Sen. Sarah Eckhardt
We wrap up our week with the statewide candidates with our candidate for Comptroller, Sen. Sarah Eckhardt. A fixture in Travis County politics, having been the first woman elected Travis County Judge after two terms as County Commissioner, she is now in her third term in the Senate from SD14. The daughter of former Congressman Bob Eckhardt, she has passed laws to protect children’s healthcare, to lower barriers for Texans returning to school, and to provide a tuition exemption for paramedics, among others. The Comptroller is an office with a lot of not-always-visible power, with oversight of budgets and the power of audits, and now management of the voucher program. It’s also now in the hands of wingnut former Senator Don Huffines, who was appointed as the second Acting Comptroller in less than a year as a peace offering by Greg Abbott, whom he had previously challenged as insufficiently zealous in a primary. The contrast between the two couldn’t be clearer, and you can hear all about it in the interview:
Here’s the transcript, provided as always by Greg Wythe. Next week will be an assortment of interviews for different offices, and after that we’ll get to a bunch of Legislative candidates. Let me know what you think.
PREVIOUSLY:
Rep. Jon Rosenthal – Railroad Commissioner – Transcript
Sen. Nathan Johnson – Attorney General – Transcript
Clayton Tucker – Ag Commissioner – Transcript
From the primaries:
Leticia Gutierrez – CD09 – Transcript
Christian Menefee, CD18 (from the special election) – Transcript
Rep. Sylvia Garcia, CD29 – Transcript
Melissa McDonough – CD38 – Transcript
Justin Early, CD31 – Transcript
Staci Childs – HD131 – Transcript
Letitia Plummer – Harris County Judge – Transcript
Abbie Kamin – Harris County Attorney – Transcript
Traci Gibson, HCDP Chair – Transcript
A squish by silence on the issue of getting Texas out of the anti-BDS biz, unlike Green Shehla Faizi.
Thanks for listening. I’m sure you heard Sen. Eckhardt say that the Comptroller does not have the power to enact policy changes, as we saw with the lawsuit over Houston’s Historically Underutilized Business Program. It was the Legislature that put Texas into the anti-BDS biz, and it will need to be the Legislature that undoes it.