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Republicans have begun attacking Mike Collier

Jul 28th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

Interesting.

Mike Collier

Fox News host Laura Ingraham is joining a growing list of Republicans attacking Mike Collier, the Democratic candidate for Texas lieutenant governor, as polls indicate a narrowing race between him and incumbent Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

Ingraham reposted an article from a right-wing website on Sunday criticizing Collier for opposing private school vouchers, which would allocate public funding to send children to private or charter schools. It’s an increasingly popular policy among Texas Republicans, including Gov. Greg Abbott, who have cast both vouchers and charter schools as a way to ensure parents can find alternatives for their kids if they don’t like their local public school.

Collier has said he would lead the charge to ban them if elected as a top state policymaker.

Teachers’ unions and Democrats have likened the push for school vouchers to an effort to defund already-struggling public schools.

“Vouchers are for vultures,” Collier said during a speech at Texas Democrats’ convention in Dallas earlier this month.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz also blasted that remark last week, calling Collier’s stance “sick.”

[…]

It’s a marked change from Collier’s last run against Patrick in 2018, when Republicans generally shied away from mentioning Collier by name or publicly attacking him. Collier lost to Patrick by five percentage points that year. Recent University of Houston polling indicates it’s now a 4-point race.

“As Mike Collier closes the gap in the race for lieutenant governor to just 4 points, it’s no surprise that Dan Patrick’s extremist allies suddenly rush to his defense,” said Collier campaign manager Ali Zaidi. “And while Dan Patrick continues to hide from the voters of Texas, Mike Collier will be on the ground, on the airwaves and online — exposing the truth about Dan Patrick’s eight years of failure to fund our schools, rein in property taxes and fix the damn grid.”

It’s interesting because while Republicans have always attacked Democrats as a group and high-profile Democrats who may (Beto, Biden, Hillary Clinton, Obama, etc) or may not (Nancy Pelosi, AOC, etc) be on the ballot, they almost always reserve those attacks for those brand names. They very rarely attack candidates with lower profiles who name ID they will inevitably raise by their actions. I don’t know what’s behind this apparent change in strategy – maybe it’s just the ants-to-a-picnic effect of a Fox News personality making Mike Collier their main character for a day, in which case this will disappear as quickly as it manifested. I hope Collier is able to raise a few bucks from it in the meantime.

On a side note in re: the “tightening” polls: Yes, there have been a few recent poll results that show a fairly close race for Governor, with one of those polls also putting Collier within four points of Dan Patrick. It’s more than one poll, and some of those individual polls showed movement in a Dem direction since their previous sample, but I still hesitate to attribute any meaning beyond the simple numbers to them. Maybe there is a Dobbs effect (with perhaps also a Uvalde effect), and maybe it will all dissipate like the morning dew as our attention spans fill up. I’ve been burned on this topic too many times, and I can already see the headlines that we’ll get if this “trend” doesn’t continue. The data is what it is at this point. If the Republicans are responding to it – we don’t know that this is what they’re doing, but let’s roll with that for a minute – then that’s another data point. That’s as far as I’ll go with it.

UH/Hobby Center: Abbott 49, Beto 44

Jul 14th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

This one is post-Dobbs.

In the race for governor, Republican Greg Abbott leads Democrat Beto O’Rourke by 5% among likely voters, 49% to 44%, with 5% undecided and 2% intending to vote for Libertarian Mark Tippetts.

More than nine out of 10 Abbott (95%) and O’Rourke (92%) voters are certain about their vote choice, while 5% and 8% indicate they might change their mind between now and November.

Abbott holds a 27% (60% to 33%) lead over O’Rourke among white voters while O’Rourke holds a 72% (80% to 8%) lead over Abbott among Black voters and a 9% (51% to 42%) lead among Latino voters.

O’Rourke has a 6% (49% to 43%) lead over Abbott among women, while Abbott enjoys a 18% (56% to 38%) lead over O’Rourke among men.

Older Texans belonging to the Silent Generation/Baby Boomer cohort and to Generation X favor Abbott over O’Rourke by margins of 18% (57% to 39%) and 9% (52% to 43%) respectively, while O’Rourke is the candidate of choice among younger Texans belonging to the Millennial/Generation Z cohort, with a 15% (51% to 36%) advantage over Abbott.

Virtually every Texas Democrat (96%) intends to vote for O’Rourke compared to 1% who intend to vote for Abbott, and virtually every Texas Republican (91%) intends to vote for Abbott, compared to 2% who intend to vote for O’Rourke. Texas Independents are more evenly divided, with 48% intending to vote for Abbott and 32% for O’Rourke.

When asked to what extent 15 issues would be important to their gubernatorial vote choice, more than three-fourths of Texas likely voters listed these five policies as being extremely or very important: inflation (84%), crime and public safety (83%), economic growth (78%), government spending and taxes (78%), and health care costs (76%).

Only three issues are extremely or very important to less than half of likely Texas voters when deciding who to vote for in the 2022 gubernatorial election: climate change (48%), COVID-19 policies (47%), and LGBTQ rights (36%).

Four issues are extremely or very important to more than nine out of ten Abbott voters when making their gubernatorial vote decision: inflation (96%), immigration and border security (94%), crime and public safety (92%), and government spending and taxes (91%).

Three issues are extremely or very important to more than nine out of ten O’Rourke voters when making their gubernatorial vote decision: voting rights (94%), gun control (92%), and health care costs (90%).

In the race for lieutenant governor, Republican Dan Patrick leads Democrat Mike Collier by 5% among likely voters, 48% to 43%, with 9% undecided.

More than nine out of 10 Patrick (96%) and Collier (92%) voters are certain about their vote choice, while 4% and 8% indicate they might change their mind between now and November.

In the race for attorney general, Republican Ken Paxton leads Democrat Rochelle Mercedes Garza by 5% among likely voters (46% to 41%), with 9% undecided and 4% intending to vote for Libertarian Mark Ash.

More than nine out of 10 Paxton (94%) and Garza (91%) voters are certain about their vote choice, while 6% and 9% indicate they might change their mind between now and November.

The generic Republican U.S. House candidate leads the generic Democratic U.S. House candidate by 6% among likely voters (49% to 43%), with 6% undecided.

Among likely voters, Abbott is viewed favorably by 50% and unfavorably by 47%.

Among likely voters, O’Rourke is viewed favorably by 45% and unfavorably by 50%.

This was an online YouGov poll, fielded between June 27 and July 7, so entirely after the Dobbs decision, the first such poll. It’s more or less the same as the their February poll, so at least in this poll there doesn’t seem to be much difference as a result of that ruling. Well, in this sample Beto is much closer to Abbott among independents. That probably doesn’t mean much, but it’s what I see.

It’s interesting that the Lite Guv and AG races have similar margins, with the Dem candidates doing almost as well as Beto in total support. The norm for these lower-visibility races is that the “don’t know/no answer” contingent is much higher, which tends to drag the Democratic number down further, as those candidates lack name recognition. This poll confirmed that a large number of respondents didn’t really know much about Mike Collier or Rochelle Garza or any other statewide non-Beto Democrat, but they’re willing to vote for them anyway. Make of that what you will. Reform Austin has more.

Houston get a medical marijuana pick-up location

Jul 14th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

For those who will need it.

Houston’s first permanent pick-up location for medical marijuana opened Tuesday, giving patients another option for obtaining their prescription cannabis.

Texas Original, the state’s largest medical marijuana provider, opened a 1,776-square-foot facility on Houston Avenue in First Ward. The location offers a full range of cannabis products, including gummies, tinctures and lozenges.

The brick-and-mortar location offers another option to patients, Texas Original CEO Morris Denton said. Most patients get their prescription delivered to their homes, but they need to be present to sign for the delivery and verify their identity. At the new location, they can arrange to pick up their prescription when it’s convenient.

“From a patient’s perspective, it makes it a lot more convenient and a lot more flexible,” Denton said. “You can come by when it makes the most amount of sense for you.”

The pick-up process will be similar to home delivery. Patients will need to provide their prescription and ID and answer a few basic questions to verify their identity, Denton said. The process will take less than five minutes.

State regulations prohibit Texas Originals from storing medical marijuana at the new location, so the Houston location will not be able to take walk-in orders for same-day pick-up, Denton said. Any prescriptions that are scheduled for pick-up will need to be shipped each day from the company’s Austin dispensary.

Texas Original has 13 pick-up locations across the state, but many of them – including in Katy and North Houston – offer once-a-week pick-up at places, including doctor’s offices. The new Houston location is the company’s first permanent storefront, patients can also pick up from the Austin dispensary.

That was from late June. You can see from the picture in the story that it’s next to Cafe Brussels on Houston Avenue. This seems like as good a time as any to note that the Texas Republican Party’s scary and authoritarian-loving platform opposes recreational marijuana legalization, and as we have discussed as long as Dan Patrick has power we’re never going to get any real expansion of medical marijuana or any incremental reform of marijuana criminalization. Just so you know.

A big part of the Cornyn gun bill will do nothing in Texas

Jun 26th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Just a reminder.

The bipartisan gun bill that is on a fast track through Congress and backed by U.S. Sen. John Cornyn includes new state grants to incentivize red flag laws, which allow judges to temporarily seize firearms from people who are deemed dangerous.

That means it’ll be up to states as to whether they want to take advantage of one of the key provisions of the landmark gun legislation. But despite last month’s Uvalde school shooting being the inspiration for the bill, Texas is unlikely to get on board.

Red flag laws likely remain a nonstarter among Republican leaders in Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott already faced a conservative backlash after he asked the Legislature to consider them four years ago.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who oversees the Senate and wields tremendous sway over what legislation is considered, indicated Wednesday he still opposes such an effort.

“After the Santa Fe shooting, we had the same move to do this and we did not support it,” he said in a radio interview. “I did not support [that], the Senate did not support that.”

Patrick said that if he were in the U.S. Senate, he would have been among the 36 Republicans — including Texas’ junior senator Ted Cruz — who sided against the bipartisan gun bill in an initial vote Tuesday. Patrick added that he was “very, very concerned about that and where that goes.”

See here for some background, in which the subject of red states and red flag laws was thoroughly discussed. I don’t really have anything to add to that, so go listen to this week’s episode of the Josh Marshall podcast, in which they discuss the politics of this bill and what might happen next. Our job here remains to elect leaders that will not be obstacles to sensible and meaningful gun reform.

One more thing:

Red flag laws are nonetheless popular with Texas voters. A poll released Tuesday found that 75% of the state’s voters support laws that “give family members or law enforcement a way to ask a judge to issue an order temporarily removing guns from someone who poses a violent threat to themselves or others.” The survey was conducted by Third Way, a centrist think tank, and GS Strategy Group, a GOP polling firm.

The poll doesn’t break any of their issues questions down by party (or any other subgroup, like gender or race or age), so it’s not very useful. That said, in addition to the number cited above, the poll had 89% support for “Requiring a background check before every gun purchase, including at gun shows and for online sales”, 80% support for “Increasing the minimum age to purchase a semi-automatic weapon from 18 to 21 years old”, 80% support for “Allowing law enforcement to access sealed juvenile records to ensure that young adults with a history of violent criminal behavior are restricted from purchasing firearms”, and 68% support for ” Funding research around the effectiveness of gun safety policies”. You’re not going to get those kind of numbers without a fair amount of Republican support. Getting them to vote for candidates that also support those positions, that’s a different matter. As we well know. The Chron has more.

Where are we with the Paxton whistleblower lawsuit?

Jun 22nd, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

We are in the familiar position of waiting for the drawn-out appeals process to conclude. Pull up a chair and make yourself comfortable.

Best mugshot ever

The appeals process has grown a bit longer in state Attorney General Ken Paxton’s effort to dismiss a whistleblower lawsuit by four top agency officials who claim they were improperly fired in 2020 after accusing him of accepting bribes and other misconduct.

Paxton turned to the Texas Supreme Court 7½ months ago after two lower courts rejected his bids to toss out the lawsuit.

Last month, the Supreme Court told Paxton and the whistleblowers to provide justices with a deeper dive into the legal issues involved, kicking off a second round of legal briefing that was recently extended when the court granted Paxton’s request for an extra month to file his expanded brief.

Paxton’s brief is now due July 27, and although the court told Paxton that additional extensions aren’t likely to be granted, the move means the final brief isn’t due until Aug. 31 at the earliest.

That moves the case into election season as Paxton seeks a third four-year term against a Democrat, Rochelle Garza, who has made questioning Paxton’s ethics a campaign centerpiece. Three opponents tried the same tactic against Paxton in this year’s GOP primaries without success.

The timing also puts the case close to the two-year anniversary of when eight top officials of the attorney general’s office met with FBI agents and other investigators to relate their suspicions that Paxton had misused the powers of his office to help a friend and political donor, Austin real estate investor Nate Paul.

See here and here for the most recent updates. Paxton’s argument is that as an elected rather than appointed official, he doesn’t count as a “public official” under the Texas Whistleblower Act, so the employees who fired him have no grounds to sue. He has other arguments, but that’s the main thing that will be of interest to the Supreme Court. I’m sure you can surmise what I think, but if you want to dig deeper you can click the Texas Whistleblower Act tag link and review other posts in this genre.

Just as a reminder, we are also waiting for the FBI to take some kind of action in their investigation of the Ken Paxton-Nate Paul dealings, the State Bar complaint against Paxton for his attempt to overthrow the 2020 election should have a hearing sometime later this summer, and of course there’s the granddaddy of them all, the original state charges that Paxton engaged in securities fraud, which are now eight years old. He’s sure been a busy boy, hasn’t he?

The very least Greg Abbott could do

Jun 3rd, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

You can always count on him for that.

Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday called on the Texas Legislature to form special committees to make legislative recommendations in response to the Uvalde school shooting.

In a letter to House Speaker Dade Phelan and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the Senate’s presiding officer, Abbott told his fellow Republicans that the state “must reassess the twin issues of school safety and mass violence.” He said the committee process should start “immediately” and outlined five topics he would like the committees to take up.

Notably, the topics include “firearm safety.” Abbott last week essentially ruled out gun restrictions as a response to the massacre, in which a gunman killed 19 students and two adults last week at Robb Elementary School. He focused his attention on mental health care and school security in his public comments.

The other topics Abbott charged leadership with making recommendations on were school safety, mental health, social media and police training.

Phelan responded to Abbott’s call by saying in a statement that “conversations about the issues outlined by Gov. Abbott are already underway in the Texas House and will continue to be a top priority in the months leading up to the next school year and the legislative session.” He added that the House “will get to work immediately.”

[…]

Abbott’s critics quickly argued that the time for committees has passed. They pointed out that the Legislature also formed special committees after mass shootings in 2019, and those discussions did not prevent the Uvalde school shooting from happening.

Abbott’s Democratic challenger for reelection, Beto O’Rourke, panned Abbott’s push for legislative committees.

“Anyone can call for a committee. Only a governor can call a special session,” O’Rourke tweeted. “Do your job.”

The 2019 committees on gun violence followed the anti-Hispanic massacre at a Walmart in El Paso. A Democratic state senator from the area, César Blanco, sent Abbott a letter Wednesday saying that he appreciated the call for committees since the Uvalde shooting but noted “we have solutions ready now.” He cited nine bills he filed in the first session after the Walmart shooting, including a proposal to extend background checks to cover private gun sales. While Patrick initially showed interest in that idea — even suggesting he would stand up to the National Rifle Association to pass it — it was a short-lived crusade and the legislation never got a Senate committee hearing.

Those committees will also be stacked with pro-gun legislators, so adjust your already dismally low expectations accordingly. Despite all this, there’s a call for a special session, mostly from Dems, which I don’t expect to happen since Abbott clearly doesn’t want it to happen, no matter his “haven’t ruled it out” rhetoric. The sound you hear is Greg Abbott quietly waiting for this all to blow over.

I’m just going to leave this here:

Ask not what your Governor can do for you. Ask what your Governor can ask other people to do for him so he doesn’t have to do anything himself. The Current has more.

Republicans threaten businesses over abortion access

May 24th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

If you didn’t see stuff like this coming, you haven’t been paying attention.

With Texas poised to automatically ban abortion if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, some Republicans are already setting their sights on the next target to fight the procedure: businesses that say they’ll help employees get abortions outside the state.

Fourteen Republican members of the state House of Representatives have pledged to introduce bills in the coming legislative session that would bar corporations from doing business in Texas if they pay for abortions in states where the procedure is legal.

This would explicitly prevent firms from offering employees access to abortion-related care through health insurance benefits. It would also expose executives to criminal prosecution under pre-Roe anti-abortion laws the Legislature never repealed, the legislators say.

Their proposal highlights how the end of abortion would lead to a new phase in — not the end of — the fight in Texas over the procedure. The lawmakers pushing for the business rules have signaled that they plan to act aggressively in the next legislative session. But it remains to be seen if they’ll be able to get a majority on their side.

The members, led by Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park, laid out their plans in a letter to Lyft CEO Logan Green that became public on Wednesday.

Green drew the lawmakers’ attention on April 29, when he said on Twitter that the ride-share company would help pregnant residents of Oklahoma and Texas seek abortion care in other states. Green also pledged to cover the legal costs of any Lyft driver sued under Senate Bill 8, the Texas law that empowers private citizens to file lawsuits against anyone who assists in the procurement of an abortion.

“The state of Texas will take swift and decisive action if you do not immediately rescind your recently announced policy to pay for the travel expenses of women who abort their unborn children,” the letter states.

The letter also lays out other legislative priorities, including allowing Texas shareholders of publicly traded companies to sue executives for paying for abortion care, as well as empowering district attorneys to prosecute abortion-related crimes outside of their home counties.

Six of the 14 signers, including Cain, are members of the far-right Texas Freedom Caucus. How much political support these proposals have in the Republican caucus is unclear. House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, declined to comment. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Gov. Greg Abbott did not respond.

Since the legislative session is more than seven months away, Cain said in an email that “a quickly drafted and sent letter can hardly be said to reflect the pulse of my Republican colleagues.” He was confident, however, that his ideas would find some support in the Senate.

“Knowing that chamber and its leadership, I’m willing to bet legislation targeting this issue will be promptly filed in January,” Cain said.

But doing so would likely mean targeting companies that the state has wooed as potential job creators. Tesla, for instance, announced this month that it would pay for employees’ travel costs when they leave the state to get an abortion. Abbott celebrated the electric car company’s move to Austin last year and this year urged its CEO, Elon Musk, to move Twitter’s headquarters to Texas, too, if he completes his purchase of the social media firm.

Joke all you want about how Republicans used to be the party of big business, because that hasn’t really been true for awhile. They’re the party of “give us your donations and keep your mouth shut about anything we don’t like regardless of what your employees and customers and stockholders say and maybe we’ll leave you alone and toss you a tax cut” now. You may say that it’s unthinkable that Republicans might actually chase large employers out of the state, but a lot of unthinkable things have been happening lately. Remember how the business community helped defeat the “bathroom bill” in 2017, and issued sternly-worded statements about voting rights and further anti-trans bills last year? How’s that been going?

We are living in Briscoe Cain’s Texas now. If he doesn’t get what he wants now – and mark my words, he wants to arrest people who have anything at all to do with abortion – he’ll get it next time, as long as his Republican Party is in charge. The business community needs to recognize that they are right in the crosshairs along with the rest of us. Daily Kos has more.

DMN/UT-Tyler: Abbott 46, Beto 39

May 17th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Here’s the story, which I currently can’t access. A very brief summary of it is in this Current article. The data is here and I’m going to riff on that, with references to the February version of this poll, for which the data can be found here. I will note that there are some primary runoff results in this sample, and I am ignoring all of them – that kind of polling is too tricky to be worth worrying about.

“In a race for Governor would you vote for Governor Abbott, Beto O’Rourke, or someone else?” I’ll generally be quoting the poll questions, which thankfully are the same in each sample. In May, as noted in the post title, it’s 46-39 for Abbott, basically identical to the 45-38 Abbott result from February. The shape of those numbers are a bit different. In February, possibly because both Beto and Abbott were in contested primaries, there was a considerable amount of crossover support for each, Dems were only 76-16 for Beto, while Rs were just 76-11 for Abbott. In May, those numbers were 82-9 among Dems for Beto and 85-7 for Abbott among Rs. Independents were 36-29 for Abbott in February and show as 16-6 for Abbott now, with 29% going to the Libertarian (there is a Green candidate named as well, who also gets 6%) and an astonishing 38% for “someone else”. This has to be a mangling of the data – among other things, given the size of the Indy subsample, it would have put the Libertarian candidate at nearly 10% overall, but the topline result gives him just 3%. Most likely, the 38 is for Abbott and the 29 is for Beto, or possibly all of these numbers are just wrong. I will shrug and move on at this point.

For approval numbers, President Biden checks in with 39-58 approval, which is obviously not good. Greg Abbott is also underwater at 46-50, while Beto has a 42-44 approval rating, which is the only one of the three to improve since last time. It was 39-57 for Biden, 50-46 for Abbott, and 40-46 for Beto in February.

Weirdly, Dan Patrick has 50-41 approval, and Ken Paxton has 42-41. Usually, Abbott does better in approvals than any other Republican, in part because fewer people have opinions about the rest of them. A separate question about Paxton asks “do you agree or disagree that he (Paxton) has the integrity to serve as attorney general?”, and it’s 30 for agree, 37 disagree, and 33 unsure. He was at 34-33-33 in February, so a bit of a dip there.

For some other questions of interest, the numbers are not bad for the Dems, and usually a little better than they were in February.

“If the general election was today, would you vote for a Republican candidate or Democratic candidate for the Texas House?” That was 49-48 for Republicans in May, 52-45 for Republicans in February.

“On orders from Governor Abbott, Texas Child Protective Services recently began investigating families who provide gender-affirming care to transgender children. Was this action” needed or unnecessary, with various reasons for each? There were three sub-options for each of those choices, and if you add them up it comes to 52-48 combined for “unnecessary”. Honestly, that’s better than I expected. There was no February comparison for this one, as that order had not yet been given at that time.

“Should the Supreme Court overturn its Roe v. Wade decision and allow states to decide abortion policy?” This was 53-46 for “no it should not be overturned” in May, and 50-47 in February. Again, a little better than I might have thought, and a tick up from before, which is to say before the draft opinion got leaked. Put those numbers in your back pocket for the next time someone claims that Texas is a “pro-life” state.

“Do you agree or disagree that K-12 teachers should be permitted to discuss how historical examples of discrimination in our laws apply to inequalities today?” Here, 61-24 strongly or somewhat agreed in May, and it was 59-22 for Agree in February. That means that for abortion, trans kids, and book banning, the Republican position is the minority one. Obviously, one poll and all that, but there’s nothing to suggest Dems should be running scared on any of this. Quite the reverse, in fact.

Now as we’ve said a zillion times, it’s one poll, opinions on issues often don’t drive voting behavior, and we’re still months away from an election where many other factors will affect the outcome. I’m quite scared of another COVID wave, especially if Congress doesn’t get some more funding for vaccines and treatments and whatever else passed in the very near future. But for now, and bearing in mind that it’s still a 7-point lead for Abbott, the numbers ain’t that bad. We’ll see what other polls have to say.

Abbott and Patrick ask SCOTx to take up Paxton’s whistleblower appeal

Apr 27th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

They sort of have a point, but they should still butt out.

Best mugshot ever

Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick on Monday urged the Supreme Court of Texas to take up Attorney General Ken Paxton’s appeal to throw out a whistleblower lawsuit against him.

The appeal is Paxton’s latest attempt to avoid a trial after eight of his former top deputies accused him of bribery and abuse of office in late 2020. Within seven weeks of their complaint to authorities, all eight had either been fired or driven to leave the agency. Four of the fired employees later filed a whistleblower lawsuit against Paxton saying they were fired in retaliation for their complaint and have asked to be reinstated to their jobs. Paxton denies wrongdoing.

Paxton, a Republican, has fought that lawsuit, claiming that the state’s whistleblower law — which covers public employees, appointed officials and governmental entities — does not apply to him because he is an elected official. A district court and an appeals court have ruled against Paxton’s lawyers and said the lawsuit could move forward. But in January, Paxton’s lawyers asked the Texas Supreme Court to reconsider the matter and throw out the case.

Paxton’s lawyers argue that allowing whistleblowers to sue the attorney general for firing them could hamper the executive power that the state constitution gives him. It is the same argument two lower courts have already rejected after hearing from the whistleblowers’ lawyers, who argue that siding with Paxton would take away whistleblower protections for employees trying to report the misconduct of an elected official.

Lawyers for the governor’s and lieutenant governor’s offices did not indicate whether they agree with Paxton’s argument. The two Republican state officials filed friend of the court briefs asking that the high court take up the case because it is relevant to statewide governance and to the powers of an executive office under the Texas Constitution. Because of that, lawyers for the offices argued the case should be considered by a statewide court and not by the local courts that have already rejected Paxton’s argument.

The two lower courts were filled by Democrats. The Texas Supreme Court is made up of nine Republicans.

See here for the background. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to argue that the state’s high court should weigh in on this question. They could, I suppose, simply issue an order denying the appeal request on the grounds that they’re fine with the lower courts’ rulings. Most cases never get close to the Supreme Court. Indeed, one of the themes I saw in the judicial Q&A responses I got from 1st and 14th Court of Appeals candidates in 2018 and 2020 was precisely that those courts are often the last word on a lot of consequential cases. SCOTx has no obligation to take this up. It’s easy to see why they might want to, but in the end it would be unremarkable if they didn’t.

It’s also easy to see that what Abbott and Patrick want is for a court full of Republicans to have the final word, since I’m sure they don’t consider the lower courts to be valid in the same way. One could perversely assert that only a rejection from the all-Republican Supreme Court will settle this matter in a way that might shut up Paxton and his sycophants, though perhaps the Court of Criminal Appeals would beg to differ.

One more thing:

An attorney whose firm represented Paul, the friend and campaign donor to Paxton, also urged the Supreme Court Monday to weigh in on the case, saying it “presents far reaching consequences for our state government.”

Statewide officials like Paxton need to be able to fire or retain employees based on whether they help advance their goals, wrote Kent Hance, founding partner of the Austin-based law firm Hance Scarborough.

“Inferior officers are carefully chosen by an elected official to provide competent policymaking advice in line with the policymaking goals as defined by the elected official,” Hance wrote. “This works well when the goals are in line with the advice, but what happens when they are at odds?”

A political action committee for Hance’s firm — the HS Law PAC — donated $25,000 to Paxton in June 2020, after he intervened in litigation involving Paul, as Hearst Newspapers reported.

Lawyers for one of the whistleblowers pointed to the donation this week.

“Only somebody as shameless as Ken Paxton would get a lobbyist whose firm donated $25,000 to Paxton while it was representing Nate Paul companies to ask the Texas Supreme Court to re-write the Texas Whistleblower Act,” lawyers TJ Turner and Tom Nesbitt said in a statement. They declined to comment on the briefs by Abbott and Patrick.

Hance did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but managing partner Jay Stewart, who is trustee of the PAC, has told Hearst it operates independent of the firm’s litigation section and that the donation had nothing to do with any cases.

Yeah, that’s a pretty good summary of Texas politics. Political donations never have anything to do with getting the political outcome we prefer. Who would ever think such a thing?

Beto calls for expanded gambling

Apr 26th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

It’s fine. Good politics, given the polling.

Photo by Joel Kramer via Flickr creative commons

Democrat Beto O’Rourke said if he’s elected governor he’s “inclined to support” expanding casino gambling and legal sports betting in Texas, the first time he’s publicly addressed the issue on the trail.

During a press conference in Dallas, O’Rourke said Texans are already going across state lines for casino gambling and sports betting and Texas is losing out on billions of dollars in revenues that are going to other states.

“From listening to Texans across the state, it’s one, a very popular proposal, and two, it would also help us address some of the challenges we have in reducing inflation and property taxes in the state,” O’Rourke said. “So I think that warrants a very close look and it’s something I’m inclined to support.”

O’Rourke’s has also talked about legalizing marijuana to produce more revenues for the state budget. The combination of additional money from gambling and marijuana would allow the state to reduce reliance on property taxes to fund the government.

But getting it done is no easy feat in Texas where the Republican-held legislature hasn’t given the issue much serious consideration at all.

We’ve talked about this subject plenty, and I won’t bore you with a recap of it all. Suffice it to say that this is something that polls well and allows Beto to go on the offense, but has little to no chance of passing the Senate even if Dan Patrick loses. But it’s worth talking about, especially if paired with a promise of property tax cuts, and it may move a few votes. Go for it.

Dan Patrick wants a “Don’t Say Gay” bill for Texas

Apr 10th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
19 comments

Of course he does.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said Monday he will prioritize passing Texas legislation that mimics the recently signed Florida bill referred to as the “Don’t Say Gay” law.

That state’s controversial law prohibits classroom lessons on sexual orientation or gender identity for kids below the fourth grade or any instruction that is not “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate” for older students. It has come under heavy scrutiny as opponents of the bill say it will harm LGBTQ children.

While Texas’ next legislative session doesn’t start until January, the issue will be addressed in Education Committee hearings before then, Patrick said in a campaign email.

“I will make this law a top priority in the next session,” he said.

Patrick’s office did not immediately respond to a request late Monday.

Enforcing Florida’s law falls to parents, much like Texas’ restrictive abortion law, Senate Bill 8, which empowers private citizens to sue anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy.

A parent can sue a school district for damages if they believe it has broken the law. If they win, parents will receive money and recoup attorney fees. In Florida, the law’s supporters portrayed it as a way to give more rights to parents. Gov. Greg Abbott has similarly said parents should have more rights concerning their children’s education as he campaigns for a third term.

Val Benavidez, executive director of the Texas Freedom Network, said in a statement to The Texas Tribune that Patrick’s promise to bring similar legislation to the state is a “stain on Texas.”

“Gender expression by children is not something that is scary or harmful. What is scary is that political activists are grasping at power by overstepping into the lives of Texas families and education of students,” Benavidez said. “While politicians use hate speech that is far from center to harm our vulnerable youth, we will continue to love our children and make sure that all families are uplifted in public life.”

Look, we know Dan Patrick means what he says when he says crap like this. He hates LGBTQ people, and he’s going to do everything he can to make their lives miserable, especially now that he’s seeing other states do things that Texas doesn’t do. We can either vote him out, or we can watch him do what he says he’s going do. Not much else to say about it.

Hispanic Policy Foundation: Abbott 50, Beto 42

Apr 8th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

More poll data.

In the November 2022 gubernatorial election, Greg Abbott leads Beto O’Rourke by 8% (50% to 42%) among likely voters and by 12% (53% to 41%) among the most likely (almost certain) voters. Among both groups, Libertarian Mark Tippetts registers 2% and the Green Party’s Delilah Barrios 1%, with 5% and 3% undecided.

Abbott enjoys a two to one advantage over O’Rourke among white voters (65% to 29%) and O’Rourke an 88% to 11% advantage among Black voters. Support is more
equal among Hispanic voters, 53% intend to vote for O’Rourke and 39% for Abbott.

Abbott bests O’Rourke among men by a substantial 61% to 34% margin, while O’Rourke narrowly edges out Abbott among women by a 47% to 45% margin.

Abbott (96%) and O’Rourke (93%) are the preferred candidates among their fellow Republicans and Democrats, while 4% of Democrats intend to vote for Abbott and
1% of Republicans for O’Rourke. Independents favor Abbott 51% to 19%.

[…]

In the November lieutenant governor election, Dan Patrick leads [Mike] Collier by 6% (49% to 43%) and [Michelle] Beckley by 8% (50% to 42%) among likely voters and leads Collier by 10% (52% to 42%) and Beckley by 13% (53% to 40%) among the most likely voters.

[…]

In the November attorney general election, [Ken] Paxton leads [Rochelle] Garza and [Joe] Jaworski by 6% (48% to 42%) and 7% (48% to 41%) respectively among likely voters and by 10% (50% to 40%) and 12% (51% to 39%) among the most likely voters.

In the November attorney general election, [George P.] Bush is in statistical dead heat with both Garza and Jaworski both among likely voters (39% to 39% against Garza and 38% to 39% against Jaworski) and among the most likely voters (39% to 38% against Garza and 38% to 38% against Jaworski).

In a general election against Garza and Jaworski, Paxton’s vote intention among Texans whose partisan ID is Republican is 91% and 92%. In a general election against these same two Democrats, Bush’s GOP vote intention is 68% in both cases. The vote intention for Libertarian candidate Mark Ash is 3% when Paxton is the GOP attorney general candidate, but rises to 7% and 8% when Bush is the nominee.

In a November generic U.S. House ballot, the Republican candidate leads the Democratic candidate by a 7% margin (49% to 42%) among likely voters and by a 12% margin (52% to 40%) among the most likely voters.

In November, the HPF had Abbott up over Beto by a 44-43 margin. I’d account for the increase in Abbott’s support as one part being past the primaries – as we’ve seen before, sometimes supporters of a primary opponent will be a “don’t know/no answer” response in a poll, which gets converted later to supporting the party’s nominee – and one part the general enthusiasm gap that exists now. Beto’s level of support was largely the same, so at least we have that going for us. The other races are similar, which is a little odd as there’s usually a larger “don’t know/no answer” contingent in them. Not sure if that’s a result of the HPF’s likely voter screen or just an unusual level of engagement among the respondents. Oh, and I consider that “Most Likely Voters” bit to be meaningless.

The poll also suggests that Mike Collier, Rochelle Garza, and Ken Paxton are all well-positioned to win their runoffs. Primary polling, especially primary runoff polling, is a dicey proposition, but they’re projecting the March leaders in each case, so it’s not a crazy idea. This poll result is obviously less favorable than the recent Lyceum poll result, which has been prominently touted in multiple fundraising emails lately, but that’s why we don’t put too much emphasis on any one poll. You have to track them all as best you can, and to that end let me cite the Reform Austin poll tracker, which showed me a couple of results I hadn’t seen before. Feels like we’re entering another polling cycle, so let’s see what we get.

Can Beto legalize pot?

Mar 16th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

He’s gonna try. It’s not entirely up to him, though.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke is making Texans a promise: If they elect him as governor, he’ll legalize marijuana.

Shortly after his resounding victory in Tuesday night’s primary, O’Rourke asked a crowd of supporters in Fort Worth: “Don’t you think it’s time we legalize marijuana in the state of Texas? I do too. We can get that done.”

He reiterated his position again on Twitter in the days following.

The issue could come up often on the campaign trail later this year, as O’Rourke prepares for a face-off against Gov. Greg Abbott in November. Abbott, a Republican, has only gone as far as to suggest the drug should be decriminalized.

[…]

The November general election is widely expected to benefit Republicans, and Abbott is the favorite in the gubernatorial contest. But if O’Rourke pulled off an upset, he’d still have to work with the conservative state Legislature — including [Lt. Gov. Dan] Patrick, potentially — on any proposals.

A June 2021 poll by the University of Texas at Austin found that 60 percent of Texans believe possession of small or large amounts of marijuana for any purpose should be legal.

Another 27 percent said the drug should only be allowed for medical purposes, and 13 percent said it should be outlawed entirely.

The story correctly notes that Dan Patrick is the main obstacle to any pot decriminalization/legalization bills passing, though in a world where Beto gets elected Governor, it seems likely to me that Patrick would also lose. (Pause for a moment to enjoy the thought.) He’d still definitely face a Republican Senate and very likely a Republican House, and it would be up to them to pass a bill that he could sign. Beto is correct to note that Republicans like weed too, but that is not the same as saying that a Republican legislature will be willing to give the first Democratic governor in almost 30 years a signature win on an item he campaigned on. I mean, I’m old enough to remember when Republicans liked the idea of a market-based private-insurance national health care law, and we know how that went.

I think if we get to that point Beto can certainly use the pot issue as a means of applying pressure on the Republicans, and it might serve as leverage for cutting a deal. I wouldn’t rule anything out now, but in the absence of a Dem trifecta, which we emphatically will not get, everything will be deeply politicized, and whatever people (especially Republicans) are for or against now doesn’t matter once Governor Beto makes an issue of it. Let’s hope we get to have that fight, but do keep some perspective about it. Reform Austin has more.

The Dem runoff for AG is not fully settled

Mar 6th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
7 comments

First place in the Democratic primary for Attorney General went to Rochelle Garza. Second place is still somewhat of a question.

Rochelle Garza

Two days after election day in the March primary, the Democratic race for attorney general is still not settled.

By Tuesday night, it was clear that Rochelle Garza, a former American Civil Liberties Union lawyer from Brownsville, was the clear front-runner in the race, but she did not garner enough support to avoid a May runoff. Joe Jaworski, an attorney and former Galveston mayor, was in a tight battle with civil rights lawyer Lee Merritt for second place, with Jaworski in the lead but only a few thousand votes separating the two.

Early Wednesday morning, Garza celebrated her showing, thanking voters for their support. She did not mention the runoff and instead turned her sights to Republican incumbent Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is headed into his own runoff against Land Commissioner George P. Bush.

“I got in this race to fight for Texas families, protect voting & reproductive rights and hold corporations and bad actors to account when they take advantage of Texans,” Garza said in a statement. “Indicted Ken Paxton is the most corrupt Attorney General in the country and our campaign is ready to defeat him this November.”

Merritt said Wednesday afternoon that the “race is not over” and was waiting for all the votes to be counted. He said the delayed results showed “flaws in our election system” that led to mistrust, confusion and people being discouraged from voting.

“Our campaign is eagerly watching and waiting along with the rest of the state and the country to see the results of this election,” he said in a statement.

By Thursday, the secretary of state’s website said all polling locations in the state had reported. But some mail-in ballots and provisional ballots can still be tabulated. Jaworski still held a slim lead over Merritt.

On Thursday, Jaworski tweeted cheerily that he was still in second place and was “exhibiting Olympian patience” in waiting for final results.

“Let’s get another cup of coffee while we wait,” he said. “Onward!”

Meanwhile, Mike Fields, who placed a distant fourth, congratulated Garza and said she was “the preferred choice of the majority of Democratic primary voters,” garnering more than twice the votes of her nearest competitor. He then asked Jaworski and Merritt to forgo a runoff and allow Garza to focus her attention on winning the general election in November.

First, Garza received 432,212 votes out of just over one million cast. Jaworski is second with 196,463, while Merritt has 195,045. That’s a difference of 1,418 votes, and 0.14 percentage points. It’s a small margin, but I think it’s highly unlikely that any combination of provisional ballots, overseas ballots, and mail ballots that can still be corrected for incorrect voter ID information could put Merritt ahead. There may not be enough votes left in play for it to be mathematically possible, and even if there is he’d have to win such an overwhelming number of them that it’s virtually impossible. This is why so few elections are truly in doubt once the Election Day votes are counted. There just isn’t enough slack for the difference to be made up.

As for Fields’ suggestion that Jaworski and Merritt drop out so Garza can begin her general election campaign, there is an argument for that. She needs to raise a bunch of money, and it would be better to have most of it for November. Of course, money spent on organizing and voter outreach now, for the runoff, is still a good investment. One could also argue that she’ll get more attention over the next two months as the frontrunner in the runoff than she would as the nominee, especially with Paxton himself in a runoff. I’m agnostic on the question, but it doesn’t really matter since neither Jaworski nor Merritt seems inclined to take that advice.

But as noted, one can make a reasonable case for Garza’s path to be cleared. This is much more of a stretch.

State Rep. Michelle Beckley forced a runoff in the Democratic race for lieutenant governor — and now she’s calling on her opponent, Houston accountant Mike Collier, to end his campaign.

“He doesn’t inspire the base,” Beckley, of Carrollton, said in an interview Thursday. “He should drop out.”

Collier was the 2018 Democratic nominee for the post and came within 5 points of unseating Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick that year. He earned about 42 percent of the vote in Tuesday night’s election, followed by Beckley at 30 percent.

A third candidate, Houston educator Carla Brailey, came in just behind at 28 percent, according to unofficial results. Patrick, who is seeking his third term in Texas’ No. 2 spot, sailed to victory in the Republican primary.

Collier says he has no intention of dropping out, and the two will face off in a May runoff election.

“Our campaign is building a diverse coalition around the issues that matter to Texans — protecting our individual rights, fully funding our public education system, fixing the damn grid, expanding Medicaid — and working together to defeat Dan Patrick,” Collier said.

[…]

Collier has two statewide elections under his belt: the lieutenant governor’s race four years ago and a bid for state comptroller before that. His campaign has a massive funding advantage, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in the lead-up to the primary.

As of Feb. 22, his campaign had about $120,000 on hand to Beckley’s $9,000. Collier has raised nearly $2 million since announcing his run last year, though his campaign is bogged down by about $450,000 in outstanding loans — a holdover from the 2018 race that he’d given to himself.

For Collier, the lead-up to the May runoff will focus on digital campaigns and travel across the state, starting with a visit to North Texas on Monday. His campaign also announced a number of new endorsements on Thursday, including three members of Congress — Reps. Veronica Escobar, Lizzie Fletcher and Lloyd Doggett — and a slate of Houston-area politicians who had previously endorsed Brailey.

Seems a bit presumptuous to me. Collier is reasonably well known among Dems, he did quite respectably well in 2018, he’s done decently in fundraising, and well, he got the most votes this past Tuesday. Maybe he’s not “inspiring”, whatever that may mean, but if so I’d say it’s on Beckley to demonstrate that she’s more so than he is. That’s what the runoff is for.

Oklahoma’s experience with medical marijuana

Mar 4th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

A good read.

Inside an old metal building off a quiet stretch of U.S. 77, Josh Blevins walked among rows of fragrant marijuana plants basking below carefully calibrated light. Blevins, a former construction engineer from Texas, bought this former scrap yard just north of the farming town of Lexington, population 2,200, after a statewide ballot initiative legalized medical marijuana about four years ago.

Since then, dispensaries have become as ubiquitous as gas stations and churches in much of Oklahoma, where state officials have licensed more than 12,000 marijuana-related businesses and about 1 in 10 people now own medical marijuana cards.

Blevins, 36, has capitalized on the boom, building another 10,000-square-foot warehouse and brand new office space just down the road from the former scrap yard. Like many commercial growers, he created his own supply chain from seed to sale, stocking the shelves of his two dispensaries — both named Twister Roo — in Moore and Noble. It has proven to be both profitable and a learning opportunity, Blevins said, as he eyes expansion to other states with upcoming marijuana ballot initiatives.

“What we’re doing here is kind of building the picture that we want to duplicate in other states,” Blevins said. “Just copy and paste.”

But while Oklahoma has become a kind of nirvana for growers and producers, who enjoy a relatively low startup cost in comparison to other states, it has some lawmakers leery because of lax regulation. Officials with the overwhelmed Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority said they’ve been able to inspect only a quarter of licensed marijuana businesses so far.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, said during his State of the State address on Tuesday that voters were misled by the language on the 2018 ballot initiative and it has “tied our hands as we regulate the industry.”

“This is causing major problems in our communities,” he added, “and we must get it under control.”

Stitt said the relatively low cost of getting a business license and the lack of a cap on the number of growers has fueled a black market in Oklahoma that may require legislation to reform.

“While we can’t change the past, we can learn from it and improve our future,” Stitt said. “We’re getting the right leaders in place and untying their hands to enforce the laws.”

[…]

The state presented a rare opportunity for legalization in 2018, when medical marijuana backers garnered enough signatures to put one of the most accessible medical marijuana initiatives in the country on the ballot, bypassing the conservative Legislature. The result: It costs $2,500 to apply for a business, cultivation or transportation license in Oklahoma — compared to $100,000 or more in neighboring Arkansas.

“This is a system that is set up to basically create opportunities for small businesses,” said Morgan Fox, the political director of NORML, a national cannabis advocacy organization. “There’s a lot of room for people to start up businesses without a tremendous amount of capital.”

Lured by the state’s low fees and relative lack of regulation, Paulie Wood, a former California grower and the CEO of Kannabiz Monkeeyz, said he decided to close his West Coast operations about two years ago because of the “insane overtaxation” hampering his business.

In California, he paid more than $100,000 a year in state and local taxes to operate two cultivation sites even after one outdoor crop was destroyed by smoke and ash following the Oak Fire in Mendocino County in September 2020. He pays a fraction of that cost in Oklahoma.

“In Oklahoma you can literally start a grow for under $10,000, where in California you’re going to be out hundreds of thousands of dollars to just get started,” Wood said. “They call it the wild, wild west of cannabis in a good way. As a whole, it’s the nicest, friendliest state we could ever want to be in.”

Oklahoma is also friendly toward people trying to get medical marijuana cards, which cost only $120 for the application fee, plus a doctor’s visit. While some states have very specific and restrictive lists of conditions that qualify for a card, such as AIDS and cancer, Oklahoma’s list is relatively expansive and includes less severe medical issues, including anxiety, insomnia and muscle spasms.

But now, a battle is brewing in Oklahoma between advocates who want to expand the industry and opponents who are trying to rein it in. In the legislative session starting next month, state lawmakers hope to play catch-up and introduce new restrictions on growers and processors amid renewed efforts by groups hoping to pass another ballot initiative, this time for full legalization.

Oklahoma’s growing medical marijuana market has been lucrative for the state, generating nearly $150 million in revenue in 2021, up from nearly $128 million in 2020, according to state data.

The Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority, which has almost doubled its staff in the past year, is still struggling to get inspectors to all of the licensees, said Adria Berry, the agency’s executive director. “We have not been able to keep up with the demand, but we are getting to the place where we’re able to get many more people out inspecting those places on a day-to-day basis.”

The Oklahoma law says medical card holders must be in-state residents, but Blevins and other growers said much of the demand for their product is coming from out of state, in places like Texas — where possession of marijuana largely remains illegal — and Kansas, another deeply conservative state that is in line to legalize medical marijuana. That high demand has driven down prices, Blevins said, to about a third of what they were when he started in 2018.

“Now they’re so much cheaper than the black market, and they can be bought and sold for profit,” he said.

A few thoughts…

1. The fact that the medical marijuana regime approved by Oklahoma’s voters is extremely appealing to both growers and users because of low costs and lax regulation, and also kind of a nightmare for the state government because of those lax regulations, is probably the most Oklahoma thing about this.

2. That $150 million in revenue generated for the state by the new marijuana industry may sound like a lot, but it would represent less than 0.1% of Texas’ annual revenue, which is to say a rounding error. Texas’ economy is a lot larger than Oklahoma’s, but even then that $150 million would represent about 1% of that state’s annual revenue. (Here’s a more recent number, which isn’t much different.) Adding legal pot to the economy may do a lot of beneficial things, but it’s not going to help fund the state government in any substantial way.

3. Along those lines, this is a reminder that Oklahoma also has casinos. Which also would not generate much revenue for the state of Texas if we had them, though legalizing them here would shift some funds that currently go out of state back to here. You can support or oppose casinos and marijuana as you see fit – I’m strongly for marijuana legalization, and at best ambivalent about casinos – the economic arguments just aren’t that compelling.

4. The article contains the standard bit of optimism about the future potential for expanding access to marijuana in Texas, citing public opinion polls and some recent mumblings by Greg Abbott that are sort of vaguely in favor of something. It therefore makes the classic error of completely ignoring (or being unaware of) Dan Patrick’s implacable opposition to loosening marijuana laws, which renders those two items useless. When Dan Patrick is no longer Lt. Governor, we can talk about how expanded access to marijuana might play out. Until then, it’s a dead letter.

That’s all I got. Link via the Current.

2022 primary results: Statewide

Mar 2nd, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

That didn’t take long:

Literally one minute after polls would have closed in El Paso. You can’t report any earlier than that. With the first very early batch of results posted on the SOS website, Beto was at 92.82% of the vote, so even though maybe ten percent of the votes had been counted, this seems like a pretty safe call.

Greg Abbott was cruising as well, with just under 70% in very early returns. The Trib says his race was called at the same time; I didn’t see anything on Twitter, but you know how that can go. At least one of his opponents was preparing to concede right out of the gate. Both Huffines and West were in the 10-12% range early on, which makes their attention-to-performance ratio pretty much a “division by zero” error.

Susan Hays was headed for a decisive win for Ag Commissioner on the Dem side, starting out with about 85% of the vote. All of the other Dem statewides look like they’re headed for runoffs. Mike Collier, Rochelle Garza, and Janet Dudding were the clear early leaders for Lite Guv, AG, and Comptroller. The Land Commissioner race was more jumbled, with Sandragrace Martinez and Jay Kleberg the initial frontrunners.

On the Republican side, Dan Patrick and Glenn Hegar easily turned away nominal opposition, while the crook Sid Miller was close to 60% against more substantial opposition. Ken Paxton and Wayne Christian were leading for AG and Railroad Commissioner, but both were in the low-to-mid 40s early on. Dawn Buckingham was at about 45% with three opponents who might be the one to face her in a runoff in the 12-15 percent range. Two Supreme Court incumbents, Evan Young (appointed to replace Eva Guzman) and Scott Walker, were in the mid-to-upper 50s against single opponents.

I found the Trib‘s results page to be faster than the SOS, and it had both Dems and GOP on one page. The only other matter of interest here for now is total turnout. I’m not going to get a handle on that before I go to bed, so let’s put that in the to-be-followed-up file.

DMN/UT-Tyler: Abbott 45, Beto 38

Feb 22nd, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

From the DMN, via another source that I can get to.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is leading former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (R-Texas) by 7 points in a new poll tracking November’s gubernatorial race.

The survey, conducted by The Dallas Morning News and University of Texas at Tyler, found that in a race between Abbott and O’Rourke, 45 percent of registered voters polled would support the incumbent governor, while 38 percent would vote for the former congressman.

Sixteen percent of respondents said they would vote for someone else, and 1 percent said they remain unsure.

Abbott received a greater share of support among independents at 36 percent to 29 percent.

The survey, conducted between Feb. 8 and Feb. 15, comes roughly nine months before Texans will head to the polls to vote for the next chief executive of the Lone Star State.

[…]

Sixty percent of registered voters polled said they plan to support Abbott in the GOP primary. No other candidate polled double digits. Former Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) came in second with seven percent support.

Fifteen percent of respondents, however, said they do not know who they plan to vote for.

A similar situation emerged on the Democratic side. O’Rourke is dominating the field with 68 percent support among primary candidates in the new poll, with no other candidate securing more than five percent. Former Austin public-radio journalist Joy Diaz polled second with four percent support.

Fourteen percent of respondents, however, do not yet know who they will vote for in the primary.

Poll data is here. They have Dan Patrick at 54% in his primary, with 31% “don’t know” and all of the no-names in low single digits. They also have Ken Paxton at only 39%, with P Bush trailing at 25%, but you know my mantra – don’t put much stock in primary polling. That said, for what it’s worth, only 16% of respondents in the GOP AG primary poll said they didn’t know who they were voting for. The polls for Dem Lite Guv showed everyone with low totals and no clear advantage, while Rochelle Garza was ever so slightly ahead for the Dem AG race, though “ahead” at 22%, with Joe Jaworski at 13%, doesn’t really mean much.

One month ago, the DMN/UT-Tyler poll ad the race at 47-36 for Abbott, and before that at 45-39. This is kind of a goofy polling outfit, but so far at least they’ve been pretty consistent. As noted in that post, there was also a UH Hobby School poll that was mostly about the primaries but also had the Abbott-Beto general election matchup at 45-40. The February UT-Trib poll had Abbott up 47-37.

I saw this on Friday and now have no idea where the link came from, but a group called Climate Nexus did a poll that was mostly about climate change and green energy, but it also included a question about Biden’s approval rating (40-56, very much in line with others) and an Abbott-Beto question (45-40 for Abbott). You can see the poll data here – that link should take you to the last page, where the general election question was. I really need to start tracking these things on the sidebar. Put it on my to-do list for this week, I guess.

2022 primary early voting, Day Four: Dan Patrick contributes to the mail ballot problem

Feb 18th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
7 comments

This fucking guy, I swear to God.

Thousands of applications for mail-in ballots submitted by Texas voters have been delayed — and some voters may ultimately not receive ballots — because Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s campaign instructed eligible voters to send requests for absentee ballots to the Texas secretary of state’s office instead of their local elections offices.

A mass mailing by Patrick went out to Republican voters across the state in January, ahead of the March primary, and included a two-page letter emblazoned with the seal of his office encouraging voters to submit the requests following “three easy steps.” The problem was the third step, which instructed voters to return the applications in an enclosed reply envelope that was addressed to the state.

The lieutenant governor’s campaign said it used the secretary of state’s address because “many Republican voters are rightly suspicious of Blue County election officials.”

“The decision to direct return mail to the Secretary of State (SOS), someone who is trusted and respected, gave voters an added layer of comfort,” Allen Blakemore, a campaign consultant for Patrick, wrote in an email.

But the campaign’s approach forced the secretary of state, which had a stated policy of rejecting applications erroneously sent its way, to sort and forward the Patrick-inspired forms to the counties where they should have been sent originally.

The delayed delivery could put voters’ requests for mail-in ballots at risk as counties continue to see higher-than-normal rejection rates of applications under new ID requirements enacted by Republicans last year. Any issues with defective applications must be resolved by Friday so voters can receive a mail-in ballot.

State workers have been forwarding the waylaid applications to respective counties, which this week were still receiving packages containing hundreds of misdirected applications.

The fiasco has further muddled the first election held since Patrick, as head of the state Senate, presided over last year’s passage of new laws tightening voting processes, including a measure making it a crime for local election officials to send out applications for mail-in ballots to people who did not request them.

“Everyone age 65 and older has earned the right to vote early by mail. As Republicans, we have fought to make it easier to vote while protecting election integrity, so we need to make sure we increase our turnout by taking full advantage of this convenient and secure voting option,” Patrick wrote in a letter dated Jan. 20 that was attached with the applications.

Though the letter contains the official state seal for the lieutenant governor, as allowed by law, the materials were labeled as being sent out by Patrick’s campaign and not at taxpayer expense.

[…]

The full scale of Patrick’s mailing efforts is unclear; his campaign did not answer a question about the reach of the mailings. But the secretary of state’s office previously told some county officials that it had received at least two pallets of applications, and some local election officials have indicated they were receiving hundreds of delayed applications.

“The SOS has always accepted ABBMs and quickly and efficiently routed them to the proper local offices,” Blakemore said, referring to applications for a ballot by mail. “We believe that this will ensure that Blue County election officials are more likely to properly handle our ABBMs when they know they are being watched and monitored by the SOS.”

In an email responding to questions about the misdirected applications, a spokesperson for the Texas secretary of state did not address the mailing campaign by the lieutenant governor.

“Generally speaking, we request that voters do not mail, fax, or email completed applications for Ballot by Mail to the Secretary of State Office,” wrote Sam Taylor, the spokesperson, noting that the office would forward applications to early voting clerks “as a courtesy to help the voter.”

“It is not the voter’s fault if a third party put the incorrect return address on an ABBM, so we want to ensure voters are not adversely affected by that,” Taylor said.

This appears to be a departure from the office’s previous stance on applications wrongly sent to its office. The secretary of state’s website previously warned voters against sending applications to its office, noting that “all applications received by this office will be rejected.” That language was removed from the website at the beginning of the month, according to a screenshot of the same page archived by the Wayback Machine.

Be the chaos you want to see in the world, I guess. It would serve a lot of people right if a ton of these folks did not get their mail ballots, or received them late enough to not be able to send them in on time, but we all know that Patrick would tout that as proof of the perfidy and incompetence of “blue county” administrators, and his brain-addled followers would believe him. It’s enough to make you want to rip a phone book in half. The Chron has more.

There’s only so much I can do about the toddler-like behavior of our Lt. Governor, and apologies to all the well-behaved toddlers out there who don’t deserve that analogy. Let’s go to the daily EV totals. Here are your Day Four early voting totals. The table for comparison:


Election    Mail   Early   Total
================================
2018 D     8,844  16,160  25,004
2018 R    12,530  16,053  28,583

2020 D    15,101  25,260  40,361
2020 R    16,428  24,785  41,313

2022 D     5,412  18,571  23,983
2022 R     3,419  23,599  27,018

As a reminder, 2018 final totals are here, and 2020 final totals are here. At this point, Republicans continued to lead in 2018 and nudged ahead in 2020 because of more mail ballots being returned. It all makes your head spin a little.

I should note that four days’ worth of early voting in both 2018 and 2020 took us through Friday of the first week in each case, because that’s when Presidents Day was those years. Because of that, and not wanting to compare weekend days to weekdays, I’ll put this on pause until Tuesday, when the calendar days finally match up to the early voting days. Try to cope in the meantime. And get out there and vote. I did my usual bike ride to the West End MultiService Center, which is both convenient to me and generally has no lines. They also had two scanners for the paper receipts, which makes me feel better for ensuring that this part of the process won’t bog down. How were things where you voted?

Houston’s preparations for the next freeze

Feb 17th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

We learned from the experience, which I hope will serve us well for the next time.

The grid’s near collapse last February had drastic consequences for local governments, none more acute than the challenge water systems confronted in trying to keep taps flowing without power. In Houston, the outages and difficulties with back-up generators resulted in a four-day boil-water notice. In Texas, providers to nearly two-thirds of the population were unable to send clean water to customers.

Public Works has done test runs, called “black starts,” for years at its main water plants, but now has expanded the practice to eight other critical facilities. The department also has provided CenterPoint with an updated list of critical infrastructure, hired new contractors for generator maintenance at pump stations, pursued an $8 million grant for wastewater plant generators, stocked up on chemicals to treat water and roadways and drafted protocols to distribute bottled water.

“We are more prepared than a year ago, but still not as prepared as we want to be and need to be,” said Mayor Sylvester Turner, who has managed responses to seven federally declared disasters in his six-year tenure. “It’s a constant work in progress.”

During the freeze, workers scrambled to fix generators, maintain pressure in the system, and account for chlorine shortages and spare supplies of bottled water.

The prolonged power outages proved more daunting than those in Hurricane Harvey or any other event of the last 15 years, said Drew Molly, who leads drinking water operations for Public Works.

“This one took the prize. This was a bad situation,” Molly said. “As rough as it was, I think there’s some things … that are going to make Houston more resilient going forward.”

The most substantial generator failure in the city’s network occurred at the northeast plant, where machines tripped offline during the switch to back-up power and led to an hours-long outage. Molly said Public Works is working on a procedure to proactively switch to generators before the power goes out to avoid that scenario in future storms, though it may require state approval.

[…]

John C. Tracy, director of the Texas Water Resources Institute at Texas A&M, said those kinds of common-sense adjustments often are the most prudent system upgrades after severe events.

“You cannot prevent this from happening, all you can do is prepare and respond,” Tracy said.

Texas should include the risk of weather events like hurricanes and winter storms in its water plan, drafted every five years to address the state’s water needs. Currently, it only accounts for droughts, Tracy said. The change could help make billions of dollars available to cities and water authorities for a broader array of projects through what is called the State Water Implementation Fund for Texas, which provides low-cost financing to help communities develop water infrastructure.

You can read the rest to see more about what the city is doing – Harris County has a more limited role since the county doesn’t manage a water system – and overall it seems like they’re doing sensible things. You don’t really know until you’re actually tested, but doing good prep and some regular drills and simulations should help.

Of greater interest to me is the bit in that last paragraph about the use of SWIFT funds. The House passed a bill last spring that would have done exactly that, made $2 billion available from that fund for weatherization projects. That sounds like a decent idea, but the bill (and an accompanying joint resolution for a constitutional amendment, which I presume was necessary because SWIFT was established via amendment) was never taken up in the Senate. You remember all that talk from Greg Abbott about how everything is now peachy with the electric grid? This is exactly the sort of thing that could have been done to improve things, but it wasn’t. You tell me why this didn’t happen, or better yet have Dan Patrick tell me, because this died without a peep in the Senate, and that’s his fiefdom.

By the way, the last I’d heard of SWIFT since the 2013 referendum vote was in 2017 following Hurricane Harvey, when there was briefly some talk about tapping into SWIFT funds for flood mitigation projects. Far as I can tell, that went nowhere as well, though it’s possible that federal relief funds obviated the need for it. I don’t know enough to say one way or the other. What I do know is that I have no idea how SWIFT has been used since it was set up in 2013, which sure seems less than optimal to me. Some dashboards and a searchable database, that’s all I’m asking here.

Republican incumbents are probably going to win their primaries

Feb 15th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Take all primary polls with a grain of salt because polling in primaries is especially tricky. That said, here’s the most recent UT/Texas Tribune polling on the primaries, which also includes a general election gubernatorial matchup.

Republican incumbents in statewide office have significant leads in their upcoming primary races enroute to reelection, and Democrats are still struggling to boost public recognition of their candidates beyond the top of the ticket, according to a poll released Monday by the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas Politics Project.

The poll of 1,200 registered voters illustrates the significant advantage that Republican incumbents hold within their party after leaning further to the right during the state legislative sessions last year. Additionally, the poll found that surveyed voters were divided on GOP-touted issues like removing books from public school libraries, parental influence in education and restrictive laws on abortion.

Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Attorney General Ken Paxton are head and shoulders above their competition in the Republican primaries, according to the responses from the 41% of surveyed voters who said they would vote in the Republican primary. Paxton, who is the most likely of the three to be pulled into a runoff, faces the most significant competition in his race.

On the Democratic side, former presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke was the choice for governor of 93% of the polled voters who said they would vote in the Democratic primary. But below O’Rourke on the ticket, a majority of voters said they had not thought enough about the down-ballot Democratic primaries to make an immediate choice between candidates, a sign that the party still has significant work to do to introduce its candidates to voters and disrupt the longtime Republican hold on the state.

In a hypothetical matchup right now between O’Rourke and Abbott — the leading primary candidates in their respective parties — the poll found that Abbott would win the race for the governor’s mansion 47%-37%. The 10-point predicted victory nearly matches the result of a 9-point win for Abbott when the same question was asked in a UT/Texas Tribune poll from November.

Joshua Blank, research director for the Texas Politics Project at UT, said that it’s unlikely that either Abbott or O’Rourke will be able to mobilize partisans on the other side to vote for them in the current political environment. But given recent election results in Texas that have seen Democrats lose by margins smaller than 10 points, Blank said there is still potential for a shift in public opinion — either toward Abbott and O’Rourke — over the next couple of months leading into the general election.

“Looking at previous election cycles and knowing about O’Rourke’s ability to fundraise and generate earned media, I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that he’s not likely to chip away at that 10-point deficit,” Blank said. “The question just becomes: How much can he chip away at it?”

O’Rourke has an overwhelming lead in the Democratic primary with the support of 93% of polled voters. No other candidate received more than 2%.

Abbott is up against two challengers from his right — former state Sen. Don Huffines and former Texas Republican Party Chair Allen West. In the poll, Abbott received the support of 60% of the respondents who said they’ll participate in the Republican primary, while West and Huffines received 15% and 14%, respectively.

[…]

Forty-seven percent of likely voters said they would pick Paxton, 21% picked Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, 16% picked former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman and 15% picked U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tyler. The hotly contested battle has spotlighted both ethics and commitment to conservatism, with many of the challengers criticizing Paxton’s legal expertise in their bid to become the state government’s top lawyer.

Blank said that while Paxton has a slimmer poll lead than Abbott or Patrick, the conservative base that he has cultivated during his time in office has made him popular among the Republican primary electorate, which tends to lean further to the right than the broader conservative electorate.

“The fact that, despite all the troubles [Paxton is] facing legally and the presence of three high-quality challengers, he still finds himself close to the 50% threshold is a testament to his strength amongst the Republican primary electorate,” Blank said. “Bush and Guzman are explicitly in the race because of concerns about Paxton’s electability in the general election should he face further legal troubles. They see Paxton as wounded.”

Dan Patrick got 82% of the vote in the poll for the Republican Lt. Governor primary, against opponents I’m pretty sure you can’t name without looking them up – I know I can’t. On the Democratic side, Mike Collier and Rochelle Garza led for Lt. Governor and AG, respectively, but both totals include a significant number of people whose initial response was that they didn’t think they knew enough to say. Like I said, take it with a grain of salt.

The poll data is here, and it has some questions about school library books, abortion, and voting access that add to the pile of data that says recent laws are farther to the right than the electorate at large, but as long as Republicans keep winning statewide there’s no reason to think that will change. As for the GOP primaries, I think Paxton may slip by without a runoff, but even if he doesn’t I’d expect him to win in overtime. And if there’s a higher power out there, he’ll be hearing from the FBI shortly thereafter. That’s my birthday wish, anyway.

Endorsement watch: Almost all of the big ones

Feb 14th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

The Sunday Chron was full of endorsements, which given the timing and the edition is what you’d expect. Most of them are not particularly remarkable, and I’m not going to spend any time on their recommendations for Beto and Mike Collier on the Democratic side, or Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, or Eva Guzman on the Republican side. Everyone except Collier is obvious, and Collier is both a good choice and the familiar one. Read them as you see fit, but I don’t expect you’ll take much away from them.

There were some other races with more interest, starting with the CD38 primary in which they tapped Duncan Klussman.

Duncan Klussman

Two years ago, Diana Martinez Alexander emerged as top vote-getter in a raucous six-member Democratic primary for a seat on the Harris County Commissioners Court. Now she’s asking party voters to entrust her with their hopes for picking up a seat in Congress, representing the new district Texas lawmakers created following the 2020 Census.

Alexander’s command of the issues facing the next Congress impressed us. So did her background as a teacher in HISD and fighter for causes near to the hearts of Democratic primary voters, as when she told us she’d make voting rights a top priority. “We have to make some progress in protecting our voting rights,” she said. “So that would be the number one priority, because we can’t have anything else if we don’t have a right to vote.”

But we believe it’s another candidate — former Spring Branch ISD superintendent Duncan Klussmann — who will give Democrats the best chance of winning in the fall.

When Texas lawmakers drew the new 38th Congressional District last year, they did so intending to give a Republican candidate the advantage, and the GOP primary field includes well-known and well-financed contenders. Democrats will need their strongest candidate to compete. Despite Alexander’s impressive showing in the March 3, 2020 primary, she lost the subsequent runoff to Michael Moore.

We believe Democrats stand the best chance in November with Klussmann, 58, on the ticket. His priorities are kitchen-table issues all voters worry about. He’d stress getting the supply chain moving, ensuring the Houston area gets federal support for flood mitigation and tackling rising inflation. “Some of us who were around in the 1970s remember when, when my parents were paying 12 percent, 14 percent interest on their mortgages,” he told us. “So we know how that can impact people’s lives.”

Coupled with his experience as superintendent for 18 years, Klussmann’s priorities could help him build broad consensus, something there is far too little of in Congress these days. But he knows fighting for the home team is important, too. He said he’d work to expand Medicaid for Texas and push universal pre-K.

My interview with Duncan Klussman is here and with Diana Martinez Alexander is here; as noted before, Centrell Reed declined the opportunity to be interviewed. Klussman is fine, well-qualified and knowledgeable, and can speak to the experience of being a former Republican, which can certainly be an asset. Lord knows, we’re going to need more people like that. If this election were in 1996, or even 2006, he’d be the strongest candidate on paper. I don’t know how much of an advantage his profile is now, given the shrinking number of crossover voters and potential for some Dem voters to be less enamored with that kind of centrism. I know and trust Diana Alexander and would be inclined to vote for her if I lived in CD38, but you have good options however you look at it.

One race I didn’t have a chance to get to was the SBOE4 race, which is an open seat as incumbent Lawrence Allen is running for HD26. The primary winner will be elected in November, and the Chron recommends Staci Childs.

Staci Childs

Voters have five options in the Democratic primary for the District 4 seat, but two candidates stood out to us as especially impressive.

Marvin Johnson, a former high school math teacher and chemical engineer who is a lecturer at North American University in Houston, had good ideas for how to improve schools, but he struggled with the narrow scope of authority granted to the state school board.

“What I see right now is not working,” he told us, adding that he was “disappointed” to learn how little say the SBOE has over how schools operate when he first filed to run. He’ll try to convince lawmakers and others to join his call to expand its responsibilities, should he be elected.

We’d rather see Democrats choose a candidate who promises to work full-time to improve school curriculum. We believe Staci Childs, a former teacher in Georgia, is that candidate. Though now a practicing attorney, she’s the founder of an education-related nonprofit called Girl Talk University.

We especially liked her ideas about how Texas’ use of TEKS standards — short for Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills — is failing some kids and their schools. Often, she said, all that stands between a student and knowing what’s required is a specific gap in their knowledge left unfilled from a previous grade. A quick effort to identify and bridge that gap can quickly allow them to come up to grade level and pass, without the stigma of being held back.

“I don’t want to say remedial, because that has a negative connotation,” Childs told us. “But we need a serious plan to address the TEKS, since … they do not address these learning gaps.”

I will come back to this race for the very likely runoff, as there are five candidates.

Finally, two judicial endorsements. One is for a challenger, Kim McTorry.

Kim McTorrey

Judge Greg Glass has decades of experience as a criminal lawyer in Harris County, but he’s fallen short of expectations on the 208th Criminal District Court bench. We recommend voters give his challenger, Kimberly McTorry, a defense attorney and former prosecutor, a chance to win the seat in the general election.

While we recognize how difficult bond decisions can be for judges, particularly when the right to bail is enshrined in the Texas Constitution, in the case of Deon Ledet, a twice-convicted ex-felon, it is clear Glass made an egregious mistake.

Prosecutors initially sought to have Ledet held without bail even though he hadn’t been charged with a capital crime, arguing he’d twice previously been convicted of a felony. A magistrate judge set bail at $40,000 initially; Glass subsequently agreed to a request from Ledet’s lawyers to reduce his bail to $20,000. Ledet immediately violated the terms of his pre-trial release, and when two Houston police officers showed up at Ledet’s home to serve an arrest warrant, he allegedly shot and killed Officer William Jeffrey.

Glass, 73, told the editorial board his decision to reduce Ledet’s bond was a mistake. “I really feel sorry for Officer Jeffrey’s family, it’s a horrible thing what happened,” Glass said. “If I could change it, I would.”

[…]

McTorry, 34, would bring a balanced perspective to the courtroom, having practiced on both sides of the docket. While she has only recently begun handling second-degree felonies as a defense attorney, we believe her trial experience as a Harris County prosecutor, where she handled thousands of felony and misdemeanor cases, makes up for that relative lack of experience.

“I believe in restorative justice, I believe in criminal justice reform, but I also believe that a judge should be equally as compassionate about the victims of crimes as they are about those who are accused of crimes,” McTorry told us.

My Q&A with Judge Glass is here. I have one in the queue for McTorry that will run tomorrow.

The Chron also went with an incumbent, Judge Frank Aguilar in the 228th Criminal District Court.

There are those who believe Judge Frank Aguilar of the 228th District Court in Harris County is too quick to side with prosecutors’ arguments in court. But in a county whose criminal court judiciary turned over en masse four years ago, and where concerns about rising crime and lax bond decisions are widespread, we aren’t persuaded that Democrats would be wise to part company with a judge in their party with a tough approach to crime. Whether Aguilar wins or his opponent criminal defense lawyer Sam Milledge II does, the party’s nominee can expect that question of how judges handle bond in violent cases to be central to the November general election.

Those considerations aside, however, we believe Democrats should vote for Aguilar, 64, because he’s spent his first term on the bench learning to be a better judge — training the voters have paid for. His docket clearance rate has been 99 percent for cases in the previous 90 days, about average for all judges, and 86 percent for the previous year, a little better than average. He has about 10 percent fewer cases pending than average.

My Q&A with Aguilar’s opponent Sam Milledge is here; I never got a response from Judge Aguilar. I find this endorsement a bit amusing, since they considered Aguilar the poster boy for why electing judges is bad, a sentiment they extended to after the election. Maybe all that gnashing of teeth was a bit over the top, eh? I know they have an all new crew doing these screenings now, but it still raises my eyebrows a bit that they didn’t come close to acknowledging their previous reservations about the incumbent.

So, as of the start of early voting, the Chron has managed to do nearly all of the endorsements they set their sights on. I haven’t tracked the Republican side closely, but on the Dem side the main omissions I see are Attorney General and five Criminal District Courts. I know they’re not doing county courts and JP races, I’m not sure if they’re doing civil/family/juvenile district court – if they are, add all of those to the tab. I’ve got judicial Q&As queued up through Friday; I don’t expect to receive any more responses at this point, but if I do I’ll add them in. Now go out there and vote.

Trib overview of the Democratic candidates for Lt Governor

Jan 31st, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

It’s a good field, I’ll be happy to support any of them, but boy do I wish they’d all raise more money.

Mike Collier

Three Democrats are facing off in the lieutenant governor primary for the chance to challenge a veritable Goliath in incumbent Dan Patrick.

While ideologically similar, their resumes are vastly different and candidates are campaigning on who brings the best experience to the table. But one thing is clear after last week’s deadline to disclose campaign donations for the last six months — even the strongest fundraiser of the bunch is wildly outmatched by Patrick’s war chest of $25 million.

Mike Collier, a 60-year-old accountant and auditor, who came within 5 percentage points of unseating Patrick four years ago, is so far leading the pack in fundraising with a haul of $826,862 over the last six months. Coming in second, Carla Brailey, an associate professor at Texas Southern University and the former vice chair of the Texas Democratic Party, raised a total of $39,490. She entered the race in mid-December.

Michelle Beckley, a small businesswoman who has served two terms as a state representative from Denton County, took in $32,386. She entered the race in mid-November.

Their combined total is still less than a third of Patrick’s nearly $3 million haul over the same six-month period. Patrick, a two-term incumbent who is one of the most conservative and well-known politicians in the state, will be expensive to compete with, especially for candidates with less name recognition.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think Dan Patrick’s name ID is an advantage for him. People know who he is, but that doesn’t mean they like him, or even that they feel vaguely positive about him. There’s a reason he came close to losing in 2018, and ran behind all of his fellow Republicans except Ted Cruz and Ken Paxton.

Carla Brailey

Brailey’s political experience stems from her time as vice chair of the state party and in the administration of former District of Columbia Mayor Adrian Fenty. She served in multiple roles under Fenty, including executive director of community affairs.

In 2019, she ran for Houston City Council but did not garner enough support to make the general election runoff.

Brailey, who is Black, is the only person of color in the race. She said her candidacy brings more voters to the table because she understands the experiences of voters of color and can bring them to the forefront.

“It brings experience in listening to other communities that may have not always been listened to or are listened to,” said Brailey, who added that she always seeks to advocate for marginalized communities in her work. “We get to hear their voice early.”

Brailey said her campaign priorities are affordable health care, public education, addressing the shortcomings of the state’s electric grid and the digital divide between poor and wealthy areas of the state.

Brailey said the state’s leaders have taken the state backward by passing laws like last year’s ban on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy and making it more difficult to vote.

“We’re in a very bad place in Texas and I really believe that our democracy is at stake,” she said. “Everything is big in Texas, and I think so goes Texas, goes the nation.”

[…]

Michelle Beckley

After flipping a Republican district in 2018, Beckley became a lightning rod for conservative criticism because of her support for issues like Medicaid expansion and her aggressive approach to politics.

Once in office, Beckley was vocally critical of what she saw as failures of the state’s GOP leaders and often feuded with Republican colleagues on social media.

Beckley has promised to bring that same combative approach to the role of lieutenant governor. She said Republicans have become too focused on controversial social issues like regulating which bathrooms transgender Texans can use and ignore real issues like the failure of the state’s electric grid, which resulted in hundreds of deaths last February.

“People are sick of that crap,” Beckley said. “People want what I represent: They want a functioning government.”

Even in a GOP-controlled Legislature in which she had a number of powerful enemies, Beckley said, she was able to pass one of her priorities last year when she tacked on to the Republicans’ elections bill a policy that will increase the number of counties that can apply for countywide voting programs.

Beckley said that legislative experience gives her an advantage over her opponents. She is the only candidate in the race to have been elected to public office and to serve in the Legislature.

I trust that my readers are generally familiar with Mike Collier, so I skipped his part of the story. You can listen to the interview I did with him in 2018 if you need a refresher. I have not yet made up my mind in this one. I was happy to see Collier announce his candidacy – he had an early start, which was also a positive – and under normal circumstances, I’d stick with the known quantity. But Carla Brailey and Michelle Beckley deserve consideration, and so they will get it. But again, whoever wins will be fine by me. And a billion times better than Dan Patrick.

Beto for legalizing weed

Jan 14th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
15 comments

I do think this is a winning campaign theme.

Beto O’Rourke

At a crowded rally in downtown Austin, Beto O’Rourke ticked off his usual laundry list of campaign promises: stabilizing the power grid, rolling back the state’s new permitless carry law and expanding health care access.

But the El Paso Democrat got some of the loudest cheers of the night when he promised to legalize marijuana in Texas, something he said “most of us, regardless of party, actually agree on.”

“I’ve been warned that this may or may not be a popular thing to say in Austin, Texas,” O’Rourke said to the crowd gathered in Republic Square Park in December. “But when I am governor, we are going to legalize marijuana.”

The support is nothing new for the gubernatorial candidate. O’Rourke has championed legalization efforts throughout his political career, ever since his time as a member of the El Paso city council. He also nodded at the policy throughout his failed campaigns for U.S. Senate and for president.

But in his early run for governor, O’Rourke, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has repeatedly mentioned legalizing marijuana on the campaign trail across Texas. Advocates hope the increased attention will give momentum to legalization efforts in a state with some of the harshest penalties and highest arrest rates for marijuana possession.

[…]

If O’Rourke becomes governor, his plans to legalize marijuana would face another set of hurdles in the form of the Texas Legislature, particularly Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who leads the state Senate.

After the House in April 2019 gave preliminary approval to a bill that would have reduced criminal penalties for Texans possessing small amounts of marijuana, Patrick declared the measure dead in the Senate.

There’s been some momentum for more progressive marijuana policies within Patrick’s party in recent sessions. In 2019, state Rep. Stephanie Klick, R-Fort Worth, and state Sen. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels, filed bills that would relax laws restricting medical cannabis access. Both of those reforms failed to become law. But Gov. Greg Abbott in May did sign a watered-down expansion of Texas’ medical marijuana program to include people with cancer and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Patrick did not comment for this story. In a previous statement to The Texas Tribune, a Patrick spokesperson said the lieutenant governor is “strongly opposed to weakening any laws against marijuana [and] remains wary of the various medicinal use proposals that could become a vehicle for expanding access to this drug.”

Abbott didn’t answer questions on his position regarding marijuana legalization.

Legalization advocates hope O’Rourke’s candidacy can move opinions among state leaders on relaxing marijuana restrictions.

“Hopefully with Beto O’Rourke presumably being the Democratic nominee, we can push the other candidates in the race to talk about this issue more, to come to the table and have a conversation about how these policies are having negative impacts on our state,” said Heather Fazio, director of Texans for Responsible Marijuana Policy.

Marijuana legalization draws some broad support across the state. According to a June 2021 University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll, 60% of Texas voters say at least a small amount of marijuana should be legal. That figure includes 73% of Democrats, 74% of independents and 43% of Republicans.

Mike Siegel, the co-founder of Ground Game Texas, a nonprofit focused on supporting progressive policies around “workers, wages, and weed,” said the issue is an opportunity for O’Rourke to reach independent or nonaligned voters.

“[Marijuana policy] is a major opportunity for [O’Rourke] to reach out to middle of the road, independent or nonaligned voters and even some Republican voters,” Siegel said. “A governor’s race that’s high-profile like the one that is coming up, where it could be Beto O’Rourke versus Greg Abbott, that’s the best opportunity to push these populist wedge issues.”

But Joshua Blank, research director for the Texas Politics Project at UT-Austin, said marijuana legalization isn’t a “terribly important issue” for voters on its own. Its political salience depends on the issues tied to the policy, he said, whether that is the economy, criminal justice system or health care.

As the story notes, this is a longstanding issue for Beto, going back to his days on El Paso City Council more than a decade ago as well as his time in Congress. I do think this is an issue that can move votes and motivate less reliable voters, though of course it has to be part of a bigger structure. I could see the overall message as being basically that Abbott is out of touch with what typical Texans want, with “not freezing to death because of massive power grid failures” being the first item on that list. Basically, how effective this will be as a campaign issue is largely what Beto can make of it. For now, I’m happy to see stories like this one.

The Lege will get worse before it gets better

Dec 18th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

I have three things to say about this.

More than two dozen members of the Texas Legislature are retiring or running for a different seat next year, creating a slew of vacancies that could push both chambers to become redder and more polarized by the time lawmakers reconvene in 2023.

Many of the outgoing members are center-right or establishment politicians with years of experience, opening up seats for younger and more ideologically extreme replacements. In many cases, their districts were redrawn to strengthen the GOP’s hold on the Legislature, eliminating all but a few of the battleground contests that tend to attract more moderate candidates.

Those changes, paired with new political maps that leave little opening for Democrats to gain ground in November, have laid the groundwork for an even more conservative Legislature, even as Republicans toast the 2021 legislative session as the most conservative in the state’s history.

“The tides are shifting again,” said state Rep. Dan Huberty, a moderate Republican from north Houston who is not seeking re-election. “You have different political leaders, and the constituency has a view of what they want. You’re going to see a shift. I would assume it’s going to be more conservative.”

The Capitol is also poised to lose some of its longest tenured legislators to retirement, draining “a generation of policy expertise” on areas such as health care, education, agriculture and the border, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. The average tenure of the departing members is 13 years.

We’ve covered this before. What distinguishes members like Dan Huberty and Chris Paddie and Lyle Larson and even otherwise crappy ones like James White is that they had policy chops, in at least one area, and took that part of legislating seriously. They were perfectly happy to vote for all of the destructive wingnut crap, and we should never forget that as we say nice things about their legislative experience, but the truth is that whoever survives the freak show primary to replace them will almost certainly be worse than they were. Until such time as Dems win a majority, or Republicans become collectively less sociopathic (whichever comes first), the Lege will become a worse place than it now is.

In 2011, Huberty was one of 37 mostly Republican freshmen in the Texas House — a mix of conservatives and moderates who rode the tea party wave into office, including three members who had served in the House previously, lost their seats and then gained them back that year.

By 2023, few of the moderate new members elected from that class will remain, with most of the remaining holdouts — including Huberty, John Frullo of Lubbock, Lyle Larson of San Antonio and Jim Murphy of Houston — declining to seek re-election next year.

We’ve discussed this before as well. What do all these members have in common? They will have served twelve years in the House, which makes them fully vested in the Lege’s pension plan. There may well be other reasons for their departures, and of course the first post-redistricting election is always an exodus, but I guarantee you that’s a factor.

In the Senate, [Sen. Eddie] Lucio’s seat could be the sole competitive race next year. The other open districts are solidly Republican, and those who are likely to replace the outgoing members are ideologically further right than their predecessors — or are, at least, closely allied with [Lt. Gov. Dan] Patrick, the leader of the upper chamber.

[Sen. Kel] Seliger was known for frequent fallouts with Patrick, defying him at times and blocking passage of priority bills. But state Rep. Phil King, the Weatherford Republican vying to replace him, has already earned Patrick’s stamp of approval.

[Sen. Larry] Taylor, one of the most moderate members of the Senate, is also poised to be replaced by a more conservative successor. Those running to replace him include [Rep. Mayes] Middleton and Robin Armstrong, a physician backed by Attorney General Ken Paxton, a tea party favorite. (Armstrong gained attention last year when he controversially administered hydroxychloroquine to COVID-19 patients at the Texas City nursing home where he works.)

We really need a better descriptor in these stories than “moderate”, which has lost all meaning in the post-Tea Party, post-Trump era. Kel Seliger is conservative in the way someone from the Reagan/Bush years would recognize the term. He’s also a legitimate work-across-the-aisle guy, and was maybe the last Senate Republican to not care about whatever Dan Patrick wants. You could fit a term like “iconoclast” or “maverick” to him if you had to, but he’s just a guy who was generally faithful to his political beliefs, and voted in what he believed was the best interest of his district. Which these days is pretty goddamned quaint. As for Taylor, look, he’s as down-the-line a Republican as there is. It’s true, he doesn’t spew conspiracy theories every five minutes, he’s not performatively nasty on Twitter, and as far as I know he eats his food with a knife and fork, and chews with his mouth closed. That makes him fit for human society, but it has nothing to do with how he votes or whether there’s an inch of distance between him and Dan Patrick. If that’s what we mean these days when we refer to a Republican legislator as “moderate”, can we please at least be honest about it?

Matthew Dowd drops Lt Gov bid

Dec 8th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Sensible.

Matthew Dowd

Matthew Dowd, a former George W. Bush political strategist who had launched a bid to be the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor in 2022, ended his campaign Tuesday, six days before the candidate filing deadline.

In a statement, Dowd, who is white, said he was dropping out of the race to make way for a more diverse field of candidates.

“When I first announced, the only other candidate was a white male Christian,” Dowd said, referring to fellow Democratic candidate Mike Collier. “A diverse field is now emerging in the Democratic primary for this office. I do not want to be the one who stands in the way of the greater diversity we need in politics.”

Collier and Dowd had been joined on the ballot by state Rep. Michelle Beckley, D-Carrollton, last month and Carla Brailey, vice chair of the Texas Democratic Party, has said she is considering a run for lieutenant governor. Brailey’s Facebook page on Tuesday teased “An important announcement is coming soon!”

In a statement, Beckley said she appreciated Dowd’s willingness to step back and let women compete for the seat. She said she welcomed Dowd and his supporters to join her campaign.

“Women have been underrepresented in politics for too long,” Beckley said. “The Democratic Party is a diverse party and a party that supports the goals and aspirations of women, and in stepping back, Dowd is showing his respect for voters.”

[…]

Dowd had focused on denouncing Patrick as a divisive figure who had failed to address the state’s core issues while pushing for controversial laws that loosened gun restrictions and restricted abortion and voting rights in the state. In his statement announcing the end of his campaign, Dowd said he’d continue to fight against Patrick.

“The GOP Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, has failed our state and harmed Texans,” he said. “He seeks to undermine important rights of our fellow citizens and must be defeated. I will do whatever I can to accomplish that end now as a Texan not running for office.”

Dowd said he would continue to be involved in politics and work to elect candidates for state and national office. He said he was converting his campaign committee to a general purpose committee to aid in that effort and would announce next steps in 2022.

See here, here, and here for some background, and here for Dowd’s statement. I was open-minded to Dowd’s candidacy, and definitely hopeful that a contested primary would raise the profile of whoever gets to run against Dan Patrick, but to be sure it was not really clear how Dowd was meaningfully different than Collier, other than the baggage he had as a former Dubya man. We still have a contested primary, with a broader field of candidates now, and this helps put it in the news for another day, so whatever else one may say, on that score Dowd has been an asset. If he continues to be an attack dog against Dan Patrick, so much the better. Reform Austin has more.

It’s the power grid, stupid

Dec 5th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

It’s also a campaign theme.

Texas Democrats want to talk about the power grid.

Specifically, they want to talk about how it failed in February, how they don’t think enough has been done to fix it and why they believe Republicans in statewide leadership positions are the ones to blame.

Democratic candidates and strategists see the power grid as the Republican party’s biggest vulnerability — and they see highlighting it as their best shot at winning crossover voters in the state’s 2022 election cycle, which is expected to be an uphill battle for the minority party.

In stump speeches and messages to supporters, Democrats say that GOP leaders failed at fixing the shortcomings of the state’s energy infrastructure that led to millions of Texans losing power for multiple days during a winter storm in February, which resulted in a death toll that has been calculated as ranging from 210 to more than 700 people.

Beto O’Rourke, the frontrunner to challenge Republican Greg Abbott for governor, has said the two-term incumbent did “absolutely nothing” to heed warnings despite a previous electricity blackout in 2011. Mike Collier, who is running for lieutenant governor, coined the slogan “fix the damn grid” as one of his campaign’s top priorities. And Luke Warford, who is running for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the state’s oil and natural gas industry, has made “Let’s keep the lights on!” his campaign slogan.

“It makes sense for Democrats to want to channel those doubts and put them front and center,” said Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. “About the only good thing for Democrats about the extended Republican monopoly [in state politics] and their demonstrated inability to break that monopoly is that there’s only one political party that can be blamed.”

Republicans, not surprisingly, disagree. It’s not much of a campaign slogan if there’s no conflict. The story notes that 1) the public largely agrees with the position that Abbott and the Lege didn’t do enough, according to the polling data we have; 2) the state’s own studies say we’re still vulnerable to blackouts under the right (or wrong, depending on how you want to look at it) set of circumstances; and 3) numerous Republicans, from Dan Patrick to the pack of jackals running against Abbott in the Republican primary, think that Abbott and the Lege didn’t do enough to fix the problem. As I said, this is Greg Abbott’s bet, that things will be sufficiently OK through the next winter and summer, and if so he’ll claim the credit for it. Only time will tell.

Fraudit funding

Nov 22nd, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

It’s bullshit all the way down.

GOP leaders on Friday approved shifting $4 million in emergency funds for the Texas secretary of state’s office to create an “Election Audit Division” at the agency, which will spearhead county election audits as required by the state’s new election law set to take effect next month.

The additional funding, first reported by The Dallas Morning News, was requested by Gov. Greg Abbott earlier this week and approved by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, House Speaker Dade Phelan and the Republican budget-writers of the two chambers, state Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, and state Rep. Greg Bonnen, R-Friendswood.

In a Nov. 18 letter to Patrick and Phelan, Abbott said the emergency shift in money — which is coming from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice — was necessary because the secretary of state’s office “does not currently have the budget authority to adequately accomplish the goals sought by the Legislature.”

Friday’s news comes as the secretary of state’s office has a “full forensic audit” of the 2020 election underway in four of Texas’ largest counties: Dallas, Harris, Tarrant and Collin.

It also comes after the GOP-controlled Legislature passed a new election law this summer that further tightens the state’s election rules with a host of changes, such as a ban on drive-thru voting and new rules for voting by mail.

The new law, which is facing legal challenges, also requires the secretary of state’s office to select four counties at random after each November election and to audit all elections that happened in those counties in the prior two years. Two of the counties that undergo the audit must have a population of more than 300,000, while the other two must have a population lower than that.

In a statement later Friday, the secretary of state’s office referenced both its 2020 audit and future audits required under the new state law, saying that the latest funds would be used for “additional staff to oversee audit activities,” such as “verifying counties’ removal of ineligible voters from the rolls … and ensuring compliance with state and federal election laws.”

See here, here, and here for the background. Just a reminder, most of the counties with 300K or more people were carried by Joe Biden, while the large majority of counties with less than 300K were won by Trump. This particular division is less egregious than what Republicans originally wanted, but it’s still designed to put more scrutiny on Democratic counties. Who wants to bet that most of the “problems” they find are in exactly those counties? The Chron has more.

In the meantime, our new not-to-be-trusted Secretary of State is out there promoting the fraudit with the idea that it’s the only way to “restore voters’ confidence in the strength and resilience of our election systems”. Let me stop you right there, pal: The reason some people have lost faith in the election system is because the guy who lost the last election has been vocally and repeatedly lying about it being “stolen” from him, and demanding that his minions conduct these fraudits for the express purpose of sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt. He continues to tell the same lies, which are eagerly believed by his rabid followers, despite losing every lawsuit filed and the Arizona fraudit finding exactly nothing and all of his lies being repeatedly debunked. Why should the rest of us have any faith in an audit being done by people who fraudulently claim there is fraud?

Michelle Beckley files for Lt. Governor

Nov 17th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

And now there are three.

Michelle Beckley

Democratic state Rep. Michelle Beckley of Carrollton, who gained national attention for joining lawmakers who fled to Washington, D.C., to block a Republican election bill this summer, is running for lieutenant governor, expanding her party’s primary to three contenders.

In her campaign announcement on Tuesday, Beckley said she was running because Republican incumbent Dan Patrick is implementing policies that “hurt Texas business and make life harder for all Texans.”

“I’m running for Lieutenant Governor because politicians are putting ideology ahead of results that matter to Texans,” she said. “In the last legislative session alone, they worked to limit voters’ rights, put bounties on women, marginalize minorities, and make-up false boogeymen in our schools, and the health and wealth of Texans suffered. I’m running to stop them.”

Beckley joins a race that already includes political commentator Matthew Dowd and Houston accountant and auditor Mike Collier, who was the Democratic nominee for the position in 2018 and came within 5 percentage points of beating Patrick. She said she was recruited to run for the position but did not say by who.

Beckley said she joined the race to give Democratic voters another option and a candidate with more legislative experience.

“Neither one of those candidates has won an election,” she said. “I won an election in a hard district and improved my margins.”

[…]

Beckley said Republicans will have a fundraising advantage over her, but she plans to raise enough money to get her message out and win over voters.

“I was outspent 10-to-1 my first election. Nobody thought I was gonna win that either,” she said. “I’ve done it before. So I’m confident I could do it again. I wouldn’t be running if I didn’t think that.”

Beckley said her top priorities as lieutenant governor would be expanding Medicaid, fixing shortcomings in the state’s power grid and fully funding public education. Those issues are in line with the priorities of the other candidates in the Democratic primary.

But Beckley, one of the most liberal members of the Texas House, is also known for her support for marijuana legalization, abortion rights and her call for more gun control after the 2019 mass shootings in El Paso and Midland-Odessa.

Beckley said she is a candidate who can bring “balance” to the position of lieutenant governor. Issues like marijuana legalization and Medicaid expansion would benefit rural communities whose farmers could benefit from growing marijuana for business and whose struggling hospitals would be helped by a change in the health care system, she said.

But she does not back down from the positions she’s taken on immigration, abortion rights and guns, saying she’s portrayed as a liberal when she believes her actions are in step with the majority of Texas voters.

“Our state has gone to the extreme and I am the values of the moderate,” she said. “In many other states I would not be considered liberal at all.”

I don’t know about that last statement, but as we know there’s been consistent polling in recent years showing popular support for marijuana legalization and Medicaid expansion, with at worst modest support Roe v Wade and not making abortion more illegal in Texas. Whether any of that can flip her some votes in East Texas is another question – and I say this as someone who advocates for the Medicaid and marijuana issues as a way to appeal to rural constituencies – but she will hardly be out on a limb campaigning for them.

As the story notes, Beckley had announced a candidacy for CD24 before the map was redrawn to make it a Trump +12 district. Her HD65 was also made to lean Republican, though it would not surprise me to see it flip in a cycle or two. If she can win the nomination, it’s likely that she has at least as good a shot at beating Dan Patrick as she would have had in either of those races.

She does have to win the primary first. As a two-term State Rep, her name ID will not be very high – I’d say Mike Collier is much better known, at least among Dem primary voters, thanks to his past candidacies – but being the only woman on the ballot (if no others join in) will help her. She had $25K on hand as of July, so fundraising is going to be a high priority for her – there’s only one way to get your name out there in a statewide race, and it doesn’t come cheap. I welcome her to the race and look forward to seeing what she has to say. The more people out there telling everyone what a lousy Lite Guv we now have, the better.

Comings and goings

Oct 21st, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Rep. Lloyd Doggett will run in a new district again.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett

Longtime U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, has decided to run for reelection in Texas’ 37th Congressional District, opting to vie for one of Texas’ two new congressional districts — a bright-blue seat concentrated in Austin — rather than his current district, which reaches down to San Antonio.

Doggett announced the decision Sunday in an email to supporters and then shared it in person Monday outside Bryker Woods Elementary School in Austin.

“Nobody, me included, has any entitlement to public office, but Bryker Woods does issue reports cards,” Doggett said, “and I’m ready for my neighbors to grade my service in Congress and my devotion to the families of this city.”

Doggett currently represents the 35th Congressional District, which runs from Austin down along Interstate 35 to San Antonio. The proposed 37th District is far more compact, contained almost entirely within Travis County, home to Austin. Both are currently safely Democratic districts — and likely to remain so after redistricting.

[…]

Doggett also survived the last round of redistricting by switching districts, changing to the 35th District, which was new at the time. It was drawn to be a Hispanic-majority district, and Doggett faced a primary against then state Rep. Joaquin Castro of San Antonio. But Castro ultimately ran for the San Antonio-based 20th Congressional District after its Democratic incumbent, Charlie Gonzalez, announced his retirement.

Doggett’s chances of reelection in the new district are high. He has served in Congress since 1995 and a built a massive campaign war chest, totaling $5.4 million as of Sept. 30.

Doggett’s decision to run in CD-37 means there will be an open seat in CD-35.

Potential Democratic candidates for the 37th District have included state Rep. Gina Hinojosa of Austin and Wendy Davis, the former Fort Worth state senator and 2014 gubernatorial nominee who unsuccessfully challenged U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Austin, last year.

Doggett was first elected in what was then CD10. In the DeLay re-redistricting of 2003, he moved to what was then CD25, then into CD35 as noted. I’m just going to leave this here:

Someone needs to start a project to track down everyone who has been continuously represented by Lloyd Doggett since 1995.

Rep. Doggett may or may not get some real competition for CD37. I’d make him a heavy favorite against pretty much anyone. As for CD35, that will likely draw a crowd.

Progressive firebrand and Austin City Council Member Greg Casar is likely to run for Congress in Texas’s 35th District, he told the Texas Observer in an interview.

“It’s very likely that I’m running,” says Casar, who has formed an exploratory committee to examine a run for the district that runs from Austin to San Antonio. “The maps haven’t been signed into law yet, but shortly after they are, I will make things much more official.”

[…]

The prospect of a newly open seat in a heavily Democratic majority-minority district sets the stage for a potential primary battle.

State Representative Eddie Rodriguez, who’s served in the Legislature since 2003, is reportedly “taking a hard look” at a run for the 35th; his southeast Austin state House district sits almost entirely within the new 35th boundaries. Also, longtime San Antonio Representative Trey Martinez Fischer requested that lawmakers draw him into the 35th, indicating that he may also run. Claudia Zapata, a progressive activist in Austin, is currently the only officially declared candidate. Casar’s home and his north-central council district are in the 37th, right along the border with the 35th.

That story is all about CM Casar, and you can read it if you want to know more about him. I’m mostly interested in the name game at this point.

Moving along, we will have a new open State House seat in Bexar County.

State Rep. Lyle Larson, R-San Antonio, who bucked his party on a number of major issues this year, announced Wednesday he will not seek reelection.

In an email to constituents, Larson said he was following through on legislation he has repeatedly introduced that imposes a term limit of 12 years on any elected official at the state level.

“As a strong proponent of term limits, will follow the limits we previously proposed in this legislation,” Larson wrote.

Larson was first elected in 2010 to represent House District 122 in the San Antonio area.

He had been increasingly expected to pass on a 2022 reelection campaign as he grew disillusioned with his party and potential GOP candidates lined up for his seat. Larson was the only Republican to oppose the GOP’s priority elections bill that led House Democrats to break quorum this summer. He also was the only Republican to vote against legislation that Republican supporters argued would crack down on the teaching of critical race theory in Texas classrooms. More recently, he filed a long-shot bill during the current special session to provide rape and incest exemptions for Texas’ new near-total abortion ban, despite previously voting for it.

Rep. Larson, who had been targeted by Greg Abbott in the 2018 primary, was sure to draw challengers this primary as well. He’s also now got his 12 years in, which means he’s fully vested in the pension. That’s always a propitious time to pull the plug. As noted before the current HD122, which began the decade as the most Republican district in Bexar County, has moved sharply towards Democrats. It was also significantly changed in redistricting, and was made more red than it had been in 2020, but could still be competitive in the near future. Maybe if a more wingnutty Republican wins, that timetable could move up.

Also moving districts due to the new map:

State Rep. James Talarico, D-Round Rock, announced Wednesday he is moving to run for reelection in a different House district because his current district is being redrawn to be more favorable to Republicans.

Talarico said he would run in nearby House District 50, where the Democratic incumbent, Celia Israel, is not seeking reelection as she prepares to run for Austin mayor. He announced the new campaign with the support of the biggest names in Democratic politics in Texas, including Beto O’Rourke, Wendy Davis and Joaquin Castro.

Talarico currently represents House District 52, which is set to become redder in redistricting — going from a district that President Joe Biden won by 10 percentage points to one that Donald Trump would have carried by 4. HD-50, meanwhile, is likely to remain solidly blue after redistricting.

[…]

Whether Talarico can avoid a competitive primary for HD-50 is an open question. Earlier Wednesday, Pflugerville City Councilman Rudy Metayer announced he was exploring a run for the seat. Metayer is also the president of the Texas Black Caucus Foundation, and he released a list of supporters topped by two of the state’s most prominent Black politicians, state Sens. Borris Miles of Houston and Royce West of Dallas.

HD-50 is more diverse than the district Talarico, who is white, currently represents. In a series of tweets announcing his new campaign, Talarico prominently highlighted how he “call[s] out White supremacy on the floor,” a reference to his outspoken advocacy against Republican legislation aiming to restrict the teaching of “critical race theory” in Texas classrooms.

Talarico was part of the over 50 House Democrats who broke quorum this summer in protest of the GOP’s priority elections bill, though he was part of the first several to return, causing friction with some in his own party.

See here for more on Rep. Israel. I have to think that HD52 will still be attractive to someone on the Democratic side; that person may have a harder time of it than Rep. Talarico, but a 4-point Trump district is hardly insurmountable, and I’d bet on further change in a Dem direction. As for Talarico, I’ll be very interested to see how big a deal his coming back in the first wave from the quorum break is in his primary. I’m sure the subject will come up.

Closer to home:

State Rep. Dan Huberty, R-Houston, announced Tuesday he will not seek another term to the Texas House.

Huberty, who has represented House District 127 since 2011, said in a statement that “it is time for new opportunities in life.”

“I have thought long and hard about this decision,” Huberty said. “It’s been an honor to represent the people and communities of District 127 at the Texas Capitol, and I’m proud of the work our team has accomplished.”

During the 2019 legislative session, Huberty helped spearhead reforms to the state’s school finance system, which included $6.5 billion to improve public education in the state and pay teachers, plus $5.1 billion to lower school district taxes.

Huberty said Tuesday that his “interest in and passion for public education remains at my core” and said he believed that the school finance reform legislation from 2019 “will have a lasting impact for the school children of Texas for a long time to come.”

Another fully-vested-in-the-pension guy. Funny how those things work out. Rep. Huberty, like several of his colleagues, is one of those increasingly rare serious-about-policy types, who has done some good work with public education. As his district remains pretty solidly Republican, at least in the foreseeable future, the best we can hope for is someone who isn’t a total clown emerging from the Republican primary. Say a few Hail Marys and toss some salt over your shoulder.

And speaking of Republicans with policy chops, this was not unexpected but is still bad.

Amarillo state Sen. Kel Seliger, a Republican who often butted heads with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and was known to be a key swing vote for his party, will not seek reelection.

“After thoughtful consideration and with the reassurance of my family, including my new very vocal granddaughter, I have decided not to be a candidate for re-election to the Texas Senate,” Seliger said in a statement. “I am forever grateful for my family, supporters, staff, and those who. have worked on my behalf since 2004. Thank you for placing your trust in me as your Texas State Senator.”

Seliger said he will serve out the remainder of his term, which ends in January 2023. He has represented Senate District 31, which covers the Panhandle, South Plains and the Permian Basin, since 2005. Prior to that, he served four terms as mayor of Amarillo.

In the Legislature, Seliger was known as an advocate issues of public education, higher education and local control. He led the Senate Higher Education Committee for three sessions between 2013 and 2017. But as parts of the Republican Party in Texas shifted toward support of private school vouchers and against policies passed in Democrat-leaning municipalities, Seliger was often criticized for not supporting those stances and derided as a “liberal.”

[…]

As recently as Monday, Seliger was still breaking with Republican leadership in what he said was deference to his constituents. He was one of the only Republicans in office who openly opposed legislation to ban employers from requiring COVID-19 vaccines, saying the proposal, pushed by Gov. Greg Abbott, was “anti-business.” Earlier in the 30-day special session, Seliger was the sole GOP vote in the Senate against a bill that would clear the way for party officials to trigger election audits. Seliger reportedly said he opposed the legislation because it is an “unfunded mandate of the counties, and I’m opposed to big government.”

His maverick streak led to frequent conflict with Patrick, a conservative firebrand who presides over the Senate. In 2017, Seliger voted against two of Patrick’s legislative priorities: a bill restricting local governments’ abilities to raise property tax revenues and another one providing private school vouchers. The next session, Patrick stripped Seliger of his chairmanship of the Higher Education Committee prompting a back and forth with Patrick’s office that escalated to Seliger issuing a recommendation that a top Patrick adviser kiss his “back end.” (Seliger ultimately apologized, but only for directing the comment at the adviser and not at Patrick himself.)

There used to be a lot of Kel Seligers in the State Senate, and in the Republican Party. Now they run the gamut from Joan Huffman to Bob Hall, and the next person to be elected in SD31 is almost certainly going to be on the Bob Hall end of that spectrum. We sure better hope we can beat Dan Patrick next year.

Finally, here’s a non-legislative vacancy that may have an effect on the House delegation in 2023.

The race for Bexar County judge is wide open as the 2022 election approaches.

Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff confirmed last week that he would not seek reelection next year. Wolff has served as the county’s leader since 2001. Local political scientists say they expect a packed Democratic primary, though the number of officially declared candidates currently sits at zero.

So far, only state Rep. Ina Minjarez has publicly announced interest in the seat; she tweeted that she was exploring a run after Wolff announced his decision not to run again.

“I’ve received countless calls from community members for me to consider running for Bexar County Judge; with today’s news I’ve decided to form an exploratory committee,” she wrote on Oct. 6.

Rep. Minjarez was the only legislator mentioned in that story, but County Judge is a pretty good gig, so others may check this out. Being a County Judge is also a decent stepping stone to higher office, if that’s on one’s path. I will keep an eye on that.

With the mapmaking done, I expect we’ll start to hear about more people getting in, getting out, and moving over. And the January finance reports are going to tell us a lot. Stay tuned.

The Trib on Collier/Dowd

Oct 20th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Good story.

Mike Collier

Mike Collier is willing to bet Texas voters know his name.

In fact, he’s confident that when he last ran for lieutenant governor three years ago and came within 5 percentage points of winning, it was because most of the 3.8 million Texans who checked his name were voting in support of his candidacy, and not just against Republican incumbent Dan Patrick during a watershed year for Democrats.

“They’ll only do that if they like the candidate they’re voting for,” Collier said. “Yes, a lot of people voted against Dan Patrick but they’re not going to vote for just anybody. They looked and they [said], ‘I don’t like Dan Patrick, he’s bad for the state. I like Mike Collier, I think he’s good for the state.’”

His evidence? In two-thirds of Texas counties, he outperformed Beto O’Rourke, who led the top of the ticket in 2018 against U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and sparked a flurry of excitement among Democrats that year.

But several other statewide Democratic candidates with little name recognition and no real campaign funding also outperformed expectations against their GOP counterparts that year, largely on O’Rourke’s coattails. Collier wasn’t even the party’s second-highest vote-getter statewide. That was Justin Nelson, who came within 295,000 votes of unseating Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Collier, a 60-year-old accountant and auditor from the Houston area, will have his chance to prove his bonafides next year after announcing earlier this month that he is officially running for a rematch against Patrick.

“I came very close to beating Dan Patrick. I came within 4.8 points,” he said. “And I decided that looking at the numbers, that I can beat him.”

But first, he’ll have to get past Matthew Dowd, a former George W. Bush strategist turned Democrat, and any other candidate that joins the race in a Democratic primary. Collier said he looks forward to the contest.

“My strategy is to keep talking to every Texan and have a much better team, much more money and a network of surrogates and friends and volunteers and champions and validators all over the state,” he said. “I think I win the primary.”

The rest of the story is a nice profile of Collier, hitting on some of the things he did in his 2018 campaign, his case against Dan Patrick, and how he is differentiating himself from Matthew Dowd. If you didn’t know anything about him to begin with, it’s a good introduction and I think it makes him look very presentable. My hope is that there are stories like this to be done around the state, in newspapers and for local TV stations. They can be about Dowd too – really, I hope there are stories about both of them. But to whatever extent that happens, both Collier and Dowd are going to have to show they can raise enough money to fund a robust statewide campaign, and get their names in front of as many voters as they can. There’s a quote in the story from a poli sci professor about how Collier’s vote total in 2018 was more a reflection of what people thought of Dan Patrick than of Mike Collier, and I agree with it. The next step is to be more than “not Dan Patrick”, and that’s going to take some money. I very much hope the January finance reports reflect that.

UPDATE: Almost as if on cue, here’s the Chron’s Erica Greider writing about the Dowd/Collier race from a more Dowd perspective.

Senate passes Congressional map

Oct 9th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Start the litigation countdown. Yes, I know, this still has to pass the House, but still.

The Texas Senate approved a map Friday that would largely protect incumbents in Congress while reducing the number of districts in which Black and Hispanic residents make up the majority of eligible voters — stymieing the growth of the state’s Democratic Party representation in Washington, D.C.

The congressional map is focused more on protecting incumbents than on growing the power of the dominant Republican Party in the state by flipping districts from blue to red. But the map, proposed by GOP state Sen. Joan Huffman of Houston, helps Republicans by increasing the number of districts that would have voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election and decreasing those that would have gone for Joe Biden.

In anticipation of federal challenges to the map, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican who presides over the Senate, said in a statement Friday that the proposal approved by the chamber was “legal and fair” and represented a “commitment to making sure every Texan’s voice is heard in Washington, D.C.”

[…]

State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, D-San Antonio, proposed a map that would create three additional districts where Hispanics made up the majority, bringing the number of those districts to 10.

But Republicans rejected the proposal, with Huffman saying the amendment had been drafted less than 24 hours before the Senate’s vote on the maps and would result in a “detailed and painstaking racial gerrymander” in North Texas to draw a new Hispanic-majority district in the same area as the current Congressional District 33, represented by U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey, D-Fort Worth.

Gutierrez accused Republicans of racially discriminating against voters of color.

“How else do we describe a situation where Texas gains new political power because of the physical presence of millions of Black, Brown, and Asian bodies, and yet the political establishment does not give those very Texans the ability to elect more candidates to represent them?” he said in a statement. “It is an insult to the foundations of our democracy.”

Under the proposed maps, voters of color may end up with less representation in the congressional delegation. The new map drops the number of districts in which Hispanics make up a majority of eligible voters from eight to seven, and the districts in which Black Texans make up a majority of eligible voters from one to zero.

The number of districts where whites make up a majority of eligible voters goes up to 23 although the state’s white population — which increased by just 187,252 — was swamped by the growth of people of color.

See here for more on the initial map, which looks to be largely the same as the final map. Which we know is totally fair and representative because Dan Patrick says it is. The House will likely make some changes, but it seems unlikely to be substantively different. I’ll say this much, they’ve given Harris County Democrats a new district to target, and I feel confident that any Republican who wins the new CD38 is never going to get a free pass. I’ll be interested to see who files for this on the Democratic side.

As for the coming litigation, the arguments are clear, it’s just a matter of what SCOTUS will allow in the post-Voting Rights Act world that it wants. I will say again, it’s not too late for a new Voting Rights Act to be passed. We’re going to need an upgrade in the US Senate to make that happen, I fear.

Speaking of litigation, I would love to know what the status of the Gutierrez/Eckhardt lawsuit is. That had to do with the legislative maps, not the Congressional map, but given the speed with which those maps are moving along, we will be reaching a point of no return soon. Let’s at least have a hearing on this one before events make it moot, OK?

UPDATE: I should have spent more time looking at the District Viewer, because I have just now realized that this map moves me out of CD18, where I’ve been for 30 years, and into CD29. I feel a little weird about that.

Collier announces

Oct 5th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

It’s officially official, we have a contested primary for Lite Guv.

Mike Collier

Mike Collier has been itching for a rematch with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick for nearly three years, after coming within 4.9 points of unseating the Republican in 2018.

“I woke up the next morning thinking, ‘I’m pretty sure if I had more time or money, we could beat him,’” Collier said. “That was my first impulse. The dust settled, and we went and analyzed the performance county by county.”

“I quickly realized: If I stay on this, I can close that gap and I can win.”

Collier, an accountant and former chief financial officer of an oil company, said his campaign infrastructure has grown significantly in the intervening years. He worked to support other Democrats running for office during the 2020 general election and served as a senior adviser to President Joe Biden’s Texas campaign.

[…]

Collier formed an exploratory committee in April to consider running again for lieutenant governor, and his campaign officially began Monday morning.

He is the second Democrat to formally announce for the seat. Matthew Dowd, a former strategist for George W. Bush and political analyst for ABC News, launched his campaign for the post last week.

“We’re close to winning, and when you get close to winning, you begin to attract people who say, ‘I’d like to be lieutenant governor,’” Collier said. “I have been devoted to bringing real political competition to the state, which means winning statewide office for the Democrats. I’ve been focused for nearly a decade and went through the darkest of times with the party.”

This will be Collier’s third run for statewide office after unsuccessful campaigns in 2014 for comptroller and 2018 for Patrick’s seat.

But Collier contends that he is a different candidate today than he was three years ago, one with improved fundraising chops and a better grasp of the issues that are important for voters. For months his refrain has been a call to leaders at the statehouse to “fix the damn grid” after widespread power outages during winter storms this year resulted in hundreds of deaths.

In his mind, a surefire way to win over voters is to ask them, “Are you better off now than four years ago?”

“The answer on so many levels is clearly no,” Collier said, arguing that while he has improved as a candidate since the 2018 election, Patrick’s performance has only gotten worse. “This mad dash to pander to the primary voters of the Republican Party has taken us so far outside of where Texans want us to go.”

Collier said his campaign will run on the same message and strategy employed in 2018, which he says entails speaking with people in every corner of the state and working to earn their trust, without taking any one voter for granted.

See here and here for the background. Collier was a strong candidate in 2018, and though he hasn’t been much of a fundraiser the fact that this would be his third time on the ballot if he’s nominated does help. I do hope he can raise more money and that he’s built up his campaign infrastructure, because we all are going to need that. I think he’s got his finger on a winning message, it’s largely a matter of getting that message out. I’ll be very interested to see what his next finance report looks like.

As for Dowd, I’ll keep an open mind. Scott Braddock on the Texas Take podcast (the “It’s Never Enough For Trump” episode) kind of laid into Dowd as just a talking head whose biggest asset is being of interest to the media, and drew a clear roadmap for the Collier campaign for why Dowd bears a significant amount of blame for the state of the Republican Party today, which he now publicly decries. Braddock also speculated that a woman or person of color see an opportunity in this race; all I ask is that it’s someone who would be able to fundraise if that is so. I’m happy to have a contested primary, to draw some attention to this race and these candidates and why Dan Patrick is trash and needs to be removed. Let’s make sure that no matter what else happens, we’re all focused on that. Houston Public Media, Spectrum News, and Texas Monthly have more.

Matthew Dowd has entered the Dem primary for Lite Guv

Sep 30th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

We have another contested primary for Dems.

Matthew Dowd

Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist for George W. Bush’s presidential reelection campaign who later split with the former president publicly, is running for lieutenant governor as a Democrat.

Dowd also has worked for Bob Bullock, who in 1994 was the last Democrat elected as Texas lieutenant governor, and faces an uphill battle to unseat Republican Dan Patrick, the state’s second-highest-ranking official who has steered Texas politics into the far-right fringes of the GOP.

In a two-and-a-half minute campaign announcement video, Dowd said GOP politicians have failed the state, zeroing in on Patrick, who he called “cruel and craven” and denounced as a divisive figure who puts his political ambitions over the needs of everyday Texans.

“Enough is enough. We need more officials who tell the truth, who believe in public services, in common sense with common decency for the common good. … We need to expect more from our politicians,” Dowd says in the ad. “Dan Patrick believes in none of those and that is why I am running for the powerful office of lieutenant governor of this great state.”

In an interview with The Texas Tribune, Dowd said he started seriously considering running for office after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump who were trying to stop the certification of last year’s presidential election. But it wasn’t until after the state’s legislative session that Dowd really focused on Patrick as his target.

“Watching the legislative session and how horrendous it was — not only what the lieutenant governor didn’t do, but also what he did do,” Dowd said. “This summer, I started thinking maybe I should run and remove this guy so I don’t have to be embarrassed about our own state.”

[…]

Dowd said he doesn’t think he’ll match Patrick in the fundraising race, but he expects to have enough to run a competitive race.

Before he can get to Patrick in November, he’ll have to face other Democratic candidates in a March primary. So far, Mike Collier, the Democrat who came within 400,000 votes of unseating Patrick in 2018, has formed an exploratory committee and has been barnstorming across the state. One of his main issues is “fixing the damn grid” and he is expected to formally announce his campaign soon.

In a statement following Dowd’s announcement, Collier’s deputy campaign manager blasted Dowd for his previous work for Republicans.

“We welcome Matthew Dowd back to the Democratic Party,” Ali S. Zaidi said in a statement. “Mr. Dowd — you may notice things have changed a lot since you were working for Republicans. Democratic voters will be interested to hear how selling a false war, ensuring the deciding Supreme Court vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, and leading the charge to pass numerous anti-marriage equality ballot measures have shaped your current views.”

Dowd said he knew Collier was exploring a run but it did not factor in to his decision to jump into the race.

He said he would not attack Collier or any other Democrat that gets in the race. Instead, he’ll focus on showing Texans why Patrick is out of touch with their values.

“From Day One, I’m gonna take this to Dan Patrick and that’s gonna continue for 405 days,” he said, referring to the number of days until next year’s general elections. “I’m gonna be unrelenting in telling the truth in showing how Dan Patrick has hurt Texans and hurt this state.”

Dowd has talked about this race before, so now he has followed through. I guess it’s a little premature to say we have a contested primary as Mike Collier is not yet official, but he’s been at least as an active a campaign presence as anyone out there, so I will be surprised if he doesn’t join in. At a high level, the two are pretty similar, though Dowd does indeed have his Bushian past to deal with. What I want at this point is for their race to generate some news and interest, to remind people of all the ways in which Dan Patrick is terrible, because on that point the two of them are very much in agreement. The Chron has more.

Trans kids are still fighting for their right to not be dehumanized

Sep 29th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

The toll being taken on them, it’s inhumane.

Karen Krajcer and Linzy Foster are two friends familiar with the hallways of the Texas Capitol.

During this year’s regular legislative session and two subsequent special sessions that followed, the two mothers have shown up with a handful of other parents to advocate for their children who have been caught in the crosshairs of a slew of bills that target young transgender Texans.

Now, with the Legislature’s third special session underway, the two friends are enduring another round of visits and demonstrations as legislators again debate a top Republican legislative priority: restricting transgender youth from playing on sports teams that are consistent with their gender identity.

“It just keeps on happening, it’s ridiculous,” Krajcer, a mother to a 9-year-old, said about the amount of bills filed during sessions that have targeted LGBTQ Texans. “This is the fourth round this year. … Why are we still having to do this?”

So far, the Texas Senate has passed a bill limiting transgender participation in youth sports four separate times. The first three times, the bills stalled out and failed. Last week, Senate Bill 3, authored by Lubbock Republican state Sen. Charles Perry, was approved by a 19-12 Senate vote, with all but one Democrat voting no.

It has now moved to the House and on Monday was referred to the House Public Education Committee, where last time state Rep. Harold Dutton, D-Houston, blocked similar legislation from reaching the House floor. During an interview at The Texas Tribune Festival on Friday, House Speaker Dade Phelan said the House would have the votes to pass the legislation should it head to the House floor.

The bill would require student athletes at K-12 public schools to play on sports teams that correspond with the assigned sex listed on their birth certificate as it was issued at or near the time of their birth. The University Interscholastic League, which governs school athletics in Texas, already uses students’ birth certificates to confirm their gender, and also accepts modified birth certificates a student may have had changed to align with their gender identity. SB3 would end that acceptance.

Although the sports bill and other bills targeting transgender youth, such as those that would limit gender-affirming care, have not become law in Texas, LGBTQ advocates and the transgender community have expressed that the simple possibility has already exacted a mental toll on transgender youth. And with a third special session now underway, parents of transgender children have only seen the frustration — and exhaustion — grow among their families.

I find it exhausting – and infuriating – just to write about this stuff. I can’t begin to imagine how hard it must be on these parents and children, who have done nothing to deserve such a sustained assault. I don’t know what happens from here, if we’ll get the good version of Harold Dutton who plays gatekeeper, or if he’s having another fit of pique and lets it get to the floor. Even if it doesn’t get approved this time, there will surely need to be at least one more session to finish off redistricting, and that means one more chance for the likes of Charles Perry and Dan Patrick to use trans kids as punching bags. There’s only one way to make this stop, and we all know what that is.

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