at the block-walk event, the Hardy-Downtown Connector project will be considered by the Commissioners Court sometime at the end of March or beginning of April. According to Moritz, HCTRA will have to provide a financial viability report which will be key in garnering political support amongst the court. If the project is not financially viable, then the project could lose steam.

    “People are not shy about telling me about how they feel about the work that the county is doing or planning to do,” Garcia said in a statement. “I am hopeful that once the public sees (the report), they will feel confident that their voices have been heard.”

    I have blog posts about the original plans for this from 2005, 2007, and 2011, when it looked like it was set for final approval. I don’t know what happened at the time, but obviously it did not get built. What is being described now sounds better than what was once proposed, and the Houston Landing story shows at least some community support for the current plan, but opposition still exists.

    You can see a preliminary map of the project here. I didn’t find a dedicated HCTRA webpage for this – that ARCGIS page points to http://www.hardydowntownconnector.org/, which appears to be inoperative, and Google pointed me to this empty HCTRA page. I’m not sure what to make of that. Be that as it may, we’ll learn more about where this stands shortly.

    Posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

    Texas blog roundup for the week of March 18

    The Texas Progressive Alliance would like for just one of the cases against the Former Guy to get a firm court date and stick with it as it brings you this week’s roundup.

    Continue reading

    Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged , | Leave a comment

    And just like that, SCOTUS flipflops on SB4

    UPDATE: It’s blocked again!

    A federal appeals court late Tuesday night stopped a state law allowing Texas police to arrest people suspected of illegally crossing the Texas-Mexico border — hours after the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed it to go into effect.

    Earlier in the day, the high court had allowed the law to go into effect after it sent the case back to the appeals court, urging it to issue a ruling promptly. The appeals court soon scheduled a hearing for Wednesday morning. And on the night before hearing oral arguments the appeals court issued an order to let a lower court’s earlier injunction stopping Senate Bill 4 stand, according to a filing.

    The Supreme Court earlier Tuesday let SB 4 go into effect but stopped short of ruling on the law’s constitutionality, which has been challenged by the Biden administration.

    Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas at Austin law professor, said the back-and-forth is “indefensibly chaotic.”

    “Even if that means SB 4 remains paused indefinitely, hopefully everyone can agree that this kind of judicial whiplash is bad for everyone,” he said.

    The same Fifth Circuit whose “administrative hold” on the district court’s ruling led to this indefensible chaos is the court that put the law on pause again. What an absolute nightmare. Below is what I wrote originally. It all still stands except for the fact that the law is once again on hold. Read on…

    WTF?

    The U.S. Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision on Tuesday ruled that a law allowing Texas police to arrest people suspected of illegally crossing the Texas-Mexico border can take effect while a legal battle over the new state law empowering local law enforcement plays out.

    The decision comes a day after the high court had extended its temporary block of the law.

    Justice Samuel Alito had issued the block as the high court considered an appeal from the Biden administration, which has argued Senate Bill 4 is unconstitutional because it interferes with federal immigration laws.

    The legal case is far from over. The case will now go back to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Eventually it has to be resolved in a federal court in Austin, where the lawsuits were originally filed.

    The Supreme Court didn’t rule whether the law is constitutional, but said that the appeals court didn’t follow the rights steps when it reversed a federal judge’s order blocking SB 4 from going into effect.

    “That puts this case in a very unusual procedure posture,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in her opinion, which was joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

    “I think it unwise to invite emergency litigation in this court about whether a court of appeals abused its discretion at this preliminary step,” Barrett wrote in her opinion.

    Barrett also said that if the 5th Circuit doesn’t issue its own order soon on whether the law can take effect while the appeals court weighs SB 4’s constitutionality, the case can go back to the Supreme Court, which could decide whether the law is constitutional.

    Meanwhile, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the three liberal justices who voted no Tuesday, said her colleagues are wrong for not continuing to block the law, writing in her dissent that the Supreme Court “invites further chaos and crisis in immigration enforcement.

    “Although the Court today expresses no view on whether Texas’s law is constitutional, and instead defers to a lower court’s management of its docket, the Court of Appeals abused its discretion by entering an unreasoned and indefinite administrative stay that altered the status quo,” she added.

    See here for the previous update. If you feel like you’ve got whiplash, join the club. TPM adds some details.

    The law — and the Supreme Court’s Tuesday order — contravenes the 2012 Arizona v. U.S. Supreme Court ruling, which upheld federal supremacy over immigration law.

    It sets up a mind-boggling conflict between state and federal authority. A person with federal permission to be in the United States could now face 20 years in Texas prison if they ignore an order, issued by a Texas state judge under the law, to leave the country.

    The Supreme Court’s decision to allow the law to go into effect, however, may be ephemeral. It dealt with whether or not to put the law on hold, sidestepping the merits of the law, which the Court will almost certainly be asked to consider.

    A Texas federal judge had paused enforcement of the law, which was passed last year. Texas appealed that ruling to the right-wing 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which said, via an administrative order, that the law could begin to take effect. It has yet to respond to an emergency stay motion from the Biden administration.

    Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh wrote a five-page statement concurring with the order, saying that, for procedural reasons, it was not the right time for the Supreme Court to weigh in. Their logic effectively shunted the Court’s authority to decide the case off to what it described as the 5th Circuit’s “exercise of its docket management authority.”

    “It is surprising that both the parties and the panel contemplated from the start that this Court might review an administrative stay,” Barrett and Kavanaugh remarked.

    The judges left open the possibility that they may stay the Texas law once a stay appeal that they deem procedurally appropriate appears before them. It also left open the possibility that they may strike down Texas’ law once they are asked to consider it.

    Nonetheless, the decision to allow Texas’ state deportation law to take effect signals a fundamental openness to SB 4’s central proposition: that the federal government does not have supremacy over the states in border enforcement.

    The ruling opens the door to a morass of potential issues. Per federal law, those seeking asylum have the right to protection — including to stay in the United States — until a determination is made as to whether or not they qualify. The Supreme Court’s decision could then pit state and federal officials with competing and undefined obligations against each other.

    Slate calls BS on the whole thing.

    We don’t know why Chief Justice John Roberts, Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, or Samuel Alito voted to let S.B. 4 spring into action. But Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, proffered a weak excuse for the capitulation. The 5th Circuit, she noted, did not issue a traditional stay of the district court’s injunction (called a “stay pending appeal”), which the justices could review. Instead, the 5th Circuit styled its order as an “administrative stay.” These stays are meant to briefly preserve the status quo while a court considers whether to issue more formal, lasting relief. SCOTUS does not typically look at mere administrative stays due to their fleeting and informal nature; it prefers to wait for a formal stay before jumping in. So the 5th Circuit has begun to call its most controversial stays “administrative” in a brazen bid to insulate them from probing Supreme Court review.

    On Tuesday, it worked. Barrett called the 5th Circuit’s administrative stay “an exercise of its docket-management authority,” declaring that SCOTUS should not “get into the business” of reviewing “a short-lived prelude to the main event.” In other words, because the 5th Circuit used the magic word administrative to describe its (indefinite) stay, Barrett refused to consider whether S.B. 4 should be kept on ice while the merits are reviewed. She simply rubber-stamped the 5th Circuit’s stay, rewarding its shameless gamesmanship. The only silver lining here is that Barrett appears to recognize the broader pattern “lurking” here: defiant lower courts recasting stays as “administrative” to thwart Supreme Court review for months with no endpoint in sight. “The time may come, in this case or another, when this court is forced to conclude that an administrative stay has effectively become a stay pending appeal and review it accordingly,” she tsked, sending a warning signal to the 5th Circuit. “But at this juncture in this case, that conclusion would be premature.” (Barrett did not explain why SCOTUS did not just issue its own injunction against S.B. 4, as it undoubtedly could have.)

    Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s sharp dissent, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, was far less tolerant of the 5th Circuit’s duplicity. (Justice Elena Kagan also dissented in a brief separate opinion urging that an administrative stay not be used to “spell the difference between respecting and revoking long-settled immigration law.”) Sotomayor noted that the 5th Circuit “recently has developed a troubling habit of leaving ‘administrative’ stays in place for weeks if not months,” citing stays that dragged on for as long as 85 days. In reality, she explained, this benign-sounding tool has developed into an act of extreme judicial gaslighting. The administrative stay here, she wrote, “not only upends the status quo but also extends that disruption indefinitely.” In the process, it “defeats the purpose of this court’s stay analysis and threatens to evade effective review of this unprecedented law.” This play is largely a repeat of S.B. 8, Texas’ 2021 vigilante abortion ban, which SCOTUS allowed to take effect in the dark of night, without any reasoned analysis—after the 5th Circuit froze a district court’s injunction with (you guessed it) an administrative stay. (In her opinion on Tuesday, Barrett wrongly claimed that the Supreme Court has never reviewed an administrative stay, evidently forgetting the S.B. 8 fiasco.)

    Had the court called BS on the 5th Circuit and applied its usual standards to the stay, Sotomayor correctly noted, it would have no choice but to halt S.B. 4. When you tot up the balance of alleged irreparable harms here, it isn’t even a close call. On the one side of the ledger, Texas claims to suffer a temporary inability to repel an immigration “invasion.” On the other side, the federal government stands to suffer irreparable harm to its foreign relations, its international obligations to protect individuals fleeing from persecution or torture, and its ability to carry out legitimate immigration enforcement. Meanwhile, noncitizens face unimaginable harm now that Texas can arrest and deport them with zero regard for their rights under federal law. None of these evils can be readily unwound, and the Supreme Court had previously held unequivocally that states cannot arrogate the federal government’s power over immigration policy and enforcement. These facts should have been reason enough for SCOTUS to block S.B. 4 immediately.

    Reading the Barrett and Sotomayor opinions side by side, there is a bit less of a delta than you might assume. What’s strange about Barrett’s opinion is that she clearly recognizes the 5th Circuit’s bad behavior, yet suspends any appropriate response for the time being. A cynic might think Barrett knows S.B. 4 is obviously unconstitutional but wants to punish the Biden administration for its allegedly lax border enforcement by letting the law kick in for a few weeks. Her opinion implicitly faults both parties, Texas and the federal government, and gives Texas a reprieve this time—to the detriment of immigrants, Latinos, and the basic principle of federal supremacy. “If a decision does not issue soon, the applicants may return to this court,” she cautioned the 5th Circuit. In the meantime, cruelty and nullification will reign in Texas, but just for an indefinite while.

    Just a capital-F Farce from top to bottom. It’s not even clear how the state plans to exercise its newfound illegitimate authority, as the Chron notes.

    It is unclear exactly how the law will work in practice, and its rollout could be complicated. It is unclear if Mexico will accept migrants the state tries to send back across the border. The Mexican government has been vocally critical of the law. Advocates, meanwhile, have raised concerns that it will lead to racial profiling, as it empowers any state or local officer to arrest those they believe entered the state illegally.

    The Department of Public Safety and Texas Military Department, which have run Gov. Greg Abbott’s border crackdown, Operation Lone Star, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on enforcement plans. Nor did Abbott’s office. DPS refused to release enforcement plans to Hearst Newspapers, citing the ongoing litigation.

    Victor Escalon, a Department of Public Safety director overseeing operations in South Texas, said in sworn statements before the court that the agency would focus enforcement in counties that are close to facilities operated by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the state, though he did not specify which facilities. He said DPS officers would have probable cause to make arrests when they witness migrants crossing between ports of entry. He said DPS expects to house and process migrants detained under SB 4 primarily in state-owned facilities and does not anticipate a need for “extensive” use of county-owned jails.

    Escalon said that if Mexican authorities do not accept migrants who have been ordered back across the border, the escorting DPS officer will deliver the migrants to the American side of a port of entry and observe them go to the Mexican side. After watching them cross, the officer will consider them to have complied with the return order and will cease monitoring the alien, he said.

    The state wrote separately in legal filings before the high court that authorities would turn migrants over to federal immigration officials at ports of entry — a departure from how Texas Republicans have previously discussed the law as a means for the state to deport migrants.

    I don’t even know what to say. Well, there’s this:

    Translation: “Mexico expresses its rejection of the Supreme Court’s decision of US for the entry into force of the SB4 law. Our country will not accept repatriations from the state of Texas. The dialogue on immigration matters will continue between the federal governments of MX and US”.

    And this:

    That would be tomorrow, so get ready for more news. I suppose there’s at least a chance that this could be undone quickly. I’m going to hope for that. Law Dork has more.

    Posted in La Migra, Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

    We’ll see what City Council makes of the firefighter pay agreement

    There’s a bit of pushback happening.

    Mayor John Whitmire

    Mayor John Whitmire’s administration and officials from the Houston firefighters union are hoping to get final approval in May or June on a massive settlement deal to end their nearly decade-long contract stalemate.

    The two sides announced last week they signed an agreement that would give firefighters $650 million in backpay, along with up to 34% in raises over the next five years. They were in court Monday morning to notify the judge overseeing the 7-year-old court case on the matter that they had reached a deal.

    They did not file the settlement, though, and attorneys for both sides said after the hearing that it would take some time to work through the approval process. Judge Lauren Reeder must sign off on the final agreement, but the Texas Attorney General’s Office also must sign off on the judgment bond – the order that will allow the city to spread the $650 million cost of the backpay over 25 to 30 years.

    Lawyers for both sides said they want bond attorneys to review the settlement’s language before they file it in court. City Attorney Arturo Michel said they are aiming to finalize everything in the city’s current fiscal year, which ends June 30.

    […]

    Meanwhile, at least two City Council members began raising concerns about the financial consequences of the deal. Council Members Edward Pollard and Tiffany Thomas wrote a letter Monday to Whitmire asking for more details on the arrangement.

    “We are in agreement that our firefighters must be paid a competitive salary, however, due to minimal engagement from your office on any specifics, and non-response from you to previous emails on the subject, we have questions on whether the proposed deals is in the city’s best financial interest, or will it ultimately cause dire fiscal challenges that will impact services city wide for years to come,” the two council members wrote.

    Budget Director Melissa Dubowski has said the city will have to close a $160 million budget gap in the next fiscal year, a figure that does not account for the firefighters’ raises. City Hall and union officials so far have declined to answer questions about specific details of the deal that go beyond the information they have released in press releases, citing the confidential nature of the mediation talks.

    Whitmire’s office has not said how much the projected raises, which include a 10% pay hike on July 1, will cost, or how it plans to pay for them.

    Pollard and Thomas asked how Houston firefighters’ current compensation compares to other Texas cities, whether the administration plans to ask voters to amend or eliminate the city’s cap on property tax revenue growth to help pay for the deal and what interest rate the city will have to pay on the $650 million judgment bond, among other questions.

    See here for the previous update. CMs Pollard and Thomas ask some good questions, and don’t seem too happy with the level of responsiveness they are getting from the Mayor at this time. Maybe they’re out on an island, and maybe they can cobble together seven other skeptics to block approval of this deal until they can get some questions answered. At the very least, pushing hard for the repeal or revision of the stupid revenue cap has to be on the table – there’s just no way to make this work without more revenue for the city, and that’s before we get to the promise to hire more cops. Asking for the details is hardly asking for a lot. Let’s start there and see where we go.

    Posted in Local politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 23 Comments

    More on Miles and the principals

    I never know what to make of what this guy says.

    Houston ISD’s appointed Superintendent Mike Miles defended the results of his controversial principal screenings on Monday after nearly half of the district’s principals were notified that they had not yet met the requirements to guarantee their jobs next year.

    The 117 principals who must undergo a second screening to remain at HISD include both longtime veterans and principals appointed by Miles’ administration just this year, representing Houston’s highest- and lowest-performing schools. Miles projected confidence Monday that the majority of those principals would keep their jobs, and noted that most of the district’s remaining school leaders had already passed the bar.

    “There are 124 (principals) who are already above the proficiency bar, and the 117 (others) are the ones we told are making good progress, and you need to continue to make progress,” Miles said. “The overwhelming majority, between 80% and 90%, will be asked to return.”

    […]

    Principals who were told that they must undergo a second proficiency screening received an email notifying them of their status and an invitation to a meeting with Miles earlier in March.

    The Houston Chronicle obtained a copy of the email, along with a list of its 117 recipients, from a source with direct knowledge of the meeting. The Chronicle initially published the names of everyone listed as a recipient on the email, but removed the list after receiving a tip that a principal may have been included in the distribution erroneously.

    Miles said Monday that the list of 117 principals who received his message was accurate, but indicated that there were discrepancies between the list distributed internally at HISD and that published by the Chronicle. He declined, however, to specify what those differences were.

    Results of the proficiency screenings sparked outrage within school communities over spring break, as parents rushed to defend beloved principals, especially those at high-performing schools.

    Leaders of a group of concerned parents known on social media as Supporters of HISD Magnets and Budget Accountability have argued that the screenings may violate state laws and local policies that say appraisals must be developed in consultation with local advisory committees, among other criteria. They said the proficiency screenings were not approved by the district’s appointed board of managers, and argued that Miles has shifted the goalposts because his broader principal evaluation, the “LEAD” appraisal system, has been updated multiple times since it was approved by the board in October.

    “The fact that multiple principals from high-performing schools did not pass Miles’ Proficiency Screener shined a light on significant issues with both the ever-changing LEAD and the Proficiency Screener,” reads a legal memo drafted by the group. “Upon review, it appears that both are not only unfairly and inconsistently applied, which is against HISD policy, but they also violate Texas law.”

    Miles said that critics of the appraisal system may not be educators or “steeped in evaluations,” and could have misconceptions about what it entails. Miles’ presentation to principals, along with the latest version of his LEAD appraisal system, were also leaked to the media.

    “No harm, no foul if someone is trying to present the viewpoint that this doesn’t seem fair, I get that,” Miles said. “But I would say hold off because you don’t really know what the outcome is going to be.”

    See here for the background. I dunno, if we had more information and some faith that this wasn’t mumbo-jumbo based on small sample sizes and also on a crappy rank-and-yank mindset, maybe there wouldn’t have been this reaction in the first place. Next year, when we see how much churn there’s been among the principals, then maybe we’ll know more. Until then, we read the tea leaves as best we can. The Press has more.

    Posted in School days | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

    SCOTUS pauses SB4 again

    This time indefinitely.

    The Supreme Court on Monday extended a temporary block on a new Texas immigration law that is being challenged by the Biden administration.

    In an order issued by conservative Justice Samuel Alito, the court again imposed a temporary freeze on a lower court decision. The court said the law would remain on hold “pending further order” of the court.

    The law was originally due to go into effect on March 10, but Alito has now stepped in on three occasions to ensure the lower court ruling remains on hold.

    His most recent order was due to expire on Monday evening, meaning the law would have gone into effect absent Supreme Court action.

    The ruling is now blocked indefinitely, giving all nine justices additional time to determine what next steps to take.

    See here for the previous update. We’ll just have to see what happens next, and it could be weeks or months before that happens. If you’re wondering what it means that this time the stay is indefinite while the previous ones had been only for a few days, I’ll let Prof. Vladeck explain:

    In other words, it was just Alito being Alito. At least now he’s done the normal thing. We’ll wait for the next move.

    Posted in La Migra, Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

    Sure, Pornhub could verify identities and ages if they wanted to

    But that’s not the point.

    House Bill 1181, which was passed in June and went into effect in September, says that any entity publishing pornographic material must require a visitor to provide digital identification or use a commercial age verification system that uses a government ID or public or private transactional data to verify the age of an individual.

    “Texas is not alone in this. In fact, there were 144 pieces of state legislation last year across the United States requiring age verification for one reason or another,” Age Verification Providers Association Execute Director Iain Corby said.

    The Age Verification Providers Association is “a not-for-profit global trade body representing 26 (organizations) who provide age assurance solutions,” according to its website.

    Corby said he didn’t know the ins and outs of the Texas legislation but did provide examples of ways people can verify their ages online.

    Some ways are straightforward, such as uploading your driver’s license, to prove your age.

    As for using transactional data, Corby said the most common way is by verifying your age through your bank by giving it consent to share your age with the website. He added credit reference agencies and reports as the other common ways for Americans to confirm their ages using transactional data.

    He said in Europe people are working on a system where users can recycle their age verification check from one site to access others.

    “The whole process is very privacy-preserving,” Corby said. “Obviously people are sometimes a little bit nervous about sharing their identity when they’re looking at that sort of site so the essence of our industry is proving your age without disclosing your identity.”

    See here for the previous update. I don’t know anything about the Age Verification Providers Association or their claims; they may be legit or they may be opportunists jumping on a hot story. If they’re legit then this seems like a reasonable way forward and could be the basis for a settlement in the lawsuit filed by the state if the Fifth Circuit’s ruling is left to stand. But the point is that the original ruling followed existing precedent, and the Fifth Circuit did not, which puts this in defiance of current law. SCOTUS may of course decide that they’re fine with the Fifth Circuit monkeying with their rulings, or they may decide to revisit their previous opinions and make their own modifications. Until then, this is an encroachment on free speech, and it’s not on Pornhub to accommodate that.

    Posted in Legal matters, Technology, science, and math | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

    Do I really need to worry about West 11th Street?

    I dunno, man.

    Houston Mayor John Whitmire is reevaluating several street infrastructure projects for effectiveness, including the completed 11th Street redesign despite the controversy surrounding the recent removal of pedestrian and cyclist upgrades on Houston Avenue.

    Whitmire, who took office in January, has made it a priority to review city projects that the previous city administration made. His office confirmed to Houston Public Media that the overhaul includes the contentious redesign of a 1.5-mile stretch of 11th Street in The Heights. The $2.4 million project was completed in 2023, following more than four years of community engagement, and now Whitmire will decide if it should be torn up or changed.

    “The mayor has been very open about his concerns with the 11th Street project. What started out as a request for a safe crossing at Nicholson and 11th Street ended up a bike lane project that makes it difficult for emergency apparatus to maneuver and has negatively impacted a business. He is reviewing this along with other projects,” said spokesperson Mary Benton.

    The project involved the addition of bike lanes and safe crosswalks at various intersections, particularly at Nicholson, where the Heights hike and bike trail intersects with 11th. While cycling and pedestrian advocates welcomed the changes as they provided additional safety measures for a busy neighborhood street, the project faced some opposition from several businesses, who expressed concern about how it would impact their establishments.

    The overhaul of all these infrastructure projects has some public safety advocates worried, especially as word that a temporary pause was put on all projects that include narrowing or removing vehicle lanes or adding bike lanes was confirmed by Houston Public Works in a report by the Houston Chronicle.

    Joe Cutrufo, executive director at BikeHouston, whose advocacy helped get this project in place, told Adam Zuvanich of Houston Public Media that he’s concerned about the fate of 11th Street.

    “If the mayor were to undo this project and revert 11th Street back to how it used to be,” Cutrufo said, “I don’t think you’d see the city winning any awards for that.”

    There’s been a number of stories speculating about this, and there’s definitely some alarm in the bicycle-pedestrian community. I’m not dismissive of any of it, but I’m also not sure how much of this is normal review of a predecessor’s project list (with perhaps a few dollops of old-guy grumpiness) and how much of it is a serious threat. The Houston avenue debacle was caused in part by complaints from the police and fire departments; there are no such issues here that I’m aware of. Removing the modifications to West 11th would mean tearing up a much longer stretch of road to undo a much more expensive renovation that has been physically in place a lot longer and which had been in discussion and planning a lot longer than that. I just have a hard time wrapping my mind around the possibility that the Mayor would take such a big action based on a handful of malcontents.

    But maybe I’m wrong and I’m not taking this seriously enough. I think the backlash here would be a lot bigger than the one that Houston Avenue caused, but we’ll see. I hope I’ve got the right take on this.

    UPDATE: On the subject of Houston Avenue and the reasons for the dismantling of its median, late in the day yesterday we got this.

    The city’s planning department has declined to release records related to the controversial installation and subsequent removal of a concrete median on Houston Avenue, citing concerns about terrorism and the candor of its employees.

    The city’s legal department has cited those two exemptions in the Texas Public Information Act in a letter asking the Texas attorney general’s office to withhold some of the records requested by the Houston Landing.

    […]

    Mayor Whitmire’s 2023 campaign included messaging around transparency, and wanting to be more open with the public.

    Houston Landing contacted the mayor’s office last week, seeking additional comment on the rationale for requesting some of the information to be withheld.

    Mary Benton, the mayor’s director of communications, said Whitmire likely would not comment about an ongoing Texas Public Information Act process, but that the mayor had been adamant about processing public records requests quickly. Benton also said she would forward the Landing’s request to City Attorney Arturo Michel, who had not responded as of Monday afternoon.

    “This strikes me just on a very surface level as a governmental body that seems to be reaching for any possible exemption to avoid disclosing this information,” [James Hemphill, an Austin lawyer on the executive committee of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas] said. “I don’t know that that’s what’s going on, I don’t know enough about the situation. This does appear to be a pretty elaborate invocation of some exceptions.”

    Well OK then.

    Posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

    Does Ted Cruz think he might lose?

    Who knows what he thinks?

    Not Ted Cruz

    U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign is warning donors this week that he’s already tied with Colin Allred and bracing for a tougher 2024 reelection campaign than GOP voters might expect.

    The push comes less than a week after Allred secured the Democratic nomination in the race and six years after Democrat Beto O’Rourke emerged from relative obscurity to push Cruz to the brink of losing his seat.

    While no Democrat has won statewide office in Texas since the 1990s, Cruz has been telling Republicans for weeks that they can’t take things for granted in Texas anymore, partly because of that close call to O’Rourke.

    “I will say, my race here in Texas is a battleground race,” Cruz told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo last month. “My last race I won by less than three points because I’m the Democrats’ top target.”

    Allred has been telling supporters he has a real shot at toppling Cruz based on limited early public polling and fundraising data. At his primary victory party in Dallas last week, the congressman acknowledged being the underdog but pointed to his history of knocking off veteran U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions, a Republican, in 2018 to win his seat.

    “I’m used to overcoming long odds,” Allred said, pointing not just to his races in 2018, but his upbringing as the child of a single mother and making the NFL as a linebacker despite being undrafted.

    I have no insight into Ted Cruz’s thinking, nor do I want to spend any time pondering his deep thoughts. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that at this point of the campaign, it’s in both Cruz and Allred’s interests to portray this as a close race, and for the same reason – the fundraising. It’s good for Cruz to keep his funders from being complacent, and Allred needs his backers to have hope. Everything else at this point is just details – the polling is mostly meaningless, comparisons to 2018 are premature at best, and what issues or lines of attack may land are too soon to tell. The name of the game is keeping the engine running. Allred has done a very good job of that, and Cruz is trying to keep up.

    Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments