Lawsuit filed against land ownership ban

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Good.

A pair of Chinese citizens asked a federal judge to block a new law banning Chinese nationals and people from a select number of other countries from buying or leasing property in Texas.

In a lawsuit filed July 3, Peng Wang and Qinlin Li, two Chinese citizens currently in the United States with visas, called Senate Bill 17 unconstitutional and racist.

The law bars noncitizens from China, Iran, Russia and North Korea from owning land in Texas. During the recent legislative session, the law’s supporters argued it would protect the state against spying and the influence of hostile countries.

U.S. District Judge Charles Eskridge indicated he plans to rule on the group’s injunction before it goes into effect Sept. 1.

The suit argues that the law discriminates against Chinese people based on race and ethnicity. The plaintiffs argue that the law’s threat of punishment creates fear of finding housing while living legally in Texas.

“Chinese people in this state of Texas will be terrified of so much as renting a place to live, because if it turns out this law does apply to them. It is a state jail felony, and they can end up in jail for up to two years,” said Justin Sadowsky, the lead counsel for the Chinese American Legal Defense Alliance, the group representing Wang and Li.

The lawsuit also argues the new law is preempted by federal processes that review real estate purchases that could affect national security.

Wang, one of the plaintiffs, has lived in Texas for 16 years and is pursuing a Master of Divinity degree at a seminary in Fort Worth, according to the lawsuit. Wang argued that he might be forced to leave the country if he’s not allowed to lease housing. Along with homeownership, the law bans Chinese citizens from entering long-term leases lasting more than a year. Wang argues most of the homes where he lives are leased for a year or more.

The other plaintiff, Li, is a recent engineering graduate from Texas A&M who already works for a private company designing wastewater treatment plants. She plans to obtain a work visa to remain in the United States, according to the complaint.

“Ms. Li would ultimately like to purchase a home because property ownership is the only way to ensure that homes are well maintained,” attorneys wrote. “But because her career will likely require her to spend time at multiple cities in Texas, she would like to buy a home at more than one location— which SB 17 prohibits.”

[…]

Eskridge in July denied a request for a preliminary injunction. This week he set arguments for Aug. 14.

The plaintiffs are seeking to turn their complaint into a class-action lawsuit representing all non-citizens targeted by SB 17.

I didn’t follow this legislation this year, mostly because I try to follow the Lege less closely, for sanity reasons. Here’s a press release that was sent out by Asian Texans for Justice upon SB17’s passage if you want to know a little more. As this story notes, a similar bill failed to pass in 2023. Multiple other states have bans similar to the one just passed, though this one seems excessive even by those standards to me. I would hope that it could be struck down on the grounds of being too broad. Not sure if the denial of the initial request for a preliminary injunction is a bad sign. We’ll know soon enough.

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The (driverless) trucks at night, are big and bright

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

I regret nothing.

Autonomous vehicle technology company Aurora has expanded its driverless freight operations to include nighttime travel on Texas highways, according to the company’s announcement Wednesday.

In late April, the self-driving 18-wheeler service was launched without a safety driver in partnership with Uber Freight and Hirschbach Motor Lines. The company’s vehicles have driven more than 20,000 driverless miles, and its fleet of driverless vehicles has expanded to three trucks. The trucks travel between Dallas and Houston at night.

“The progress propels Aurora and the freight industry into a new era,” said Chris Urmson, co-founder and CEO of Aurora, in the Wednesday business review call.

Aurora added that it completes two trips a day. With three trucks, it can now make 12 trips.

[…]

Aurora said that its autonomous vehicles, which don’t suffer from fatigue like human drivers, will improve the industry’s safety record. Texas led the nation in fatal large truck crashes between 2018 and 2022, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

Aurora will also continue to have an observer in the front seat of the three trucks, at the request of its long-time partner, design and manufacturing company PACCAR.

“While we added a front-seat observer at the request of a partner given certain prototype parts in their base vehicle, it’s crucial to note that the Aurora Driver remains fully responsible for all driving tasks, with no interventions needed,” Urmson said.

The company also plans to receive 20 Volvo trucks by the end of the year for testing.

“We’ll wait for (Volvo) to be comfortable announcing the timeline for us to launch initially with (the trucks) driverlessly,” Urmson said.

See here for the previous update. As I said then, I was surprised how small their fleet was initially. I had gotten it in my head that these things would be all over I-45, instead of basically making two total trips per day. They are ramping up, though, so your odds of spotting one have increased.

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Comparing the districts

Posted on August 11, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

As I write this on Sunday, there’s a lot we don’t know about how this saga ends. I feel confident saying that at some point there will be a quorum and a new map will be passed. Beyond that is anyone’s guess.

The purpose of this post is to assume that we’re going to get the map that is currently proposed, and to see how its architect squeezed out five possible pickups without endangering existing incumbents. Given that this map was constructed under the assumption that voting patterns witnessed in 2024 would persist, I also wanted to see what the numbers would look like in a more favorable environment for Democrats, namely those like we saw in the 2018 election. We can then hopefully see the effect of those 2024 assumptions.

To do this, I put the 38 Congressional districts into three groups: The reasonably safe but not overwhelmingly red Republican districts, the deep red districts, and the districts that were won by Democrats in 2024. I then took the election results from 2018 and 2024 for the current and proposed maps and made the tables below, with the Trump/Harris and Beto/Cruz numbers for each, to see how they shift.

2018 results, current districts
2018 results, proposed districts

2024 results, current districts
2024 results, proposed districts

Here’s the first group, the “normal” Republican districts:

Current map – Plan 2193


Dist    Trump24  Cruz18   Harris24  Beto18
==========================================
CD02      61.3%   62.0%      37.5%   37.3%
CD03      58.6%   57.5%      38.7%   41.7%
CD05      62.8%   59.9%      35.8%   39.4%
CD06      63.6%   61.5%      35.1%   37.7%
CD10      61.6%   58.4%      36.8%   40.6%
CD12      60.7%   57.7%      38.1%   41.4%
CD15      58.5%   43.8%      40.6%   55.5%
CD21      61.1%   59.8%      37.6%   39.3%
CD22      58.7%   58.4%      39.2%   40.9%
CD23      57.2%   50.5%      41.7%   48.7%
CD24      56.8%   56.9%      41.3%   42.3%
CD26      61.0%   59.6%      37.6%   39.6%
CD31      60.8%   59.9%      37.6%   39.0%
CD38      59.4%   59.8%      38.7%   39.4%

Proposed map – Plan 2308


Dist    Trump24  Cruz18   Harris24  Beto18
==========================================
CD02      60.3%    60.2%     38.4%   39.0%
CD03      60.3%    58.9%     37.0%   40.3%
CD05      60.1%    56.8%     38.6%   42.5%
CD06      60.6%    59.5%     37.6%   39.7%
CD10      60.5%    55.8%     37.9%   43.3%
CD12      61.3%    56.9%     37.5%   42.2%
CD15      58.5%    44.1%     40.6%   55.4%
CD21      60.2%    57.4%     38.5%   41.7%
CD22      59.2%    58.5%     38.5%   40.5%
CD23      56.9%    51.4%     41.9%   47.8%
CD24      57.1%    56.7%     41.0%   42.4%
CD26      61.2%    59.4%     37.4%   39.7%
CD31      60.1%    59.2%     38.3%   39.8%
CD38      59.3%    59.1%     38.9%   40.1%

Just so we’re clear, the dividing line between these and the “dark red” districts is fuzzy and vibes-based, so please hold your questions about why this district is here and that district is there. You can see how much care was put into the maintenance of the existing Republican districts. With two obvious exceptions that I’ll get to in a minute, none of these become noticeably less red. CDs 10 and 12 are the biggest mover among the rest of the districts, going from “solid” to “maybe on the fringe of competitiveness in a more favorable year than 2018 was”. Which is to say, not much to hang one’s hat on.

The exceptions are of course CDs 15 and 23, where the former goes from a solid Trump district to one won by Beto by 12 points, and the latter goes from solid Trump to tossup with a slight Republican lean. You have no doubt see the stories about how the Republicans are banking on the red shift among Latinos in 2024 being mostly permanent. These are the first, but far from the last, examples of what they are talking about. If Latinos vote similarly in 2026 to how they did in 2024 – it doesn’t have to be exactly the same, just enough of the same – then the Republicans will accomplish what they are aiming for with this map. That will also re-solidify Texas as a truly red state, not one that is trending towards or on the verge of becoming competitive at the statewide level. If everything is like 2018 again, then not only is Texas back to being a competitive state for the next Presidential election, Dems could break even or maybe possibly pick up a seat even under this map. No pressure, right?

I do think based on current polls and the normal behavior of midterm elections that some reversion to the previous norms are to be expected. The big question is by how much. In 2022, a year where the percentages were more or less the same in the non-15 and 23 districts above, Beto lost CD15 52-46 and CD23 54-44. 2024 was very different than 2018, but it didn’t happen all at once. A reversion to 2022 for Latinos will keep these districts red and likely still give the GOP that five-seat pickup. I really don’t know what to expect, and it’s mostly a fool’s game trying to draw conclusions from polling data this far out. There are reasons for optimism and reasons for caution. Just keep in mind that 1) reversion to 2018 is a big step, and 2) even then, the best we can probably hope for is to break even. If Trump starts polling consistently below 35% approval, then we can reassses.

Now here are the solid red districts:

Current map – Plan 2193


Dist    Trump24  Cruz18   Harris24  Beto18
==========================================
CD01      75.2%   72.5%      24.0%   26.9%
CD04      65.3%   62.7%      32.9%   36.6%
CD08      66.3%   62.8%      32.4%   36.5%
CD11      72.2%   69.2%      26.8%   30.0%
CD13      73.3%   71.5%      25.6%   27.8%
CD14      66.5%   62.6%      32.5%   36.7%
CD17      64.0%   60.5%      34.8%   38.7%
CD19      75.3%   71.5%      23.7%   27.8%
CD25      67.5%   64.5%      31.2%   34.7%
CD27      64.3%   59.6%      34.7%   39.7%
CD36      67.8%   64.4%      32.3%   35.0%

Proposed map – Plan 2308


Dist    Trump24  Cruz18   Harris24  Beto18
==========================================
CD01      74.3%    71.4%     24.8%   28.0%
CD04      61.2%    59.0%     36.6%   40.3%
CD08      61.9%    56.0%     36.7%   43.3%
CD11      66.5%    63.4%     32.2%   35.7%
CD13      72.5%    70.7%     26.4%   28.5%
CD14      63.5%    60.5%     35.3%   38.8%
CD17      59.9%    56.5%     38.5%   42.5%
CD19      75.3%    71.5%     23.7%   27.8%
CD25      61.4%    56.6%     37.4%   42.6%
CD27      60.0%    58.0%     38.7%   41.2%
CD36      66.2%    61.8%     32.6%   37.6%

Ultimately, if you want to squeeze more Republican districts out of the current Congressional map, you have to move some amount of Democratic voters out of districts that you would like to target for flips, and some number of Republican voters in to replace them. The natural place to do this is in the districts that are the most heavily Republican to begin with, as they have the greatest capacity.

The biggest shifts are in CDs 08, 17, and 25, all of which shift between eight and 12 points towards Dems at the Presidential level from the current map to the proposed one. That doesn’t make any of them competitive under 2024 conditions, but as they also have a similar shift from 2024 to 2018, they’re as competitive as anything from the first group in the 2018 environment. This is also a function of many districts becoming more Latino – the “2024 voting patterns are the new normal” assumption is baked in at multiple levels. If we are in a situation where Trump has mostly lost what he had gained among Latino voters, and his approval ratings are in the dumps, then we are going to want to have recruited decent candidates in these districts. That will almost certainly require a bet on our side, as the filing period for next year will likely be too far out to have any confidence in that kind of projection. Whatever we’re focusing on now, we should be thinking ahead as well.

I will also note that CD11 has a similar shift at the Presidential level, and CD36 has one from 2024 to 2018, but the net effect of both still leaves them as comfortably red. I honestly expected there to be a bigger effect in the deepest red districts, but for the most part it was within the same bounds as anywhere else that was red to begin with.

The real big shifts are in the districts won by Dems in 2024. That’s a tautology to some extent, as these were the districts that were expressly targeted for Republican pickup opportunities, but it’s still shocking to see the effects.

Current map – Plan 2193


Dist    Trump24  Cruz18   Harris24  Beto18
==========================================
CD07      38.1%   37.7%      58.8%   61.5%
CD09      27.2%   20.3%      71.2%   79.2%
CD16      41.3%   25.3%      57.2%   74.1%
CD18      29.4%   22.4%      69.1%   76.9%
CD20      38.7%   30.0%      59.9%   69.0%
CD28      53.1%   40.2%      45.8%   58.9%
CD29      39.2%   23.2%      59.6%   75.7%
CD30      25.8%   19.5%      72.6%   79.9%
CD32      36.7%   32.5%      60.3%   66.6%
CD33      31.9%   20.8%      65.6%   78.5%
CD34      51.8%   34.1%      47.3%   65.3%
CD35      32.3%   22.9%      65.8%   76.2%
CD37      24.2%   21.1%      73.2%   77.8%

Proposed map – Plan 2308


Dist    Trump24  Cruz18   Harris24  Beto18
==========================================
CD07      36.5%    30.9%     60.5%   68.4%
CD09      57.1%    48.7%     41.9%   50.7%
CD16      41.1%    25.1%     57.4%   74.3%
CD18      22.2%    16.0%     76.3%   83.5%
CD20      35.0%    26.4%     63.5%   72.7%
CD28      54.8%    33.5%     44.4%   65.8%
CD29      34.0%    24.0%     64.7%   75.4%
CD30      25.7%    19.6%     72.7%   79.8%
CD32      57.7%    53.9%     40.0%   45.2%
CD33      32.6%    23.9%     65.2%   75.4%
CD34      54.6%    44.2%     44.5%   55.0%
CD35      54.6%    49.7%     44.2%   49.4%
CD37      20.6%    15.7%     76.8%   83.3%

The good news is that under 2018 conditions, only one of the five targeted districts would be a clear underdog for Dems, that being CD32. CDs 09 and 35 would be tossups, with the former slightly favoring Dems and the latter slightly favoring Republicans. CDs 28 and 34 would be solidly and reasonably blue.

But boy it’s hard to look at these numbers and not be stunned by the degradation in Democratic performance from 2018 to 2024. CDs 16 and 28 are almost not the same district from one cycle to the next, while CDs 29, 33, and 34 have double-digit shifts, with several others right behind. Only CD35 is affected to the same degree as some of the deep red districts. It’s absolutely mind-boggling.

Let’s be clear that this kind of motion in the numbers isn’t the result of a drop in turnout or more effective voter suppression or whatever comforting rationales we want to indulge in. Sure, there were people who voted for our team in 2020 who didn’t show up in 2024. I’ve written about it, and I’m sure to this day that the voter data supports that. But you can’t explain these numbers without accepting that some number of people changed who they voted for. It’s the mirror image of what we saw in districts like the old CD07, when a bunch of people who were Mitt Romney Republicans in 2012 were now voting for Democrats. Those people have largely stuck with us – indeed, they’re more Democratic now – through multiple subsequent elections. If they can shift and stay shifted, why can’t these voters?

One answer to that is that they’re not getting what they voted for, if what they voted for was lower prices and more focus on deporting criminals. We have polling data to back that up. They’re still going to need to be persuaded, and there’s still going to be a ton of money spent to spread lies and fear and disinformation to them, which we will have to counter. It won’t be easy. But the upside for doing it is huge, and it’s not like we have a choice. This is what the playing field is probably going to look like. When the fight stops being about preventing this map from happening – and it will, and we all know that it will – this is what the fight needs to be about. Keep fighting to prevent the map, but be ready to move on when the time comes. We can still get what we want out of this.

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Waymo to come to Dallas

Posted on August 11, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Arriving next year.

Why it matters: North Texas has been an early proving ground for autonomous technology.

  • Autonomous trucking companies are testing their fleets on the region’s highways and Lyft plans to offer self-driving taxis in Dallas next year.

The intrigue: Waymo said the high traffic fatality rate in Dallas influenced its decision to expand its all-electric, self-driving fleet to the city.

  • “There’s also a notable opportunity for us to improve road safety,” the company said in a news release.

State of play: Waymo is in its early testing phase in Dallas and plans to start offering rides next year.

  • The rides will run 24/7 and have similar pricing to other cities — such as Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco — where Waymo operates.

How it works: Riders will be able to request a ride using the Waymo app, which will tell them the estimated price, wait time and time of arrival.

  • The vehicles have exterior and interior cameras to record incidents and rule violations. Support staff can hear inside in the vehicles only after an incident or to assist. Avis Budget Group will manage the fleet of vehicles.

Zoom out: A Waymo spokesperson told Axios the company has tested its technology in more than 10 U.S. cities so far this year.

Lyft is also planning to operate robotaxis in Dallas “as soon as 2026”, so we’ll see who gets going first. I missed the original announcement of this coming attraction, which Waymo made on July 28, but fortunately Ginger caught it for this week’s roundup.

More from Reuters:

In Dallas, Waymo will operate through a new multi-year partnership with car rental company Avis Budget Group, which will manage fleet operations, including maintenance and depot infrastructure, Waymo said in a blog.

Waymo currently serves more than 250,000 paid trips every week with about 1,500 vehicles in cities such as Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin.

[…]

This year, Waymo began its service in Austin exclusively on the Uber platform, months before Tesla started a limited robotaxi trial in the city with about a dozen Model Y SUVs and a human safety monitor in the front passenger seat.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said the company will rapidly expand its robotaxi services to other U.S. cities and is seeking regulatory approval from California, Nevada, Florida, and Arizona.

Commercializing autonomous vehicles has been challenging, with several companies such as GM’s Cruise shutting down after collisions, recalls, and federal investigations.

Amazon-backed Zoox is among the few still operating, preparing to launch commercial services later this year.

Until Tesla’s Austin trial, Waymo was the only company to operate paid driverless taxis in the United States.

Rides will be available through the Waymo app. The company is also planning launches in Miami and Washington, D.C., in 2026 as part of its broader national rollout.

As NBC DFW reminds us, Waymo had been in Houston earlier this year as part of a road trip that is now coming to a close. I’d completely forgotten about that, most likely because I didn’t see or hear anything about the road trip while it was supposedly here.

Finally, CNet brings some numbers.

Waymo currently operates fully autonomous rides for the general public in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Austin, Texas, which take place aboard the all-electric Jaguar I-Pace. The vehicles can be summoned either via the Waymo One app or Uber, depending on the city. Waymo plans to begin offering rides in Washington, DC, and Miami starting in 2026. In April, it said it’ll begin driving its vehicles on Tokyo’s streets, making this the company’s first international location.

Earlier this month, Waymo’s vehicles also arrived on the streets of New York City, where the company will begin by manually collecting driving data. It’s also rolling out a limited fleet of vehicles with human drivers in Philadelphia. The goal is to develop its technology and possibly expand its ride-hailing service to those cities someday.

In January, Waymo announced it would begin testing with manually driven vehicles in 10 new cities this year, starting with Las Vegas and San Diego. And in April, it said it reached a preliminary agreement with Toyota to “explore a collaboration” geared toward developing autonomous driving tech, which could someday be factored into personally owned vehicles.

Waymo’s expansion extends to its manufacturing facilities as well. In May, the company said it’s opening a new, 239,000-square-foot autonomous vehicle factory in the Phoenix area. The plan is to add 2,000 more fully autonomous Jaguar I-Pace vehicles to its existing 1,500-vehicle fleet. Notably, Waymo indicated it received its “final delivery from Jaguar” earlier this year, as it plans for future iterations of its driverless rides. Waymo added that the “facility’s flexible design” will allow it to integrate its upcoming sixth-generation self-driving technology into new vehicles, starting with the all-electric Zeekr RT.

In October, Waymo also announced that it’s partnering with Hyundai to bring the next generation of its technology into Ioniq 5 SUVs. In the years to come, riders will be able to summon those all-electric, autonomous vehicles using the Waymo One app.

The self-driving company says it provides more than 250,000 paid trips each week and drives across more than 700 square miles across the US. I’ve hailed several rides myself in San Francisco and, as off-putting as it can seem at first (especially to see a steering wheel turn by itself), I quickly adjusted, and it soon felt like an ordinary ride.

That’s not to say there hasn’t been pushback as Waymo rolls out to more cities. The company’s vehicles have been involved in a handful of high-profile collisions, including one with a bicyclist in San Francisco and another with a towed pickup truck in Phoenix. (Waymo recalled and updated its software to address the issue.)

Waymo’s Safety Impact report notes that over the course of 71 million autonomous miles driven through March 2025, its Waymo Driver technology had 88% fewer crashes leading to serious injuries or worse and 78% fewer injury-causing crashes, compared with “an average human driver over the same distance in our operating cities.” It also reported significantly fewer crashes with injuries to pedestrians (93%), cyclists (81%) and motorcyclists (86%).

The safety aspect of this is the most compelling for me. The tech isn’t fully there yet – see Cruise’s flameout for a prime example – but Waymo has the longest track record, and its numbers attest to that. There are very different competing visions for what an autonomous driving future looks like, and however it goes the changes will be profound. I’m still not convinced that there’s enough of a market for all of this yet – if you already own a car, as so many of us do, how often do you even think about taking some kind of ride service anywhere? – but in the longer term I’m sure this will be the norm. What’s your level of interest in these things? Would you become a robotaxi landlord, would you just never buy another car and just depend on robotaxis, or would you keep on doing what you’ve always done? Leave a comment and let us know. KERA has more.

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A win for cottage foods

Posted on August 11, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Nice to know that at least one good thing came out of the regular session.

Bee Boyd slid on a baking mitt, fittingly decorated with bees, before pulling open the oven door. They took a quick glance at the puffy, mounded toffee and chocolate chip cookies inside, announced, “They’re perfect,” and pulled them out to cool.

Staying at home in their Memorial apartment, Boyd sometimes repeats this process upward of 10 times in a day, churning out enough cookies to satisfy customers online and at places like the Houston Farmers Market. Along with their fiancé, Ty’Sun Ambres, Boyd runs All The Buzz Bakery as a cottage food business, meaning that it’s operated out of their home rather than a commercial kitchen.

For Boyd, a Navy veteran, the flexibility of this model worked best with their disabilities — even though they knew from the start that Texas law would limit their business. Currently, cottage food businesses can’t sell food that has to be refrigerated. They have to include home addresses on every food label. And perhaps most importantly, they can’t bring in more than $50,000 in revenue a year, not even accounting for expenses.

On Sept. 1, however, that is set to change. A new law signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in May will go into effect then, dramatically lessening restrictions on Texas home food businesses. Home bakers, pickle makers and jam sellers will now be able to bring in up to $150,000 yearly, and sell through third parties, such as local cafes and event venues. For people like Boyd, those changes could make all the difference.

“I definitely could not see a longevity in doing the cottage food law until recently,” Boyd said.

The new law, Texas SB541, lifts several of the long-standing restrictions on cottage businesses. Rather than listing what home cooks can sell, it now restricts a few categories of food — meat, seafood, raw milk, ice cream — and permits everything else.

“This movement is creating an opportunity for small, home and family-based businesses to grow and contribute to our economy while meeting the growing demand in their local market for fresh, homemade food products,” state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, who sponsored the new law, said in an emailed statement. “Providing regulatory relief and sensible rules is just good business.”

The updates follow years of advocacy from cottage food businesses. Texas passed its first law allowing home cooks to sell some of their wares commercially in 2011. Since then, the legislature passed at least two more laws expanding the limits, before landing on this more expansive version. Earlier cottage laws received pushback from the Texas Restaurant Association, but the organization did not oppose the most recent update.

Kelley Masters, who runs Homemade Texas and has advocated for cottage food makers since 2007, said she thinks this law hits almost all of the major priorities of home food businesses, with the exception of the fact that people still can’t ship their products.

“I hope that this gives enough runway for anyone in their cottage food business to either make it something that they can live off, or to provide enough of a foundation that they can then make that jump to commercial,” she said.

I’ve been following the cottage food movement since 2009, when a college friend who was also a home baker reached out to me about it. Their most recent legislative success was in 2019, when the law about pickling was updated to allow for vegetables other than cucumbers to be counted. This law here makes a lot of sense to me and is the kind of “government efficiency” that I can get behind. I had no idea this was going on before now, and I’m glad to see this update. Kudos to all involved.

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Weekend link dump for August 10

Posted on August 10, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

“Is the Government Still Collecting Inflation Data?”

“How a Nazi-Obsessed Amateur Historian Went From Obscurity to the Top of Substack”.

“A display at the Smithsonian Institute, focused on the extremely rare practice of presidential impeachment, has now been altered to make it seem just a little bit rarer. You’ll never guess which of America’s three impeached presidents has been removed!”

“Let us imagine a world where football is no longer the bullying juggernaut dictating every move in college sports. Instead, what if the central tenets that drive the enjoyability of a conference — local rivalries, historical animosity, recruiting battles — were the focus? Dream with me!”

Here is a report on the World Dog Surfing Championships, complete with several pictures of dogs surfing. You’re welcome.

RIP, Ann Harris, longtime book editor who worked on such bestsellers as “The Exorcist”, “The Thorn Birds”, “A Brief History of Time”, and many more.

RIP, Loni Anderson, two-time Emmy-nominated actor best known for WKRP in Cincinnati.

“On Wednesday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reported that the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew at a 3 percent annual rate in the second quarter. That sounds like good news, but the underlying data tell us that the U.S. economy is stumbling—and that’s before President Donald Trump doubled down last week on his destructive tariffs.”

Any time an event is compared to Fyre Fest, it’s bad news.

“The FBI Redacted Trump’s Name in the Epstein Files”.

“After years of decline, marriage rates are up. Divorce rates have continued to nosedive. More American children are being born into two-parent homes. The average age of first marriage in the US is a touch above 28 for women and a touch above 30 for men. With the youngest Millennials turning 30 next year and the oldest in our 40s, that means that this nationwide marriage resurgence is largely thanks to Millennials. And it’s not a coincidence that Millennials are the marriage generation, and also a generation that is more feminist, better educated, and less likely to be incarcerated than those that came before it. Gender equality and individual stability are the keys to getting and staying married.”

“I need the wolves to respond and know that, hey, humans are bad.”

“‘Star Wars’ has had a contentious relationship with artificial intelligences for a very long time—and now that we find ourselves staring down the barrel of generative AI, the galaxy far, far away has given us the surprising language to denigrate it.”

“A group of state attorneys general, led by New York, has filed a lawsuit accusing the Trump administration of mounting an unconstitutional pressure campaign against gender-affirming care for transgender youth.”

“[Thirty-nine large wildfires, including one at the Grand Canyon,] come as the National Park Service and other federal agencies face large cuts to their workforces, including among personnel who help fight wildfires. Multiple reports have suggested that cuts made by the Trump administration to U.S. Forest Service staffing have hampered the agency’s ability to fight fires.”

“And therefore never send to know for whom the AI slop tolls; It tolls for thee.”

“We are members of the Writers Guild of America who speak with one voice to decry the dangerous and escalating attacks on the First Amendment, independent media, and the free press”.

“Now to be clear, put me down as a decided skeptic on whether Chuck Schumer is the person who can lead Senate Democrats as they need to be led in the Trump era. But coming off the March budget showdown debacle, at a minimum, Schumer and his media advisors are now clear on the kind of legislative leader Democrats are demanding and are very focused on portraying him as that guy. Are they ready for what’s coming in September? I’m not really sure. But I think they have a pretty clear sense of what’s being demanded of them.”

RIP, Emily Cole, trailblazing principal at Houston ISD.

“A number of employees with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) were informed via email late on Tuesday that they have been reassigned, effective immediately, to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The workers had seven days to accept the reassignment, under threat of being removed from the civil service.”

“Jen Pawol is set to become the first woman to umpire in Major League Baseball when she works games this weekend between the Miami Marlins and Atlanta Braves.” Major kudos to her for that.

“What compels someone to sneak a sex toy into a basketball game and throw it on the court at athletes is beyond my comprehension, but it’s telling that this is only happening right now at WNBA games.” There’s also somehow a cryptocurrency link in all this, and I just can’t.

“If only someone with a lot of money, a vested interest in protecting their image, and the desire to make the world safer for other women and girls would take Elon’s ass to court over this.”

RIP, Jim Lovell, NASA astronaut who commanded the Apollo 13 mission.

RIP, Billy Howton, All-American wide received for Rice University who was a two-time All Pro for the Packers in the NFL and went on to help start and be the first President of the NFL Players Association, where he got a pension plan started and got the players paid for the use of their likeness on trading cards.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged | Comments Off on Weekend link dump for August 10

The censure

Posted on August 10, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Don’t we have enough drama already?

Harris County commissioners voted 3-1 Thursday to censure Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo following a heated disagreement over a proposed tax increase for early childcare programs.

Commissioners Lesley Briones, Tom Ramsey and Adrian Garcia voted in favor of admonishing Hidalgo. Commissioner Rodney Ellis cast the lone dissenting vote. Although the censure carries no immediate penalty, it will be formally entered into the record, a county official told the Houston Chronicle.

It came after a chaotic scene erupted as Hidalgo goaded dozens of children, who attended the meeting to support the continued funding of a slate of early childcare programs, to call on commissioners to vote in favor of the proposed tax increase. Multiple calls for decorum were ignored by Hidalgo, who repeatedly interrupted commissioners during discussion on the matter.

Garcia took to X shortly after the argument and criticized what he labeled as Hidalgo’s “disruptive behavior.”

“We must hold ourselves to the highest standards,” Garcia said. “It was particularly offensive to witness her trying to use children as props for her political agenda. The people of Harris County deserve better.”

The move also came after Hidalgo criticized her colleagues in a social media post, which she also read portions of aloud in court prior to departing for a scheduled appointment.

“They have ridiculously massive contractor-funded war chests. We redrew districts that benefit them,” Hidalgo said of her fellow commissioners. “Democrats in Commissioners Court have until the end of the day today to avoid unnecessary cuts to basic services. Which side are we on?”

Although commissioners did not formally vote on the proposed increase, they failed to meet a key deadline, effectively making the motion moot.

There’s a longer version of the story, which was in the Saturday print edition, here. The links in the excerpt above also have more details. I’ve got a headache and would like to relax a little this weekend, so I’m going to cut to the chase and say that while I thought Judge Hidalgo’s proposal had merit, the timing of it was not great given the county’s current budget situation, and to the extent that it was possible to convince at least two of her Democratic colleagues to support this proposal that she obviously feels strongly about, she failed to accomplish that. And so here we are.

This is a mess, and it was avoidable. I like all of the people involved here so I’m going to stop before I say something that will get me into (more) trouble. Campos has more.

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Tesla and Musk sued over robotaxi issues

Posted on August 10, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Interesting.

A group of Tesla shareholders sued the company and CEO Elon Musk, alleging they weren’t forthcoming about problems with its robotaxi.

The proposed class action lawsuit, filed in a Texas federal court Monday, says Tesla misled investors, failed to disclose problems with its long-in-the-works robotaxi service, and “overstated the effectiveness of its autonomous driving technology.”

“There was thus a significant risk that the Company’s autonomous driving vehicles, including the Robotaxi, would operate dangerously and/or in violation of traffic laws,” the lawsuit said.

Tesla debuted a test of its robotaxis — fully autonomous cars available through a ride-hailing service — on June 22.

There were some hiccups.

According to videos posted by influencers and Tesla shareholder who participated in the test in Austin, some cars drove in the wrong lane, exceeded the speed limit, braked at inappropriate times, and had trouble parking without intervention. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it was looking into the irregularities depicted in videos.

Shareholders appeared unhappy: Tesla’s stock price fell by 6.05% over June 24 and June 25, following reports about the videos and the NHTSA announcement, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit also points to the August 1 jury verdict in a Florida federal court over a deadly crash involving a Tesla on “Autopilot” mode.

The jury awarded the family of Naibel Benavides Leon and her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, a combined $329 million in total damages. It found Tesla responsible for $242.5 million in combined punitive and compensatory damages in the case.

Per Reuters, the case is Morand v Tesla Inc et al, U.S. District Court, Western District of Texas, No. 25-01213. This is a shareholders’ lawsuit, so it’s not so much about how good or bad the tech is but that it may have been released prematurely and in doing so caused damage to the stock’s value. I await further news with great interest. Quartz and The Guardian have more.

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We get closer to school closures

Posted on August 10, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Words from Mike Miles.

Houston ISD’s state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles announced Wednesday the district may borrow $180 million for a new career and technical education center, pending board approval.

Miles, addressing hundreds of teachers at an annual teachers’ convocation, said this is to have more than one career and technical education center in the district. The groundbreaking would be in 2026-27.

This move toward another career and technical education center follows the failed $4.4 billion bond that would have included $375 million for three new career and technical education centers — $125 million per center.

The Barbara Jordan Career Center will also see upgrades with more emphasis on the use of drones and cybersecurity in its CTE programs.

[…]

Miles also said the administration is trying to hand a list to the Board of Managers with no more than 10 “small” schools for closure due to failing facilities.

“We are trying to whittle that down to get it under 10. Not sure I can do that,” Miles said. “But we’ll see. But that, we will give to the board probably in December, that list of schools.”

The mention of school closures follows the district’s decision to close an undetermined number of schools in 2026-27. The state’s largest school district lost nearly 7,400 students in the 2024-25 academic year, representing HISD’s largest enrollment loss since the COVID-19 pandemic. HISD reported that it had 176,731 students enrolled on Oct. 25, which is about a 4% enrollment decline from the previous year.

See here for some background on the recent school closure discussion. This is a topic HISD has danced around for some number of years. The update from February is that this time they have a possible number of campuses in question, though still no list or criteria to suggest what the targets may be. That’s when this goes from “troublesome” to “all-encompassing freakout”, for the very good reason that closing a school is disruptive to a neighborhood and people hate the idea of it. As I’ve said before, I don’t mind that it’s Mike Miles who will have to deal with this.

As for the new CTE center, I’m okay with this in principle, but, um, where is the money for it going to come from? Voters famously defeated that bond proposal, so either there’s going to be another, smaller proposal on a near-future ballot or Miles is planning to use a mechanism to finance it that is unclear and possibly nonexistent. I’m sure the Chron would have asked him some questions about that, but they were denied press credentials for the convocation where he was speaking, on the grounds that the event at Delmar Stadium was “at capacity”. Yeah, sure, no way they could have squeezed in one more person, even if they had to stand. Sheesh.

Posted in School days | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Quorum break Day 5 roundup: Help an ideological enemy out?

Posted on August 9, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Hilarious.

Still a crook any way you look

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and House Speaker Dustin Burrows are asking an Illinois court to enforce arrest warrants against Democratic lawmakers who have left the state to delay passage of a GOP-backed congressional map.

Burrows issued civil arrest warrants on Monday, ordering the sergeant-at-arms and state troopers to track down and arrest the dozens of House members who absconded Sunday to deny quorum, or the minimum number of members required for the lower chamber to pass legislation.

These warrants are only enforceable within state lines, making them a largely symbolic threat that also ensures any members who return to the state can be apprehended and returned to the chamber.

The request to Illinois’ Eighth Judicial Circuit Court marks a significant escalation in Republicans’ efforts to restore quorum and pass the new congressional map, which aims to secure five additional seats for Republicans. The Legislature undertook the unusual mid-decade redraw under pressure from President Donald Trump, who is looking to pad his party’s narrow majority in the U.S. House ahead of next year’s potentially difficult midterm election.

When Texas Democrats left the state to break quorum in 2003 and 2021, the House speakers at the time issued warrants but did not try to enforce them outside Texas.

“The Texas Representatives named herein hope the State of Illinois will provide safe harbor for their political actions and shield them from legal process,” Paxton wrote in the filing. “The United States Constitution, federal statute, and the doctrine of comity between states demand otherwise.”

Paxton is calling on the “full faith and credit” clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says states should honor each other’s judicial proceedings. States typically do enforce each others’ judgments and comply with extraditions, but there are limits to when they are required to do so, legal experts previously told The Texas Tribune.

[…]

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker previously said his state is “going to do everything we can to protect every single one of them,” referring to the Texas legislators in his state. Some other members went to Massachusetts and New York.

In the filing, Paxton calls on the goodwill of Illinois’ leadership, saying both states share the same fundamental interest in preventing “factionists and disorganizers” from blocking the progress of government.

“This is a far more fundamental common policy of the two sister states than any political differences about any legislation the Texas House of Representatives may consider or act on when a quorum is restored,” Paxton said.

I’m not sure which is funnier/more pathetic, that Paxton venue-shopped this in a way that would make the usual Kacsmaryk-humping sycophants in the wingnut legal factory chuckle, or his absolutely cringeworthy “help us help fulfill the authoritarian dreams of a President who just wants to avoid any and all accountability and also hates your state’s guts” language. If you’d been wondering how Paxton’s bad-boss tendencies might affect the quality of the work product there, wonder no more. If somehow this court buys into his bullshit, I feel confident it will get swiftly knocked down on appeal.

The targeted House Dems are doing what they can to get their message out.

If Gov. Greg Abbott is determined to pass a gerrymandered congressional map, Texas Democrats know he has the votes and the power to eventually get his way.

But for the dozens of Democrats who left the state this week in protest of the map, it’s not just about winning — it’s about fighting.

Away from their families and regular jobs, Texas Democrats, most of whom are hunkered down in a suburb about an hour west of Chicago, are facing $500-per-day fines, civil arrest warrants and threats from Republican state leaders to remove them from office.

Now five days into the walkout, they plan to stay away until at least the end of the special session on Aug. 19. When they return, they face the possibility of being stripped of their leadership positions and even further marginalized in a chamber where they are already outnumbered. And no matter how long they stay away, Abbott can just call another special session to pass the map.

But it will all be worth it, they say, if they can lay the groundwork for a national fight over redistricting and ensure enough voters across the country understand what they frame as an attempt by President Donald Trump to stack the deck in the midterm election next year.

“It takes an act of defiance like this to wake up the country and let them know that our democracy is being stolen right in front of our eyes,” said Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer of San Antonio in an interview. “If we’re going to be the spark that lights that fire, then we’re doing our jobs.”

[…]

With Republicans moving to approve the map at a quick clip, the determination to deny quorum solidified among Democrats in the 48 hours before they got on a chartered plane headed for Chicago. Others made their way to Albany to meet with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, and to Boston for a state legislative conference.

Democrats say they’re buying valuable time by walking out, drawing attention to the issue among voters and getting other blue states involved — even while recognizing that Texas’ map is likely to get passed and will need to be fought in court.

“The spotlight has been turned on,” Rep. James Talarico of Austin said in an interview. “I’m hoping this courage that my colleagues and I have shown will be contagious, and it’ll inspire other legislators in blue states to respond with their own redistricting attempts.”

Using their hotel complex as a base camp, Democrats have done scores of media interviews out of their cramped rooms and a small park off the Fox River in Illinois; hosted news conferences with federal, state and party leaders at local union halls and blue state capitols; and met with Democratic governors and elected officials from across the country.

Talarico, who is mulling a run for U.S. Senate, said he did 25 interviews in the first 24 hours of the quorum break, ranging from TV and traditional platforms to podcasts with ranging ideological bents. His TV hits alone reached 9.8 million viewers across the country, he said, not including thousands of others on social media.

One of those interviews Rep. Talarico did is here, with Mother Jones. Dude’s a talent for sure. I’m still rooting for him to run for Governor, as I think he’s the best shot we’ll have at that office, he can do what he wants when he’s ready to do it.

I like how the story notes the way that Republicans hid the map, which was very much not the big risk for existing GOP incumbents we thought it might be, and then moved with all due speed to get to a floor vote once it passed out of committee. I wondered at the time if they feared/expected a quorum break and were rushing to either make it too difficult for Dems to pull it off, or if maybe they thought it would be better for them politically if they forced the Dems to flee. I don’t have any particular insight on that, but I do believe the short timeline was a factor.

The story also notes that red states would have the overall advantage in an all-out redistricting war. Whatever may come of that, Florida is getting on board to be next in line.

Oh, and now Greg Abbott is threatening to go bigger on redistricting when the Dems come back. That would seem to me to have a much greater likelihood of becoming a dummymander, but what do I know?

As much fun as this all is, there are real things at risk in the short term.

With Texas legislators locked in a standoff over Republicans’ push to redraw the state’s congressional districts mid-decade, time is running out for election officials to prepare for next year’s primary without major disruption.

Planning for the March primary election is already underway, but election officials say they can’t move forward without finalized maps — and the first key deadline, mandated by the state, is coming Sept. 9.

Democratic lawmakers have pledged to remain out of the state in protest of the Republicans’ proposed congressional map, making an agreement unlikely by the end of the special session Aug. 19. The proposed map could still change, and if Gov. Greg Abbott calls another special session, the debate could extend well into the fall.

Without knowing where the boundaries will be drawn, election officials won’t be able to finalize decisions about polling locations or the number of election workers needed. Voters whose polling location changes will also need to be informed, and candidates who want a spot on the primary ballot also need the new boundary lines well in advance in order to familiarize themselves with the district and campaign. Candidates have to be residents of the district they seek to represent.

In a typical redistricting cycle year, the process of adapting to new maps is labor-intensive for election officials and takes months.

“Who knows if we’ll have enough time?” said Chris Davis, the voter registration director in Travis County. He said the Sept. 9 deadline is when county precinct chairs — who represent their political party in a precinct within their neighborhood — can begin filing to run in the primary. A new map could shift precinct boundaries entirely.

Candidates “need to know now which precinct they’re filing for,” Davis said. “If we have to split a precinct into two, they may end up being the chair of a new precinct.”

All other primary candidates can begin filing for a spot on the ballot Nov. 8. The filing deadline is one month later.

Election officials across the state have for months been updating precinct boundary lines to account for population growth, as required by state law in odd-numbered years. But that work is now on hold due to the redistricting battle, multiple election officials told Votebeat. If and when new maps get approved, they’ll have to start over.

I doubt that’s giving anyone in the state leadership even a moment’s pause. The lower levels of government are there to do their will, after all. While Dems could stay out long enough to go past that September deadline, I doubt the November-December filing period is in any danger at this time. The main complication there is likely to be if the courts hold things up. Even with that, when a quorum is re-established the Lege can also move the primaries back to May or whenever, as they did for 2012. There absolutely will be a mess and a scramble at the end of all this, but we’re way too far away from actually preventing new maps from being ready in time for next year.

Later on Friday afternoon, Ken Paxton did the thing he said he was going to do.

Attorney General Ken Paxton asked the Texas Supreme Court on Friday to vacate the seats of 13 state House members who have fled to block GOP redistricting, carrying out a threat from earlier in the week.

House Speaker Dustin Burrows had set a deadline of 1 p.m. Friday for dozens of absent Democrats to return voluntarily, but the body did not reach a quorum.

[…]

The members named in the suit are: state Reps. Ron Reynolds; Vikki Goodwin; Gina Hinojosa; James Talarico; Lulu Flores; Mihaela Plesa; Suleman Lalani; Chris Turner; Ana-Maria Ramos; Jessica Gonzalez; John Bucy III; Christina Morales. Wu is also included in Paxton’s suit.

The House Democratic Caucus could not immediately be reached for comment, but Bucy said in a statement Friday that he was not deterred.

“I broke quorum to protect the voice of millions of Texans,” Bucy said. “This seat belongs to the people of Texas House District 136 — not Ken Paxton. I’m not backing down.”

Paxton said he was focusing on those members because they “made incriminating public statements regarding their refusal to return.” He pointed to a statement by Wu, for example, in which he declared that “this corrupt special session is over,’ referring to the 30-day session that Abbott called to pass legislation on redistricting, flooding recovery and hemp regulation.

I’m sure there’s a legal argument in there somewhere, but as with Abbott and Cornyn’s actions it’s hard to see one. I’m just going to leave these here:

The Trib has more. Once again, a master class on lawyering from Paxton. This too is a “quo warranto” filing, to the Supreme Court, who all things being equal I’m sure would have preferred to have a nice, quiet weekend. Hey, if we can’t have nice things then neither can you.

Paxton also filed a lawsuit against Beto O’Rourke, claiming he doing illegal fundraising for the quorum busters. On this one, Paxton succeeded.

Former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke cannot financially support Texas Democrats who left the state to delay passage of a new congressional map, a Tarrant County judge ruled Friday evening.

O’Rourke and his political group, Powered by People, were sued by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton Friday afternoon. Paxton argued that the group was deceptively fundraising for and illegally helping support Texas Democrats as they fanned out to Illinois, Massachusetts and New York to deny the House the headcount needed to pass legislation.

Tarrant County District Judge Megan Fahey granted Paxton’s request for a temporary injunction, barring O’Rourke and Powered by People from fundraising for the Democrats or spending money to cover their expenses. The order came less than four hours after Paxton’s office filed the petition.

Fahey, a Republican, was appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott in 2019 and has twice been reelected to the bench.

In her ruling, Fahey agreed with Paxton’s contention that Powered by People engaged in false, misleading or deceptive fundraising practices, and by distributing funds to Texas Democrats, writing in the ruling that the group either “directly violates or causes Texas Democratic Legislators” to violate state law and House procedures.

The group cannot use political funds to pay for travel or accommodations for “unexcused Texas legislators during any special legislative session called by the Texas Governor as consideration for a violation of such legislators’ Constitutional duties.”

O’Rourke filed his own lawsuit against Paxton Friday in El Paso district court. He alleged that the attorney general was engaging in a “fishing expedition, constitutional rights be damned,” and asked the judge to block Paxton’s investigation into the organization’s practices.

In a statement responding to the injunction, O’Rourke said Paxton was trying to “make examples out of those who fight so that others won’t.”

I dunno, man. How would this even be enforced? If it goes through the Texas Ethics Commission, I doubt anyone has all that much to fear. And what happens if O’Rourke succeeds in his lawsuit? I’m so confused. May there be less news over the weekend, that’s all I’m asking for.

Posted in That's our Lege | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Ask questions, get booted

Posted on August 9, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

This is why the whole Board of Managers concept sucks.

The four ousted members of the Houston ISD Board of Managers sent the majority of the board’s formal requests for information to the district in the two years before the Texas Education Agency removed them from their roles in June, records show.

HISD’s appointed school board members can submit formal “requests for information” to the district for certain data, policies or documents. The district typically sends the response to all board members, even those who did not ask the initial question, members said.

HISD’s current and recently removed appointed board members have made more than 140 requests into topics such as teacher shortages and retention, the district’s removal of principals, and student enrollment and achievement data from June 2023 to May.

Over the past two years, former HISD school board members Audrey Momanaee, Cassandra Auzenne Bandy, Rolando Martinez and Adam Rivon sent more than 100 formal information requests combined.

Meanwhile, board members Ric Campo, Michelle Cruz Arnold, Angela Lemond Flowers and Paula Mendoza sent eight total formal requests for information.

Janette Garza Lindner — the fifth remaining school board member — sent 29 requests, while five requests have no name attached to them, according to HISD records.

Martinez said he felt like, as an effective board member, it was important to submit requests for information — as well as multiple questions before school board meetings — because he wanted transparency for other board members and HISD community members.

“This data, for me, shows … that I took it seriously, that I was going to work at it, and I was going to ask questions when I felt like I didn’t have answers, even if that meant there was a perception that I wasn’t 100% aligned with the superintendent or the district or the TEA,” Martinez said.

While he remains excited about the district’s “tremendous” academic progress, Martinez said he wasn’t necessarily surprised when the TEA removed him from the board. He said he thought it might happen eventually due to potential concerns from the administration over the perception that he was misaligned with the district’s direction.

[…]

Bill Aleshire, an Austin-based lawyer focused on government accountability, said the district data does not directly indicate a correlation between the number of requests and the TEA’s removal of board members, particularly because the member with the third-highest numbers of requests remained on the board.

However, he said the data does raises “a legitimate concern and suspicion” about the dynamics of an appointed school board like HISD’s, where members do not have to be held accountable by voters in elections.

“If someone sat there and never asked questions and never submitted a request for information other than what they were fed, that might not go well with voters, but it depends on who they think they’re being held accountable by,” Aleshire said. “That’s why the takeover statute is so undemocratic, so dangerous, because it completely changes the dynamic of who the board is serving and how they are held accountable.”

See here and here for the background. I’ll concede that this is more suggestive than conclusive. Why wasn’t Janette Garza Lindner removed when she was as active a question-asker as the four who were booted? All that gets us to is another level of speculation. But when you never worked to build trust, when you avoid engagement with the public, when you work to be un-transparent, this is what you get. The next real Board is going to have a lot of work to do just making visible all the things Mike Miles did without anyone asking him why.

Posted in School days | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Checking in on Kerrville

Posted on August 9, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Texas Public Radio sent a reporter to Kerrville to talk to some residents there about how they’re doing after the flood.

Jack Morgan/TPR

The next person I spoke to, Jess, had been slowly moving along the memorial, reading every notice. When she spoke, it was surprising.

“I grew up in England. I now live in Missouri, and I’ve been doing disaster relief for the last 15 years,” she said.

Jess said she worked for an organization called All Hands and Hearts, and she was here to help. We wondered if going to the site of natural disasters with regularity was overwhelming work.

“It would be, but I get to see the best of humanity in the darkest times. I work with volunteers who have come from around the country and around the world to help a community they don’t know, for no reason, for no money, other than that they saw it on the TV, and they thought, people could use a helping hand. And so I am honored to get to be a part of that,” she explained.

Driving a bit further I saw a sign that read “Emotional Support Here.”

“I’m Kelsi Wilmot, director of community relations and the public information officer. This is our emotional support center, and it is located at 819 Water Street. It is a free service for anyone impacted by the flood to come in, have a safe space to talk,” she said.

She works for the Hill Country Mental Health Development Disability Center. Kelsi didn’t lose her home, but she explained that even those who didn’t lose anything can easily suffer trauma.

“We grew up on the river. The river has been, least for me, something vital and just where all of my memories are made,” Wilmot said. “So it’s been kind of strange having to redefine that relationship with the river as well.”

Realizing that the tranquil Guadalupe River she knows well could become a deadly wall of water is tough to process.

She added that her group has sent a van to Hunt to help with emotional support services there too.

“And then we one thing that we’ve started, too, is our mobile clinic. So in Hunt, we’re offering free services as well.”

There’s more, so read the rest. The embedded photo is one of many, showing a memorial wall honoring the dead and the two that are still missing. Anyone in Houston can relate to what they’re going through, that’s for sure. I wish them all the best.

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Quorum break Day 4 roundup: So what is the FBI doing?

Posted on August 8, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Nobody knows.

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn announced that the FBI has granted his request to investigate and locate the Texas Democratic lawmakers who left the state in an attempt to stop the passage of new GOP-favored congressional maps.

A spokesperson for Cornyn declined to provide additional details about the FBI’s involvement, and the bureau declined to comment.

Cornyn, a Republican who is facing a tough primary challenge, previously sent a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel asking for the agency’s help in tracking down the House Democrats, who decamped to Illinois and are known to be staying at a hotel in the Chicago suburbs. Cornyn also asked Patel to investigate the legislators for alleged bribery by accepting funds to cover costs associated with their trip.

In response to the letter, Cornyn said on a local radio show that Patel “had assigned agents in both the San Antonio and Austin office,” but he did not specify what role those agents would play.

[…]

The FBI’s involvement, with its federal law enforcement powers, raises the prospect for the first time of agents getting involved to apprehend the Democrats. The Texas House Democratic Caucus did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump previously floated the possibility of FBI involvement, saying Tuesday the agency “may have to” get involved.

The largest contingent of Democrats is seeking refuge in Illinois, but the state’s governor, JB Pritzker, said on a podcast Wednesday that the FBI would be “unwelcome” in any operation seeking to apprehend the lawmakers. He previously vowed to “do everything we can to protect every single one of them.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries brushed off the threat, accusing the Trump administration of continuing to “weaponize law enforcement to target political adversaries.”

The reason Cornyn didn’t give any answer to the question of what exactly these agents would be doing is because it’s hard to even imagine what they could reasonably do. This isn’t a manhunt – the location of the legislators is known, as proven by the person who knew what hotel to call in a bomb threat for. If they were going to be arrested and dragged back to Texas, Cornyn would have said on what charge. This is playing to the cheap seats. That could change – I did use the word “reasonable” in there and we are talking about Trump’s FBI – but for now at least, this is sound and fury.

Along similar lines:

Texas Democrats had been out of state for less than 48 hours when Gov. Greg Abbott moved to have their seats declared vacant.

The emergency legal filing represents an unprecedented escalation of Abbott’s effort to pass a new congressional map that adds additional GOP seats, as demanded by President Donald Trump. It flies in the face of Texas’ own founding documents, centuries of legal precedent and a recent Supreme Court of Texas ruling, legal experts say.

Even Attorney General Ken Paxton, a fellow Republican, threw cold water on Abbott’s strategy, filing his own brief saying that while he “appreciates the Governor’s passion,” he does not have the authority to bring this type of case.

But just because legal precedent is not on his side doesn’t mean Abbott’s case is doomed. The long-shot filing is before the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court, where Abbott has appointed six of nine justices. Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock was Abbott’s former general counsel, as was Justice James Sullivan.

“They have their own independent authority, of course, but it does put them in a tough political position,” said Andrew Cates, an Austin-based attorney and expert on Texas ethics law. “They don’t want to be in the position of potentially biting the hand that initially fed them.”

Abbott’s petition specifically targets Rep. Gene Wu, the House Democratic leader, serving as a test case that could eventually allow him to remove every member who left the state. Abbott asked the court to rule by Thursday; the justices gave Wu until the end of the day Friday to respond.

It is hard to argue that leaving the state to deny the Legislature a quorum is equivalent to abandoning an office, legal experts say. Texas’ constitution sets an intentionally high threshold for quorum — two-thirds of the chamber, compared to half in most other states — in an effort to limit the majority’s complete authority. And centuries of quorum breaks, both in Texas and other states, have resulted in expulsion only once, during the colonial era, when members of the New Jersey assembly, upon regaining quorum, voted to remove their peers who stayed away.

“The law allows for consequences, like arrests and fines, to entice the members back,” said Charles “Rocky” Rhodes, a constitutional law expert at the University of Missouri law school. “If they wanted to say you lose your office, they could have put that in there, but they didn’t.”

The rest of the story is about all the ways that this is without precedent and on basically nonexistent legal grounds. If the news peg up front is that Abbott’s best chance is that some of the Supremes may decide they owe him one for having appointed them in the first place, well, that tells you a lot about the strength of the argument. And also about how degraded the legal system could be if they go that way. Per the Chron, Rep. Wu is to file a response today.

We shouldn’t talk about that attack on Rep. Wu without talking about all the other attacks on him.

Rep. Gene Wu

In late May, House lawmakers were hours into a debate over a proposal to teach Texas school children about the dangers of communism.

Rep. Gene Wu, a Houston Democrat, stepped up to the podium of the House floor. He shared a story about when his family had its land confiscated by the communist Chinese government. During the Cultural Revolution, his father, 13 years old at the time, was dispatched alone to fields and “and basically told to either farm or die,” Wu said.

His father survived. Many others did not.

“When I hear people call me a communist spy, or when members of this body say those things, I get a little offended,” Wu said, clasping his hands atop of a podium and looking across the room at his fellow lawmakers. “Because our family has been the victims of communism for a very long time, and we fled to this country as fast as we possibly could.” Wu was opposing the bill which he said could lead to the stigmatizing and stereotyping of people who fled communist countries.

For years, Wu — the leader of the Texas House Democrats — has been the recipient of such remarks from Republicans inside the Capitol and out. His GOP critics, which include party officials, have accused him on social media of being an operative of the Chinese Communist Party doing China’s bidding in the Legislature while baselessly questioning his loyalty to Texas and the U.S.

I don’t want to amplify the specifics, so I’ll leave it to you to read the rest. There are some truly shitty people out there, and they no longer feel like they need to hide that. I’m not a proponent in general of shame, but some folks really could use a bit of it.

Beyond that, not much else to say. Trump sent in some henchmen to lean on Indiana, with seemingly limited results. We wait and see what SCOTx does and how Ken Paxton tries to do the same abandonment thing his own way. I won’t be surprised if there’s an answer for the former by the end of the day. Daily Kos has more.

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Fifth Circuit upholds voter ID for vote by mail

Posted on August 8, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Of course they did.

A federal appeals court has upheld Texas’ requirement that potential voters must list their identification information in their application for a mail-in ballot.

In Texas, voting by mail is only available for certain groups of people, including elderly voters and people with disabilities. Under Senate Bill 1 passed in 2021, voters must also include an ID number — such as a driver’s license number — on both the vote-by-mail applications and the mail-in ballots and both numbers need to match. Opponents of the law said this provision discriminated against voters with disabilities and that it would not meaningfully cut down on voter fraud.

In a Monday ruling, a panel from the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the updated requirement does not violate federal law. It also reversed a lower court’s decision.

“We have no difficulty concluding that this ID number requirement fully complies with a provision of federal law known by the parties as the materiality provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” wrote Judge James Ho, a Trump appointee.

Judge Patrick Higginbotham and Judge Don Willett, who were appointed under the Reagan and Trump administrations, respectively, joined Ho’s ruling.

[…]

Prior to this decision, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas had ruled in 2023 that the requirements infringed on the Civil Rights Act. Though later that year, Paxton’s office was able to stop that decision from going into effect.

These voter ID requirements were also the target of legal challenges from several civil rights groups, along with other provisions of SB 1.

Following the Monday ruling, the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas said its legal team is continuing to evaluate its options for a possible appeal.

See here for the background. What’s shocking is not that the Fifth Circuit ruled this way – I mean, have you met the Fifth Circuit? – but that it somehow only took them four months to do it. It took three and a half years from the time of the original lawsuit to the district court’s ruling. This was absolute greased lightning by appellate standards. Make of that what you will. As for the consideration about further appeal, I’m hard pressed to see the reason at this point. It’s going to take federal law, and a considerable bit of federal judicial reform, to fix this ever-increasing mess. But we all already knew that.

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Dispatches from Dallas, August 8 edition

Posted on August 8, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

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

This week, in news from Dallas-Fort Worth, we have redistricting; what Dallas city council is up to and facing now that it’s back from its summer holiday; deaths in the Tarrant and Dallas County jails; questions about local ICE conditions; the latest on who’s buying the Dallas Morning News; DART news that isn’t about the Lege; local school district and suburban updates, mostly about lack of money; public health news about COVID, STIs, and heat; the return of King of the Hill; and State Fair news, including the Big Tex Choice semifinalists.

This week’s post was brought to you by the music of Jessie Murph and Rose Betts, brought to me courtesy of the algorithms. Murph is a little rap-oriented for my taste but Betts is a folk-inflected singer-songwriter who is right up my alley. Maybe one or the other of them is up yours!

The biggest news this week is redistricting and the quorum break, which our host is ably covering, so I’m only going to drop a few links of local interest. First, Gromer Jeffers, Jr analyzes the effect of redistricting on Dems in North Texas, specifically the effect on CD 33, currently held by Marc Veasey in Fort Worth. In the new map, CD 33 is in Dallas County and I’d be in it (I live in northeast Dallas). And CD 32, Julie Johnson’s district, formerly held by Colin Allred, moves east into Fort Worth; her home is in CD 24, Beth Van Duyne’s district (which I’m currently zoned into). It’s worth reading if you’re interested in the slicing and dicing going on and Dallas politics.

The Star-Telegram reports that Beto O’Rourke and Joaquin Castro are rallying in Fort Worth on Saturday to support the quorum-breakers. (This is the kind of thing that’s getting Beto’s group Powered by People scrutinized by Ken Paxton) I’ll miss that due to other commitments but I may throw Brother Beto some scratch just to annoy the Attorney General. The other item I recommend, for some historical perspective on quorum-breaking, is Jim Hightower on the Killer Bees. Our institutional memory on the Democratic side does go back to 1979.

In other news:

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Texas blog roundup for the week of August 4

Posted on August 8, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance salutes the Texas Democratic legislators who are standing up against the racist Republican gerrymander as we bring you the week’s roundup.

Continue reading →

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Quorum break Day 3 roundup: Of course there’s a bomb threat

Posted on August 7, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

I suppose something like this was inevitable.

Texas House Democrats in Illinois to block GOP redistricting were evacuated from their hotel Wednesday morning due to a bomb threat, lawmakers and local police said.

A press conference scheduled for 12:30 p.m. with U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin was cancelled as a result.

In a statement, Texas House Democratic leaders, including caucus chair Gene Wu of Houston, said the group is safe.

“We are safe, we are secure, and we are undeterred,” the statement read. “We are grateful for Governor Pritzker, local, and state law enforcement for their quick action to ensure our safety.”

[…]

State Rep. John Bucy, an Austin Democrat, in a statement blamed Texas GOP leaders for using rhetoric that put the Democrats’ safety at risk.

“Unfortunately, this is what happens when Republican leaders, like our corrupt Attorney General, call on their supporters to ‘hunt us down,’” he said. “We’ve been threatened by the governor, the attorney general, and our colleagues in the House. This harmful discourse emboldens bad actors and encourages violence. It’s unacceptable and needs to end.”

State Rep. Ann Johnson, of Houston, also blamed Republicans.

“I’ve had my life threatened before as a chief human trafficking prosecutor,” Johnson said. “I never expected those threats would come from the Governor or my colleagues in the Legislature.”

As the story notes, no bomb was found. I got the same press releases that are quoted above, and I agree with their sentiments. Use violent rhetoric, expect violent actions. Abbott knows this full well. It’s a very old story.

In yesterday’s post, I noted how Abbott had bypassed Ken Paxton to file a lawsuit against Rep. Gene Wu, making the ridiculous claim that Rep. Wu had abandoned his office and should be removed. A later version of the story indicates that Paxton did not care for that.

Attorney General Ken Paxton, who threatened to file similar legal actions earlier in the day against multiple House Democrats, followed Abbott’s emergency petition by sending his own letter to the state Supreme Court hours later, in which he argued that Abbott lacked the authority to request the removal.

Paxton wrote that while he “appreciates the Governor’s passion” for restoring a quorum, state law permits only the attorney general or a local county or district attorney to bring what’s known as a quo warranto proceeding, which seeks a member’s removal on the grounds that they have abandoned their office.

In the letter, Paxton said he would take action against the absent legislators if the House continued to lack a quorum on Friday, the deadline set by House Speaker Dustin Burrows.

Abbott clarified in a social media post later in the night that his filing sought quo warranto through a provision in the Texas Constitution and a separate portion of government code, which he said would give his office the proper authority. He also attached a letter addressed to the state Supreme Court in the post that stated “at least 500 years of common law” made it clear the governor’s office could make the filing.

Gotta love a little AG-versus-former-AG smackdown. If anyone on the Republican side were capable of feeling shame, I’d think that Abbott’s cheeks might be a little inflamed today. Thanks to Campos for the catch.

But don’t worry about Ken Paxton. He’s finding ways to stay busy.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has launched an investigation into whether Beto O’Rourke’s political group, Powered by People, is breaking laws by funding Texas Democrats’ out-of-state travel attempting to stop the passage of the new Republican-favored congressional maps.

In a press release, Paxton cited The Texas Tribune’s reporting on Tuesday that O’Rourke’s group is funding the travel and fines for the more than 50 Democrats who left Texas this weekend to shut down the Legislature by depriving the House of a quorum.

The attorney general accused the organization of running a financial influence scheme that convinced Texas Democrats to leave the state, and vowed to investigate “any Democrat coward breaking the law by taking a Beto Bribe.”

He is using a statute called “request to examine” to demand documents and communications from the organization. While the legal tool has come under scrutiny, the Texas Supreme Court defended its use in a ruling earlier this year.

Paxton’s gonna do what he’s gonna do. He achieved his primary goal of getting a headline. The task is a lot harder from there.

And speaking of former AGs, Sen. John Cornyn had suggested that the FBI get involved in finding and detaining the quorum busters. Naturally, this found its audience.

During an unrelated event, Trump was asked whether the FBI should “get involved” in the quorum break. He answered that “they may have to” and “it almost looks like [Democrats have] abandoned the state.”

“I know they want them back. Not only the attorney general, the governor wants them back,” Trump said. “So a lot of people have demanded they come back. You can’t just sit it out. You have to go back. You have to fight it out. That’s what elections are all about.”

Typical word salad, so who knows what any of it means. But whether that happens or not, it won’t be because of a deliberate decision or compliance with any known processes.

Both Mother Jones and The Downballot get into the question of how blue states and governors can try to fight back against what Texas Republicans are doing. To the extent that the answer is “redraw our own maps to boot out Republicans”, the options are limited (some blue states have only one member or already have all Democratic caucuses) and difficult to achieve thanks to nonpartisan redistricting commissions and other legal obstacles. To the extent that the answer is “take the fight seriously and restore some trust in the Democratic brand with its disenchanted base”, there’s a lot that can and hopefully will be done.

The 19th talks to a couple of the Dems who are now out of state.

“We can’t go gently, we have to fight,” [Rep. Erin] Zwiener told The 19th earlier this week from New York, where she decamped after holding a Saturday town hall on the proposed redistricting with her constituents.

“I haven’t gotten to have much of a summer with [my daughter] because I’ve been studying for the bar,” she added, “but I had made her a big promise that we would go to a water park after I finished the bar, and I was able to do that this weekend before leaving — so I’m grateful we got to have our big summer adventure.”

The Texas lawmakers are now at the center of a national debate about how Democrats should respond to the White House-driven push to shore up Republicans’ slim and endangered U.S. House majority with unprecedented, mid-decade redistrictings that many believe run afoul of state constitutions.

Though leaders in the Democratic Party are more likely than Republicans to favor nonpartisan redistricting done by commissions and other independent entities, Texas lawmakers like Zwiener are warning that if Democrats do not respond by redrawing maps in Democratic-led states like Illinois, Massachusetts and New York with large left-leaning populations, the GOP will be able to cement a House majority that does not reflect the electorate. It would also allow the Trump administration to avoid accountability: The presidential impeachment process, for example, begins in the House.

“If Texas is going to try and break the democratic process in this way, then other states are going to have to counterbalance that in order for our democracy to survive,” Zwiener said. As they began what she described as “outreach” in their chosen states, Republicans in Missouri indicated they are considering redrawing maps there as well.

“Make no mistake about this,” Zwiener said: “This is an attempt for Donald Trump to avoid accountability in Congress.”

[…]

When state Rep. Linda Garcia, a first-term Democrat who represents parts of east Dallas and nearby Mesquite, decided that she would bring her 9-year-old son with her to Illinois — she thought being away from him for the regular, 140-day legislative session was already too much — she “did my absolute best to prepare him for any possible scenario that would take place,” she said. Garcia is prepared to enroll her son in school in Illinois or home school him if the lawmakers remain outside of Texas as the school year begins.

“If we get to the airport, there may be people with cameras; there may be flashing lights. You may be printed on paper or on TV, and your friends might see it, and people may criticize what we’re doing. They’re going to say I’m a criminal; I could get arrested in front of you,” Garcia told him. “I went through the best and the worst, absolute worst case scenario, which the ultimate worst case would be getting removed as a member — and he turned and looked at me, and he’s like: ‘That doesn’t really sound like the worst case to me.’”

Still, Garcia said, she did not hesitate to commit to leaving Texas when it became clear it was their best option to draw attention to what is happening in her state — or about bringing her son along for a real-life lesson in civics and democracy.

“I really understood that this isn’t about me, and that I will have to face those consequences when those consequences come. This is about my constituents, but also the state of Texas, and it is about the United States of America and where it is headed,” Garcia said. “I cannot live in a world where I think out into the future and look back and didn’t take this step over money.”

Just a reminder that most of these legislators are pretty regular folks, and what they’re doing is hard on them and their families. However this ends, when we’re all very likely to feel at least some disappointment, please do keep that in mind.

That’s it for now. Coming up next, Indiana, maybe.

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The Operation Lone Star boondoggle

Posted on August 7, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Money, money, money…

Maverick County Attorney Jaime Iracheta works in a freshly refurbished, wood-paneled office with a matching desk and leather couch set.

He holds meetings in a video-equipped conference room and drives to work in a heavy-duty Chevy Silverado 4X4 pickup with a premium trim and towing package. It cost $83,000, and it’s one of six pickups the office owns.

That doesn’t include the two Polaris Ranger Crew all-terrain vehicles purchased in December for $25,000 apiece. One of them is a Texas Edition “offering enhanced capability along with exclusive Texas Edition badging and premium paint,” procurement records show.

Texas taxpayers paid for all of this — and more — through Operation Lone Star, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s much-touted border security initiative.

Lone Star is best-known for the thousands of state troopers and Texas National Guard soldiers Abbott has deployed to patrol the border, string razor wire and detain undocumented immigrants.

With less fanfare, the state also has doled out more than $100 million since 2021 to counties and cities to cover border enforcement costs. The grants were supposed to pay for more police officers and sheriff’s deputies, added jail capacity and the cost of prosecuting migrants on state trespassing charges.

Much of the grant money has been spent for those purposes. But over the last four years, millions of dollars have gone to fund routine government operations and other expenses that in some cases were unrelated to border security, an investigation by the San Antonio Express-News and Houston Chronicle found.

Reporters interviewed officeholders and law enforcement officials and reviewed records on more than 4,600 Operation Lone Star grants approved from September 2021 through January of this year. The governor’s office authorized about $177 million in grants during that period and paid out about $113 million.

The records were obtained through the state’s Public Information Act. Some were redacted, and in many cases explanations for spending were vague, making it impossible to determine how all the money was spent.

Border crossings this year are near record lows. President Joe Biden, whose policies Abbott said necessitated his border initiative, is out of office, replaced by the governor’s close ally, President Donald Trump. Yet the Texas Legislature just extended the Lone Star grant program for two more years.

To qualify for grants, local governments have to issue a declaration of disaster, aligning themselves with Abbott’s position that Biden’s immigration policies caused an “invasion”— a stance that raised the governor’s national profile and influenced the 2024 presidential election.

In exchange for the grants, Abbott has secured backing for his signature issue from elected leaders in a part of Texas that was once a Democratic stronghold. Some county officials have said they aren’t facing a border crisis, and that they issued disaster declarations simply to get the money.

It’s a long story so go read the rest. One can certainly make sarcastic remarks about wasteful spending or mission bloat or whatever else, and one would not be wrong. My thinking is more along the lines of why doesn’t the state give more money to more counties to help fund basic services? In the last twenty-plus years, the state has underfunded public schools, put numerous unfunded mandates on local governments, such as forbidding the reduction of spending in any form on law enforcement, restricted what cities and counties can do in terms of governing themselves, and limited their revenue growth with plans to do more of that in the special sessions. It’s no wonder that counties on the receiving end of Operation Lone Star’s largesse, many of which are not on the border, grab that cash with both hands and use it on whatever they can. It’s just survival.

Anyway, that’s the lens through which I would view this. Oh sure, some of the choices that various county governments have made can and should be criticized. As I said, you can read the rest for more. All I’m saying is that if as a matter of routine Texas’ counties could fully take care of themselves, the money Greg Abbott is throwing at them for “border security” might be more likely to be used for that purpose. Well, up to the point of ridiculously diminishing returns, anyway. I could have written that post, too.

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Appeals court sides with Catholic Charities against Paxton

Posted on August 7, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Good.

Still a crook any way you look

A Texas appeals court this week denied Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office’s request to question a nun who leads Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, one of the state’s largest migrant aid organizations.

In a 2-1 ruling issued on Monday, the three-judge panel of the 15th Court of Appeals reaffirmed a lower court’s ruling from last year. The 11-page ruling said the attorney general’s office had the “burden of proof to demonstrate that the benefits of forcing a pre-suit deposition outweigh the burdens to Catholic Charities.”

“Given Catholic Charities’ cooperation with the investigation, the documents it produced, and its provision of a sworn statement answering the (Office of the Attorney General’s) questions, the trial court was within its discretion to deny” Paxton’s request to question Sister Norma Pimentel, the leader of the Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley.

The case is one of several in which the attorney general’s office has targeted groups that work with migrants across the state. The probes began after Abbott in December 2022 directed Paxton’s office to investigate “the role non-governmental organizations may have in planning and assisting illegal border crossings into Texas.”

[…]

In Texas, lawyers can question someone under oath for an investigation before a lawsuit is filed, but they need a judge’s approval to do so.

See here and here for the background. The opinion is readable but technical. It largely boils down to “the AG asserted powers for itself that aren’t written into state law, the plaintiffs complied with the requests that the AG does have the power to make, the district court made a reasonable ruling, nothing for us to do here, go file an actual lawsuit if you want to do more”. That’s about as good a result as I could have wanted.

The 15th Court of Appeals is the new statewide appellate court, with three justices appointed by Greg Abbott, created recently mostly to take cases away from the big urban appellate courts that have Democrats on them. That bodes reasonably well for the other charities that Paxton has been harassing, though the ruling here is tied to the specifics of this case more than to a legal principle, so the others may still have to run the gauntlet. And as noted, this case and the others are about Paxton trying to force a higher level of disclosure from these charities without having first filed a lawsuit against them. His office could simply file those lawsuits now. They would have to survive a motion to dismiss before he can get to discovery, which is his ultimate aim here, but it would be a massive pain for the charities, beyond what they’re already going through. So while this is a good ruling, it’s unlikely to be the end of the story.

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Quorum break Day 2 roundup: Paxton hauls out a big threat

Posted on August 6, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

He seems destined to fail, but we’re going to go through the motions anyway, I guess.

Still a crook any way you look

Attorney General Ken Paxton will ask for a court ruling declaring vacant the seats of any lawmakers who are not back to work by Friday, he said in a press release Tuesday.

[…]

On Tuesday, the chamber once again was six votes short of quorum, and Burrows adjourned until Friday at 1 p.m.

If members are not back by then, Paxton said that would qualify as “abandonment of office,” enabling him to file a legal action seeking to have their seats vacated.

“Democrats have abandoned their offices by fleeing Texas, and a failure to respond to a call of the House constitutes a dereliction of their duty as elected officials,” Paxton said in a statement. “Starting Friday, any rogue lawmakers refusing to return to the House will be held accountable for vacating their office.”

Texas’ Constitution explicitly enables the possibility of a so-called “quorum break,” the Supreme Court of Texas ruled in 2021, although it also allows for consequences to bring members back.

Legal experts say it would be difficult to argue that engaging in a quorum break qualifies as abandonment of office.

“I am aware of absolutely no authority that says breaking quorum is the same as the intent to abandon a seat,” said Charles “Rocky” Rhodes, a constitutional law expert at the University of Missouri law school. “That would require the courts extending the premise to the breaking point. It’s inconsistent with the very text of the Texas Constitution.”

[…]

Paxton himself has acknowledged that this would likely be a lengthy and complicated process, telling conservative podcaster Benny Johnson that they’d have to bring individual lawsuits in each district.

“We’d have to go through a court process, and we’d have to file that maybe in districts that are not friendly to Republicans,” Paxton said on Monday. “So it’s a challenge because every district would be different.”

Greg Abbott made some noises about this in his initial reaction to the quorum break, so obviously Paxton had to Do Something now that it’s out there. My interpretation of this is that he will file one lawsuit in whatever he thinks is the friendliest venue and hope for the best. Maybe Tarrant County, which has all Republican district court judges and a former House Democratic Caucus leader (Rep. Chris Turner) as a potential target. I’m just guessing, we’ll see soon enough. [NOTE: See update below.]

Separately, there’s the threat that the FBI could get involved, to drag the legislators back to Texas, in who knows what manner or condition. I’ve mentioned that possibility before and it is worth worrying about, but I don’t know how likely it is so I’m going to worry about other things for now.

At least at the national level, there is a bit of queasiness on the Republican side about this whole thing.

Reps. Kevin Kiley, R-Calif., and Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., have called to impose nationwide limits on partisan gerrymandering, a rare move for Republicans in Washington who have thwarted proposed bans for years.

Democratic governors like California’s Gavin Newsom and New York’s Kathy Hochul have threatened to retaliate against Texas by pursuing their own redistricting plans that could knock out GOP-held swing districts, like those Lawler and Kiley represent.

Kiley announced he will introduce legislation Tuesday to nullify new House maps states adopt before the 2030 census, including any that might be approved this year.

That would block the ongoing Texas effort and any potential push in California, his office said.

“Gavin Newsom is trying to subvert the will of voters and do lasting damage to democracy in California,” Kiley said in a statement Monday. “Fortunately, Congress has the ability to protect California voters using its authority under the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution. This will also stop a damaging redistricting war from breaking out across the country.”

Lawler, a fellow second-term Republican who represents a swing district, also said he will introduce legislation to prohibit gerrymandering in every state.

“Gerrymandering is wrong and should be banned everywhere — including in New York, Texas, California, and Illinois. I’m introducing legislation to ban it,” Lawler said Monday on X, inviting Democrats to sign on.

Still, it’s unlikely that House Republican leaders would allow a vote on any legislation to limit partisan redistricting. That would be an about-face from the party’s long-standing view that Washington shouldn’t impose any such limits on states. The office of Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., didn’t immediately comment on the idea.

[…]

Democrats in Washington have tried to pass legislation to prohibit partisan gerrymandering, some of it in recent years during the Biden administration. A section of the sweeping For the People Act of 2021 would have required all states to set up independent redistricting commissions with balanced partisan representation. Democrats passed it in the House along party lines during the Biden administration, but a different version of the bill failed to overcome a Senate GOP filibuster.

Reps. Kiley and Lawler are obviously acting in their own interest, but that’s fine. That’s a motive that can lead to actual compromise, since there’s something you want to achieve. It won’t happen with this Congress of course, but with a Democratic House majority and a better Senate it could happen in the future.

We have talked about how expensive a prolonged quorum break would be. Here’s how it is being paid for, at least for now.

Powered by People, a Democratic political group started by former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, has emerged as a top funder covering the costs of Texas lawmakers’ out-of-state decampment to thwart a new GOP-proposed congressional map, according to two people involved with the fundraising efforts.

The expenses are mounting fast for the more than 50 Democrats in the Texas House who left the state Sunday to prevent the Republican-controlled chamber from having enough members to conduct business. Most lawmakers traveled to the Chicago area by way of a private plane from CommuteAir. They are now on the hook for lodging, meals and the $500-a-day fines they will each accrue for every day of the special session they miss.

National Democratic organizations have been eager to pick up the tab for what they see as a last-ditch effort to stop a nationwide redistricting war that threatens to upend the 2026 midterms. O’Rourke’s organization, armed with a $3.5 million war chest, has covered much of the costs so far — including air transport, lodging and logistical support, a person involved with the fundraising said — though other groups have been in the mix.

Texas Majority PAC, a group backed by Democratic megadonor George Soros and formed by alums of O’Rourke’s 2022 gubernatorial bid, is coordinating with national Democratic groups to solicit fundraising from the party’s regular big-dollar donors, according to two people with knowledge of the internal dynamics.

The sources, each of whom were granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations that could have legal implications, declined to say which big-dollar donors were being courted or how much money Powered by People had contributed to the quorum-busting effort.

Please GTFO with any hot takes about shadowy big money groups operating in the shadows. Not unless you want to have a long talk about the billionaire cabal that props up and orders around Greg Abbott and most of the Texas GOP these days first.

Meanwhile, the Senate still has a quorum.

The Texas Senate State Affairs committee on Monday again approved a “bathroom bill” proposal that would restrict transgender people from using bathrooms in government and school buildings that match their identifying gender.

Senate Bill 7 is one of two bills currently filed in the Texas Legislature after Gov. Greg Abbott put the provisions on the special session agenda. The bill would mandate that people only use restrooms in government buildings and schools that match their sex assigned at birth. Similar restrictions would also be placed on prisons and women’s violence shelters based on biological sex, which the bill also defines.

Supporters of SB 7 and similar legislation have framed the bill as a way to protect women from discomfort and predation in private spaces. The bill’s author, Sen. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston, said the bill was common sense that upheld “biological and biblical truths.” To do this, Middleton said the bill has greater enforcement capabilities than previous bills: SB 7 institutes a $5,000 first-time fine for agencies or schools where violations occur, which increases to a $25,000 fine for subsequent violations.

A committee substitute that was filed Monday contained a provision mandating that the 15th Court of Appeals have exclusive jurisdiction to any civil action brought from the bill, and added its own definitions of male and female.

Over 100 people registered to testify on SB 7 both for and against the bill, with testimony from both sides at times becoming emotional over fears or recollections of harassment and abuse.

During testimony, opponents of the bill said they feared that attempts to enforce the law would evolve into discriminatory scrutiny and surveillance affecting both cisgender and transgender women. The bill does not specify what agencies or schools would need to do to ensure the law is enforced, save that they “take every reasonable step to ensure” no violations occur.

I for one am happy to see garbage bills like this one and others like it wither on the vine. That may be a temporary victory, depending on how long the quorum break lasts. It may be a pyrrhic one as well, in that Republican legislators may care about passing some of those bills now in a way they hadn’t before; remember that some of these bills died during the regular session, so passing them going into this session was not a given. The quorum break may be incentive for the Rs to pass them. Or maybe it won’t be. That’s one of the risks that had to be taken.

The House is standing down until Friday. The messaging continues. Hang in there, y’all. The Barbed Wire, Texas Monthly, the Current, the Dallas Observer, Politico, and the Chron have more.

UPDATE: Greg Abbott decided he couldn’t wait for Paxton to file something.

Gov. Greg Abbott asked the Texas Supreme Court on Tuesday to remove state Rep. Gene Wu of Houston from office for his role in leading Democrats in their quorum break over redistricting.

Wu and dozens of other Democrats fled to Illinois on Sunday to block a vote on a new congressional map meant to shore up Republicans’ power in Congress.

“Representative Wu and the other Texas House Democrats have shown a willful refusal to return, and their absence for an indefinite period of time deprives the House of the quorum needed to meet and conduct business on behalf of Texans,” Abbott said in a statement. “Texas House Democrats abandoned their duty to Texans, and there must be consequences.”

[…]

The legal action by Abbott ratchets ups the Republican effort to move ahead with the congressional map last week. In past quorum breaks by Democrats – one in 2021 and two others 18 years earlier – ended with the absent members returning to the Capitol voluntarily. No legal action was taken, much less threatened, in those cases.

Abbott, in the court filing, asked the justices to make a ruling on his request by Thursday, If they do not order Wu’s removal from office, Abbott asked them to find that “at the very least” he has demonstrated “demonstrated probable grounds” to file additional court documents to advance his claims.

You can see a copy of the lawsuit here. I have not read it. Among many other things, if this is a valid legal argument it’s wild to me that no one thought to employ it in 2003 or 2021. What could possibly be different now?

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HISD says it has no F-rated schools

Posted on August 6, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

This is legitimately great. And it means we can officially start the Mike Miles Countdown Clock.

Zero Houston ISD schools received an “F” in the Texas Education Agency’s A-F accountability ratings this year, while 18 received a “D,” according to preliminary scores released by state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles Tuesday afternoon.

In 2023, 121 of the district’s 274 campuses received a “D” or “F” rating on the annual statewide ratings, which measure school achievement and progress primarily through State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness exams. Two years into the state takeover, the state’s largest district had just 18, all of which were D’s.

Nearly three-quarters of the district’s students are now attending “A” and “B” rated schools, up from 35% two years ago, Miles said in a live presentation.

“Every child, no matter where they are in Houston, no matter where they are on this map, has a high-performing school, an A or B campus near them,” Miles said. “That’s never been the case in Houston or any other large urban district, and this is what our students have been doing. So that success for our kids is phenomenal in just two years.”

Miles, who was appointed by the TEA in June 2023 to improve academic achievement within long-struggling schools, must have zero multiyear failing campuses to exit the state takeover.

The district superintendent, who received a five-year contract extension and raise in June 2025, said he had recently purchased a home in the city. Miles predicted that improved academic achievement would boost the city’s business climate and create a workforce better equipped for the future.

Whatever. I’ve said some nice things about the improvement in performance levels in HISD before, so take that as stipulated. All I want to know at this point is when we can started getting elected trustees back. As soon as we have a majority of them, let’s have a vote on that ridiculous contract extension, and go from there.

Posted in School days | Tagged , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Tesla expands its Austin robotaxi service area

Posted on August 6, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Returning to one of my pet obsessions.

Tesla’s robotaxi service began in Austin back in late June, and now the brand has undergone its second expansion that has seen it quadruple its initial service area. This new expansion is almost double the size of the original extension seen in mid July.

As first spotted by Tesla fan Sawyer Merritt, the company’s robotaxi service expanded on Sunday, August 3. It saw the service begin to cover more of the south of Austin than before.

Electric vehicle news source Teslarati reports that the brand now covers 80 square miles across Austin. The initial testing from Tesla saw it covering 20 square miles, before an expansion on July 14 saw it move to 42 square miles.

It’s thought Tesla’s biggest rival, Waymo, covers 90 square miles of the city. Joe Tegtmeyer on X, who often posts around Tesla topics, shows the Waymo service on a map alongside its rival. The map shows how Tesla has more coverage in the south of the city, while Waymo’s extends further into the north.

[…]

Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, previously confirmed its plans to expand coverage areas during its latest earnings call. The company said it planned to expand its Austin area by 10 times that of the initial rollout. It didn’t confirm what deadline, if any, it had set in place for the changes.

Tesla rolled out this service in late June and did that first expansion a month later, so they are indeed moving fast. How well they can keep this up remains to be seen. I’m going to point you to a couple of recent articles about how this whole project – which is key to the company’s future success, especially now that Elmo has poisoned the brand name – is going.

From Fortune in an article entitled “‘Elon is gambling’ — How Tesla is proving doubters right on why its robotaxi service cannot scale”:

But autonomous driving at its heart is a technology steeped in statistical eventualities. How many cars are operating at the same time and how many miles do they collectively log before the first accident occurs—thousands? Millions? More?

Flying may seem like a dangerous endeavor to some, but there is no form of mass transportation safer since 99.9999% of flights land without incident. Companies like Tesla and Waymo now need to demonstrate a similar level of reliability despite variables far exceeding a plane flying through a relatively less crowded sky.

For that you need extensive, detailed data — the kind that [FSD beta tester Elias] Martinez collects with the help of the Tesla community. If you ask the company for answers, though, you’ll get none — just the opposite in fact. Instead of attempting to gain public trust through transparency, Musk’s company is currently pressing federal regulators to bury its robotaxi safety record, claiming the data must remain confidential for business reasons.

“This shouldn’t be proprietary. You’re driving on public roads so the data needs to be made available,” he said. “The fact that they’re hiding data should tell you everything you need to know. If you really want trust, you have to have full transparency.”

Instead, Musk only releases a quarterly crash statistic for his FSD beta program, now called FSD Supervised: for the first three months of this year Teslas drove 7.44 million miles before an accident. While this is a sterling result compared to the 700,000 miles for the average American driver, these are not robotaxi miles—they rely on drivers intervening before a collision ensues.

And even these figures, Martinez argues, should be vetted independently by regulators before being taken as credible: “If you leave it to a company, they will filter it to fit their narrative.”

And from Timothy B. Lee’s Understanding AI, “What I learned watching 78 videos from Tesla’s Austin robotaxis”:

Waymo’s vehicles are only available in a handful of metropolitan areas. Waymo’s commercial vehicles don’t operate on freeways. And Waymo has remote operators who can intervene if the vehicles get stuck. For years, Tesla fans argued that these precautions showed that Waymo’s technology was brittle and unable to generalize to new areas. They claimed that Tesla, in contrast, was building a general-purpose technology that could work in all metropolitan areas and road conditions.

But in a piece last year, I argued that they were misunderstanding the situation.

“Tesla hasn’t started driverless testing because its software isn’t ready,” I wrote. “For now, geographic restrictions and remote assistance aren’t needed because there’s always a human being behind the wheel. But I predict that when Tesla begins its driverless transition, it will realize that safety requires a Waymo-style incremental rollout.”

That’s exactly what’s happened:

  • Just as Waymo launched its fully driverless service in 50 square miles near Phoenix in 2020, so Tesla launched its robotaxi service in about 30 square miles of Austin last month.
  • Across 16 hours of driving, I never saw Tesla’s robotaxi drive on a freeway or go faster than 43 miles per hour. Waymo’s maximum speed is currently 50 miles per hour.2
  • Tesla has built a teleoperation capability for its robotaxis. One job posting last year advertised for an engineer to develop this capability. It stated that “our remote operators are transported into the device’s world using a state-of-the-art VR rig that allows them to remotely perform complex and intricate tasks.”

The launch of Tesla’s robotaxi service in Austin is a major step toward full autonomy. But the Austin launch also makes it clear that Tesla hasn’t discovered an alternative path for testing and deploying driverless vehicles. Instead, Tesla is following the same basic deployment strategy Waymo pioneered five to seven years ago.

Of course, this does not necessarily mean that Tesla will scale up its service as slowly as Waymo has. It took almost five years for Waymo to expand from its first commercial service (Phoenix in 2018) to its second (San Francisco in 2023). The best informed Tesla bulls acknowledge that Waymo is currently in the lead but believe Tesla is positioned to expand much faster than Waymo did.

That’s a long article and well worth your time to read in full. I did not know that neither Tesla nor Waymo was operating any of these vehicles at top speeds of less than 50 MPH, which is to say only on regular roads. That’s quite the limiting factor for now. I also did not know that both Tesla and Waymo have “teleoperation” capabilities, which is to say operators who can remote control the vehicles; Tesla appears to be more active in that regard, though there’s no public data on either. The more you know and all that. Read both stories and see what you think. Mashable has more.

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UH Hobby Center polls CD18

Posted on August 5, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Make of this what you will.

Approximately 100 days before the November 4, 2025 Texas Congressional District 18 special election, four candidates are effectively deadlocked in their respective bids to obtain one of the two positions in an all but certain runoff election that will be held in either January or February of 2026.

Democrats Christian Menefee and Amanda Edwards are tied with a vote intention of 19%, enjoying a modest advantage over Republican Carmen Maria Montiel and Democrat Jolanda Jones who are tied at 14%. The field of the six most visible candidates who were included on this test ballot is rounded out by George Foreman IV, who is running under the Independence Party label, with 4%, and Democrat Isaiah Martin with a vote intention of 3%. More than one in four (27%) of these likely voters remain undecided about for whom they will vote in the TX-18 special election.

[…]

As of July 9, when the fielding of the survey began and as of the writing of this report on July 27, 23 people had filed statements of candidacy in TX-18 with the U.S. Federal Election Commission (16 using the Democratic Party label, 3 using the Republican Party label, 2 as Independents, 1 using the Independence Party label, and 1 using the label of Other).

The names of the six most visible candidates at the time of the fielding of the survey, which were presented to the likely voters to be evaluated, included the following: Amanda Edwards (Democratic Party), George Foreman IV (Independence Party), Jolanda Jones (Democratic Party), Isaiah Martin (Democratic Party), Christian Menefee (Democratic Party), and Carmen Maria Montiel (Republican Party). The partisan labels of the candidates were not included in the initial survey question in which likely voters were asked if they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the candidate but were included in the subsequent vote intention question.

There’s more if you want to read the rest. All polls are snapshots in time, and this one is even more ephemeral than usual. Nobody has started spending money on their campaigns yet, so everything here is based on name ID, with a little partisan ID boost for Carmen Monteil, who was unknown to 78% of respondents and received zero Democratic support.

Determining who is a “likely” voter for this race is a bigger challenge than usual, because of what else is and isn’t on the ballot. This is an off year for city of Houston elections, but there’s now also the special election for City Council At Large #4. There’s the constitutional amendments, which is the one thing anyone and everyone will have on their ballots, and there are some HISD and HCC races. CD18 is the single biggest draw in there, and its turnout is mostly going to be a function of the candidates themselves and the motivation of CD18 voters to finally get a representative in Congress again. It’s not a stretch to say that Menefee and Edwards are the frontrunners, but I would consider any quantification beyond that to be highly inexact. I’m mostly curious to see how this will compare to any future polling and to the final result. Thanks to The Downballot for the pointer.

UPDATE: I should note that this poll was conducted and released before the proposed new Congressional map came out. Whatever happens with that, this election is for the remaining year of the 2025-26 term, and will be conducted under the current map. I can’t say what the future may hold for the eventual winner. But they’d at least get that year to serve.

Posted in Election 2025 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

If Democrats could gerrymander now in Texas

Posted on August 5, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

There’s not a lot of news on Day Two of Quorum Break 2025. The session ground to a halt as expected. Greg Abbott shook his fist and threatened to Do Things to the absent Democrats that he does not have the power to do. What he does have the power to do is take redistricting off the agenda and insist that the Lege get to work on flooding issues, but he has not done that and almost certainly will not do that. The Republicans in the Lege also took symbolic action against the Dems. The Dem walkout has additionally sidelined other terrible bills, though as with redistricting there’s only so long that can happen.

In the meantime, New York’s Governor has gotten into the fight, though it’s not clear what she can do in the short term. At some point, all of this is unsustainable as well as bad for democracy, and will need to be addressed at a big picture level, almost certainly after Trump is gone. Some Texas Dems chose not to break quorum but to stay and fight here, which is a thing people will have Opinions about. The Trib is tracking stories here, though as you can see there’s not much else to add.

So with that in mind I’m breaking out this post that I drafted last November, a couple of weeks after the election, but never got around to running. Texas Monthly did a little experiment in extreme redistricting Texas Dem style, to see how many safe and competitive blue Congressional seats they could draw. The answer is probably a lot more than you think, if you don’t mid drawing a ridiculous map. Clearly, there’s no shame on that score, so click on to see what they came up with. The article may be paywalled now, but there’s enough text to give you the idea. Enjoy!

Continue reading →

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

The Afghan women’s soccer players of Houston

Posted on August 5, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Great story.

The early evening sun still shone strongly overhead when Sodaba Khinjani adjusted her cleats and squinted out at the soccer field at Bayland Park in southwest Houston.

The temperature was hotter than the playing conditions she was used to in Afghanistan; but then again, pretty much everything about this felt different.

On Sunday, Khinjani and other Afghan women’s soccer players held their first team practice on American soil since they fled Afghanistan under persecution by the Taliban and arrived in Houston as refugees.

They dribbled around the field and relished a return to the sport they loved, one that years earlier made them targets for violence.

After the Taliban regime took over Afghanistan in 2021 and banned women and girls from participating in sports, FIFA helped evacuate more than 150 people connected to women’s sports from Afghanistan. Khinjani was one of 10 female athletes — eight Afghanistan Football Federation developmental system players and two members of the national basketball team — who eventually relocated to Houston in June 2023 after stops in Qatar and Albania.

Sunday’s practice was a reclamation of their identities, but also demonstrated how easily refugees can fall through the cracks.

During the 18 months the Afghan players were in Albania, FIFA paid for their housing and gave them a $50 monthly stipend. When the women arrived in Houston, however, they were abandoned by the sport’s international governing body and handed off to local agencies that were too overwhelmed to help.

The Afghan refugees were on their own when it came to obtaining employment and learning English. Years later, most have green cards and blue-collar jobs but feel far from stable. They haven’t seen their families since leaving Afghanistan. They still worry about their loved ones’ safety, about making enough money to support themselves and those back home, and about their own futures in the U.S. under an administration that is restricting immigration.

And they need help finding their way back to soccer, to the game that gave them hope.

Khinjani said she has communicated with FIFA representatives via email and asked for help to secure a training field and funds. She said that although FIFA’s responses seem sympathetic to the refugees’ plight, no actual assistance has been offered. FIFA did not respond to a list of questions emailed by the Chronicle this week.

“We need action,” Khinjani said. “I’m not saying that FIFA is bad. I can’t forget it that when we were in Afghanistan and Taliban took over Afghanistan and they were searching for everybody, especially for women in the sports teams, we were thinking that now Taliban will enter our house, they will kill all of us. In that time, FIFA act as an angel and they rescue us. I never forget it. I’m glad. But the rest of this story? If somebody wants to help you, they should stay through (to) the end. They should not leave you in the middle.”

[…]

Because of their age differences, the soccer players didn’t know each other back in Afghanistan. In the years since they evacuated together, they’ve grown close and consider each other family in Houston.

Ahmad Sultani, who works for local nonprofit organization Connect Community, was recruiting coaches for a youth soccer team earlier this year when he was connected to several of the Afghan players, who introduced him to the others.

Connect Community serves a large immigrant community in the Gulfton and Sharpstown neighborhoods, an area that Sultani (no relation to Zed) estimates is home to several thousand Afghan families. When he heard the stories of Khinanji, Yaqobi and the others, he knew he had to help.

Pretty soon, they’d started a WhatsApp text group. Earlier this month, they attended a Houston Dash game together, which got them thinking about how to get back on the field themselves.

“They had big hopes for their soccer careers back in Afghanistan, but when the Taliban took over Afghanistan, they were disappointed,” Sultani said. “But when FIFA got involved, they got another hope again, that somebody is now there and they will go back to their profession. But unfortunately, they have been brought to us unattended and they have to start struggling with life with no family, some at very young ages and away from their families. … Now, when they see that we are trying to bring them back on their feet and back to the game, they’re very excited, very happy.”

With the help of Connect Community and Harris County Precinct 4 Commissioner Lesley Briones, whose precinct includes the Gulfton area, plans were made to organize an official practice.

These women would step onto the field again.

[…]

The women plan to meet for practices every Sunday, and eventually would like to play in an 8-v-8 recreational league run by the Houston Women’s Soccer Association. They hope that will lead to more elevated competition.

Last week, FIFA announced its intention to create an Afghan women’s refugee team that will play friendly matches outside of competition – falling short of exiled players’ wishes to have an officially recognized national team to play in international qualifying competitions. FIFA has also not suspended the AFF even though the federation’s exclusion of women violates FIFA’s own gender discrimination policies.

FIFA did not specify a timeline for the refugee team’s creation and said only that it is “engaging directly with the relevant players.” Although most of the former Afghan senior national members are in Australia, some are older now and the team would likely need to fill out the roster with youth and developmental players who are dispersed around the globe.

Khinjani and Sultani said they have not heard from FIFA about the refugee team, or about anything else. They said they would consider joining but are scared to travel to a training camp held outside the U.S. in case they are barred from returning. The Trump administration is considering restricting citizens from certain countries, including Afghanistan, from entering the U.S. and it is unclear whether such travel bans would apply to people with existing visas or green cards.

In the meantime, they are hoping that FIFA or local community partners step up to sponsor them so they can keep playing. In Australia, professional club Melbourne Victory FC sponsored Afghan senior national team members to play in a state league.

I’m rooting for these women, who have been through a lot and deserve some wins. I’m glad they’ve found support, from each other and from various locals – kudos to Commissioner Briones for all she’s done for them – and hope that continues. All the best, y’all.

Posted in Other sports | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

State House Dems break quorum

Posted on August 4, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

It’s on.

Texas Democratic lawmakers fled the state Sunday in a bid to block passage of a new congressional map designed to give the GOP five additional seats in the U.S. House next year, raising the stakes in what’s poised to be a national fight over redistricting ahead of next year’s midterm election.

The maneuver, undertaken by most of the Texas House’s 62 Democrats, deprives the Republican-controlled chamber of a quorum — the number of lawmakers needed to function under House rules — ahead of a scheduled Monday vote on the draft map. The 150-member House can only conduct business if at least 100 members are present, meaning the absence of 51 or more Democrats can bring the Legislature’s ongoing special session to a halt.

“This is not a decision we make lightly, but it is one we make with absolute moral clarity,” state Rep. Gene Wu, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, said in a statement, in which he accused Gov. Greg Abbott of “using an intentionally racist map to steal the voices of millions of Black and Latino Texans, all to execute a corrupt political deal.”

Most House Democrats left Texas Sunday afternoon en route to Chicago, with some also headed to New York to meet with Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has condemned Texas’ mid-decade redistricting effort and entertained the idea of retaliating with new maps in her state. A third contingent of lawmakers also departed for Boston to attend the National Conference of State Legislatures’ annual legislative summit.

There are just over two weeks left of the Texas Legislature’s special session, during which Abbott has also asked lawmakers to take up measures responding to the deadly July 4 Hill Country floods, stiffer regulations for consumable hemp, and contentious GOP priorities such as cracking down on abortion pills and the bathrooms transgender people can use. The prospects for those items, along with the new redistricting maps, were immediately thrown in doubt by the Democrats’ departure.

In his statement, Wu said Democrats “will not allow disaster relief to be held hostage to a Trump gerrymander.”

“We’re not walking out on our responsibilities; we’re walking out on a rigged system that refuses to listen to the people we represent,” he said. “As of today, this corrupt special session is over.”

[…]

Preventing a quorum was the nuclear option, coming just before the map was set to reach the House floor. Republicans advanced the redistricting plan out of a House committee Saturday morning and later scheduled it for a floor vote Monday. Democrats could skip town long enough to run out the clock on the current session — which began July 21 and can last up to 30 days — but Abbott can continue calling lawmakers back for subsequent sessions.

Texas House rules adopted by Republicans in 2023 impose a threat of arrest and a $500-per-day fine on each lawmaker who absconds from the state. House rules also prohibit lawmakers from using their campaign funds to pay the fines, making the decampment a potentially expensive move. But Democrats have been raising money in recent weeks in anticipation of the quorum break, and those involved in the fundraising say they have found a way to circumvent the campaign restrictions.

Among those fundraising to support Democrats is Powered by People, a political group launched by former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke in 2019. The group raised over $600,000 in 2021, the last time Democrats deprived the House of a quorum, to help cover the costs associated with staying out of state, and an O’Rourke spokesperson confirmed the group is again supporting this year’s effort.

The new punishment rules came in response to the 2021 episode, when Democrats fled Texas in an unsuccessful attempt to block new voting restrictions. That effort failed after Democrats on the lam splintered, and enough returned to Austin and granted Republicans the numbers needed to resume business.

Attorney General Ken Paxton has said his office would assist federal, state and local authorities “in hunting down and compelling the attendance” of any Democrat who flees the state.

There’s obviously a lot going on here. That first vote on HB4 was as far as I know originally scheduled for Tuesday, so it may well be that it was moved up a day in an attempt to make it harder for Dems to break quorum. But here we are. I’ve just read all this on Sunday afternoon and I’m sure there will be tons more to come, but a few opening thoughts:

– How this actually plays out is mostly a function of communications at this point. Dems have some advantages, in that the redistricting effort was demanded by Trump for his political gain – Republicans have at least done them the favor of being honest about that part – and I would think that public opinion would lean in their favor on this matter, given where other polling is now. Republicans can and will complain that this means the Lege won’t be able to deal with flooding issues, but they’re in charge of the agenda and they put redistricting first, so that kind of falls flat. But again, this is all a function of messaging. Be clear, be consistent, be loud, and hope for the best.

– One thing that may perversely help Dems is that Trump and the likes of Paxton are almost certainly going to overreact to this. Republicans have time on their side here – Dems can only do this for so long, Abbott can call as many special sessions as he needs to, all they have to do is wait and act like they’d really love to do some Serious Legislating but they can’t because the Dems aren’t there. I’ve alluded to this before, but would anyone be shocked if Trump sics the FBI, Homeland Security, federal marshals, the TSA, even ICE on the Dems? Given how people have soured on other displays of federal force against people Donald Trump doesn’t like, I think this kind of response could boost the Dems in the public’s eyes.

– It could also, let’s be very clear, get extremely ugly and maybe violent. I’d rather not speculate any more than that.

– Again, let’s be clear that all the Republicans have to do is wait. There’s no good endgame for the Dems, unless they’re willing to stay out of state for several months at least. Legislators have jobs, spouses, kids, all kinds of personal obligations. How would your life be made more difficult if you suddenly had to hole up in a hotel in Illinois for four or five months, with just some basics packed? They can last till the end of this session. Maybe, maybe, they can hold out for another 30 days, if Abbott calls another session right away. But as with 2021, at some point it becomes impossible to maintain.

– And Abbott doesn’t have to call another session right away. He could stay quiet until enough of the wayward Dems come back, and then call it after getting Texas law enforcement involved to drag people to Austin. The Republicans have all the advantages.

– The other thing about that is that it will be easy for Dems to turn on each other as soon as there’s any sign of people returning, for whatever the reason and after however much time. That happened in 2021 and in 2003, mostly with the Senate quorum break.

I’m just trying to maintain some perspective here. What the House Dems have done is brave and principled and comes at a high personal cost, and we should laud them for that. And then we should cut them some slack when it inevitably crumbles, because it is impossible to sustain over any kind of long term. Enjoy the high you’re feeling today, because it will end and we will have to deal with it. The Chron, Lone Star Left, the Lone Star Project, and the Senate Democratic Caucus have more.

UPDATE: The overreactions and freakouts have begun. Buckle up.

Posted in That's our Lege | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Mayor’s anti-bike obsession claims another victim

Posted on August 4, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Sorry, Telephone Road. You should have thought about the possibility of the next Mayor being a bike hater when you began this work five years ago.

What was and now will not be

The Harrisburg Redevelopment Authority has tapped the brakes on approving a scaled-back $12 million redesign of Telephone Road in the East End that has been in the planning stages for years after a sharp pivot in city policy.

The board that oversees Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone 23 had been expected to vote Monday on a plan once envisioned as a model for multimodal infrastructure. Community members now fear that Mayor John Whitmire’s administration’s overhaul doesn’t match that original intent.

The board postponed its decision until after an upcoming community engagement session, even though the delay could put some funding sources for the project at risk.

The Telephone Road situation mirrors recent controversy around the Montrose Boulevard redesign, where the city’s mobility directives similarly led to the removal of bike lanes and a shift back to vehicle-oriented planning, despite earlier community-supported designs.

TIRZ 23 officials and city representatives explained at the meeting how the project had been reshaped by the Whitmire administration, which has directed all roadway improvements across Houston to align with the mayor’s “guiding mobility principles.” Those principles prioritize maintaining traffic lanes while removing bike lanes and center medians, which the city says interfere with emergency response access.

The redesign will add about $438,000 to the project’s original $12 million price tag.

[…]

Public comments during the meeting reflected widespread dissatisfaction with the redesign. Many residents criticized the revised plan as a retreat from years of community planning.

Lindsey Williams, president of the Greater Eastwood Super Neighborhood, said the redesign was discouraging, particularly given how often she sees children crossing the road using the now-eliminated center turn lane as a refuge.

“I am hearing regularly that there is very strong concern about not having that center lane and not having an option for residents to stop in the middle on their way across Telephone Road because four lanes is very difficult to cross,” Williams said. “Especially if we are talking about kids crossing the road, that is a terrifying moment.”

Kevin Strickland, co-founder of Walk and Roll Houston, said the redesign fails to address the core safety concern: drivers speeding through the corridor. He argued that the original plan’s three-lane configuration was intentionally crafted to calm traffic.

“At no point have you heard either from Gage or the city justify why you need this project,” Strickland said. “They’ve simply described the new project.”

East End resident Lisa Hunt questioned the added $438,000 expense, calling the redesign a political and financial stewardship problem.

“That is a waste of tax payer money,” Hunt said. “And it’s not being done in the name of safety or beauty or progress for the East End.”

Just so you know that it’s not only about Montrose and the Heights. I didn’t follow the gutting of the West Alabama bike lanes, so add that to the tab as well. Putting aside the Mayor’s obsessions for a moment, what really bugs me about all this is how years of collaborative and cooperative work are just tossed aside because one guy says no. I don’t like making gratuitous comparisons to what’s going on with the federal government, but this just adds to the overwhelming feeling of not having control over one’s lives anymore. And it costs extra money, to boot. It sucks and I hate it.

Posted in Elsewhere in Houston, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Tarrant County responds to redistricting lawsuit

Posted on August 4, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Noted for the record.

Tarrant County filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by citizens claiming the county engaged in racial gerrymandering when they approved a map with new precinct boundaries on June 3.

The motion argues the court overseeing the case does not have jurisdiction over the matter, the districts being changed are not protected under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and no evidence of racial intent in the redistricting process was provided.

The county in the motion claims they were redistricting purely to increase the Republican majority on the court from 3-2 to 4-1, drawing out Precinct 2 County Commissioner Alisa Simmons. She is up for reelection next year.

[…]

“Tarrant County adopted a redistricting plan that from conception to enactment was an unambiguous, explicit and unabashed effort to increase Republican power and decrease Democratic power on the Commissioners Court,” according to the motion.

The plaintiffs — those bringing forth the lawsuit — claim the district map approved by the court disenfranchises Black and Latino voters by packing them into more white districts, diluting their vote.

Democratic commissioners Simmons and Roderick Miles Jr. had the UCLA Voting Rights Project analyze the precinct maps. That analysis found all the redistricted maps were “drawn based on racial characteristics and all proposed maps overly concentrate (pack) Black and Hispanic residents into a single district.”

The motion claims the map commissioners approved, called Map 7, still over-represents the Black population because 25% of the precincts would be represented by commissioner Miles, who is Black, while 19% of the county’s population is Black.

“Plaintiffs imply that any scenario where Democrats lose power is racially motivated even though Black elected officials still hold a disproportionate number of district seats on Commissioners Court,” the motion claims.

See here and here for the background. The key thing to look for in the short term is whether the new map gets blocked pending the outcome of the litigation or not. Based on past experiences, my guess is it will not be unless it’s truly egregious. Even then, that would be a tossup. The goal for Tarrant Dems needs to be to at least win the County Judge race next year, and thus maintain the partisan status quo on the Court. If there’s a chance the map will be blocked, there will need to be a ruling in the next couple of months, so as to be in time for the 2026 primary filing season.

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Weekend link dump for August 3

Posted on August 3, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

There is an X Files Little Golden Book, for the slightly offbeat preschooler in your life.

“Governments Are Legally Required to Address Climate Change, Top Global Court Says”.

“Here’s the bottom line on pregnancy and antidepressants, according to that best available science and the experts on it: The risks of failing to treat an expecting mother’s depression far outweigh any risks from the medication itself.”

“Hacking is hard. Well, sometimes. Other times, you just call up a company’s IT service desk and pretend to be an employee who needs a password reset, an Okta multifactor authentication reset, and a Microsoft multifactor authentication reset… and it’s done. Without even verifying your identity.”

“[Science Moms] works to demystify climate change and motivate moms to demand plans and solutions that will protect the planet for their kids—and their kids from dangerous, climate-change fueled extreme weather events.”

“If this sounds incredibly stupid, that’s because it is. So how did this happen?”

Meet the Pan-American Municipal Baseball League, or what professional baseball could look like under something akin to a European soccer model.

RIP, Tom Lehrer, legendary musical satirist. If you are somehow unfamiliar with his work, go now to YouTube or your favorite streaming service and listen to all his songs. You won’t regret it. Also, his prank on the NSA is amazing.

“Here’s the thing with the masculinity crisis: women have our own problems that need to be addressed, such as workplace inequality, abortion, and if you asked me, most of all – sexual harassment and rape. Men have a different set of problem: the suicide rate, the homelessness, the male addiction epidemic. The thing is that women aren’t the cause of male problems, nor do women hold the solution.”

“But as much as anything it was the example it set. Gawker wasn’t damaged. It was destroyed. It ceased to exist. For what was essentially pocket change, Thiel got his revenge. In that one suit, you can see the evil vapors of Trumpism and its oligarchic billionaire milieu congealing into solid matter for everything that was to come. In so doing Harder and Thiel radically raised the stakes for all journalism in the United States.”

Bankrupt her.

“In a cautionary tale for vibe coders, an app-building platform’s AI went rogue and deleted a database without permission during a code freeze.”

“Marshall McLuhan was warning us about the internet long before it was invented.”

RIP, Ryne Sandberg, Hall of Fame second baseman for the Chicago Cubs.

“The European Union’s trade deal with the United States could cost the pharmaceutical industry between $13 billion and $19 billion as branded medicines become subject to a tariff of 15%, analysts said on Monday. The added costs could raise prices for consumers unless pharmaceutical companies take action to mitigate the impact of the tariffs”.

“If you take nothing else from today’s piece, take this: MLB shares more local revenue than the NFL does. The difference in the two systems is entirely about revenue sources.”

“Don’t Be Surprised When Trump Pardons Ghislaine Maxwell”.

“ALMOST 1000 people gathered in Edinburgh to watch a man fold a fitted sheet, as videos of the event have gone viral on social media.”

“Falling linear ratings, the rising cost of materials needed for home renovations, the threat of further price hikes due to President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the rise of DIY TikTokers have all hit [HGTV] like a slab of Italian marble to the face.”

“On Wednesday, 12 Democratic House members sued for access to ICE detention facilities, in accordance with the law.”

“Our biggest obstacle to being good or to doing good is our defensive need to identify as good. We tend to be at our worst when our self-identity as “good people” feels threatened.”

RIP, Flaco Jimenez, conjunto music legend, six-time Grammy winner. Texas Monthly has more.

Tacky. Tacky, tacky, tacky.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged | 4 Comments

The last redistricting hearing

Posted on August 3, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

We’re just going through the motions at this point.

The Texas redistricting map unveiled this week was drawn for the express purpose of boosting Republican strength in Congress, the House sponsor of the measure said Friday during the first, and perhaps the only, public hearing on the most controversial measure being considered in the special session of the Legislature.

“These districts were drawn primarily using political performance,” state Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi, told the House Redistricting Committee. “And I want everybody to know that.”

The bill reshaping 37 of the state’s 38 congressional districts would provide five additional winnable districts for Republicans. If the map is approved by the Legislature and signed into law, it could give the Texas GOP 30-8 majority after the 2026 midterm elections.

The unusual overhauling of the congressional districts in the middle of the decade has angered Democrats and has again put Texas in the national political spotlight. Democrats in Texas and in Washington have urged Democratic governors in other states to redraw their congressional districts in an effort to offset any Republican gains under the proposed new maps.

As the author of House Bill 4, the legislation that would enact the new map, Hunter was the first Republican lawmaker to offer an expansive defense of redrawing the districts adopted by the GOP-led Legislature in 2021.

When asked in past hearings why the matter was back before lawmakers, redistricting committee chairman Cody Vasut, R-Angleton, and Republican state Sen. Phil King of Weatherford, who leads the committee in the upper chamber, have said they were simply following the direction of Gov. Greg Abbott. The Republican governor called the 30-day special session that ends Aug. 19 and put redistricting on the agenda.

Hunter, who started his career as a Democrat and is now one of the most senior members of the Texas House, brushed aside arguments that Abbott and the Legislature are abusing the political process by revisiting redistricting with no new census data or court order compelling them to do so.

“It is important to note that when it comes to redistricting, it can be at any time,” he said.

Hunter also sidestepped questions about President Donald Trump’s influence over Texas redistricting, saying he is aware of the president’s interest in the matter but that he was not taking orders from the White House.

By Rep. Hunter’s logic, we could redistrict after every election. I say that with the intention of showing how ludicrous it would be, but I’m quite certain there are people out there who would nod in agreement. This is what you get with a SCOTUS that cares more about power than anything else.

I don’t have the energy to dwell on this. The map is out and the Republicans are gonna do what they’re gonna do. They may twist the meaning of a recent Fifth Circuit ruling to bolster their case or they may just ignore it, they don’t care. Maybe other states will get involved as well and maybe not. Maybe someday we’ll have more rules in place to restore a bit of order and reduce the farcical nature of what we’re doing now, but today is not that day.

The House committee on redistricting has now voted out HB4, with the full House expected to take it up on Tuesday. That means that if there is to be a quorum break, it would need to happen before then, at least if it’s on the House side where the break occurs. The Senate hadn’t scheduled a committee hearing as of Saturday afternoon for HB4, so a Senate quorum break could occur later. The Trib and Lone Star Left have more.

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On Ed Pollard’s campaign cash

Posted on August 3, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

It’s a lot, as we have previously noted.

CM Ed Pollard

It isn’t even close to the time potential candidates will start announcing their intention to run for Houston mayor in 2027.

But if campaign finance reports are any indicator, Council Member Edward Pollard — who has long been rumored as interested in the position — is fast encroaching on current Mayor John Whitmire when it comes to campaign funds.

During the mayoral campaign, Whitmire commanded a lead in the race with his war chest, a product of his 52 years as a member of the Texas Legislature. Whitmire spent around $9 million as he ran for office, and he had $4.3 million on hand as the election drew closer in November 2023.

That amount, though, has slowly whittled down throughout the mayor’s first year and a half in office. Whitmire currently has nearly $2.3 million on hand, according to his most recent campaign finance filing.

Meanwhile, Pollard has more than $2.1 million on hand, according to his most recent filing — an amount that dwarfs his colleagues on the City Council. The council member with the next greatest amount of cash on hand is Abbie Kamin at nearly $416,000, followed by Martha Castex-Tatum at more than $367,000.

Notably, around $1 million of Pollard’s cash on hand is a loan he gave himself.

Experts say Pollard’s report makes one thing clear: The council member, who will soon hit his term limit, has his eyes set on a higher office.

I’ve been talking about this for awhile, most recently when the latest city of Houston campaign finance reports dropped. CM Pollard is term-limited, so whatever he’s raising all this cash for, it’s not for re-election. The self-loan of a million bucks also blows my mind, just because I had no idea he had that capability.

The question is what office he might have his eye on. As we well know now, anything he says before December of 2026 would trigger resign-to-run, so one presumes he will play his cards close to his vest in the short term. Mayor is an obvious possibility – I’m sure Controller Chris Hollins has some thoughts about that, but he too needs to keep them to himself at this time – but it’s not the only one. Harris County Judge and CD18 (or CD09, if the proposed redistricting map is amended or not adopted) also come to mind, though those would mean the end of his time on Council. I’ve not heard anything that rises above the level of the speculation I’m indulging in here. At some point, he’ll make a move and then we’ll know. Until then, all we can do is what we’re doing now.

Posted in Local politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Guess who’s coming to Texas?

Posted on August 3, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Already here, in fact.

Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted of sex trafficking in connection with Jeffrey Epstein, has been moved to a federal prison in Texas, officials said Friday.

Maxwell was transferred to the minimum-security federal prison camp in Bryan from a low-security prison in Tallahassee, Fla., a Federal Bureau of Prisons official told the Houston Chronicle.

The bureau’s online inmate locator currently shows Maxwell as “Not in BOP Custody,” though a prison spokesperson said the system would be updated at midnight to reflect her current location.

According to the Inmate Security Designation and Custody Classification code, inmates can be moved because of security and supervision requirements, medical or programming needs, separation or security measures for inmate protection.

The specific reason for Maxwell’s relocation has not been revealed, officials told the Chronicle.

She was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison in 2022 for helping Epstein groom and sexually abuse underage girls.

Josh Lepird, vice president for the region of the officers’ union that includes Bryan, said the transfer did not seem unusual to him, even for a high-profile prisoner like Maxwell.

“The only unusual thing is that you typically only go to a camp if you have just a couple years left,” he said. “But if someone is a cooperating witness, they can request a lower security level.”

Yes, what could that be about? I’ll leave you with this.

Indeed, the family of Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein accuser who died by suicide in April, slammed Maxwell’s move. In a statement to CNN, they said:

It is with horror and outrage that we object to the preferential treatment convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell has received. Ghislaine Maxwell is a sexual predator who physically assaulted minor children on multiple occasions, and she should never be shown any leniency. Yet, without any notification to the Maxwell victims, the government overnight has moved Maxwell to a minimum security luxury prison in Texas. This is the justice system failing victims right before our eyes. The American public should be enraged by the preferential treatment being given to a pedophile and a criminally charged child sex offender. The Trump administration should not credit a word Maxwell says, as the government itself sought charges against Maxwell for being a serial liar. This move smacks of a cover up. The victims deserve better.

Maxwell is serving 20 years in federal prison for her role in helping Epstein abuse numerous underage girls. After she agreed to the Trump administration’s request for an interview, she is now pushing for Trump to pardon her.

It’s unclear what Maxwell told the DOJ in the two-day-long interview. However, she had ample reason to lie and tell the Trump administration what it wanted to hear, since it could earn her a pardon.

Trump has not ruled out such a pardon, saying multiple times that he is “allowed to do it.”

Make of that what you will. And maybe ask Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick what they think about it. Josh Marshall has more.

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

Hill Country flood hearings

Posted on August 2, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

Brutal.

Kerr County’s emergency management coordinator acknowledged Thursday that he was ill and asleep when rain inundated the Hill Country community early July 4.

Will Thomas told lawmakers during a legislative hearing in Kerrville that his wife woke him at 5:30 a.m. with a call from the city “requesting that I mobilize.” At that point, floodwaters had already torn through Kerrville.

Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said he was also asleep in the early morning hours of July 4. Deputies on duty called him before dawn to notify him of the situation. Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, who oversees emergency management, said he was out of town.

The officials’ testimony was part of the special hearing state lawmakers called in Kerrville to hear from residents and local officials about the state and local response to the flooding in Central Texas that killed at least 130 people. Gov. Greg Abbott has asked lawmakers to introduce legislation during the current special session to address concerns raised by the floods, including how residents were warned about the rising Guadalupe River and how quickly they received aid.

While acknowledging the surprising volume of rain that night, some lawmakers questioned what appeared to be confusion at the local level.

“The three guys in Kerr County who were responsible for sounding the alarm were effectively unavailable,” said state Sen. Ann Johnson, a Democrat from Houston.

[…]

Johnson asked Thomas how the county warned Camp Mystic of the rising Guadalupe River. Twenty seven campers and staffers of the all-girls camp died in the flooding.

“It is my understanding that there were little girls with water around their feet at 2 a.m. that were told, ‘Stay in your cabin.’ And those little girls did what they were told. What was the protocol to warn people when that scenario comes up?” she asked Thomas after his testimony.

Thomas told Johnson the camp should have notified the sheriff’s office of flooding. But Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said he did not receive any such notification from Camp Mystic.

The complete absence of the top three officials during the critical period in Kerrville is just mind-boggling. My wife, upon reading this news, said to me “Have they never heard of delegation of authority?” As in, if you’re not available for whatever the reason – and it was a holiday weekend, people are allowed to go out of town – someone else is given the authority and responsibility to act on your behalf. However you look at this, it was a massive failure.

More from the Trib.

The Kerr County officials’ testimony was their first public statements about what they had been doing the morning of the disaster, and they revealed that key officials weren’t awake to react to flood warnings in the critical early morning hours of July 4.

“One of the problems that this process is showing is we have a lot of folks who have titles but when the time came to act, they did not do so in a timely fashion,” Rep. Drew Darby, R-San Angelo, said during the hearing.

“The three guys in Kerr County who were responsible for sounding the alarm were effectively unavailable,” said Ann Johnson, D-Houston. “Am I hearing that right?”

When the flooding began, Kelly was at a house on Lake Travis outside of Austin, he said. Everything felt normal to him; he’d been getting ready for family to come over during the holiday weekend. He said Leitha, Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd and Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice tried to contact him while he slept.

Kelly said he woke up around 5 a.m., or 5:30 a.m., or 6 a.m. — he wasn’t quite sure. In Kerr County, rain had been pounding the south fork of the Guadalupe River and a wall of water was raging down the river toward unsuspecting communities that had no idea what was headed their way.

“We now know that by that time the flooding had already overtaken Camp Mystic, Heart O’ the Hills and La Junta, and several other upriver camps,” Kelly said, “something that I could never have imagined.”

Thomas, the emergency management coordinator, told lawmakers that he was home sick. He hadn’t been feeling well since July 2 and didn’t work on July 3, which he’d previously requested to take off anyway for another reason, he said. He missed two regular state emergency management calls that day, but said other county leaders typically receive written summaries afterward to make sure information reaches them even when Thomas isn’t working.

Thomas said he woke up around 5:30 a.m. after the City of Kerrville Emergency Management Coordinator Jerremy Hughes called his wife, who roused him.

Both Kelly and Thomas told legislators that they’d had no idea what was coming.

But there were warnings: The National Weather Service issued a flood watch for the county on July 3, meaning flooding was possible, and pushed out increasingly dire flood warnings saying that flooding was happening or imminent starting at 1:14 a.m. July 4.

“Based on the data we had at the time, there was no clear indicator that a catastrophic flood was imminent,” Thomas said. “The rain fell in remote areas with limited gauge data; forecasts were not materially different from past events that did not result in flooding.”

Emphasis mine. The lack of imagination, the inability to conceive of worst-case scenarios, these are not attributes you want in people who are responsible for disaster readiness and response. The “we’ve gotten these warnings before and they were always nothing” stance is understandable to a point – overreacting has its costs as well – but the warnings were a lot more dire hours before the disaster hit, when all three of these guys were sound asleep. Honestly, given what we now know, I don’t understand why these guys haven’t resigned. I’m surprised there isn’t more pressure on them to do exactly that.

And wait, it gets worse.

A five-year-old emergency management plan, obtained by The Texas Tribune late Thursday, shows that Kerr County and Kerrville officials were operating from a generic disaster response template that, in some cases, officials failed to follow when 30-plus feet of floodwaters swamped the Guadalupe River banks on July 4.

The plan, which all counties must file with the Texas Division of Emergency Management, serves as a disaster playbook for local officials.

Emergency management plans spell out who is in charge of the entire response to a mass disaster that could result in serious injury and death, and designate which tasks — evacuations, medical treatment tents, sanitation and the recovery of bodies — go to which county and city administrative leaders to keep confusion at a minimum and bureaucratic bottlenecks from occurring.

It’s not known if Kerr County and Kerrville officials used the plan. A request for comment was not immediately returned late Thursday.

But if they had, there was a clear set of instructions on when to increase monitoring of weather once a flood watch was issued, the first sign that trouble may be approaching, and also at what point evacuations should begin. And the plan indicates that all of the top officials in the area considered flash flooding and flooding as the greatest threat to Kerrville and Kerr County.

“Our cities of Kerrville, Ingram and Kerr County is (SIC) exposed to many hazards, all of which have the potential for disrupting the community, causing casualties and damaging or destroying public or private property,” the November 2020 plan begins.

The plan puts the the county judge and the mayor in charge of offering general guidance to disaster response. It puts the emergency management coordinator or the city manager as the lead to direct the overall response. Initially city officials had to take lead because the top three county officials were out missing when the flooding began.

[…]

Local officials told lawmakers that they received little warning about the flood, that it came too quickly for an adequate response. Thomas admitted to state Sen. Charles Perry, a Lubbock Republican, that Kerr County and Kerrville first responders had never conducted a countywide evacuation exercise ever.

“We have not done a full-scale evacuation exercise,” Thomas admitted.

But the 55-page plan, indicates that local officials should have been better prepared. The plan was released to the Tribune by the Texas Division of Emergency Management in response to a public records request. Kerr County officials have not responded to a similar request made earlier by the Tribune.

“Proper mitigation actions, such as floodplain management, and fire inspections, can prevent or reduce disaster-related losses,” the plan states. “Detailed emergency planning, training of emergency responders and other personnel, and conducting periodic emergency drills and exercises can improve our readiness to deal with emergency situations.”

Here’s a recent example of an emergency drill. In the cybersecurity world, we do stuff like this pretty regularly too. It’s a good way to make sure everyone knows what they’re supposed to do in an emergency, in a low-stakes environment where errors and goof-ups are learning opportunities and not reasons why people die.

The reason for these hearings is also to learn from what happened, which contrary to what certain people believe is good practice and not “loser behavior”, and make changes to prevent the things that went wrong from happening again. I must admit to a certain amount of queasiness here, because those changes will in some ways mandate behavior by local governments, perhaps with consequences for failure, and while in the abstract that’s the right thing to do, we’re talking about the Texas Legislature and Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick, and their track record on this matter is not just bad, it’s actively harmful. Maybe, in this case, with the focus of the failures being on dark red counties and conservative Republican officials, they’ll take a less punitive approach and do something constructive instead. That I’m thinking about it this way really says a lot about how our state government works these days.

There’s another avenue for improvement, but for various reasons it’s not likely to be taken in this session.

Although not specifically named in Gov. Greg Abbott’s list of directives for the current special legislative session, state lawmakers have filed several bills to shore up the safety of youth camps in the wake of the devastating Hill Country floods.

So far, nine bills have been proposed that would address everything from emergency plans and camper disaster drills, to better communication systems and life jackets inside every cabin. They are all in response to the July 4 floods that killed 137 people, including 27 campers and counselors at storied Camp Mystic. The camp’s longtime owner Dick Eastland was also among the victims.

“My hope is that these common sense reforms would help prevent confusion during floods and ensure every camper has the tools and information needed to act quickly when every second matters,” said state Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, who has filed three of eight camp safety bills.

Realistically, it’s tough to see how any camp safety proposal will pass by Aug. 19, when the special session ends, when so much is vying for the Texas Legislature’s attention. Many flood-related proposals that will likely take priority over camps are aimed at fast-tracking disaster funding to businesses and improving emergency disaster response.

And there’s no guarantee that all camps will be on board with the proposed safety regulations.

While some camp industry representatives have told The Texas Tribune they welcome regulation as they grieve alongside their impacted peers, these businesses, particularly more profitable camps, have influenced legislation or circumvented certain mandates in the past. Two weeks after the flooding, the Associated Press reported that Camp Mystic had in recent years successfully appealed to FEMA to have several of its buildings removed from federal flood zone maps, which could have lowered Mystic’s insurance cost and made expansion of the camp easier to do.

“The youth camps don’t like regulation,” state Rep. Vikki Goodwin told The Texas Tribune when asked about concessions she had to make to certain camps on a 2023 safety bill.

Whether the camp safety bills make it, are re-filed in another special session or resurface in the 2027 regular legislative session, one thing is certain: The small but politically astute camp industry is expected to face a lot more questions from lawmakers and specifically, Texas parents, about how it keeps campers safe, particularly the large contingent of sleepaway camps along the state’s lakes and rivers.

“Whatever is coming out, especially from the Legislature or state law, we’re going to gladly take it and run with it,” said Dan Neal, the chair of the state’s camp advisory committee and whose family owns Georgetown-based Camp Doublecreek. “And the camps that I know that I work closely with are going to be happy to take what that is, and really, I would say, make it even better than what is just gonna be probably the base regulation.”

[…]

The youth camp industry is hardly different from other industries in Texas, a pro-business state famously allergic to strict regulation. Youth camps, like most private enterprises and even counties and cities, hire lobbyists to protect their interests via a trade association during legislative sessions.

This is where I remind you that while camps and Elon Musk are free to hire all the lobbyists they want to get what they want from the Legislature, Greg Abbott wants to make it illegal for cities and counties and school districts to be able to do that. Because reasons.

Anyway. Pertaining to the previous story, items like requiring camps to do safety drills and to file disaster readiness plans with the Texas Division of Emergency Management are in some of the bills that have been filed. Those seem like good ideas, along with a parent’s suggestion that camps be required to post their emergency plans on their websites; right now, parents can ask to see them but there is no requirement of disclosure. The camps have their lobbyists – the Camp Association for Mutual Progress is their trade association, which is a fancy way of saying their lobbying group – and the parents do not. You know how that tends to go.

One more thing.

A tiny agency that manages the Guadalupe River in Kerr County is promising to spend at least $1.5 million on flood protection and mitigation measures, weeks after more than 100 people — including 27 young campers and counselors at Camp Mystic — lost their lives in the area during devastating floods.

The pledge from the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, announced during a legislative hearing in Kerrville on Thursday, comes about a week after a Houston Chronicle investigation revealed that the authority delayed upgrading its flood warning system despite sitting on at least $3 million in reserve funds for more than a decade.

“You may wonder if one county river authority is too small to meet these challenges,” said Bill Rector, who was first appointed to the authority’s board by Gov. Greg Abbott in 2015 and now serves as its president. “I say no.”

But lawmakers appeared skeptical of his claims and criticized UGRA for failing to act earlier, continuing a pointed line of questioning they had launched against the river authority during a separate hearing last week.

“It was recognized through studies that you paid for that there was a need for an early warning system,” State Rep. Drew Darby, R-San Angelo, told Rector. “And yet you didn’t do anything about it.”

State Rep. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels, said “you should be in the business of protecting people from the river.” As people in the audience began to applaud, she added, “I don’t see how the Upper Guadalupe River Authority helped in any way in this flood.”

Campbell suggested that the river authority wasn’t capable of performing adequately on its own and should instead combine with the much larger Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority, which manages the waterway in 10 counties downstream of Kerr County.

“I could be wrong, but I think it’s something we need to look at,” said Campbell, whose district includes some of the rivershed that is handled by GBRA.

State Rep. Ken King, R-Canadian, noted that UGRA’s entire board is appointed by Abbott, though it is one of very few river authorities in the state that has the power to levy taxes. Three of its nine board members lead summer camps along the Guadalupe, including Dick Eastland, the director of Camp Mystic who died during the floods.

“So you’re not accountable to the voters of Kerr County, even though you’re taxing them?” asked King, who chairs the House committee on flood recovery. “They couldn’t un-elect you and take you off the board, if they didn’t think you were doing a good job?”

“That’s correct,” Rector said.

[…]

During the Kerrville hearing, lawmakers repeatedly asked Rector why the UGRA did not overhaul its antiquated flood warning system earlier. In 1989, the river authority paid for the system with a 46% property tax hike. But in recent years, it chose to spend down its hefty reserves – which were set aside for a water supply project that leaders ultimately chose not to pursue – in part by decreasing the tax rate, which is now lower than it was decades ago.

Rector did not directly respond to requests to explain that decision. Instead, he said that some of the UGRA’s surplus money went to “several projects that we were funding at that time.”

Better late than never, of course. But boy was the cost of being late awfully steep.

Posted in That's our Lege | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

A Q&A on redistricting

Posted on August 2, 2025 by Charles Kuffner

From Bolts Magazine:

The Texas legislature began meeting in a special session last week to adopt a new congressional map that will, they hope, provide additional seats to the GOP in next year’s midterms.

On Wednesday, Republicans released a draft map that could shift as many as five districts their way; the map, if it came to pass as is, would force multiple Democratic members of Congress into red-leaning districts, and pit two Austin Democrats against one another.

The state last redrew its voting maps in 2021, and redistricting again after just five years is rare by national standards. A new gerrymander could help the GOP keep control of Congress, and it could drastically reshuffle local power, including by further diluting the votes of Texans of color.

We asked readers to send us their questions about Texas redistricting as part of our series “Ask Bolts.” And we invited Michael Li, an expert on redistricting, to respond to some of your questions. Li has closely followed years of controversies and litigation over gerrymandering in Texas as senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice.

He answers nine reader-submitted questions, below. You can navigate to the question that most interests you here, or scroll down to explore them all:

Michael Li is always worth reading on redistricting. He used to run a blog called “Texas Redistricting” that ran during the 2010s and was one of my go-tos for all of the ins and outs of that decade’s saga. He often had updates on the litigation against those maps that I didn’t see anywhere else. The questions asked of him are fairly basic and will not be terrible revealing to anyone who has been following this closely, but if you’re just tuning in or if you’ve got a friend or family member out of state who’s asking you to explain this situation to them, read this or send it to them, it will get you up to speed.

The big and possibly only hearing on redistricting now that a map has been published was yesterday, and I’ll write about that for tomorrow. It looks like the House is preparing to rush this to the floor, so if there’s going to be something disruptive like a quorum break, it will need to happen quickly. Not surprisingly, that means this will be prioritized over flooding, THC, and pretty much everything else.

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