CD15 is the target for 2024

Posted on April 7, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

We’ll see if it remains the only one.

Democrats want South Texas back.

The U.S. House Democratic campaign arm plans to dump funds into Texas’ 15th congressional district this election cycle in a bid to reclaim the most competitive seat in the state, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee will announce Monday. The seat had long been a Democratic stronghold until U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz, R-Edinburg, won the district in last year’s midterm election. The race saw a Republican spending frenzy and was a critical win for the party, which has been eager to make inroads with the district’s majority Latino population.

The strategy is a shift from last year, when national party groups essentially abandoned the district to the fury of local and state Democrats. Groups like the DCCC asserted they needed to prioritize limited resources to defend incumbents also in competitive races, including Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-McAllen, who switched districts out of the 15th to the neighboring 34th last year.

The district snakes from the eastern exurbs of San Antonio down to McAllen on the Mexican border.

The loss of the 15th district was a bitter pill for Democrats to swallow. It was the first time in the district’s history a Republican won the seat and lent ballast to Republican claims that their message resonated with the culturally conservative Hispanic voters of the region.

Democrats were still able to hold off Republicans from netting any new seats in South Texas, and Democrats asserted they only lost the 15th district because its boundaries were redrawn in the 2021 redistricting to include more conservative areas north of its population core in McAllen. But Republicans managed to close margins in the traditionally Democratic areas of Hidalgo County, indicating the days of Democrats sitting pretty in the region might be over.

The optimistic take on how Republicans did in that part of the state last year is that it was an overall mediocre-at-best turnout year for Dems, which despite the overperformance of Dems in some critical races was the case nationwide as well. The test for that hypothesis will be the next election. We know that there are very few real opportunities for flips in this map, at least at this time. It’s still weird to not see CD23 on such a list. Could always be added later, if Republicans take out their incumbent in a nasty primary. For now, at least we haven’t been written off altogether. NBC News has more.

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Rep. Jones responds to her former staffers’ complaint

Posted on April 7, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Of interest.

Rep. Jolanda Jones

Houston state Rep. Jolanda Jones criticized her former staffers in a new statement Wednesday for publicizing the name of an intern who they alleged was having an inappropriate relationship with Jones’ son and for making assumptions about his mental health.

Jones’ chief of staff Kory Haywood, legislative director Catherine “Cat” Mouer and district director Yesenia Wences, in a four-page resignation letter leaked to the media last week, accused Jones of covering up the relationship and using public resources for personal reasons, among other allegations.

[…]

The House General Investigating Committee is looking into the allegations, Jones said in her latest statement.

“I welcome that investigation and look forward to being vindicated of any wrong doing,” she said, adding she would not speak directly to the allegations so as not to impede the committee’s work.

Jones last week had not responded to the letter other than to say that the staffers must have “decided this job is not for them” and to wish them luck in future endeavors.

But in her statement Wednesday, which she said would be her last on the matter, Jones said she has since spoken to the intern and learned the intern “categorically denies any wrongdoing or participation in any inappropriate relationship with my son.”

“I cannot sit quietly and allow members of my staff to be wrongfully publicly identified, denigrated and demeaned at the hands of former employees,” Jones said. “Regardless of any political capital that I may lose through this matter, I will not allow this young promising professional to be given a scarlet letter.”

Jones added that the intern, who is 26, permitted Jones to share that she is a survivor of sexual assault and understands what constitutes harassment and abuse “all too well.”

“The inclusion of her name in these allegations have caused a revictimization and retraumatization of her,” Jones said.

Despite the staffers’ allegation about a problematic age gap, Jones added her son is five years older than the intern, who has a graduate degree and is working on her doctorate.

Jones said her son, who did not respond to requests for comment by Hearst Newspapers, also denies having an inappropriate relationship. She said she was “outraged” the staffers would make assumptions about her son’s mental health “without any documentation to substantiate this claim.”

See here for the background. As before, all I know is what’s in these stories. That said, this was a pretty strong response from Rep. Jones. Perhaps there will be more information to come out, either from the former staffers or as a result of that House General Investigating Committee review. If not, I’m inclined to agree with her that there’s nothing more to be said.

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Dispatches from Dallas, April 7 edition

Posted on April 7, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

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

This week in Dallas news: Who is the Dallasite at the center of the Clarence Thomas scandal? Plus ACLU support for some area protestors; Fairfield State Park plans; Democrats fighting in Dallas County; and the music scene in Denton.

The biggest story about North Texas right now is, of course, the ProPublica story about Clarence Thomas’ relationship with Dallas real estate magnate and GOP activist megadonor Harlan Crow. The gist of it is that Crow has been taking Thomas to his private vacation estates, hosting Thomas on his yacht for international trips, and flying Thomas around the country on his private jets for two decades and more. Thomas hasn’t reported any of this travel on any of his annual financial disclosures, in violation of federal law.

It’s no surprise that Thomas’ ethics are lacking. Perhaps it’s surprising that he didn’t bother to cover his tracks better, but perhaps Thomas thinks he has transcended the realms of the little people to whom ethics rules and laws apply since he joined the Supreme Court. But we’re not focused on Thomas’ problems. We’re here for the Dallas angle of this story: Harlan Crow.

Trammell Crow, Harlan Crow’s father, founded a namesake commercial real estate development and management firms. Trammell Crow went public and is now an independent subsidiary of the holding firm that owns Coldwell Banker. Harlan Crow manages Crow Holdings, which invests both Crow family money and outside investory assets to the collective tune of $29 billion. Crow Holdings invests in and develops commercial and multifamily residential properties; its best known local project is the redevelopment of Old Parkland. Crow Holding also owns one of the biggest apartment builders in north Texas. The difference between Trammell Crow and Crow Holdings is confusing; it took the DMN article to make it clear to me which parts were which.

Harlan Crow lives in Highland Park and has been involved in a number of Dallas institutions. He once owned D Magazine, which I regularly read and cite in these posts. He’s also on the boards of a number of right-wing groups including the AEI, the George W. Bush Foundation, and the Hoover Institute per this local news explainer. Some additional details about his finances appear in this MarketWatch story (Archive link) but the gist is nobody knows how much money Crow has and if he’s not a billionaire, he’s close. The MarketWatch story also mentions Crow’s donations to Greg Abbott and Mitt Romney, which is to say: what we know about. The Dallas Observer article about the story notes Crow’s friendship with the Bushes and Crow’s gift to Virginia Thomas’ political advocacy nonprofit.

The Dallas Morning News (Archive link) also has an explainer that covers all this information plus a couple of items about his involvement in local politics. In addition to fighting against a publicly owned convention hotel, he had to get his Highland Park estate rezoned so it could also serve as a historical collection. He also has an underground parking garage for his parties and the collection/library, so folks won’t have to park on the neighborhood streets.

The ProPublica article leaves me with the sense that Crow thinks the “we all go out to the ranch and do a little huntin’ and shootin’ and such” excuse will fly. That story has never acknowledged how much business and politicking gets done between people like Crow and Thomas and whoever else was involved. In Texas that story has (officially, superficially) passed muster for a long time. But when the ranch is an upstate New York estate founded by the same woman who built Mar-a-Lago or a fancy yacht, that line becomes a little harder to sell, and the broader US public isn’t as sympathetic as (some) Texans have been. Having said that, there aren’t any teeth in the ethics laws that Thomas violated, so it may not matter.

I’m not a big fan of Jonathan Chait but his piece in the New Yorker is a good summary of the whole business. It’s also a reminder to vote against every one of the people who hold Thomas up as a moral exemplar.

In other news:

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No one asked you, Tony

Posted on April 6, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Oh good Lord.

Tony Buzbee, the millionaire businessman and trial attorney who unsuccessfully challenged Mayor Sylvester Turner in 2019, is considering another run for City Hall’s top job.

Buzbee on Wednesday said supporters are urging him to run again, and he believes he is the only candidate who can defeat U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who told church parishioners last week that she would run. He emphasized, though, that he has not made a decision yet.

“I’m most concerned about the safety and well-being of the people who live in Houston. We have decisions to make to ensure that Houston leads,” Buzbee told the Chronicle, a comment he also posted on social media. “I can spend $15 to $50 million to win, if I think there is a path to victory. I’m a moderate. I’m not affiliated with any party, but I do lean a bit left. Houston deserves a motivated independent. That’s me. Not sure I would do it, but people are pushing me to do so.”

He predicted he would “step into a runoff” if he decides to run. The only question, he said, is whom he would face. Runoffs are necessary when no candidate garners a majority in the first round of voting, often the case in crowded city elections; the top two candidates then go to a runoff.

“I haven’t decided yet if I want to do that,” Buzbee said. “Our firm is working on too many cases at the moment across the country.”

[…]

“Buzbee is not a true Republican in the sense that we associate Republicans today, but he’s definitely seen as more conservative than all the other major contenders,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston. “(If) you’ve got a more bona fide conservative in the race, it takes some of the fuel away from Whitmire’s fire.”

Whitmire, a Democrat, is positioning himself as a moderate voice who would be tough on crime, according to Rottinghaus. If Buzbee gets in, some of the more conservative voters to whom Whitmire could appeal may look elsewhere.

There also is the matter of money. Whitmire’s $10 million war chest, amassed over decades in the Texas Legislature, has loomed over the mayoral race since late 2021. It is dramatically more than any other declared candidate has, but Buzbee’s personal wealth likely will allow him to outspend any candidate.

The $12 million he spent on his bout with Turner was second only to Bill White’s $9.7 million in 2003, which when adjusted for inflation would have equaled $13.5 million in 2019. On Wednesday, Buzbee raised the specter of spending four times that sum, up to $50 million.

“The only way to beat the front-runners currently running for mayor is with a lot of money, and Buzbee has a lot of money,” Rottinghaus said. “He has, to some extent, endless pockets to keep going back to the well.”

I swore in December of 2019 that I would not devote any more brain space to Tony Buzbee, but here we are. So let’s get to the point.

– Buzbee lost that runoff by a 56-44 margin, in case anyone has forgotten that. Twelve million bucks can only buy you so much.

– As I said when SJL announced her intent to run (has she said anything more about this yet, by the way?), the field is far too big and the situation is far too chaotic to make any reasonable predictions about how it might go. Buzbee, if he does run, could perhaps take some support from Whitmire. He could maybe bring in some Republican voters who had otherwise felt there was no one for them to vote for. Whether that is enough for him to finish in the top two or not, I have no idea.

– As far as those Republicans who may currently feel like they have no one to vote for in this race, I have been saying for some time now that I think a “real” Republican is likely to enter for precisely that reason. The potential effect of such a hypothetical candidate on the not-yet-a-thing candidacy of Tony Buzbee is left as an exercise for those with way more time on their hands than I have.

– The thing about the 2019 race is that Buzbee was able to run as the “not Sylvester Turner” candidate. Which was enough in Round One to put him ahead of Bill King, who was an even less appealing candidate than he had been in 2015, which believe you me is no mean feat. He seems to want to pitch himself as the “not Sheila Jackson Lee” candidate, which makes some sense in a vacuum, but there are a whole lot of other people running as their own selves, and they will draw some amount of support based on that. With that many choices, it’s not at all clear that he’d be the top preference of those who aren’t voting for SJL. The candidates who will be making a positive case for themselves rather than a negative case against one particular opponent will have their own advantages in a race like this.

– Certainly, repeat candidates can win on subsequent attempts. Mayor Turner famously ran for Mayor and lost twice before winning in 2015, and plenty of City Council members had to run more than once before they broke through. It’s a combination of learning from past mistakes, maturing as a candidate, raising more money, finding a winning issue, having a better environment, and more. I’m honestly not sure what of these would apply to Tony Buzbee in 2023. I admit, I don’t like the guy and am judging him in part on that, but do you see anything in this story that says to you that he’s learned from his 2019 experience? I know, it’s one short story, I’m sure he’ll have (oh so very much) more to say if he does run, but my point stands. Right now, his plan is to run the same playbook but spend more money. It could work – politics is weird – but this is a different election, with different candidates and different circumstances. There’s no reason to think it won’t lead to worse results this time, not better results.

Okay, that’s all I can stand. Please, Tony, I beg you, don’t make me have to do more of this.

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A brief but dismal legislative update

Posted on April 6, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Just a few recent news stories, to give you an idea of what’s happening in the Legislative session, and why I have been avoiding it.

Item 1:

Republican Texas senators on Monday reversed themselves and voted against allowing transgender kids currently being treated with puberty blockers and hormone therapy to continue receiving such care.

That reversal essentially expanded Senate Bill 14’s proposed ban on transition-related care to include all transgender children — as outlined in the legislation’s original version. The chamber voted 19-12 along party lines Tuesday to give final approval to the broader version of the bill, which is priority legislation for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. SB 14 will now advance to the House.

Monday’s vote to expand the restrictions and advance the legislation came days after the GOP-controlled Senate agreed to allow kids already on puberty blockers and hormone therapy by early June to keep their access to those treatments. Major medical groups approve of such care and say it lessens higher rates of depression and suicide for trans youth.

Item 2:

The Texas Senate on Wednesday approved two bills aimed at restricting drag performances that children attend or see. One of them, Senate Bill 1601, would defund public libraries where drag queens are allowed to read to children. The other, Senate Bill 12, bars kids from drag shows if the performances are overly lewd and lascivious.

SB 1601 was approved in a 19-10 vote. SB 12, which is a priority for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick this session, was approved in a 20-11 vote. Both bills now head to the House.

Item 3:

A bill intended to rein in district attorneys who decline to pursue certain cases passed the Senate on Wednesday. The bill, a priority for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, is part of a larger effort to limit the power of elected prosecutors, especially in Texas’ largest, left-leaning counties.

Some district and county attorneys in Texas have said they will not prosecute people accused of violating the state’s near-total abortion bans. There’s also conflict over whether prosecutors will pursue allegations of election fraud, as well as cases involving first-time drug offenders or low-level theft.

Prosecutors have wide latitude to decide what cases their office will pursue. But conservative lawmakers have filed more than 30 bills intending to limit this “prosecutorial discretion.”

“Unfortunately, certain Texas prosecutors have joined a trend of adopting internal policies refusing to prosecute particular laws,” Sen. Joan Huffman, a Republican from Houston who authored the bill, said Tuesday. “These actions set a dangerous precedent and severely undermine the authority of the Legislature.”

Senate Bill 20, which passed the Senate in a 20-11 vote on Wednesday, is the first such bill to pass either chamber. Huffman and Sen. Tan Parker, R-Flower Mound, authored the legislation.

SB 20 would prohibit prosecutors from adopting or enforcing a policy “under which the prosecuting attorney refuses to prosecute a class or type of criminal offense.” Such a policy would qualify as “official misconduct”; if a jury finds a prosecutor guilty of misconduct, a district judge can order them removed from office.

Currently, only a county resident can bring an allegation of misconduct against an elected prosecutor. But both chambers are considering separate legislation that would allow residents and prosecutors in neighboring counties, and the attorney general, to file charges of official misconduct.

Other bills would enable the attorney general to take on any cases rejected by a county prosecutor — or sue for tens of thousands of dollars for every day a prosecutor has a policy against pursuing certain cases.

The Texas District and County Attorneys Association has raised concerns about these bills, noting on their website that there is already a system in place for residents of a county to raise issues with their prosecutor — either through bringing misconduct claims or by voting them out at the next election.

State lawmakers trying to override prosecutorial discretion is “another attempt to exert statewide control over a traditionally local function,” Sandra Guerra Thompson, a professor of criminal law at the University of Houston Law Center, told The Texas Tribune. “We’re seeing a lot of that these days.”

Any or all of these bills could fail in the House, or get amended to be less awful. I wouldn’t count on it, but it could happen. Just note that these are among the top priorities of Dan Patrick.

And finally, speaking of Dan Patrick, Item 4:

During a Senate floor debate Tuesday supposedly about “protecting children,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick rebuked Sen. Roland Gutierrez for repeatedly mentioning gun violence. Sen. Gutierrez thought gun violence might be relevant to “protecting children,” especially since his Uvalde district is still recovering from the trauma of the school massacre that took the lives of 19 children and two adults.

The reason for the public rebuke? This debate about “protecting children” wasn’t about guns or violent crime. It was about the dangers of – drag shows. Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, has proposed legislation that would bar minors from attending drag shows.

When Hughes argued that his law, Senate Bill 12,  would help “protect children,” Gutierrez countered: “Man, I’ll tell you, I’ve been all about this session about protecting children, my friend, and we haven’t done a whole lot of protecting children when it comes to guns and ammunition,” said Gutierrez.

The Senate gallery, which is open to the public, could be heard cheering, according to KVUE

Sen. Hughes looked “rattled” during the exchange, according to the Quorum Report.

But Lt. Gov. Patrick was quick to offer protection from the volley of words and came to Hughes’ rescue. Patrick scolded Gutierrez and announced that he would not be recognized to speak on the floor going forward if he could not limit his queries to the topic of protecting children (from drag shows).

“I appreciate your interest in protecting kids,” Sen. Gutierrez responded. “I sure would, could, use your support in protecting kids that are killed by gun violence in this state.”

As the Senate gallery cheered again, Lt. Gov. Patrick banged his gavel and warned that he would order the gallery cleared if there were another outburst.

“Sen. Gutierrez, I’m going to give you one more warning. That’s the last time,” Lt. Gov. Patrick said. “Stick to the topic, to the issues you’re asking questions on, or you will not be recognized in the future.”

Yes, how dare the Senator that represents Uvalde talk about guns in the context of protecting children? What was he thinking?

That’s your dismal legislative update for today. I hope to not have to provide more of these on other days.

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Harris County felony bail bond lawsuit ruling coming

Posted on April 6, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Definitely something to look forward to.

Lawyers on both sides of a lawsuit accusing Harris County of unfair bail practices that unjustly imprison lower-income inmates are pressing for a swift resolution, and a judge says a ruling in the four-year legal battle will come soon.

U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal heard arguments from attorneys representing Johnnie Ray Pierson, Dwight Russell, Joseph Ortuno, Maurice Wilson and Christopher Clack on whether Harris County officials and Sheriff Ed Gonzalez violated the five men’s and other current and former inmates’ rights by putting them behind bars because they couldn’t afford cash bail.

“In this hearing, it became clear that the judge was mostly trying to clear away some of the procedural obstacles that would prevent her from actually addressing what this case is really about,” Cody Cutting, an attorney with the Civil Rights Corps, said on behalf of the men whom he and the nonprofit have represented since 2019. “People are being jailed because they lack money and no other reason.”

Harris County’s, the State of Texas and Gonzalez’s attorneys argued that the enactment of Senate Bill 6 in September 2021 would make the men’s lawsuit “moot” because of legislation allowing any person, including all prisoners, to be eligible for bail unless denial of bail is “expressly permitted” by the Texas Constitution or by other law. The provision doesn’t apply to capital offenses when the burden of proof is evident.

“What SB6 did is require the use of secured money bail, prohibiting unsecured bonds, for people charged with certain categories of offenses,” Cutting said.

A motion in the felony bail challenge asks Rosenthal to rule in favor of all inmates held at the Harris County Jail because they cannot afford the bail amounts set by the court. Lawyers from the Civil Rights Corps, based in Washington, D.C., also argue that local judges’ practices in felony court are unconstitutional.

[…]

The main issue Gonzalez has with the lawsuit is the implementation of the bail practices and whether Rosenthal’s ruling, if in favor of the plaintiffs, will put him in a difficult position in terms of deciding which courts’ orders to comply with, Fogler said.

“The sheriff certainly does not want an overcrowded jail, but that’s what’s happening,” Cutting said. “And what the sheriff has been resisting, is being held responsible for jailing people solely because they lack money.”

See here for the previous update, from over two years ago, and here for a Chron explainer on the lawsuit. This is about felony bail, not misdemeanor, as that issue was settled in 2019 via a different lawsuit. Note that because district court judges are defendants, and district courts are state offices, the Attorney General is defending them, not the County Attorney as was the case with the misdemeanor bail lawsuit. Not sure how much longer we’ll be waiting – that story was from last week, I just hadn’t gotten to it yet. I expect an appeal regardless of the ruling.

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Texas blog roundup for the week of April 3

Posted on April 6, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

This weekly Texas Progressive Alliance roundup will take about 15% less time to read thanks to our new pitch clock.

Continue reading →

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Senate re-passes its redistricting map

Posted on April 5, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Mostly political theater, as there’s little reason to believe they actually need to cover their butts at this point.

Sen. Joan Huffman

A year and half after it was first approved, the Texas Senate on Monday voted to rubber-stamp a map setting the chamber’s political districts, which increased the Senate’s Republican majority and undercut the political power of voters of color.

The boundaries of the state’s political maps were redrawn in 2021, but the 23-7 vote was a procedural step to meet legal requirements. The state constitution requires legislative districts be redrawn in the first regular session after the results of the decennial census are published. But the delays of the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the release of the 2020 census results past the end of the last regularly scheduled session in May 2021.

Lawmakers redrew the state’s political maps to incorporate a decade’s worth of explosive population growth later in the year during a specially called legislative session. The districts were then used during the 2022 elections.

State Sen. Joan Huffman, the Houston Republican who led the chamber’s redistricting process in 2021, described the vote on Senate Bill 375 as a “culmination” of the chamber’s redistricting work, including meeting constitutional obligations.

No members of the Senate submitted proposed amendments to the map. Several changes proposed by members of the public were rejected, Huffman said, because they did not align with her stated redistricting objectives, including “partisan considerations,” equalizing population across the districts and preserving communities of interest.

The Senate map is one target of broad federal litigation challenging how the Republican-controlled Legislature used the once-a-decade redistricting process to draw maps solidifying the GOP’s political dominance while weakening the influence of voters of color.

[…]

The federal three-judge panel overseeing the redistricting case previously denied a request by Tarrant County residents to block the reconfiguration of SD-10 from being used in last year’s elections while they pursued their legal challenge.

The state has argued that the reconfiguration was motivated by partisanship, not race, and that the plaintiffs were unable to prove that race was the predominant factor motivating the Legislature’s action. The changes to the district offered Republicans an easier path to pick up the seat in the Republican-controlled chamber.

Huffman, the chamber’s chief map-drawer, said throughout the 2021 redistricting process that the maps were drawn “race-blind” and were presented to legal counsel who cleared them as compliant with federal law meant to protect voters of color from discrimination.

She has repeatedly declined to disclose how they reached that conclusion, though. In a deposition for the SD-10 challenge, Huffman invoked legislative privilege to shield herself from answering questions about her considerations while redrawing the district.

The Senate reapproved its map while the challenge to the Legislature’s redistricting work remains in legal limbo. The three-judge panel in charge of the case has yet to reschedule a trial over the new political maps after delaying a September 2022 trial because of disputes over discovery that left both the state and the various plaintiff groups questioning whether they’d have enough time to prepare to make their cases in a federal court in El Paso.

The Senate map now heads for reapproval in the House, where its redistricting committee is just beginning its work to reapprove the map it adopted in 2021 for the House’s 150 districts.

See here, here, and here for some background. As noted before, I think this is solid evidence for the assertion made by Sens. Roland Gutierrez and Sarah Eckhardt that the legislative (non-Congressional) redistricting done in 2021 was unconstitutional. Not that there’s a damn thing to be done about it now, since the Supreme Court declined to do anything about it then. I expect the state lawsuits will eventually be tossed on the grounds that they’re now moot, and then we’ll play the usual multi-year game of What Excuse Will The Federal Courts Find This Time To Let Republicans Do What They Want. Situation normal, in other words.

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Llano County ordered to return books to library shelves

Posted on April 5, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Yes, this is a thing that is happening in the year of our Lord 2023.

Officials in Llano County must return to the public library system books they removed and allow them to be checked out again, a federal judge ruled this week.

The Texas judge is also prohibiting the officials from removing any more books while a lawsuit remains pending.

Seven library patrons last year sued the county judge, commissioners court, library board members and library system for restricting and banning books. They argue in the suit that their First Amendment rights to access and receive ideas had been infringed when officials limited access to certain books based on their content and messages. The county residents also alleged their 14th Amendment right to due process was violated as the books were removed without notice or ability to appeal.

The books included a book for teens that calls the Ku Klux Klan a terrorist group, Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” and a comedic children’s book with three stories from Dawn McMillan’s “I Need a New Butt!” series.

U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pitman wrote in an opinion filed Thursday that the plaintiffs had “clearly met their burden to show that these are content-based restrictions that are unlikely to pass constitutional muster.”

Still, Pitman dismissed part of the suit, which wanted county officials to reinstate the library’s previous system for e-book access.

County officials appealed Pitman’s order reinstating the banned books, according to court filings. None were immediately reached for comment. Their lawyer, former Texas Solicitor General Jonathan Mitchell, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

“The evidence demonstrates that, without an injunction, defendants will continue to make access to the subject books difficult or impossible,” Pitman wrote.

[…]

The books at issue in the suit are “available” for check out but are hidden from view and not in the catalog.

“Their existence is not discernible to the public, nor is their availability,” Pitman wrote.

The county has also created an in-house checkout system, which does not list the books that are supposedly available to be checked out.

“They are, to the extent they exist, not accessible from the library shelves,” Pitman wrote. “A patron must, notwithstanding the fact that the books’ existence is not reflected in the library catalog, know that the books can be requested. They must then make a special request for the book to be retrieved from behind the counter. This is, of course, an obvious and intentional (effort) by defendants to make it difficult if not impossible to access the materials plaintiffs seek.”

The appeal was filed with the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

See here for the background. As a reminder, this is happening at the public library, not a school library. Not that it would be any better at a school library, but this is how far the fanatics are going. And yes, the attorney for said fanatics is the same guy who helped design the vigilante bounty hunter anti-abortion law SB8 and who is representing the guy who is suing his ex-wife’s friends for helping her find abortion medication, among many other things. These guys don’t just want to take your reproductive rights away from you, they have a whole lot more on their agenda. And now we get to see what the current level of depravity is at the Fifth Circuit. Hold on tight.

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Speedier baseball

Posted on April 5, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

A faster-paced game with more action is exactly what MLB hoped for with its myriad rule changes, and so far it’s exactly what it has gotten.

Major League Baseball’s new rules are working as hoped through the first four days of the season.

The average game time has dropped by 30 minutes, stolen bases have doubled, and batting average has increased by 16 percentage points compared to last year’s opening weekend.

Games averaged 2 hours, 38 minutes through Sunday with the new pitch clock, down from 3:08 for the first four days of the 2022 season and a 3:04 final average.

In the first year of restrictions on defensive shifts, the .246 batting average for nine-inning games was up from .230 over the first four days last year, when many games were played in cold and wet weather. Left-handed batting average increased to .232 from .229 in last year’s first four days and right-handed average went up to .254 from .230.

“We are extremely pleased with the early returns,” commissioner Rob Manfred said Monday. “Fan reaction has been positive to the brisker pace with more action. And players have made a great adjustment to the changes.”

[…]

MLB felt it was about time for drastic change after the average time of nine-inning games rose from 2:33 in 1981 to 2:46 in 2005 and a record 3:10 in 2021. With the introduction of the PitchCom electronic device to signal pitches, the average dropped to 3:04 for the full 2022 season.

Over objections from players, the 11-man competition committee adopted a pitch clock of 15 seconds with no runners on base and 20 seconds with runners. It also required two infielders to be on either side of second base and all infielders to be within the outer boundary of the infield when the pitcher is on the rubber. Players supported increasing bases to 18-inch squares from 15-by-15, proposed as a safety measure.

These were the most significant rules changes since the pitcher’s mound was lowered from 15 inches to 10 for the 1969 season and the American League adopted the designated hitter in 1973, a rule that was extended to the National League in 2022 following its temporary use during the 2020 pandemic-shortened season.

“There’s a lot more action and a lot more appealing product for the fans,” Milwaukee Brewers owner Mark Attanasio said.

The clock has had a noticeable impact, with Colorado–San Diego taking 2:03 on Sunday, Cleveland-Seattle 2:04 on Saturday and the New York Mets-Miami 2:09 on Friday.

“I don’t think it’s wrong to take a semi-victory lap right now,” Mets manager Buck Showalter said, “but we’ll see how it evolves.”

I for one approve of the changes. There have been pitch clocks in place in the minor leagues for several years now, so quite a few current MLB players have experienced them. I suspect that has helped minimize the negative effects; the number of pitch clock violations is already low, and based on what we saw in spring training it should trend down over the year. I will note that in the minor leagues, there was also a large initial drop in game times with the introduction of the pitch clock, but over the course of several years after that the times crept back up to nearly what they had been before. I think as long as MLB enforces the rule – there were some issues with that in the minors – there shouldn’t be too much regression. But it will be worth watching.

As for the jump in stolen bases, Fangraphs goes deeper into the numbers. I think we will begin to see more steal attempts over time, as the slower runners begin to try their luck, and with that the success rate will start to fall a bit. While I think the basic pitch clock as it now is will stay the same, it won’t surprise me to see further tinkering with the bases and the pickoff rules and the shift restrictions. Once you’ve opened those cans, they’re not going to close up.

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Precinct analysis: Congress 2022

Posted on April 4, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

PREVIOUSLY:
State House 2022
A comparison with 2012

This will be short and bland, as there ain’t many competitive Congressional districts by any metric. 


Dist  Abbott   Abb%    Beto   Beto%
===================================
28    79,478  46.4%   88,550  51.7%
34    57,793  42.7%   75,741  55.9%

15    81,095  52.4%   71,649  46.3%
23   116,353  54.4%   94,259  44.1%

03   163,075  59.1%  108,840  39.5%
12   143,586  59.9%   92,478  38.6%
22   144,862  59.5%   95,274  39.1% 
24   172,837  57.5%  123,159  41.0%

I could do a similar comparison to 2012, but that won’t tell us much. We already know that the swing seat list at that time was the then-Dem held CD23, and that was about it. CD23 flipped red in 2014 and managed to stay there, while CDs 07 and 32 went blue in 2018 and are now a much darker blue, to help make their formerly swingy neighbors more reliably red. This is what redistricting is all about.

Not a whole lot to say here. Republican interest in CD34 is already starting to wane, and I suspect we’re all going to be stuck with Henry Cuellar for the foreseeable future. Whatever one may say about Jessica Cisneros and any future efforts to oust Cuellar in a primary, the narrative that his district is “dark blue”, which wasn’t the case in 2020 or 2022, will hopefully die. I do think a better Dem than Cuellar can hold that district, but anyone who claims that basically any Dem could do so is at best kidding themselves. Let’s please put some more thought into this if we try again next year, that’s all I’m saying.

The best Dem pickup chance, at least on paper, is the seat that redistricting helped take away in CD15. Maybe CD23 becomes interesting again if the Republicans fully indulge in their fury against Rep. Tony Gonzales, or maybe like Cuellar and CD28 there exists room for someone more orthodox to hold the seat. On the one hand, Republican primary voters are not known for making rational, calculated choices. On the other hand, that is still a ten-point margin. You pay your money and you take your chances.

I continue to believe that the best target will end up being CD24 again, but that will likely take a couple of cycles. Maybe CDs 03 and 22 can join it, if we pray hard enough to the Demography Gods. I dunno. I will of course keep an eye on this, and I am somehow still a cockeyed optimist in these matters, but for now my forecast is that the Congressional landscape is boring. I hope to be wrong about that sooner rather than later.

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Hegar caves on phony “defunding” claim again

Posted on April 4, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Clown the Comptroller II: Electric Boogaloo.

Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar on Monday backed off his claim that Harris County “defunded” a constable’s office in violation of a state law intended to prevent cities and counties from cutting their police budgets, ending the latest standoff between the state’s Republican leaders and Democratic officials heading the state’s most populous county.

Hegar accused Harris County leaders in February of cutting the constable’s budget without getting voter approval — a requirement under a 2021 state law passed in the wake of the George Floyd protests. The comptroller barred the county from being able to set their property tax rate, which prompted Harris County officials to sue Hegar.

Local government technicalities and number-punching differences led state and county officials to opposite conclusions of whether Harris County did in fact reduce that constable’s budget.

Ultimately, Harris County won the argument — with Hegar rescinding his finding Monday and allowing the county to once again set its tax rate.

“I’m glad the Comptroller admitted his error and is no longer holding Harris County’s budget process hostage,” Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee said in a statement. “I hope that in the future, we can talk through these types of allegations, as the law requires, before the Comptroller makes a final decision.”

The fight hinged on a math problem.

Harris County officials adopted a seven-month spending plan last year as it transitioned to a new 12-month budget schedule. In that shorter plan, county officials set aside $28.6 million to fund Harris County Constable Ted Heap’s office. This year, the county is back on a 12-month budget cycle and allocated $46.6 million for Heap.

But Heap believed his office should’ve received more. He complained to Gov. Greg Abbott’s office and Hegar launched an investigation.

The comptroller estimated that based on the money Heap spent each month during last year’s shorter cycle, the constable should’ve gotten about $48.9 million this year. Hegar argued that Harris County shortchanged Heap by about $2.3 million.

County officials shot back by using Hegar’s calculation method against him. If they compared Heap’s budget this year and last year, like Hegar did, the constable’s share now actually represents a bigger slice of the county’s budget than it did then. The law also says that if a city or county’s budget is less than the previous year’s budget, the share of funds set aside for a law enforcement agency can’t fall — a standard Harris County did not violate.

See here for the previous update, and here for what happened the last time we were subject to this bullshit. Hegar is out there claiming he was right anyway, a bold move when you just publicly conceded you were wrong. This is all too stupid and annoying for words. The Chron has more.

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“One Clean Houston”

Posted on April 4, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Hope this works.

Mayor Sylvester Turner on Wednesday unveiled a $17.8 million illegal dumping initiative aimed at expediting cleanups, increasing surveillance and enforcement, and prioritizing areas hardest hit by Houston’s roadside trash problem.

Standing beside an illegal dumpsite strewn with discarded furniture and garbage bags in Greater Fifth Ward, Turner outlined his new “One Clean Houston” plan. With a $17.8 million budget for the next two years, mostly from federal American Rescue Plan Act funds, he said the initiative’s goal is to address the recurring blight that keeps appearing in distressed areas.

“Unfortunately, this community, like many others, has suffered because of countless illegal dumpsites that have created blight and become a major problem in our neighborhoods,” Turner said. “What we find oftentimes is that we can come clean it up and things will come right back a week or two later. … We need a comprehensive approach.”

In 2022, Houston saw 4,650 reported cases of illegal dumping, down from 6,251 complaints the previous year. Despite the decrease, officials said they face a daunting workload, including an increase in proactive collections in addition to cleanups prompted by calls to the city’s 311 helpline. The city’s new “dumping tracker” shows nearly 1,000 proactive trash removals in February, compared to 115 in September 2022.

The challenge is compounded by the city’s aging waste trucks and an overburdened and short-staffed Solid Waste Management Department where employees have spent years working mandatory six-day weeks just to try to keep up with trash backlogs.

To address those issues, most of the new funding, $14.5 million, will go toward trash collection equipment and services. It includes $11.5 million to support existing collection efforts, $3 million to purchase single-operator grapple trucks and $200,000 to increase hiring incentives for drivers.

The objective is to speed up dumpsite cleanups, reducing the average resolution time from about 24 days to a target of seven to 10 days, according to the Mark Wilfalk, director of the Solid Waste Management Department.

“The two greatest assets of our department, it’s going to always revolve around employees and equipment. Without either one of those, we can’t get anything done,” Wilfalk said. “And we’ve been able to improve and increase that efficiency and reduce the waiting times because of that extra support that we have been given.”

Another $2.4 million will be used to bolster enforcement, including hiring six code enforcement officers and six Harris County deputies, deploying 120 covert cameras, and funding Houston Police Department overtime. The intention, Turner said, is to make clear that illegal dumping comes with consequences.

It all sounds good, and the story quotes neighborhood residents who are pleased with the announcement. I don’t know how much equipment and other resources this money will buy, but anything should help. Dumping has been a problem for many years now, and I wish the story delved a bit into the past history of attempts to combat it. Maybe there isn’t much to say – offhand, I can’t think of anything along these lines, certainly not that much money being spent. I hope the city measures and reports on its progress, and I hope there is sufficient progress to merit celebration.

Posted in Elsewhere in Houston | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Yes, it’s another Senate 2024 post

Posted on April 3, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Sorry, I’m legally obligated to blog about these, I don’t make the rules.

Not Ted Cruz

Texas Democrats acknowledge that a steep climb awaits whoever challenges Cruz in 2024. But though they have limited options, they believe at least one potential candidate could make the race competitive.

“The real challenge is not to make [Cruz] unacceptable, which he is,” one Democratic strategist based in Texas told Inside Elections. “The real challenge is for our candidate to be acceptable.”

Rep. Colin Allred, who represents the suburbs of Dallas, and Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor and HUD secretary, are seen as the two strongest potential contenders.

Aside from O’Rourke, Castro is probably the best known Democratic figure in the state. The 48-year-old former mayor and his twin brother, Rep. Joaquin Castro, have been involved in Texas Democratic politics since the early 2000s, when Julián Castro served on the San Antonio city council and Joaquin Castro served in the Texas state House.

As mayor of one of Texas’ largest cities, he was seen as a rising progressive star and delivered a keynote speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention that elevated his national profile. Two years later, President Barack Obama nominated Castro to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and he became the youngest member of the president’s Cabinet.

But his 2020 presidential campaign failed to pick up steam, and Castro, the only Latino candidate in the Democratic primary, dropped out of the race at the beginning of 2020 and endorsed Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Democrats who spoke with Inside Elections were skeptical that Castro would make the jump — and some expressed concerns that the former presidential contender would be too progressive to win statewide.

Allred, however, appears to be seriously considering a campaign, though he’s yet to comment publicly on his intentions.

[…]

Democrats agree that if Allred decided to run, he’d clear the primary field. At the end of 2022, the congressman reported having nearly $2 million in cash on hand.

“I do think that he has the best shot, and quite frankly, I haven’t really heard of anyone else that would be credible that’s thinking about running,” Democratic Rep. Marc Veasey, who represents a neighboring district in the Metroplex, told Inside Elections.

But if neither Allred nor Castro decide to run, the Democratic primary field is wide open.

Democrats point to state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, who represents a sprawling district that stretches from San Antonio into West Texas, as a potential option.

Gutierrez’s profile has risen since the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde reignited the debate over gun laws. Throughout this year’s legislative session, the 52-year-old state senator has introduced several sets of bills to tighten the state’s gun laws and better prepare law enforcement to respond to shootings.

Other names mentioned include outgoing Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, 33-year-old state Rep. James Talarico, and even Scott Kelly, the retired astronaut and brother of Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly. Two years ago, Kelly, a Houston resident originally from New Jersey, responded to a tweet asking him to run against Cruz, saying “Hmm…maybe.”

See here for the very recent previous post on this topic. Scott Kelly is a new name to be added to the Speculation List, though a non-response to a two-year-old tweet seems like an awfully thin reed on which to build such speculation. But if it weren’t for such flights of fancy, where would we be as the political commentariat?

At this point, it’s clear that talking up Colin Allred is the thing to be doing, and I’m fine with that. He would be a great candidate. He would also be giving up a lot to make an underdog run for the Senate. I have no idea what he’ll do. I’m just happy to make note of it when the subject comes up. Link via Daily Kos.

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Meanwhile, in Ken Paxton crime news…

Posted on April 3, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Paxton buddy Nate Paul loses an appeal on the contempt charges against him.

A crook any way you look

The Austin real estate investor accused of bribing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton still faces 10 days in jail for contempt of court, after losing an appeal.

Paxton and the investor, Nate Paul, are the targets of an FBI investigation launched in late 2020 after Paxton’s aides accused their boss of abusing the power of his office and taking bribes from Paul, a friend and campaign donor.

A panel of the 3rd Court of Appeals largely agreed with Travis County Judge Jan Soifer’s criminal contempt of court order, though the appellate judges tossed two out of eight of Soifer’s violation findings because they found Paul was not given sufficient notice of the allegations, which infringed on his right to due process.

Soifer swiftly reissued the order Friday evening with the modifications the appellate court requested. Paul’s 10-day sentence is scheduled to begin April 10.

It is not clear yet whether he will appeal again. Paul’s attorney, Brent Perry, declined to comment.

In addition to the jail time, Soifer had also ordered Paul, who is enmeshed in legal battles with creditors over his crumbling business and bankruptcies, to pay over $180,000 in fines. Paul had not appealed that decision.

Soifer found that Paul failed to comply with a court order and repeatedly lied to her in court about it while under oath.

See here for the previous post and some starter posts for deeper background; as noted there, this rabbit hole goes way down. This Trib story has a brief summary.

Paul is central to allegations of corruption made against Paxton by eight of his former top deputies. Those deputies told authorities that Paxton had misused his office to benefit Paul, a friend and donor who had given $25,000 to Paxton in 2018.

Among the allegations was Paxton’s push to get the attorney general’s office involved in the Mitte Foundation’s lawsuit despite never previously showing interest in cases involving charities. In return, the employees said Paul donated to Paxton’s campaigns, helped him remodel his multimillion dollar home and hired Paxton’s alleged mistress. Paxton is married to state Sen. Angela Paxton, R-McKinney.

The eight top deputies who accused Paxton of corruption were fired or resigned, but their reports spurred an FBI investigation into Paxton that is now being led by the U.S. Department of Justice.

No charges have been filed. Both Paul and Paxton have denied the allegations.

Last June, Soifer issued an order that Paul report any spending over $25,000 by him or his businesses that could otherwise be used to pay the $2 million judgment he owed Mitte. The order required Paul to share monthly reports of his spending with the court.

Paul did not submit those reports for five months. In November, a few days before the court would consider Mitte’s request to hold Paul in contempt, Paul filed his first report. But in court, the nonprofit’s lawyers argued that 12 days after Soifer’s order went into effect, Paul had paid $100,000 to Avery Bradley, a former University of Texas at Austin and NBA basketball player who had filed a breach of contract lawsuit against Paul’s firm, World Class Holdings.

When Paul was asked about the payment at the hearing, he said he did not remember it, only to later acknowledge the payment in an amended report to the court, Soifer wrote. She found that payment violated her order because it was not made for “fair value” because Paul did not get anything in return.

Soifer also found that Paul lied about bank statements in court and falsely swore under oath that he had made no payments over $25,000 in violation of her order.

“Mr. Paul’s lies to the court while under oath were pervasive and inexcusable, and served to deliberately thwart the functions of the Court,” Soifer wrote.

The appeals court threw out three other violations for a separate $963,000 payment made by another of Paul’s companies, Westlake Industries, because Soifer had not given Paul “full and unambiguous” notice that he could be held in contempt for those violations.

In her new order, Soifer berated Paul for repeatedly disobeying the court orders in the case and other related lawsuits.

“He has been sanctioned numerous times in the past, and such sanctions have failed to deter Mr. Paul from continued disobedience of court orders and lack of candor with the Court,” she wrote.

Anyway. As the attorney for one of the parties suing Nate Paul said, this has been a bad week for him. And that makes it good for the rest of us.

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Checking in on the Astrodome

Posted on April 3, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

With the Final Four in town, we have visitors at Reliant Stadium looking over at its unused predecessor and wondering what’s going on with it. The short answer is, not much.

Ready and waiting

The state of the dome and prospects for its future weigh on the minds of those who scout the surrounding NRG Park for special events, according to Ryan Walsh, the CEO and executive director of the Harris County Sports & Convention Corporation, a governmental nonprofit that manages the complex on behalf of the county.

“It’s coming up in conversation more and more about, ‘What are you guys doing with that?'” Walsh said. “When people come and tour these facilities, for these large events, it’s, ‘What about that large building over there? What about the Astrodome?’ Unfortunately, it’s been the same answer we’ve had for, gosh, a decade or more now.”

That answer is nothing and no changes are imminent. The Astrodome was condemned by the City of Houston in 2009 and does not have a working HVAC system or plumbing, according to Walsh, and a series of ideas to refurbish and repurpose the building since that time have not come to fruition.

Former Harris County Judge Ed Emmett led a $105 million proposal to convert the county-owned Astrodome into a multi-purpose event space with under-the-floor parking, which county commissioners approved in 2018, but the project fizzled out after Emmett lost an election to Lina Hidalgo later that year. There were concerns about the plan’s long-term cost and viability, according to Hidalgo and Harris County Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who voted in support of the proposal but said he always had reservations about it.

Ellis, who represents the part of Houston where the Astrodome is located, said there is no longer an interest in spending taxpayer money to refurbish it as construction costs have escalated and county leaders have more pressing priorities such as flood control, community healthcare needs and a backlog in their criminal justice system. Walsh said the county spends about $150,000 per year in utility and insurance costs for the Astrodome as a part of the larger NRG Park complex, and Ellis said any additional funding would need to come from the private or philanthropic sectors.

A plan to resurrect the Astrodome also would need the support of the NFL’s Houston Texans and the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, which are NRG Park’s primary tenants. Tearing down the mostly revered domed stadium – an idea for which many Houstonians have expressed support over the years – is off the table after the Astrodome received a state historical designation a few years ago that largely protects it from being demolished or significantly altered.

[…]

Walsh said his nonprofit is starting to have conversations about the future of NRG Park with the Texans and rodeo, which have leases at NRG Stadium through 2032, adding that the Astrodome will be part of those talks. Rodeo president and CEO Chris Boleman, who recently wrapped up the 2023 event, said he wants to see the Astrodome become a usable space and would support a plan that benefits the rodeo and its operations.

The Astrodome Conservancy, a private nonprofit which formed in 2016 at the urging of Emmett, is gradually working to solicit public input, conduct market research and vet outside proposals to get the building up and running again. Executive director Beth Wiedower Jackson said she fields multiple inquiries per month about the Astrodome.

She added that the conversancy, which has a fundraising run scheduled for April 15, has a “very lean budget” and is “very much in the process” of finding a viable solution. Ellis said it’s likely to be at least a couple more years before an idea could be galvanized and set in motion at the Astrodome, which is paid for and “structurally solid as a rock,” according to Jackson.

The conservancy conducted a public-input campaign in 2021, with Jackson saying an overwhelming majority of the 7,500-plus respondents wanted to see the Astrodome utilized in some capacity.

“There is very much the public will, and even the political will, to do something with this building,” she said. “But there is not a vision right now, today currently, for the public or the politicians to rally around or get behind. There is not even something to say, ‘No, that’s not it.’ We’re trying to come up with that vision.”

Indeed, the last updates I have relating to the Astrodome are from 2021, and before that a post from 2019 about what’s going on with the Dome. There’s never been a shortage of ideas of what to do with the Astrodome, it’s always been about how to pay for it. I think at this point it’s going to take the Conservancy to mostly finance whatever will be done, with only a modicum of public funds being used. How we get there and how long that might take, I have no idea. This has been your semi-regular look at What’s Going On With The Astrodome.

Posted in Elsewhere in Houston | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Weekend link dump for April 2

Posted on April 2, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

“Our primary goal was to shed light on Beethoven’s health problems, which famously include progressive hearing loss, beginning in his mid- to late-20s and eventually leading to him being functionally deaf by 1818.”

“My proposal is simply this: Every high school and college theater program in Florida and Tennessee should be putting on [Twelfth Night]. So should every community theater in those states and in every other state where grandstanding demagogues are pretending that policing gender conformity is something that elected officials are entitled to do.”

I started reading Agatha Christie novels as a high school student in the 80s, and even I at that unenlightened time recognized that her novels were filled with problematic language, even if I would have not had the language back then to describe them as such. Anyway, I don’t have any problem with “sensitivity edits” on her books.

Lock him up.

“Which is to say that for many people, working from home is not a comfortable pullback enabled by prosperity but a frantic necessity in its absence.”

Those images of the Pope in a puffy white jacket are total AI fakes. But they’re realistic enough to fool a lot of people.

“Android apps digitally signed by China’s third-biggest e-commerce company exploited a zero-day vulnerability that allowed them to surreptitiously take control of millions of end-user devices to steal personal data and install malicious apps”.

If you’re banning Dolly Parton songs, you’re out of touch with the mainstream.

“As always, dignity loss, the capacity to absorb humiliation, is Kevin McCarthy’s super power.”

“A mammoth meatball has been created by a cultivated meat company, resurrecting the flesh of the long-extinct animals.” My dream of someday eating a brontosaurus burger draws ever closer.

RIP, Bobbi Ercoline, school nurse and mother of two whose image was immortalized on the cover of Woodstock’s live album.

“People like cutting spending in theory. They do not like it when you cut specific things — and especially the big stuff that could actually put a dent in the deficit.”

“The value that Twitter’s platform produced, by combining valuable streams of qualification and curiosity, is being beaten and wrung out. What’s left has — for months now — felt like an echo-y shell of its former self. And it’s clear that with every freshly destructive decision — whether it’s unbanning the nazis and letting the toxicity rip, turning verification into a pay-to-play megaphone or literally banning journalists — Musk has applied his vast wealth to destroying as much of the information network’s value as possible in as short a time as possible; each decision triggering another exodus of expertise as more long-time users give up and depart.”

“GitHub has until April 3 to unmask the hooligan(s) that uploaded pieces of the Twitter source code to the GitHub repository.”

“As we await rulings this term that could gut the already battered Voting Rights Act, weaken laws protecting the LGBTQ community, and eviscerate affirmative action in college admissions, the court teed up a new target for next term: the Americans with Disabilities Act.”

“Ahead of an expected state takeover, the Walt Disney Co. quietly pushed through the pact and restrictive covenants that would tie the hands of future board members for decades, according to a legal presentation by the district’s lawyers on Wednesday.” “Disney Pantsed DeSantis” is the TL;dr version of this. This thread, which notes that the outgoing RCID board approved the changes and recorded them with Orange County before the Florida legislature passed the anti-Disney bill, is a great explainer. And while that first story says this happened “quietly”, the truth is that everything Disney did was done in public, in plain sight, over the course of months, following the letter of state open records law. No one on Team DeSantis noticed or took action if they did.

RIP, Russell Washington, founder of the Houston-based record label Bigtyme Recordz.

RIP, Mark Russell, piano-playing PBS political satirist.

“If I were, say, running for township representative here in Darke County, Ohio and paid hush money to an inconvenient sex partner in a way that invited legal scrutiny, and the local DA (whose politics, I assure you, largely run counter to mine) found out, I would 100% not be surprised to be hauled up under an indictment. Because that’s actually how the law is meant to work. You either believe no one is above the law, or you don’t. Former presidents of the United States are no more above the law then I am, or you are, or any of us is.”

RIP, Leo D. Sullivan, pioneering Black animator and co-founder of the first Black-owned animation production company.

“A brief timeline of recent presidential criming”.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged | 3 Comments

Second federal complaint filed over TEA takeover of HISD

Posted on April 2, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

From the inbox:

The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, the ACLU, the Houston NAACP, LULAC #19, and the Greater Houston Coalition for Justice filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice on Friday regarding the Texas Education Agency’s plan to remove locally elected officials during its takeover of the Houston Independent School District. The complaint was filed on behalf of Anna Chuter, Dr. Audrey Nath, Kenyette Johnson, and Kourtney Revels, who are parents of students at Houston public schools.

Houston ISD is the largest school district in the state and eighth largest school district in the country, made up of 274 schools and nearly 200,000 students. Earlier this month, Commissioner Mike Morath announced the agency’s plans to take over the school district citing the poor performance of some schools, despite the fact that his own agency gave the district a “B” rating in 2022. As part of the takeover, Morath intends to replace the district’s locally elected school board trustees with a board of managers who will be appointed by the commissioner and will not have any electoral accountability to Houston voters.

“The district was making a lot of progress after we voted in new trustees. That’s how democracy works,” said Anna Chuter (she/her). “The state just wants to control every aspect of our lives, and I’m afraid of how this will affect our family. My son is finally getting the special needs education he deserves, but now neither of us know what will happen.”

“I feel indignant. As a pediatric neurologist, I’m particularly concerned that the district will not get the resources it needs to support special education,” said Dr. Audrey Nath (she/her). “The state takeover is insulting to so many Houston voters like me who canvass for candidates we care about and take our local elections seriously. Apparently our choice never mattered in the first place.”

The ACLU of Texas is calling on the Justice Department’s Voting Section to investigate the agency for civil rights violations of the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution. The state’s takeover prevents Houston voters of color from having the opportunity to meaningfully elect their candidates of choice, thereby disenfranchising voters and discriminating against them on the basis of race and national origin.

“We are asking the Department of Justice to take immediate action and investigate the state’s relentless attempts to take over the largest school district in Texas,” said Ashley Harris (she/her), attorney at the ACLU of Texas. “The state takeover is not about public education but about political control of an almost entirely Black and brown student body in one of the country’s most diverse cities. This hostile takeover strips power from Houston voters of color by replacing the democratically elected school district trustees with a board of managers handpicked by the commissioner. Our public officials should be accountable to the growing racially diverse communities they represent and serve.”

“This attempted takeover would essentially put an appointed, unelected commissioner in charge of the school district, with no electoral accountability to Houston’s voters of color,” said Adriel I. Cepeda Derieux (he/him), deputy director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. “It’s critical the Department of Justice step in to investigate potential violations of the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution.”

Read the Department of Justice complaint here.

See here for more on the previous complaint. As with that one, I have the same questions about timeline, process, and odds of success. I mean, I suppose either we see the Education Department do something before the Board of Managers are installed or we don’t. I do appreciate the mention of the Voting Rights Act, which I brought up way at the beginning of this process. I don’t know how much deference the federal courts will give it if it comes to that, however. At this point, all we can do is wait and see. More from the ACLU of Texas on Twitter, and the Trib has more.

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

There’s nothing like ERIC

Posted on April 2, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Be careful what you seek to destroy, Republicans.

With some Texas Republicans pushing the state to abandon one its best tools for preventing voter fraud — a coalition of states that share voting roll data to weed out duplicate and suspicious registrations — the secretary of state’s office is trying to discern if it can build a replacement.

But the effort could easily stall or take years, experts say. Similar efforts in other states over the past two decades have not worked, or have been shut down, because they lacked bipartisan support from multiple states and access to the kind of national data that produces accurate cross-state voter list matching — all of which the Electronic Information Registration Center, or ERIC, spent years developing.

The push to have Texas become the latest state to withdraw from ERIC, a long-standing effort by nearly 30 states, is rooted in a yearlong misinformation campaign that spread through right-wing media platforms and advocacy groups.

If the state decides to leave the program but fails to produce a similar tool, Texas’ voter rolls will inevitably be less accurate, which could fuel claims of voter fraud, experts say. That could increase costs for counties who’d be more likely to send election mailers to voters who have moved out of state or died, because outdated information would linger on the voter rolls. And the state, too, would spend more than it would save by leaving the program because it would need to build the technical infrastructure and meet the federal security requirements needed to protect sensitive data in order to make an alternative viable.

Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for the Texas secretary of state’s office, declined to comment on the feasibility of developing a new alternative to ERIC. He told Votebeat, however, that at least Georgia and Nevada — states that are currently members of ERIC and supportive of the program — and Oklahoma have expressed interest in working with Texas on the project. Taylor said research is also underway on the cost of developing such a system.

In no small part, experts note, the coalition ERIC built over many years worked, because member states — led by both Democrats and Republicans — agreed to come together in a good-faith effort to share the necessary data and information to help maintain voter rolls across state lines. But in recent months, political pressure on Republican-led states has put the coalition at risk. Last year, Louisiana, then Alabama, followed by Florida, West Virginia, Missouri, and most recently Ohio and Iowa, announced they would depart. Texas could be next: The Texas Legislature is already considering various bills to leave ERIC.

And the state’s attempt at replacing the program both would not be an efficient solution and could have implications for the states that remain in ERIC by making it harder for states to join together across party lines, said Marc Meredith, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on election administration. Meredith has also done research on voter list maintenance.

“It would be incredibly disappointing to end up with basically two versions of the same thing because the value of data grows exponentially as you can make more and more comparisons between states,” he said, and added that by leaving the program, Texas will deprive itself of all the other states’ data while preventing the other states from obtaining data on more than 16 million registered voters in the state. “It’s not like if you split the world and have 25 states in one [program] and 25 states in another, [it] would be equally good. It’s actually more than double the bad.”

See here and here for the background, and read the rest for more. To be clear, there are plenty of worse and more damaging things that the Republicans have teed up for this session. It’s just that this is such a clear example of a perfectly working thing that Republicans want to destroy because a few reality-denying crackpots hate it for completely unhinged reasons and none of the rest of them has the guts to push back. In its place there is nothing that comes close to matching what it does, there are no tangible plans for even a stopgap solution at hand, and the most likely long-term solution is something that will be measurably worse. And this is a thing that furthers one of their supposed top priorities! It’s like being a fossil fuels advocate and also seeking to pass laws to ban fracking and refineries. I got nothin’.

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The Observer on the effect that banning abortion has had on Texas doctors

Posted on April 2, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

I’m glad this won’t end up being one of their last stories.

Doctors have a code, a set of principles meant to guide their practice: Give care. Act justly. Respect patients. Do no harm. But for Texas doctors, especially obstetrician-gynecologists, following those seemingly straightforward principles has become a legal and ethical minefield.

Physicians are finding themselves torn between providing medically appropriate care and staying in compliance with the state’s draconian anti-abortion laws. The stakes couldn’t be higher: risking major fines and up to life in prison for doctors on one side, and on the other, often putting women’s lives at risk because of delays in care or refusals to provide formerly routine procedures. As a result, medical decisions regarding pregnancy complications now involve a host of new stakeholders—hospital administrators and lawyers—who may put questions of institutional risk above patient well-being.

Dr. Shanna Combs, an OB-GYN, waded into that minefield a few months ago while on her shift at a maternity care hospital in Fort Worth. Her patient, 19 weeks along in her first pregnancy, was in bad shape. Her water had broken prematurely, and she’d gone into labor much too early. By the time Combs got to her, she’d been laboring for 48 hours. Her child had a heartbeat but was several weeks away from being strong enough to survive outside the womb.

“Previously, we would call this an inevitable miscarriage or inevitable pregnancy loss and offer the patient options to help the process along in order to minimize risk of infection for the mother,” Combs said. Those options include counsel for pregnancy termination through a surgical procedure as well as the prescription of Misoprostol, a labor-inducing medication that is also used as an abortion medication in the first trimester.

But now, “Basically when the mother’s water breaks before viability, if there’s a heartbeat, you’re not allowed to do anything,” Combs explained. She could only coach her patient—emotionally distraught and physically in pain—through another 12 hours of labor to deliver a baby that couldn’t and didn’t survive.

“She really had to suffer,” Combs said. Unsurprisingly, the woman developed a serious infection that kept her in the hospital for another day.

For many expectant mothers, the state’s abortion laws have turned what is already a devastating reality—the loss of a wanted pregnancy—into an even more excruciating and sometimes life-threatening process. The laws have not only prohibited access to elective pregnancy termination, but they’ve also obstructed the path for timely and medically appropriate care for many Texans experiencing pregnancy complications.

Combs and other doctors said they are now forced to provide a lower quality of medical care to patients. She and her colleagues are left with “a lot of anger and frustration, and feeling like patients are not able to get the care that they deserve.”

[…]

Although treatment for pregnancy complications and abortion access might be perceived as entirely different things, medically speaking they’re not. Doctors often treat patients experiencing pregnancy loss by using the same tools and procedures that they would in an elective abortion: by prescribing labor-inducing medication or performing a dilation and curettage or evacuation (D&C or D&E) to remove remaining pregnancy tissue.

Under Texas’ abortion ban, it’s this type of standard of care treatment for pregnancy loss and other pregnancy complications that has fallen under scrutiny. The law provides an exception, permitting abortions when a patient faces “a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy.” But the vague language paired with a hefty criminal penalty for doctors—up to $100,000 in fines and life in prison—has had a chilling effect, leaving interpretations up to doctors and their lawyers and effectively discouraging the use of treatments that would once have been routine.

“When it became criminal, that’s where the line was drawn,” Combs said. “That’s your livelihood. That’s who you are as a person. You could go to jail. You will have to pay fines; you’ll lose your license. If you get out of jail, you won’t be able to practice medicine.”

Attorney Blake Rocap of Austin provides counsel to abortion advocacy groups around the state. “We’re in a situation where lawyers are also providing a lot of risk analysis,” he said. “They’re telling their clients, ‘We don’t really know how this is going to be interpreted, we think this [abortion] is protected activity, we think this qualifies as under the medical emergency exception, but no one knows for sure.’”

Rocap said such legal uncertainty discourages doctors from providing care. They know, he said, that “if they don’t do anything, they’re certainly going to be in compliance.”

In the months since the passage of the state’s trigger law, media reports have detailed stories of pregnant Texans denied miscarriage care, sent home to bleed in their bathtubs, offered care only after a patient has deteriorated enough to develop a life-threatening condition such as sepsis, or forced to cross state lines for treatment.

Even when a doctor believes an abortion is medically necessary to save a woman’s life, often the best advice that lawyers can offer to that doctor is that it “probably” is legal, Rocap said. “When the penalty is 20 years to life, ‘probably’ is not good enough.”

See here and here for similar stories. I drafted this one a few days after the Slate story that I blogged about, and on the same day as the announcement of the Observer’s demise, which thankfully turned out to be premature. I had opened a tab for this and had been thinking about blogging it, but this one was right on the heels of the Slate story, and it didn’t make me think of any new angles, just more examples of the same damaging truth. I then decided I had to blog this as a tribute to the Observer. There’s less urgency to that aspect of it now, but the story should remain in the forefront of our minds. So here it is, with a slightly more complicated backstory than I originally intended.

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SCOTx rules for city on pay parity, for firefighters on collective bargaining

Posted on April 1, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

I’m going to approach this one at first via dueling press releases. First, from the HPFFA:

The Supreme Court of Texas has ruled that the City of Houston violated the state constitution in refusing to honor voter-approved fair pay and benefits protections for Houston firefighters and all other first responders in Texas.

“This is a historic ruling, said Houston Professional Fire Fighters Association President Patrick M. “Marty” Lanction. “Never before has a local government refused to honor the will of the voters. The treatment our firefighters have endured over the last six years is unforgivable. They have stood strong and courageous in the face of overwhelming political odds. We remain grateful to the court and the voters for continuing to stand by us through this fight.”

In another ruling, the court struck down Houston’s Proposition B pay parity referendum as conflicting with the voter-approved state constitutional amendment guaranteeing firefighters and all other first responders the right to collective bargaining. Today’s court decision upholds the collective bargaining law, which is the only protection available to firefighters and police officers in a state that prohibits first responders from striking when denied fair pay, benefits and working conditions. The ruling compels the city to negotiate a contract with Houston firefighters who have been working without a contract for six years.

In the meantime, the Texas Legislature is considering a bill to require binding arbitration managed by an independent third party selected jointly by firefighters and the City when collective bargaining does not work. The bill, sponsored by State Sen. John Whitmire (D-Houston), won approval from the Texas Senate earlier this week. It is designed to prevent the stalemate Houston firefighters have had to deal with under the current mayor from ever happening again. Mayor Sylvester Turner is the only mayor in Houston history to be unable to reach a contract agreement with firefighters.

“Houston firefighters and their families have been well-represented by their union leadership,” said International Association of Fire Fighters President Ed Kelly. “This is a victory for all of labor.”

And from the city, a little while later:

Today, the Texas Supreme Court struck down the so-called Pay-Parity Amendment [Proposition B] that would have required Houston to pay its firefighters the same compensation as its police officers receive even though the jobs, shift structure, training, education, pensions, and virtually all aspects of the two jobs are very different.

The Court held that Proposition B, approved by voters in 2018, was in conflict with Chapter 174 of the Local Government Code [collective bargaining], passed by the Texas Legislature and adopted in 2003 by Houston voters to govern their firefighters’ compensation.

In addition, the Court ruled on the firefighter union’s effort to force the courts to write the union’s contract with Houston under Chapter 174 based upon what they claimed was Houston’s failure to meet the statute’s compensation standards—the same standards the firefighter union sought to change through Prop B.

Although Houston challenged as unconstitutional the provision of Chapter 174 allowing courts essentially to write the parties’ contract, the Court disagreed and sent the case back to the trial court.

Contrary to false representations by the firefighters union today, the City has not been held to have violated the Texas Constitution or any statute, or to have thwarted the will of the people. The case has simply been sent back to the trial court for application of Chapter 174’s standards now that its judicial enforcement provision has been held constitutional.

“This is a huge victory for the City of Houston. I am grateful that the Court has clarified which of the directives the City received from the voters, in approving both Chapter 174 and Proposition B, the City must follow,” said Mayor Turner “It would simply not have been possible for the City to comply with both, and the Court recognized that irreconcilable conflict. Worse, the ruinous financial burden the 2018 amendment would have placed on the City would have resulted in lost programs, services, and in layoffs, including firefighters.

“My hope is that the firefighters union will now forego efforts to try to strong-arm the City into meeting its unreasonable demands and come to the bargaining table in good faith. City officials are still waiting there.”

See here for the background. Honestly, this is about as good a result as the city could have reasonably hoped for, given that their Prop B argument was the much stronger of the two. I don’t have a whole lot to say that I haven’t said before, but I do want to address one point from the Chron story.

The Prop B case centered on whether equal pay with police would conflict with the existing framework to pay firefighters, enshrined in state law and adopted by Houston voters in 2003.

Under that law, the city must pay firefighters substantially equal to their counterparts in the private sector, and the city and the union may collectively bargain to negotiate contracts. The law has a clause that says it “preempts all contrary local ordinances, executive orders, legislation, or rules.”

The police officers’ union and the city both challenged Prop B under that law, saying it conflicted the statute by providing another pay standard. The Supreme Court agreed.

“Finally, we hold that Chapter 174 pre-empts the pay-parity amendment,” Justice Jane Bland wrote in the ruling. “Local law may not supplant Chapter 174’s rule of decision by requiring an inconsistent compensation measurement.”

Houston Professional Fire Fighters Association Local 341 President Marty Lancton acknowledged the court’s rejection of Prop B, but praised the jurists for upholding collective bargaining, saying it compels the city to negotiate with the union. The union has not reached a new contract during Turner’s tenure.

“This is a historic ruling,” Lancton said. “Never before has a local government refused to honor the will of the voters. The treatment our firefighters have endured over the last six years is unforgivable. … We remain grateful to the court and the voters for continuing to stand by us through this fight.”

I mean sure, but the whole point here was that the local government argued that the voters wanted something illegal. This is basically the same quarrel we’re having now about all of those marijuana reform referenda, both the ones that were ratified in 2022 and the one that is now on the ballot in San Antonio. Local officials are saying that the voters are being asked to support something that cannot be enforced. One can certainly disagree with their interpretation of the law, and one can certainly disagree with their response to these referenda, but the arguments have been made in good faith, in my opinion. And in this case, the argument won the day. The firefighters took a big swing, and now five years later we can definitively say they missed. Better luck to them at the bargaining table.

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MLB reaches tentative CBA with minor leaguers

Posted on April 1, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Impressive.

Minor league baseball players and Major League Baseball struck a tentative deal Wednesday on the first collective bargaining agreement between the sides that will more than double player pay and represents the largest-ever gains in the rights of minor leaguers, sources familiar with the agreement told ESPN.

The deal, which will last for five years, comes after a rapid and successful effort last year by minor leaguers to unionize under the umbrella of the Major League Baseball Players Association and follows previous improvements in housing and pay. MLB formally recognized the union upon its formation, paving the way for a negotiation that finalized the deal on the eve of major league Opening Day.

After years of disillusionment among future major leaguers about paltry salaries forcing them to work offseason jobs — and coincidentally on the day a judge approved a $185 million settlement the league will pay players who accused it of violating minimum-wage laws — the parties agreed on a deal that went out to a vote among the union’s rank and file and that will need to be approved by owners, as well, before it is formalized. The agreement could be announced officially as early as Friday, the first day of games in the minor leagues.

The pay increases at each level are significant, according to sources, and will pay players for most of the offseason as well as spring training, including back pay for this season. At each level, the pay structure will see annual minimum salaries go from:

  • Triple-A: $17,500 to $35,800
  • Double-A: $13,800 to $30,250
  • High-A: $11,000 to $27,300
  • Single-A: $11,000 to $26,200
  • Complex league: $4,800 to $19,800

Among those not included in the deal are players at teams’ complexes in the Dominican Republic. The minor league unit of the MLBPA includes only players on teams’ domestic rosters — and players from the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and other foreign countries will still reap the benefits when stateside.

The deal includes the reduction of the maximum Domestic Reserve List, which governs the number of players a team can roster outside of its Dominican Republic complexes, from 180 to 165 starting in 2024. The union had previously fought MLB’s efforts during the lockout last year to reduce the reserve list, which teams had identified as a priority.

Players, meanwhile, emphasized better housing and transportation as a matter of import. Starting in 2024, those at Triple-A and Double-A will receive their own bedroom, and players with spouses and children will receive special accommodations. In rookie ball, Single-A and High-A, teams will provide transportation to stadiums, where they’ll eat meals provided under rules negotiated by a joint clubhouse nutrition committee.

Given that MLB only recognized the MLBPA’s representation of minor leaguers six months ago, this is incredibly quick. The salaries negotiated here still aren’t a lot, but they’re a lot more than they were before, and that’s a big step forward. The players and the league still have to ratify the deal, which everyone expects to happen. I’m genuinely impressed. Kudos all around. Fangraphs has more.

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Special ed and the TEA takeover

Posted on April 1, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

This part of the reason for the TEA takeover of HISD is less well known and has some adherents among the key stakeholders, but it’s still quite controversial and far from clear that the TEA will do any better.

Many parents of special education students in Houston ISD who feel the school system has failed their children are deeply conflicted over news of the state takeover.

Some who say their children have been denied federally protected rights to an education believe a takeover is long overdue. Others agree accountability is needed, but question whether the Texas Education Agency has the capacity or track record necessary to execute change for the better. Both entities have received intense criticism of their delivery of special education services for decades.

“It’s a tall order to ask a failing TEA special education department to come and rescue a failing HISD special education department,” said Jane Friou, an HISD parent and co-founder of the Houston Special Education Parent Association. “I don’t understand how it’s going to get any better.”

The school system’s special education department’s “significant systemic compliance problems” was cited among the reasons in TEA Commissioner Mike Morath’s notice that a state-appointed board of managers will soon lead the district.

“The takeover is happening because our children’s rights are systematically and continuously violated through denial (of services) and the noncompliance of HISD,” said Marifi Escobar, a parent of an HISD ninth grader with multiple disabilities. “I want to see an overhaul of HISD. This seems to be the first time HISD is being held accountable.”

However, some advocates say they anticipate little change to the beleaguered department given that state-appointed conservators have overseen it for years.

“We, as parents, have not seen anything get better since the conservators got here,” said Fiou. “It may have actually gotten worse from a parent perspective. It’s as chaotic as ever and that makes me very concerned for whatever is coming.”

Other education experts say the state agency’s own failures to provide supports to students with disabilities doesn’t bode well for success in the district.

“TEA is the entity that receives funding from the federal government to implement (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) and it is supposed to provide technical assistance, monitoring and professional development across the state,” said David DeMathews, associate professor of the University of Texas at Austin’s department of educational leadership and policy. “TEA has failed miserably doing this job for more than a decade.”

[…]

Criticism of TEA’s implementation of special education stems from its artificial cap on the number of students with disabilities who could receive services. The since-removed arbitrary 8.5 percent cap, which was first reported by the Houston Chronicle, led to the denial of services to tens of thousands of children with disabilities in Texas.

In January 2018, the federal Office of Special Education Programs announced it found TEA had failed to ensure all children with disabilities in the state were identified and evaluated. In October 2020, TEA told OSEP  it believed it had completed all the required corrective actions. However, OSEP found the state had made only one of many required changes to its operations.

In 2021, the U.S. Department of Education said TEA failed to put into place many of the corrective actions it pledged to make to comply with IDEA and threatened recourse of taking away special education funding. Among the alleged shortcomings was that there was no indication districts in the state were promptly referring children for dyslexia evaluations.

Currently, TEA officials say the agency has “exceeded” the corrective actions laid out by OSEP and has increased the number of students in special education 37.3 percent since 2015.

See here for all my previous blogging on special education, which includes both the many issues at HISD and the many issues with the TEA. I have not had to interact with the special ed system at HISD, but some of my friends have and they very much say that it is a huge hassle. These are educated professional folks with resources to deal with those hassles talking, so you can extrapolate from there for folks who don’t have such resources. If the TEA can make things better here, that’s unequivocally great. There are plenty of reasons to be dubious of that possibility. As I’ve said before, it’s now 100% on them to make it happen. We’ll see.

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What was even the point of those TEA “engagements” with the public?

Posted on March 31, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

The public certainly doesn’t think it got anything out of them.

Teacher Monica Zepeda wrapped up an after-school tutoring session on Wednesday night and headed to a community forum at Delmar Stadium sporting her Pilgrim Academy lanyard. She stepped up to the microphone.

“I’m a highly effective teacher here at HISD,” she said, launching into several questions about prior state takeovers in Texas school districts. “Public education is the foundation, the bedrock of America. Do not take our education away.”

Zepeda, a public school educator of nearly two decades, was among several hundred teachers, parents and other members of the Houston Independent School District community who showed up at a third community forum hosted by the Texas Education Agency to demand answers from state officials about the takeover.

After this school year ends, the state agency plans to oust Houston’s elected school board and replace it with a nine-member board of managers appointed by Education Commissioner Mike Morath. The agency is now seeking applicants for the board of managers. The move has drawn ire from many.

“I have students from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico – and I’m making gains and growing them,” Zepeda said. “My school is an amazing little jewel in the southwest and there’s so many of us like that. There’s great teachers and I can’t believe that they want to do this.”

Morath did not attend the meeting. People in the audience immediately booed and questioned his notable absence.

“He could not be here tonight,” said TEA deputy commissioner Alejandro Delgado, who fielded questions from the podium during a meeting that ran for an hour and 20 minutes.

Morath told the Chronicle editorial board that he could not attend last week’s community forums because he was “under the weather.” Delgado provided no explanation for his absence this week. A final forum is scheduled for Thursday night at Kashmere High School.

“If he doesn’t have the respect for the people of this district – the teachers, the families, the children – to stand up and answer our questions, what kind of accountability is he really offering?” said Louisa Meacham, a teacher at Northside High School. “What kind of leadership is he really offering? None.”

I’m sorry, but if you can show up for an hour-plus interview with the Chron editorial board, you can damn well show up to the community engagement session. Not doing so is cowardly and disrespectful. Sure, the crowd has been rowdy at these meetings, but what did you expect? People have strong feelings about this, especially considering the overall health of HISD and the recent improvement at Wheatley, and they felt their voices weren’t being heard. Hell, the upshot here is to replace the elected Board with a Mike Morath-appointed Board, so of course people feel like they’re powerless. You either don’t care or you’re exceedingly dense to not realize or acknowledge that.

So again, these engagement sessions have been patronizing and useless in terms of actually addressing the concerns of the HISD stakeholders. If there was any chance of providing some assurance to students and parents and teachers that things would be all right, the TEA botched it completely. None of this should make anyone feel better about what is coming. Campos has more.

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Jared Woodfill and Paul Pressler

Posted on March 31, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Sleazebags of a feather sleaze together.

In 2016, former Harris County GOP chair Jared Woodfill received an urgent warning about Paul Pressler, his longtime law partner and a Southern Baptist leader. In an email, a 25-year-old attorney from Woodfill’s Houston firm said he’d recently gone to lunch with Pressler, who told him “lewd stories about being naked on beaches with young men” and then invited him to skinny-dip at his ranch.

Woodfill — an outspoken anti-gay politician and prominent conservative activist who’d just played a key role defeating an equal rights ordinance for LGBTQ Houstonians — responded to the young man’s request for help with shock and indignation. “This 85-year-old man has never made any inappropriate comments or actions toward me or any one I know of,” he wrote of Pressler at the time.

But new court records show that wasn’t true.

In recent sworn testimony, Woodfill said he’d known since 2004 of an allegation that Pressler had sexually abused a child. Woodfill learned of those claims, he said, during mediation of an assault lawsuit filed against Pressler that he helped quietly settle for nearly a half-million dollars at the time. Despite his knowledge of the accusation, Woodfill continued to work with Pressler for nearly a decade — leaning on Pressler’s name and reputation to bolster their firm, Woodfill & Pressler LLP.

Rather than pay him a salary, Woodfill testified, the firm provided Pressler a string of employees to serve as personal assistants, most of them young men who typically worked out of his River Oaks mansion. Two have accused Pressler of sexual assault or misconduct.

Woodfill led the Harris County Republican Party from 2002 to 2014 and has for years been at the helm of anti-LGBTQ and other hardline conservative movements in Houston and Texas. In 2015, amid tense debate over a Houston equal rights ordinance that would have made LGBTQ workplace discrimination illegal, he and well-known GOP power broker Steven Hotze co-led a campaign that, among other things, said the measure would allow children to be sexually groomed and abused in bathrooms, paid for hundreds of thousands of dollars in opposition advertisements and compared the gay rights movement to Nazis.

Since then, Woodfill has remained a fixture in Texas GOP politics: During the height of the pandemic, he and Hotze filed numerous lawsuits challenging COVID-19 mandates, and he’s currently representing conservative political candidates challenging the 2022 election results in Harris County. Woodfill is also representing Hotze in a criminal investigation stemming from a 2020 incident in which a private investigator, allegedly acting at Hotze’s behest, held at gunpoint an A/C repairman who he believed was transporting fake ballots.

Woodfill’s deposition came as part of an ongoing, six-year-old lawsuit in which a former member of Pressler’s church youth group accuses him of decades of rape beginning when he was 14. The suit also accuses Woodfill and others, including leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, of concealing and enabling Pressler’s behavior — claims that prompted a 2019 Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News investigation into widespread sexual abuse in the SBC, the nation’s second-largest faith group.

Released over the last few weeks, the thousands of pages of new court records show how Woodfill leaned on his Pressler connections to bolster his political and legal career — despite warnings about his law partner’s behavior. And they shed new light on how Pressler, a former Texas Court of Appeals judge and one-time White House nominee under George H.W. Bush, allegedly used his prestige and influence to evade responsibility amid repeated accusations of sexual misconduct and assault dating back to at least 1978, when he was forced out of a Houston church for allegedly molesting a teenager in a sauna.

Pressler is best known for his work in the Southern Baptist Convention, where he was instrumental in pushing its 16 million members and 47,000 churches to adopt literal interpretations of the Bible, strongly denounce homosexuality and align more closely with the Republican Party. And for decades, he was a high-ranking member of the Council for National Policy, an uber-secretive network of conservative judges, mega donors, media figures and religious elites led by Tony Perkins, head of the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council.

The new records show that in 2004, leaders of First Baptist Church of Houston, a massive Southern Baptist congregation, investigated claims that Pressler, then a deacon, had groped and undressed a college student at his Houston mansion. The church leaders deemed the behavior “morally and spiritually” inappropriate and warned Pressler but took no further action, citing differing accounts of the incident and Pressler’s stature in their church and the Southern Baptist Convention. In recent depositions, plaintiffs attorneys also briefly mention new complaints from two others about Pressler, though those documents remain sealed ahead of the looming civil trial in the case.

At least six men have now accused Pressler of sexual assault or misconduct, including two who say they were molested while minors and two who say they were solicited for sex in incidents after 2004, when Woodfill and First Baptist leaders were separately made aware of complaints about Pressler.

Pressler has not been criminally charged in any of the incidents. Neither Woodfill nor his attorney responded to a list of questions about Woodfill’s handling of the allegations against Pressler. In a Wednesday email, Woodfill’s lawyer David Oubre said they are “confident Mr. Woodfill will be successful in defeating these claims.”

See here for previous mentions of Paul Pressler. If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you already know that I consider pond scum to be a higher form of life than Jared Woodfill. If you didn’t already know that, now you know why. My homework assignment for legislative Democrats is to make sure you mention the names Jared Woodfill and Paul Pressler every time someone disparages LBGTQ folks in a hearing. It won’t change anything, but it will make them mad and it will help spread the word. Go read the rest of the article.

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Some turmoil at Rep. Jones’ office

Posted on March 31, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Hoo boy.

Rep. Jolanda Jones

Three staff members of state Rep. Jolanda Jones have resigned, alleging the Houston Democrat created an “abusive and hostile” work environment.

Chief of staff Kory Haywood, legislative director Catherine Mouer and district director Yesenia Wences alleged in a letter to Jones obtained by The Texas Tribune that Jones tasked staff with tasks unrelated to state business, required them to regularly perform work outside of business hours and regularly threatened to fire employees.

“We, as a collective of senior staff, have repeatedly attempted to curb your behavior and address the type of work environment you have bred over the last month,” the letter states. “But, to no avail; we haven’t seen any success.”

The former employees also alleged that Jones had failed to intervene in what they characterized as an inappropriate relationship between the lawmaker’s son, Jio, and an intern in the office. They also said the lawmaker directed staff to assist in arranging health care for a relative.

Jones said in a statement Thursday that working in the Legislature stressful and demanding, describing a “daily fight” on behalf of constituents.

“Some on my staff have decided this job is not for them,” Jones said. “I wish them good luck and success in their next endeavors.”

Cassi Pollock, spokesperson for House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, said the speaker’s office learned of the complaints against Jones on Wednesday, which would be reviewed to evaluate whether the lawmaker broke any House rules.

“The Speaker’s office takes all allegations seriously and expects that this matter will be addressed and resolved as soon as possible,” Pollock said.

You can read the full letter at the link. This is all I know at this time, so I’m not going to get ahead of whatever this turns out to be. I’m sure we’ll hear more soon enough.

UPDATE: The Chron has more.

Posted in That's our Lege | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Dispatches from Dallas, March 31 edition

Posted on March 31, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

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

This week in Dallas news: Carroll ISD (Southlake) bails out of TASB in a new phase in the reactionary war on Texas public schools; more on TFG and the symbolism of his Waco visit; Dallas-area cops should not be left alone with computers; get ready for a Taylor Swift exhibit; the menu at Globe Life Field for the upcoming baseball season; and a baby giraffe at the Dallas Zoo.

The big news this week is that Carroll ISD (Southlake) has voted to end its membership in the Texas Association of School Boards. The news video accompanying this article is worth the two minutes of your time; it makes clear what’s going on. State Representative Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian, sent out letters to 1000 school districts to start an exodus from TASB. Similarly, and perhaps surprisingly, the local Fox outlet has a good story on the decision to withdraw (4 minute video). The Fox coverage also talks about the general state of Carroll ISD, one of the first districts targeted by reactionaries for bringing in DEI policies, “CRT”, and other “woke” policies. DEI initiative started after a 2018 incident in which students were caught in video using the N word; in 2021 and 2022 reactionaries captured the board, and the rejection of TASB is one outcome.

You may recall that TASB is also related to the case of Marvin Lowe, the Frisco ISD trustee. He was accused of harassing a trans student at a TASB conference in San Antonio last October. It won’t surprise me if Frisco decides to follow Carroll’s example in the near future.

As noted by Charles here, the The Book-Loving Texan’s Guide to the May 2023 School Board Elections is a resource for finding out about the candidates your local school board election. The document is mostly focused on north Texas districts (Frisco is on the list and Richardson, which is the district my home is zoned into, is in progress), but Houston area districts like Katy and Humble are also included. And they’re also working on central Texas districts like Dripping Springs. While this resource is focused on book banning, that’s a good proxy for anti-DEI, anti-“CRT”, and anti-“woke” sentiment in general.

If this topic interests you, I strongly recommend Clarity & Anger, the substack of Frank Strong, an Austin teacher who put together the Book-Loving Texan’s Guide. His newsletter will keep you up to date on what the bibliophobes and “woke”-haters are up to, and there’s a free tier. I found him on Mastodon, which is where I hang out now that Twitter is toxic. While I can’t say I exactly enjoy reading about haters, I do feel better informed.

In other news:

  • A few notes about TFG’s Waco speech.
    • First, in corrections, I initially read that TFG was speaking on the anniversary of the end of the siege; instead he spoke last weekend at the anniversary of the beginning.
    • These two articles that quote Senator Cornyn’s reaction may interest you: GOP Senators Break With Trump Over ‘Offensive’ Jan. 6 Tribute At Texas Rally and Top Republicans balk at Trump highlighting Jan. 6 rioters, calling it politically unwise. Obviously it’s a long time until Cornyn faces the GOP primary field again, but I’m putting a pin in it for 2026.
    • Talking Points Memo again points to the choice of Waco as a venue and the commemoration of the Branch Davidian standoff in this post. There are a couple of follow-up reader notes on the same topic that are also worthwhile. Those of us who are old enough to remember Waco as it happened recall how awful it was, not least because it embodied the fever dream of angry white men holding out against federal force. We have too many angry people with guns in Texas to encourage fighting the federal government in 2023.
  • Department of “Dallas cops can’t use computers”, part one for this week: What’s known about the 21 cases reviewed for missing, deleted Dallas police evidence [Archive link] and Is missing Dallas police evidence impacting murder cases? Defense lawyers want answers [Archive link]. The city of Dallas is going to be sorting this out for a long time; the screwups involve both current cases and cases already decided. It’s also going to cost the city and the court system to retry cases and to compensate any defendants who receive a not guilty verdict in retrials. It implicates the credibility of the police and their evidence in future cases. All of this is bad for the judicial system, which has plenty of problems without the police losing or destroying evidence, but DPD brought these further problems on themselves by sloppy evidence handling.
  • Department of “Dallas cops can’t use computers”, part two for this week: Dallas County says sold computers may have contained the public’s personal info. [Archive link]. Short version: the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department failed to properly wipe computers that were taken out of service and sold at auction, so they may still contain confidential information from the county’s internal court databases. Oops.
  • Shared Air DFW is a visualization resource for air pollution in the Metroplex. It takes data from air quality monitors (currently 100 are being distributed throughout the region) to show real-time air quality online. It’s good that we can now see this information but the information is depressing. It’s a UT Dallas project, so thanks to UT Dallas and the funders. Related, from the Texas Tribune: The EPA wants to limit how much soot you breathe. Here’s what it means for Texas and one of its historic Black towns. Joppa, the freedman’s town in question, is less than 10 miles from downtown Dallas. The Shared Air project is concentrating early efforts there precisely because their air quality is so poor.
  • On a sad note for me personally, my advisor at Rice passed away earlier this month. Dr. Katherine Fischer Drew was a fantastic teacher, historian, and leader in her discipline, as you can see in her obituary at the Houston Chronicle. She touched a lot of lives, including mine, and I’m grateful for the advice I got from her and the lessons I learned in and out of her classes.
  • Carnivorous Plant Gallery Known as the Texas Triffid Ranch Is Closed for Good. I’m also sad about this; I have friends who had visited the ranch and I’d seen some of the plants at events at the Perot (Dallas’ science museum) before the pandemic. I never managed to get out to the ranch myself, unfortunately. I wish Mr. Riddell the best in his future endeavors and hope to see the plants he sent to the Arboretum this spring.
  • A 24-Inch Burger is Among Six New Food Items for the 2023 Season at Globe Life Field. Posting this in the hopes it will lure Charles up here this summer for a game and to try the food. I personally am going to have some of the Hurtado barbecue the next time we go with a baseball-oriented friend.
  • From my inbox: Taylor Swift isn’t just coming to Arlington to perform. She’s also the subject of the Arlington Museum’s summer exhibit: Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour Collection will be here from June through September for all your Swift needs. Tickets go on sale April 13 for members, and April 17 for the rest of us.
  • Hipster ’80s-style roller skating rink to wheel into Dallas Design District. I’m already asking around for my friends to join me when this opens for both events: the visit to the roller rink and the visit to the ER that will inevitably follow when I break something falling on my butt.
  • Last but not least, in baby animal news: It’s a girl: Dallas Zoo welcomes 131-pound giraffe calf [Archive link.] No name yet for the baby girl. I’m really excited about this one; giraffes are my favorite animal.
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Of course there’s already a Mayoral poll

Posted on March 30, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

From the Daily Kos Morning Digest:

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee

Veteran Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee upended Houston’s race for mayor on Sunday when she announced her entry into the crowded field looking to succeed term-limited incumbent Sylvester Turner this fall.

Jackson Lee has represented the Houston area in Congress since 1995, after she won a landslide 63-37 primary victory over then-Rep. Craig Washington, who had opposed projects important to the region such as the International Space Station. During the ensuing three decades, Jackson Lee burnished her reputation as an outspoken progressive and became one of the most prominent Democrats in the city, giving her instant name recognition. She also won’t necessarily have to give up her safely blue House seat (which includes 20% of Houston’s population) in order to seek the mayoralty, since voters will decide this November, with a runoff the following month if no candidate takes a majority.

That seems likely, given the large number of hopefuls already vying to run Texas’ largest city. The most notable of these is state Sen. John Whitmire, a Democrat who’s been running since 2021 and has a $10 million war chest. He also has the support of a number of major Republican donors as well as Democratic Rep. Sylvia Garcia, who represents a district that neighbors Jackson Lee’s.

A pair of conservative organizations, the Houston Region Business Coalition and Protect and Serve Texas PAC, responded to Jackson Lee’s announcement by releasing a month-old survey from Republican pollster Ragnar Research showing Whitmire with a slender 20-19 lead over the congresswoman, with three other candidates in the low single digits and a large 46% plurality undecided. The two groups, however, emphasized a head-to-head matchup between the two that had Whitmire in front 45-33. Both say they have not endorsed in the race, though HRBC has backed Whitmire in the past despite typically backing Republicans.

While the race is officially nonpartisan, almost all of the credible candidates are Democrats. No Republican has been elected mayor of Houston, which voted for Joe Biden by a 64-32 margin, since Jim McConn won a second two-year term in 1981. (Mayors only began serving four-year terms in 2015.) Houston is also a very diverse city, with an eligible voter population that’s 34% white, 31% Hispanic, and 28% Black. Like Jackson Lee, two of the contenders named in the Ragnar poll, former City Councilor Amanda Edwards and former Harris County interim Clerk Chris Hollins, are Black, while Whitmire is white and City Councilor Robert Gallegos is Latino.

See here for the background, and see also my admonition about polling in Houston elections. This same poll was also cited in the updated Chron story about Rep. Jackson Lee’s announcement. Note that the poll in question predated Gilbert Garcia’s entry into the race, which is likely why his name wasn’t mentioned.

I feel like we’re going to have more polling data that usual for this race, and I just want to remind everyone that each poll is a data point and nothing more. It’s possible we’ll see some trends, and in those trends we may see clear signs of how the race may play out. It’s also possible we’ll get a bunch of seemingly random and contradictory numbers that tell us nothing. Remember that we’re still a long way out, the campaigns have barely begun, and that a lot of factors can and will affect the outcome. Don’t read too much into any single poll result and you’ll probably be fine.

Posted in Election 2023 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Chron editorial board interviews Mike Morath

Posted on March 30, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

There’s video and a transcript here. After explaining that he missed the initial TEA community engagement sessions because he was “under the weather”, he gets asked the key question:

Lisa Falkenberg 1:55
Mhmm. Okay, and then, so, we’re trying to figure out what resources will be used – as much as you can say – what resources would be used for the D and F schools that they don’t have access to now?

Mike Morath 2:10
Sure. I mean, this is the grand question: How does a school system – and certainly one as large as Houston ISD – organize itself as a system of 250-plus campuses so that the way that the district works does not allow an individual campus to lack the structures of supports for you know, a decade or more? You can’t have a situation where kids are going half a decade, or a decade, not learn how to read, write and do math at high levels. So you know, what people keep asking us is, ‘how is that going to change?’ And there’s sort of two answers to that question: The core answer of what TEA is doing is actually indirect. What we’re focused on is leadership. So we’re replacing the school board superintendent. My task is to find nine Houstonians of a character and integrity – that are student-focused – to be members of that governing body that will work together as a team and then find a superintendent that also works with that team that can then execute. Ultimately, that’s the sole focus of the agency, the way the law is set up, the way that our oversight structure is set up. It is that group of people that then have to make all of these changes. But that fundamentally doesn’t answer your question ‘what are the changes that you need to make?’ and so this gets you into all the key questions of how do you make schools work for students? Just think of the discipline of reading. So at an elementary school. There’s an elementary school in Houston, whose last acceptable performance was in 2011. So this is two entire generations worth of kids: Kindergarten through fifth grade. They have, never as a group, been exposed to a school that equipped them to rewrite or do math and do it well. So what needs to happen?

Lisa Falkenberg 4:08
What school was that?

Mike Morath 4:09
I’ll let you guys research that. So you think about elementary literacy instruction. So what we know – what evidence tells us – the evidence is compellingly clear on how the human mind acquires the gift of reading. You’ve got to make sure kids learn how to decode. That has to be taught. There’s a very specific way to do that. You do the ‘mmm’ sound before you do the ‘ph’ sound and you do that for a reason. There’s an explicit exposure, in order, to these concepts. You’ve got a bunch of random control trial-based instructional materials out there, and training, that shows this is the most effective way to do it. So you need to make sure that in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade, that that kind of instruction is happening and with materials that have that kind of evidence base. That’s only part of the equation that helps kids learn how to read. Reading is also a function of background knowledge. All the words that you know and accumulate. And this is one of the reasons why you see such disparities by class in reading proficiency. Because if your parents are very well educated and have resources to take you on trips, and then you will learn things – a lot of things – outside of school, and much of that is going to affect your vocabulary and background knowledge. And that is a driver in literacy. So the question is, ‘are schools functioning as the great equalizer for literacy?’ Do they have a curriculum that is well-designed and intentional at building knowledge, about building vocabulary and is even designed to do so? So you think, well, what’s the evidence base? I’ll tell you that you need to have an instructional material and in a curricular environment the way classroom works in order for vocabulary to work. We know that if you have a set of lessons that are focused on say, ‘inferencing’ as a skill. You do something on ‘giraffes,’ and then you do something on ‘going to the ice cream store’ and then you do something on ‘World War II’ and then you do something on ‘your thoughts about balloons,’ that will not lead to any vocabulary growth. Instead, the evidence is quite clear. You have to read the same kind of texts over and over and over again. Same subject. So you read about ‘giraffes’ and you read about ‘zoos’ and then you read about the ‘African savanna.’ Then you read about the biology of necks. That sort of thing. That causes vocabulary growth. So the question is: “in the schools that have seen low levels of literacy for a decade, how well-designed is the instructional program in the curricular experience for kids so that that is actually happening?’ And this is not a new phenomenon. This knowledge isn’t even new to Houston. I think about the great Thaddeus Lott. He may be a principal y’all are familiar with. This epically famous principal that served, I want to say, at Wesley Elementary for decades. People came to his school, studied what he was doing, and he had a systematic, direct instruction on phonics. He had a strong, rigorous approach to background knowledge. Curriculum that was well-designed. Then, his approach to recruiting teachers focused on, of course, folks that had extremely high expectations; that if you come to school with a with a broken right arm and you can’t turn in a writing assignment because of it, you know, the teacher says, ‘well, your left arm is not broken.’ The high expectations that says, ‘No, we’re going to learn this. I’m here to support you, but we’re going to learn this’ and he creates a learning environment. He did this for 20 years at that school that got extraordinary results.

Gotta say, that’s an awful lot of words that sound suspiciously like the Underpants Gnome meme to me. To wit:

Step 1: Appoint Board of Managers
Step 2: ???????
Step 3: All schools are now passing!

I had to back away for a few minutes after that. I eventually went back and read some more, and he does get into specifics in a few places, so go read and listen for yourself. One thing he does say is that the Board of Managers is accountable to him, so to answer this question, if there’s a Board member that we the public think is dead weight, we need to convince Mike Morath of that. So, yeah.

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

The Texas Observer lives again

Posted on March 30, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Now here’s some good news.

The board of the Texas Democracy Foundation, the nonprofit parent organization of the Texas Observer,  on Wednesday voted unanimously to rescind its earlier plan to lay off the 68-year-old magazine’s entire staff and cease publication.

“This is wonderful news,” said Editor-in-Chief Gabriel Arana. “The Observer is indispensable to Texas and to democracy.”

The board issued a statement saying they have secured short-term pledges to bridge an immediate budget shortfall, “thanks to the extraordinary success of the staff’s fundraising this week.” A GoFundMe effort begun on Monday had raised more than $275,000 on Wednesday from more than 3,000 supporters.

The board had formally announced the layoffs and shutdown to the staff on Monday, at a contentious meeting at which they sought to answer no questions. However, most staffers had found out about the decision the previous evening, via a story in another publication.

The statement, addressed to the “Texas Observer Community” included an apology to the staff “for the abruptness of the layoff vote” and said the board “deeply regret[s]” the way the staff found out. The board also apologized to major donors Lynne Dobson and Greg Wooldridge of the Tejemos Foundation and to “our community of contributors, readers and supporters.” The foundation had made a major donation to the Observer last year, but the board said the nature of that gift was misunderstood by the Observer organization.

The change of plan came in the wake of an outpouring of public support for the Observer. In addition to the GoFundMe effort, readers, former staffers and former board members, and prominent journalists from around the country reached out to Observer journalists and allies to express their solidarity with the campaign to keep the magazine afloat.

“I just got chills,” said Gayle Reaves, the Observer’s editor-at-large, when news reached staffers. “I can’t tell you how proud I am of our incredible supporters and my colleagues and the board members who helped us.”

See here for the background, and here for the statement. That statement includes a call that “we work collectively to get through the immediate future—and find a sustainable model to ensure the longevity of our beloved magazine”, so there’s clearly still work to be done. You can click the embedded image to visit the GoFundMe page if you want to contribute to that, I’m sure the more they get for the immediate issue the easier the longer-term one will be to figure out. Whatever the case, at least now they’re trying to figure it out, and for that we can be thankful. The Trib, which goes into detail about those challenges that still need to be dealt with, has more.

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Texas blog roundup for the week of March 27

Posted on March 30, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance has left its busted bracket behind and turned its gaze towards Opening Day as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Continue reading →

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So what happens with CD18 now?

Posted on March 29, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

This story is a very basic explainer about Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s just-announced Mayoral campaign. There’s only so much it can tell us as she has not yet talked about what her top campaign priorities are, and most of the rest we already know, but this bit at the end is worth discussing.

Do people line up for Jackson Lee’s seat in Congress?

The congresswoman does not need to resign to run for mayor, and if she does not win, she can keep her post in Congress. Still, will people line up to succeed her in the storied 18th District if she wins?

One such candidate, former At-Large City Councilmember Carroll Robinson, wasted no time Monday in announcing he was considering a run for Jackson Lee’s seat. Mayor Sylvester Turner, who is term-limited, also lives in the 18th District, although residency is not a requirement for congressional elections.

I discussed this in my previous post, so I will briefly reiterate that Rep. Jackson Lee does not have to resign to run as noted in this story, but logistically it may be sensible for her to do so. She doesn’t have a limited legislative calendar like Whitmire does (and Mayor Turner did before them) and she has longer and more arduous travel to endure if she wants to multitask while campaigning. I don’t know what she will do, and I certainly won’t be surprised if she remains in office through the election, but there is a clear argument that she would be better off stepping down.

Let’s assume that she remains in office. If she wins outright in November, or if she fails to make a runoff, it’s easy enough for her, because the filing period for the 2024 primaries is November 11 (after the election) through December 11. Where it gets tricky is if she makes the runoff, which per usual is the second Saturday of December. That would be December 9 this year, meaning she would just have enough time to re-file for CD18 if she falls short. That sure wouldn’t leave much time to recover and rebound from what would surely be a tough loss, and it could be very awkward if in the meantime a flood of credible contenders have filed for CD18, but she could attempt to go back to Congress if she fails to become Mayor.

If she does win, either in November or the runoff, then there would need to be two elections to succeed her: A special election to serve out the remainder of her term, and a Democratic primary to determine a nominee for the November 2024 election. Both would likely draw large crowds, with some but not full overlap. It is certainly possible to have a situation where the special election winner is not the Democratic nominee for November. If the same person manages to win both, they may have to win four races – the special, the primary, and a runoff for each – to get there. (They would have to win in November as well, but CD18 is strongly Democratic – SJL got 71% last year – so it would be the least competitive race by far of them all.) It would be exhausting and a little confusing since the special election runoff would likely occur after the primary but before the primary runoff. We had a four-race situation to replace Garnet Coleman in HD147 after he stepped down; in 2016 we managed to replace Mayor Turner in HD139 in only three races, as now-Rep. Jarvis Johnson won the primary in the runoff but took the special election on the first try. (Again, not counting the November election; both districts are strongly Dem and both Rep. Johnson and Rep. Jolanda Jones were unopposed in their Novembers.)

Note that everything I wrote about above would also apply to SD15 and Sen. John Whitmire. I wrote about this in January, when Whitmire drew a two-year term for this cycle, meaning that there will be a general election for SD15 next year. If he had drawn a four-year term then there would still be a special election to replace him in 2024 if needed, but the primary election for that seat would have been in 2026. Them’s the breaks. If we get a Whitmire-Jackson Lee runoff, we might have a situation in which both candidates would be thinking about what their Plan B is, assuming they hadn’t already made any definitive statements about that. Isn’t this fun?

As for the potential candidates to run in CD18, all I’ll say for now is that the list will include a lot more people than the opportunistic Carroll Robinson. Mayor Tuner has been cited as a possible candidate for US Senate in 2024, which I don’t believe, and I’ve heard his name mentioned as a possible candidate for SD15, a prospect I find marginally more credible. I feel roughly the same about him as a CD18 candidate. The likely suspects here, for either of these offices, will include current State Reps and Senators and HISD/HCC Trustees and City Council members, various other former officeholders and candidates, and quite possibly a current Mayoral candidate or two. It’s difficult to see, always in motion is the future. Ask me again in six months.

Posted in Election 2023 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

HISD decides against appealing TEA takeover to the TEA

Posted on March 29, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

The decision makes sense, whether or not the headline to this post also makes sense.

In a close vote, Houston ISD board members decided late Monday to bypass its final appeal of Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath’s decision to takeover the district.

Earlier this month, the board overwhelmingly voted to end the lawsuit against the TEA. They still had the option to file an appeal to the state agency,  considered a last-ditch effort at preventing state intervention. These appeals hearings are not held in court but rather by a committee the commissioner selects and often do not go in the district’s favor. The board ultimately voted 5-4 against the measure.

“When it was time to give up the legal fight because we didn’t have a legal basis to continue, I was on board with that,” Trustee Myrna Guidry said. “This is an appeal that is given by the commissioner himself, giving us one more opportunity … The outcome is on the commissioner, but I believe we should take the appeal so we as a board have done everything we possibly can.”

Last week, the TEA hosted a series of informational meetings about the state intervention, which was met with outcry from the community. Shortly after the TEA’s takeover plans were announced on March 15, the community rallied in opposition to the intervention. This type of response is worth listening to, said Trustee Patricia Allen.

“I’ve heard the voice of the people. I’ve been to the community meetings. My opinion as a trustee is to listen to the voice of the people,” Allen said. “This is not a ‘must’ on the part of the commissioner. We can appeal and the commissioner can decide.”

[…]

Trustee Judith Cruz agreed the district should not spend any more money on legal counsel regarding takeover issues.

Others said they felt their chances of success with an appeal were too slim to pursue.

“Whether we file an appeal or not, there is no changing in the outcome,” Board President Dani Hernandez said. “It’s time to make a smooth transition.”

I lean in the “not worth it” direction, mostly because asking the TEA to reconsider its own decision seems highly unlikely to work. I get where Trustees Guidry and Allen are coming from, though. There might be some symbolic value in making the TEA defend itself on the record. Basically, I agree with Campos, I don’t have a quarrel with anyone’s vote on this.

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Another “future doctor shortage” article

Posted on March 29, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Third in the series. This one covers our future nurse shortage, too.

More than a year and a half after Texas implemented its six-week abortion ban, and months after Dobbs, medical providers say they are facing impossible situations that pit their ethical obligation to patients who are dealing with traumatic and dangerous pregnancy complications against the fear of lawsuits, loss of their medical licenses, and incarceration. The problem is encapsulated by a lawsuit filed this month in Texas, in which five women and two OB-GYNs sued the state over the abortion bans that they say have created so much confusion and fear among providers that it has affected women’s health and even threatened their lives. Unsure of how to comply with the new rules, hospitals have interpreted them differently, with some requiring approval from attorneys or ethics boards for physicians to provide abortion care in medical emergencies, and others leaving it up to individual doctors, with little guidance or support. This has meant that some physicians wait until patients are near death to intervene in medical emergencies, according to recent research, court filings, news reports, and interviews. “I’ll get consults from another doctor asking me what to do in a particular case—a mother bleeding, or a pregnancy where there’s an infection in the womb before the baby can survive outside the womb. I have doctors calling me, hesitating, not quite knowing what to do because the baby has a heartbeat, when clearly the mother’s life is at risk,” John Visintine, a maternal fetal medicine specialist in McAllen, Texas, told me. “These are things that I haven’t seen in, you know, 20 years of practicing OB, 14 years of practicing high-risk OB—I’ve never run into these situations where people are wondering what to do.”

The inability to provide what they say is the standard of care to pregnant patients is taking a toll, personally and professionally, according to interviews with more than a dozen doctors and nurses across Texas. And it’s causing many, like Wilson, to reconsider the future of their career in the state. Almost every provider I spoke with for this story has thought about leaving their practice or leaving Texas in the wake of S.B. 8 and Dobbs. Several have already moved or stopped seeing patients here, at least in large part because of the abortion bans. “If I was ever touch a patient again, it won’t be in the state of Texas,” said Charles Brown, chair of ​​the Texas district of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), who stopped seeing patients last year after decades working as a maternal fetal medicine specialist. Many asked that their hospital affiliation not be included in this story, in some cases because they feared consequences from their employer or the public for speaking out about these laws, even though they’re not breaking them. Some worry about what will happen to their own kids if they are targeted. Several cried through the interviews. Many of those I spoke with who haven’t left yet are still thinking about it regularly—people who have family and homes and lives in Texas and would not otherwise have considered moving.

Brown put the stakes bluntly: “Are people quitting? … The answer is yes,” he said. “I hope I’m 100 percent wrong about this, but I think it’s a much bigger trend that’s going to become obvious pretty quickly.”

[…]

This is all happening as Texans can’t afford to lose more access to medical care. In 2022, 15 percent of the state’s 254 counties had no doctor, according to data from the state health department, and about two-thirds had no OB-GYN. Texas has one of the most significant physician shortages in the country, with a shortfall that is expected to increase by more than 50 percent over the next decade, according to the state’s projections. The shortage of registered nurses, around 30,000, is expected to nearly double over the same period. Already, Texans in large swaths of the state must drive hours for medical care, including to give birth. According to recent research from the nonprofit March of Dimes, it is among the worst states for maternity care access, which has decreased in a dozen Texas counties in the past two years, mostly due to a loss of obstetrics providers.

This doesn’t yet take into account the effects of increased criminalization of abortion care, which is further compounded by dramatic pandemic-induced burnout among clinicians. As physicians retire, hospitals are struggling to replace them; as nurses burn out or leave for more lucrative travel nursing roles, their positions are sitting open. There have been a string of policies and factors that have stretched providers in Texas for many years, from having the highest uninsured rate in the country to low Medicaid reimbursement rates to the demonization of science to attacks on transgender health care, and now the abortion bans, according to Tom Banning, the CEO of the Texas Academy of Family Physicians. “The first rule of holes, when you’re trying to get out of the hole, is to stop digging,” he said. “We just continue to dig the hole that we’re in deeper.”

This is an issue for both urban and rural areas, but it’s felt most acutely outside major metros, where one retirement or move can be the difference between having access to medical care near home or having to drive an extra several hours. The state has experienced the most rural hospital closures in the country in recent years. Less than half of rural hospitals nationwide still have labor and delivery services, according to recent research from the Chartis Center for Rural Health; in Texas, that number is just 40 percent. John Henderson, the president and CEO of the Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals, said he gave a presentation this fall for a group of representatives from about 100 rural Texas hospitals where he asked them to raise their hand if they don’t currently have openings for registered nurses. “There were three out of 100 that were fully staffed, and I was actually surprised that there were three,” he said. “It’s crisis-level staffing for the majority of rural Texas hospitals.” Maternity wards have long been the sacrificial lamb for cash-strapped rural hospitals trying to save money and keep their doors open, but more recently, it’s short staffing that has forced closures and cuts to services in Texas and across the country.

See here and here for the previous entries. The problems with rural hospitals and the general unavailability of maternity care are separate but related phenomena. I realize that the plural of “anecdote” isn’t “data”, but there sure are a lot of anecdotes, and some of them do come with data, so.

It is of course possible that none of this gets beyond the anecdote stage. Some of the people quoted in the story admit that it’s tough to leave even as they get pushed past what they thought their point of tolerance was. Maybe the effect will only be truly felt in rural areas where they keep on voting for the Republicans that create and exacerbate these problems for them. Maybe it’s dumb to expect Republicans to feel the consequences for any of their actions, given that they haven’t felt them for the freeze or for the continued epidemic of mass shootings. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But as long as these stories keep getting written, I’ll keep pointing them out.

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