A large majority of Texas Republicans believe the unsupported claims of leaders that the 2020 election was stolen. But some in the party think “election integrity” legislation could backfire.
A few of Texas's big businesses have publicly criticized efforts to make voting more difficult. But many more, fearful of Republican retribution, are trying to keep their heads down.
The Pearland native went viral this week for her poised and powerful testimony against anti-trans bills.
Provisions of Senate Bill 7 would require some naturalized citizens to prove their right to vote.
Many industries bear a portion of the blame for the failure of Texas’s electric grid. But one seems to be escaping strict requirements to better prepare for future storms.
A guide to the key players in the 87th Legislature who are trying to stuff ten pounds of “priorities” into a five-pound sack.
Governor Greg Abbott has identified passing “election integrity” bills as one of his priorities for this legislative session, but the man in charge of ushering such legislation through the Texas House seems not up to the task.
Fed up with DNA tests and expensive investigators, some adult adoptees are fighting the state for access to their original birth records.
The state is expected to receive three new U.S. House seats. But those looking to expand the GOP majority in the congressional delegation won’t have an easy task.
State lawmakers grapple with how to make this year productive, as they lose cherished time forming relationships on the floor.
Anti-abortion advocates are getting their hopes up that the U.S. Supreme Court could undo Roe v. Wade, but some are tired of waiting.
In the months after Merci Mack’s murder, Dallas’s trans community has expanded its organizing efforts. Meanwhile, the Lege is set to consider expansion of the state’s protections against discrimination.
Lawmakers will have their hands full with a budget deficit and the pandemic. Here's what else to watch for this session.
Comptroller Glenn Hegar projected a nearly $1 billion deficit—far smaller than lawmakers feared.
GOP state legislators have proposed bills that could make it more difficult to cast a ballot in 2022. Some might backfire on the party.
For the first time in a decade the Texas House—and influence over redistricting—is in play. Will it slip out of the Democratic party’s grasp once again?
A year after the Legislature legalized farming the cannabis variant, big dreams for the new crop are withering.
It's March 2021 and Democrats are in power again, the state budget is a bloodbath, and the coronavirus stalks the Capitol.
And they've been dangerously slow to respond to the coronavirus.
Historically, the Lege has met shortfalls with tax increases or spending cuts. Whether Dems or the GOP are in power makes all the difference.
Critics of the forthcoming transformation of the state’s child welfare system worry about the new model’s lack of transparency. Legislators are running out of time to introduce greater safeguards.
This could make the marijuana-derived drug, which the legislature legalized for patients with intractable epilepsy, hard to get.
Senfronia Thompson has a few things to say about Hillary Clinton, Dan Patrick, and the foster care system.
First question: Who are the 38%?
The Texas Legislature may have killed the goose that laid the golden egg—and Governor George W. Bush’s goose could be cooked—if dire forecasts about state lottery revenue prove to be correct. To balance the state budget this past spring, lawmakers cut the winners’ share of lottery revenue from 55.5 percent
“If you’ve got me in your sights, I’d like to talk to you before you write anything,” said Kent Grusendorf in the closing hours of the session. He deserved a fair hearing. He is a thoughtful man who was once a fine legislator. But he has become the most radioactive
Now that the 75th session of the Texas Legislature has officially come to a close, we constituents are left to reflect on some serious key issues — questions of abortion notification, property taxes, water quality, electric deregulation, and the zero tolerance laws concerning teen smoking and drinking — until the
Remember the Sherlock Holmes story in which the great detective solves a mysterious death case because a dog did not bark at a thief in the night? The lesson is that what doesn’t happen can be just as important as what does happen—in crime or in the Legislature. (Please, no
With his spectacles and bushy mustache, he looks like everybody’s favorite uncle, and appropriately, his niche in the Legislature is to take care of the kids: juvenile justice, safe schools, and adoption laws. In the age of family-values politics, Goodman brings a quiet rationality to issues that have been known
Caught in a real-life episode of E.R., Senator Teel Bivins spent the final week of the legislative session performing triage on bills that were at death’s door. As our story begins, a perspiring Bivins frantically tries to revive Governor Bush’s charter schools program, which is among the 52 bills that
Hugo Berlanga said at the start of the session that he was tired. The time had come to do something else. He was burned-out.Mark it down that this burnout had a long fuse. Hugo—he’s a first-name figure—had a session for the ages. Through behind-the-scenes negotiations and timely amendments, he influenced
From Bush’s good try on property taxes to Bullock’s grand finale, from savvy Sadler to weaselly Wohlgemuth, from Duncan’s beginning to Howard’s end: Our sorting of the session’s standouts—best, worst, and in between.
Best PunGovernor George W. Bush. Explaining at a pre-session gridiron dinner how he had turned a deaf ear to his wife’s entreaties that he purchase new formal wear for the event, Bush said he told her, “Read my lips. No new tuxes.”Going…Going…GoneThe legislative leadership team had a lot more on
Say what you will about Arlene Wohlgemuth (and everybody did), but she will go down in legislative history. Way down. Wohlgemuth was the perpetrator of the Memorial Day Massacre, when in a fit of rage she killed 52 bills and managed to unite a previously divided House—against her.It is the
Most legislators who land on the Worst list do so through ineptitude or blunder. John Shields is different: He actively auditioned for the role. He performed as if he had researched the bad old days and come up with a surefire course of action that the greenest freshman would know
Ask not what Senator Eddie Lucio’s bills do for the public; ask what they do for him. Lucio is a poster child for the kind of legislator whose primal urge is to please his friends, punish his enemies, and promote himself.What, do you suppose, lay behind his proposal to restrict
Bless his heart, he’s just in the wrong place. The Legislature is not right for him. His conservative beliefs are too extreme, his suspicions are too easily aroused, his learning curve is too flat. The man isn’t dumb. He’s got an MBA from Harvard. They read books there. But he
Last session, passionate debate raged through the Capitol over which of these two East Texas freshmen was the worst member of the Senate. Given a second chance, Galloway and Nixon showed that they had learned…absolutely zero.“He doesn’t have two sessions of experience,” a Republican colleague said of Galloway. “He’s had
His true peers are not members of the Legislature but rather Thomas Chippendale, George Hepplewhite, and Duncan Phyfe: Like these names, that of Charles Finnell has become synonymous with “furniture”—a term that in Capitol parlance refers to those members who, by dint of their inactivity or incapacity to grasp what
The best that can be said about him is that he could have been worse—and was, just last session. Faults ranging from pettiness to mendacity, which landed him on the Worst list in 1995 (when we described him as “one of the more dismal products of democracy to reach the
Before Kevin Bailey erupted this session, sixteen years had passed since the House had seen an outspoken liberal leader in action. An extra two years would have been a blessing. Bailey is a demagogue straight from the old school—disposed to make personal attacks, preferring cliché to argument, always righteous in
Every Catholic girls’ school has one student who is Little Miss Perfect. To the endless irritation of her peers, she never misses class, always does her homework, raises her hand to answer every question, bosses her classmates around, and is as prudish and humorless as the nuns. But don’t
Two veteran warriors are facing off, and the House is enjoying it immensely. Kim Brimer of Arlington, a former University of Houston football player and one of Speaker Laney’s chief lieutenants, is trying to pass his sports arena bill, which will let local governments use tax dollars to build stadiums
Did he change the world? It’s too soon to tell. But this much is certain: Ron Wilson’s bill requiring scholarship athletes to meet regular admissions criteria at state universities was a stroke of legislative genius. Wilson, of course, was trying to make a point about the Hopwood decision, which
The best tributes are the unexpected ones. As Senator David Sibley argued for his bill to halt the costly practice of school districts’ granting property-tax breaks to businesses, a seldom heard-from San Antonio Democrat named Greg Luna joined in the debate. “I’m so glad that a senator of your esteem
At least he tried. He was the dominant figure in the session’s dominant issue, Governor Bush’s drive for significant property-tax relief, and he drove it farther than anyone thought possible, though not quite far enough. But the mere recapitulation of his role only begins to reflect what Paul Sadler
It is late in the session, and a sticky procedural issue has brought Senate debate to a momentary halt. Senators Teel Bivins of Amarillo and Royce West of Dallas are huddled beside a desk, puzzled about what to do. West, a Democrat, nods in the direction of Bill Ratliff, who
That’s what the Legislature is here to do, and unless we’re lucky, it just may.
Rating the Texas Congressmen from number one to, sigh, number twenty-two.
