Interview with Jolanda Jones

Jolanda Jones

We come to the end of the line of my interviews for this cycle. I’ll be back in the saddle soon enough for the 2026 primaries, but today we are finishing off the interviews for CD18. In a race with multiple familiar names, the most familiar of them belongs to Jolanda Jones, who has served as State Representative in HD147 since 2023. Before that, she served two terms on Houston City Council and two terms on the HISD Board of Trustees. Jones is a criminal defense attorney, former track All American at the University of Houston, reality TV star, and someone who really doesn’t need this much of an introduction. This is the seventh time I have done an interview with Jolanda Jones – the sixth one, from the 2022 primary for HD147, is here – and she is always worth talking to and hearing from. So here you go:

PREVIOUSLY:

Felicity Pereyra, HISD District I
Bridget Wade, HISD District VII
Audrey Nath, HISD District VII
Maria Benzon, HISD District V
Michael McDonough, HISD District VI
Monica Flores Richart, HCC Distict I
Renee Jefferson Patterson, HCC District II
Desmond Spencer, HCC District II
Alejandra Salinas, Houston City Council At Large #4
Jordan Thomas, Houston City Council At Large #4
Dwight Boykins, Houston City Council At Large #4
Al Lloyd, Houston City Council At Large #4
Robbie McDonough, HISD District V
Amanda Edwards, CD18
Isaiah Martin, CD18
Christian Menefee, CD18

And that’s a wrap. More information about the candidates for these and other races can be found in the Erik Manning spreadsheet, where you can always see the sun, day or night. I’ll be back before we both know it for the 2026 primary. Hope you found these interviews useful, I’ll see you on the other side.

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Rep. Gina Hinojosa officially enters the Governor’s race

Good.

Rep. Gina Hinojosa

Texas Rep. Gina Hinojosa on Wednesday announced she is running for governor in 2026, setting up a potential clash between Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and one of the Legislature’s most strident critics of his school voucher program.

“Our fight right now is against the billionaires and corporations who are driving up prices, closing our neighborhood schools and cheating Texans out of basic health care,” Hinojosa, a five-term Democratic lawmaker from Austin, said in her campaign launch video. “That’s who Greg Abbott works for. I’m running for governor to work for you.”

Hinojosa’s entry expands a Democratic primary field that includes Andrew White, a Houston businessman and son of former Gov. Mark White, Bobby Cole, a rancher and retired firefighter, and Bay City Council member Benjamin Flores. Whoever wins the nomination will be a decided underdog against Abbott, who had more than $87 million in his campaign account at the end of June and has won all three of his gubernatorial races by double digits.

Hinojosa, a civil rights and union lawyer who grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, was scheduled to formally launch her campaign at a rally in Brownsville Wednesday evening.

In her campaign launch video, Hinojosa said she first decided to run for office when her son’s elementary school faced possible closure due to state budget cuts. She was elected to the Austin ISD school board in 2012, where she later served as board president before winning election to the Texas House in 2016.

Through nearly a decade in the Legislature, Hinojosa made defending public education her calling card, becoming a primary foil to Abbott on private school vouchers. In her launch video, she contrasted her efforts to bolster public school funding with Abbott’s pursuit of vouchers, which she argued would “devastate our schools.” She also criticized the governor for accepting $10 million in campaign donations from Pennsylvania GOP megadonor Jeff Yass, one of the nation’s leading voucher proponents.

“Abbott’s corruption runs deep. The billionaires he works for will not stop until they get what they want,” Hinojosa said. “As long as we have a governor that can be bought, we won’t have the Texas we deserve.”

See here and here for some background. See her campaign video here, which goes pretty hard on Abbott. His piles of campaign cash are a real obstacle, but if the vibes are shifting, that may not be as much of one as it could be. This is a tough race, and he’s never had a close election. She’s going to need all of that fight she shows in that video, and a lot of help. I will be very interested in seeing the January finance reports.

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There may be a lawsuit over the rainbow crosswalk

Good.

A legion of Houston’s elected officials gathered at the Taft and Westheimer rainbow crosswalk Tuesday as a show of force against Gov. Greg Abbott’s call to remove it or risk the loss of state transportation funding, and some even floated the potential for legal action.

The crosswalks in Montrose were painted over weeks ago due to repaving work at the intersection, and were quickly restored to their original vibrancy after outcry from the community and elected officials.

But Abbott soon swooped in Wednesday to threaten to remove Texas Department of Transportation funding from cities that painted “political ideologies” on their streets unless they were removed. Abbott’s office called rainbow crosswalks a distraction, but Council Member Abbie Kamin said Tuesday the governor had “apparently entered the portion of the program where the state of Texas is now worried about paint.”

[…]

Any notion the crosswalk was political was preposterous, Kamin said, and that Abbott had no premise to interfere in TxDOT funding to cities that didn’t comply with a “bigoted” directive. She added the move was a “hateful, bigoted” stunt that could reap consequences for not only the area’s LGBTQ+ community, but other vulnerable groups across Houston and the state.

Kamin went as far as calling the governor’s more unconstitutional since they couldn’t legally define what is or isn’t political ideology. She and others expressed worries that the governor’s call to paint over the sidewalk could extend to Black Lives Matter murals and others across the city.

“This is about content control. It’s big government overreach at its worst, and that is not the spirit of freedom we celebrate here in Texas,” Kamin said. “The governor is wasting time obsessing about paint colors while Texans are facing increasing grocery prices, skyrocketing home insurance rates, and over a million Texans are about to lose their health care coverage … We have real problems, and they deserve real leadership.”

Among those present at the news conference Tuesday were County Attorney Christian Menefee; state Sen. Molly Cook; Harris County Commissioner Lesley Briones; former and County Judge candidate Mayor Annise Parker; Controller Chris Hollins; Council Member Mario Castillo; and state Reps. Gene Wu, Christina Morales, Lauren Ashley Simmons and John Rosenthal; as well as multiple representatives from neighborhood and LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations.

[…]

No one at the county level has filed a lawsuit to intervene in the crosswalk’s repainting, Menefee said Tuesday, but the county attorney’s office was looking into potential legal arguments. City Attorney Arturo Michel didn’t immediately return a request for comment on whether the city’s legal team would step in.

Kamin said she was speaking with legal organizations and attorneys to assess the city’s options. Menefee said Tuesday members of the commissioners were upset about the crosswalk and that his office was digging as deep as they could to make a case.

“If my tenure as county attorney has been marked by anything, it’s been fighting with a scalpel,” Menefee said. “So if we believe that we can win this, then I can guarantee you every dollar to be filed. If there’s a more appropriate party to bring the case, then we’ll turn over everything we have to them and aid them in getting it filed.”

See here for the background. I should note that despite Metro immediately saying they would paint over these crosswalks in obedience of Abbott’s diktat, as of yesterday this had not happened, and who knows, maybe now it won’t. I’m glad that a bunch of Dems stood up and called BS on this, because that’s what it is. A moment’s thought makes the free speech implications of this clear, just as the terms of Abbott’s “political ideologies” claim are vague and impossible to pin down. If a lawsuit is needed, either to prevent Metro from wielding its paintbrush or to ensure that funding isn’t interrupted, then I have confidence it will be in good hands. This is the way. Kudos to all for following it.

UPDATE: Whitmire speaks, finally.

Mayor John Whitmire spoke out on Wednesday against Gov. Greg Abbott’s call to remove Montrose’s iconic rainbow crosswalk, calling the governor’s move “man-made,” “manufactured” and “counterproductive.”

[…]

As the issue unfolded, Whitmire remained silent and elected officials gathered in force to speak out against the governor’s move. The mayor was noticeably absent from a Tuesday news conference organized by Council Member Abbie Kamin that included countless area elected officials. While some officials floated legal action, neither the city or the county have filed any sort of lawsuit to interfere in the rainbow crosswalk’s removal. Kamin said Tuesday she was told Whitmire was meeting with local LGBTQ+ advocacy groups.

During Wednesday’s City Council meeting, Whitmire broke that silence, and emphasized not only the importance of the crosswalk to Houston, but his work standing up for the LGBTQ+ community during his 52 years as a Texas senator and during his time as mayor. Whitmire is the winner of a Harvey Milk award and spent time as a legislator standing up for transgender families. He added he had been in talks with his LGBTQ+ advisory board, and that all his board appointments so far were about unity for Houston.

“To politicize something so important is just counterproductive,” Whitmire said of the crosswalk.

Whitmire added he was open to suggestions for what to do next, but said city officials would likely look at what they could add to private property instead of jeopardizing city departments by putting rainbows on public property.

“You can do away with the stripes, but you’re not going to do away with the issue or the people that are valuable citizens of Houston,” Whitmire said.

Welcome to the table. Maybe for starters tell Metro to slow its roll in the repainting department, at least until we’ve agreed on a strategy.

Posted in Elsewhere in Houston, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Texas blog roundup for the week of October 12

The Texas Progressive Alliance stands with the people of Portland and Chicago as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Continue reading

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Interview with Christian Menefee

Christian Menefee

Our next candidate for CD18 is another familiar name and the first person to formally announce their candidacy for this seat. Christian Menefee has been elected twice as Harris County Attorney – he had to resign to run for CD18 but is still serving as the interim County Attorney in the interim – where he made his name in the first term for aggressive enforcement of environmental laws, as well as defending Democratic countywide incumbents whose 2022 election victories were challenged in court. He and his office have been busy suing the Trump administration this year, winning multiple restraining orders on grants and other funding that had been cut. He was recently endorsed by the Chronicle for this race. You can listen to the interview I did with him for the 2024 primary here, and you can listen to this year’s interview below:

PREVIOUSLY:

Felicity Pereyra, HISD District I
Bridget Wade, HISD District VII
Audrey Nath, HISD District VII
Maria Benzon, HISD District V
Michael McDonough, HISD District VI
Monica Flores Richart, HCC Distict I
Renee Jefferson Patterson, HCC District II
Desmond Spencer, HCC District II
Alejandra Salinas, Houston City Council At Large #4
Jordan Thomas, Houston City Council At Large #4
Dwight Boykins, Houston City Council At Large #4
Al Lloyd, Houston City Council At Large #4
Robbie McDonough, HISD District V
Amanda Edwards, CD18
Isaiah Martin, CD18

More information about the candidates for these and other races can be found in the Erik Manning spreadsheet, where the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie. Next week is the start of early voting so barring anything really unexpected this will be the end of my interviews for this cycle. Primary season will be upon us soon, so I’ll be back in the saddle for that. I will wrap up with CD18 tomorrow.

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Harris County sues over Solar For All funds

Good.

Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee filed a lawsuit Monday contesting the Trump administration’s cancellation of more than $400 million in solar energy grants earmarked for Texas-based organizations.

The federal funding, part of a $7 billion Biden-era program known as Solar for All, was meant to help lower-income families access solar panels and battery storage systems. It was expected to save participants an estimated $1,740 annually on their utility bills, county officials said.

Across Texas, cities and nonprofits also planned to outfit community centers and minority-serving colleges with solar panels, so the technology’s potential to lower electricity bills and mitigate power outages could be shared with nearby neighborhoods.

But the funding’s fate was never secure after President Donald Trump took office in January and directed a barrage of government actions to batter renewable energy and unleash fossil fuels.

For months, Solar for All grants were frozen and then unfrozen as Texas-based organizations struggled to stand up their various programs. In August, the Environmental Protection Agency pulled the plug on Solar for All, citing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Trump signed into law the previous month.

“The bottom line is this: EPA no longer has the authority to administer the program or the appropriated funds to keep this boondoggle alive,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in August. “EPA is taking action to end this program for good.”

In his Monday lawsuit, Menefee stated that the Big Beautiful Bill gave the EPA no such authority to cancel the Solar for All grants, as those funds had already been legally committed to the program.

“EPA has time and again disparaged Solar for All… making plain its determination to shut them down by whatever means necessary — legal or not,” Menefee wrote in his legal complaint.

See here, here, and here for the background. As the story notes, there was another lawsuit filed by another group of plaintiffs, in Rhode Island, a week before this one. I was rooting for Harris County to sue when the grants were canceled, so I’m glad we’re doing it now. The county has had some success with these lawsuits this year, I hope that will continue.

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Endorsement watch: For some change in HISD

The Chron makes their endorsements in the three contested HISD trustee races.

It’s an odd election. It could even seem pointless. Right now, elected HISD trustees have little power, no vote and just a few minutes prioritized at the start of each board meeting to talk ahead of general public comment. But eventually, the state will select some of them — three at a time — to take their seats at the table. The end of the takeover will presumably rely in part on the ability of elected and appointed board members to govern productively together. Will HISD schools and voters be best served by a candidate that’s part of the End the Takeover slate endorsed by the Harris County Democratic Party? Or would it be smarter to pick incumbents who have played nice and promise to continue doing so when Morath comes looking?

Many parents have been frustrated with the state takeover of HISD, and understandably so. A takeover originally intended to target a handful of consistently failing schools was unexpectedly expanded to cover additional campuses. State-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles has often demonstrated an antagonistic attitude toward teachers’ and families’ articulable concerns. Despite those problems, the last thing anyone should want is a return to the old HISD ways, with a board that tolerated poor performance and failed to function as an effective governing unit. Voters should look for candidates who have the insight and disposition to build on the real improvements Miles has brought to HISD while sunsetting his least effective moves.

Along with experience and priorities, that balance is what we focused on when screening candidates for Districts V, VI and VII, which together cover much of the west and southwest parts of the city. They include some of the wealthiest and some of the most underserved campuses in the district.

Long story short, they picked Maria Benzon over Robbie McDonough in District V, Michael McDonough over incumbent Kendall Baker in VI, and incumbent Bridget Wade over Audrey Nath in VII. By their star rating system, that was two close calls – Benzon and Wade both rated as three and a half stars to R. McDonough and Nath’s three – and one blowout – M. McDonough got four stars to Baker’s two. I would certainly vote for Audrey Nath if I lived in that district, but McDonough over Baker may be the easiest call of any race outside of Cy-Fair ISD. Which reminds me to point you to the ever-useful Book-Loving Texans’ Guide to the November 2025 school board elections, brought to you by Franklin Strong. Read his analyses and share them with your friends.

Elsewhere, the Chron also has the 30 day campaign finance reports for the HISD races; note this is just for the contested races, as unopposed candidates are not required to file 30 day or 8 day reports. Again to sum up, no one has raised or spent a huge amount. With the exception of Baker, who had no fundraising activity to report, everyone raised between $14K and $31K, and with the exception of Wade, who dropped $17K in the period, spent less than $10K. Check that out, check out the July reports, and check out my interviews with these candidates:

Felicity Pereyra, HISD District I
Maria Benzon, HISD District V
Robbie McDonough, HISD District V
Michael McDonough, HISD District VI
Bridget Wade, HISD District VII
Audrey Nath, HISD District VII

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Interview with Isaiah Martin

Isaiah Martin

Next up for the special election in CD18 is Isaiah Martin, who like Amanda Edwards had filed to run in the 2024 primary while then-Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee was running for Houston Mayor, but then dropped out and endorsed Jackson Lee when she got back in following her loss in that race. Martin had previously worked for Rep. Jackson Lee, and while a student at UH he founded #ForTheStudents and spearheaded initiatives that tackled pressing issues such as campus voting access, food insecurity, and sexual assault support, and also advocated for TDECU Stadium to be used as a polling place for the 2020 election. Martin is the youngest candidate in the race and has a national following on TikTok. Here’s what we talked about:

PREVIOUSLY:

Felicity Pereyra, HISD District I
Bridget Wade, HISD District VII
Audrey Nath, HISD District VII
Maria Benzon, HISD District V
Michael McDonough, HISD District VI
Monica Flores Richart, HCC Distict I
Renee Jefferson Patterson, HCC District II
Desmond Spencer, HCC District II
Alejandra Salinas, Houston City Council At Large #4
Jordan Thomas, Houston City Council At Large #4
Dwight Boykins, Houston City Council At Large #4
Al Lloyd, Houston City Council At Large #4
Robbie McDonough, HISD District V
Amanda Edwards, CD18

More information about the candidates for these and other races can be found in the Erik Manning spreadsheet, where enchantment pours out of every door. Next week is the start of early voting so barring anything really unexpected this will be the end of my interviews for this cycle. Primary season will be upon us soon, so I’ll be back in the saddle for that. More from CD18 tomorrow.

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Why is HPD calling ICE so much more often now?

We deserve some answers.

Houston police officers have called federal immigration agents on civilians over 100 times since President Donald Trump took office in January — a jump of more than 1,000% from any of the previous five years, according to public records obtained by the Houston Chronicle.

The majority of those 107 calls to Immigration and Customs Enforcement came as the result of a traffic stop. In only three offense reports — for responses to domestic violence, aggravated robbery and narcotics complaints — did officers indicate that the subject had been suspected of a serious crime.

Incident reports indicate that ICE came to arrest the subject in at least one out of four cases. Those numbers could be higher, however, as many incident reports lack details about why the subject was stopped or whether ICE responded.

By comparison, Houston police called ICE nine times in 2024 — the most of any year prior to Trump’s second term in office, records show. Police officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about their cooperation with ICE.

Local immigration advocates say the department’s willingness to involve ICE in non-criminal proceedings could deter immigrants, who make up more than a quarter of the city’s residents, from reporting crimes to law enforcement. Already this summer, Houston police officers called ICE on a Salvadoran woman who reported her abusive ex-husband to police.

“The majority of these cases are non-criminal in nature,” said Zenobia Lai, executive director of the Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative. “And that is very concerning for many reasons, one being that victims of crime or domestic violence will be very hesitant in contacting the police for help when they actually need it.”

Mayor John Whitmire has long maintained that the department will hold violent criminals accountable and assist crime victims regardless of their immigration status, and that the Houston Police Department would not get involved in immigration enforcement as Trump embarked on a nationwide crackdown.

However, he has also said that local officers are required to contact an arresting agency when they come across a person with a warrant. And after immigration authorities this year added roughly 700,000 people with administrative warrants — many of which are for outstanding deportation orders — to a national law enforcement database historically reserved for major crimes, those encounters have skyrocketed.

The question of whether local officers are legally obligated to notify federal agents about administrative warrants is a murky one. Unlike judicial warrants, which are signed by a judge, administrative warrants are issued by ICE officers and do not by themselves compel other agencies to action.

In an internal email sent to police supervisors earlier this year, Executive Chief Thomas Hardin detailed the department’s policy to call ICE when officers encounter someone with an administrative warrant. It instructs officers to check whether ICE will send an agent to the scene.

No federal law obligates local police to report subjects with an administrative warrant. While Texas has passed state laws that require law enforcement to cooperate with federal immigration authorities, the law doesn’t explicitly demand that officers call ICE whenever they encounter an immigrant living in the country illegally.

You’re not alone if you’re confused by all that. The story indicates that a small number of officers are responsible for a significant number of the ICE calls, including one traffic patrol officer who leads the way with eight such calls. Maybe these guys are confused, or maybe they’re just doing their own thing, regardless of what the HPD policy is. Either way, that seems like a gap that should be addressed by HPD leadership and by the Mayor, who did not give a comment on this to the Chron. He’s been doing a lot of that no-commenting thing lately.

The one bit of good news here is that this is still a small number in absolute terms. But given the atrocities that ICE is committing every damn day, we can’t let that slide. If the Mayor doesn’t want to address the issue, he should be feeling the heat about it from City Council members, members of the Legislature, and everyone else. We don’t need HPD officers freelancing with ICE. Let’s get this under control while we still can.

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A brief recap of the whole rainbow crosswalk situation

Let me see if I’ve got this right: Greg Abbott gets his knickers in a twist over the recently-repainted rainbow crosswalk on Westheimer at Taft, after having been spun up about it by some online wingnuts. These crosswalks are no longer “compliant” with federal transit regulations because the babies in the current administration are triggered by them.

So then Metro preemptively surrenders after Mayor Whitmire kept his mouth shut, at least publicly, about the whole thing, which made people that Metro and the Mayor didn’t care about mad and also made the Chronicle mad. San Antonio, meanwhile, said um, yeah, we’ll get back to you and continued about their business. So far, nothing has happened to them or their still-existing rainbow crosswalks.

Have I missed anything? In the end, the best thing anyone said about this was on the Weird Sh*t in the Heights (Houston) Facebook group:

Do with that what you see fit.

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Interview with Amanda Edwards

Amanda Edwards

This week we will focus on the election we’ve been waiting for the longest, the special election in CD18 to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Rep. Sylvester Turner. There’s a big field for this race but there’s really only a few names that stand out, and I’ll have interviews with them this week. First up is the candidate who ran for this seat in 2024, Amanda Edwards. I spoke to her then for that race and you can listen to that here. I’m taking a slightly different approach to these interviews, focusing primarily on fighting back against the depredations of the Trump regime and how we rebuild and restore the country we’re trying not to lose in the meantime. You’ll hear about that in all of these conversations. Edwards was the first person I interviewed for this round, and as was the case for the 2024 primary she is a Houston native and attorney who served as an At Large City Council member from 2015 to 2019, which included a stint on the H-GAC Transportation Policy Council, and also worked in the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s office. Here’s our conversation:

PREVIOUSLY:

Felicity Pereyra, HISD District I
Bridget Wade, HISD District VII
Audrey Nath, HISD District VII
Maria Benzon, HISD District V
Michael McDonough, HISD District VI
Monica Flores Richart, HCC Distict I
Renee Jefferson Patterson, HCC District II
Desmond Spencer, HCC District II
Alejandra Salinas, Houston City Council At Large #4
Jordan Thomas, Houston City Council At Large #4
Dwight Boykins, Houston City Council At Large #4
Al Lloyd, Houston City Council At Large #4
Robbie McDonough, HISD District V

More information about the candidates for these and other races can be found in the Erik Manning spreadsheet, where you’ll never walk alone. Next week is the start of early voting so barring anything really unexpected this will be the end of my interviews for this cycle. Primary season will be upon us soon, so I’ll be back in the saddle for that. More from CD18 tomorrow.

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30-day campaign finance reports: City Council At Large #4

We’re less than a month out from Election Day, and that means that the candidates in the special election for Houston City Council At Large #4 need to file 30 day finance reports. The July reports included reports from two candidates, Jordan Thomas and Alejandra Salinas, though only Salinas had something to report. Here’s what we’ve got for the 30 days:


Candidate     Raised       Spent       Loan     On Hand
=======================================================
Plummer          174      23,734          0       4,586

Boykins      108,996      20,053          0      88,942
Salinas      197,272     189,469     25,000     273,618
Thomas        18,244           0          0
Rivera         2,289         383     10,500      12,450
Lloyd          3,790       6,720      5,000
Dixon          6,595         341          0
Thibodeaux       509         850          0         485

Letitia Plummer’s report, which is the first one I’ve seen filed by her since the 2023 election, has a “submit date” of September 3, and it says it covers the July-December 2024 period. Go figure. At least now we have some idea of what she has in her treasury, though of course she could have raised a bunch more this year. At this point, unless she files another city report, the next chance we’ll have to find out will be January. I’m including it here as a point of reference when we look at the county reports then.

Only seven of the candidates had reports filed in the system. With three exceptions, all of their forms were screwed up in one way or another. Jordan Thomas properly totaled and itemized his contributions, but had nothing about expenditures. Martina Lemond Dixon, who has run for city office before, had a blank summary page, contribution and expenditure numbers on the subtotals page, and no itemizations. Al Lloyd had a blank summary page but did appear to correctly list his numbers on the subtotals page, and he did itemize them. Sonia Rivera gave her contribution and expenditure totals in the wrong boxes on the summary page, then had different contribution numbers (cash plus in kind) on the subtotals page; she too did at least itemize them. Those two came the closest to getting it right.

Dwight Boykins, Alejandra Salinas, and Angie Thibodeaux had reports that at least looked like they were correctly filled in. Boykins got contributions from former State Reps. Helen Giddings of Dallas and Glenn Lewis of Fort Worth, plus a few PACs including the Houston Apartment Association and the Texas Realtors. Salinas’ report included quite a few familiar Dem names, including former State Rep. and Council Member Ellen Cohen, current State Rep. Christina Morales, and current HISD Trustee Placido Gomez; she also got contributions from several labor PACs and a number of law firms. Thibodeaux’s one contribution appears to have been from her previous campaign for State Rep. Most of her expenditures were made from personal funds.

To the extent that people will vote for names they recognize, it sure looks like those Salinas and Boykins are the frontrunners. Salinas, who has been running online ads, has enough funds to do a reasonable amount of outreach. Boykins has solid name ID and enough to do some advertising. The rest face steeper challenges. I’ll check again at the eight day deadline to see if anything changes.

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More indictments in the Maria Rojas case

Paxton pushing paper.

Eight people have been indicted on charges of practicing medicine without a license as part of the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s investigation into a Houston-area midwife accused of providing illegal abortions, the attorney general’s office announced Wednesday.

The group allegedly worked under Maria Rojas, the owner of four clinics in Harris and Waller counties, who was arrested in March and accused of performing abortions on two women in violation of Texas’ near-total ban on the procedure.

The indictments were handed up Sept. 26, according to Waller County court records. Charging documents weren’t immediately available.

The eight people charged with practicing medicine without a license were Yaimara Hernandez Alvarez, Alina Valeron Leon, Dalia Coromoto Yanez, Yhonder Lebrun Acosta, Liunet Grandales Estrada, Gerardo Otero Aguero, Sabiel Bosch Gongora and Jose Manuel Cendan Ley, according to Paxton’s office.

Only one of them, Ley, is charged with providing an abortion. Ley was arrested alongside Rojas earlier this year.

Ley allegedly told investigators that he was trained as a doctor in Cuba and allowed customers at Rojas’ clinics to believe he was working as one in the United States, even though he was working without a license. Another man, Rubbildo Labanino Matos, is accused of allowing Rojas to use his credentials as a nurse practitioner to order medical procedures and issue prescriptions.

Rojas was indicted on 15 felony charges in June, including three counts of performing an abortion. The abortion charges are related to the treatment of two women, identified in court documents as E.G. and N.M.

[…]

Rojas is accused of performing a successful abortion on N.M., but prosecutors have released no details about that case beyond the indictment.

The 12 other charges against Rojas are related to accusations she hired people to work at her clinics while they were practicing medicine without a license.

She has pleaded not guilty. Her lawyers have argued in civil court filings that the AG’s office can’t prove that an abortion occurred and said that the medication she is accused of giving to E.G. is also used to treat miscarriages.

See here for the previous update. As a reminder, we do not accept any claim about these cases from prosecutors at face value. We wait until the defense has a chance to speak first. Given how little actual information has been released – no details at all about the most explosive charges, for example – that’s just the prudent thing to do.

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Weekend link dump for October 12

“One national survey of more than 1,800 higher education staff members conducted by consulting firm Tyton Partners earlier this year found that about 40% of administrators and 30% of instructions use generative AI daily or weekly — that’s up from just 2% and 4%, respectively, in the spring of 2023.”

“The fact that Tilly Norwood and the company behind ChatGPT are simultaneously engendering such controversy is not a coincidence: This is an existential moment for human-created entertainment as we know it. If actors, talent bookers, and studio executives cannot hold the line now, at this very moment, the battle to preserve the humanity inherent to art will be irredeemably set back.”

“Artificial intelligence is rapidly spreading across the economy and society. But radiology shows us that it will not necessarily dominate every field in its first years of diffusion — at least until these common hurdles are overcome. Exploiting all of its benefits will involve adapting it to society, and society’s rules to it. ”

“Autism doesn’t excuse asshole behavior. But – here’s the thing – society is far kinder to assholes than it is to autists.” That’s an older link, though one I just recently came across. Here’s a more recent one on a similar topic that you should read, too.

Let there be ties in the NFL. Make overtime 15 minutes again if you want, but quit worrying about weird outliers.

“But now we have an actual, crystal-clear example of government officials using direct threats to pressure a tech company into removing disfavored speech—and suddenly, the free speech warriors have gone mysteriously quiet.”

Bari Weiss is proof that “merit” no longer has any meaning.

“Over the weekend, Portland’s 50-year-old Saturday Market unfolded as usual on the banks of the Willamette River; 9,000 people ran the Portland Marathon; the Portland Thorns soccer team beat the Bay Football Club 2-1 in front of a nearly 17,000 fans, and Powell’s City of Books, perhaps the world’s greatest bookstore, was jammed full of readers scanning bestsellers while sipping lattes and kombucha. True, it did not open until 2 p.m. on Friday, but on investigation, it was determined that Treebeerd’s Taproom never opens until 2 p.m.”

“Any lawyer—really, any careful reader—who makes it through even the first paragraph of the document can see that this is incorrect. The “compact” is quite explicit: Universities that do not sign on to this thing thereby “elect[] to forego federal benefits.” What benefits? Well, that same first paragraph lists quite a few specific “benefits”: “(i) access to student loans, grant programs, and federal contracts; (ii) funding for research directly or indirectly; (iii) approval of student and other visas in connection with university matriculation and instruction; and (iv) preferential treatment under the tax code,” which means 501(c)(3) status. This compact is a “reward” in exactly the same sense that it is “rewarding” to purchase protection from the Mafia. The compact is an open, explicit threat.”

Cry harder.

“A federal workers union is suing the Trump administration for inserting language into Department of Education employees’ out-of-office email messages blaming Democrats for the government shutdown.”

RIP, Ike Turner, Jr, Grammy-winning producer and the son of Ike and Tina Turner.

Jane Goodall left us all a little gift.

“I’m sorry that we dug up old tweets and yelled at celebrities for the stupid jokes they made ten years ago. But I’m not sorry about Louis CK. It wasn’t an overreaction of the times. What he did was wrong. In 2018 and in 2025.”

“Trucks from the First Nation could soon be transporting food, furniture and even critical minerals south of the [Canadian] border along ancestral pathways once used to move buffalo hides and pemmican across the plains—without paying taxes or tariffs.”

“The only world in which [Letitia] James’s activities would merit this level of attention is the political one. And that is precisely the point.”

“Psychiatrists have joined other public health groups in calling for the removal of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary.”

“The tariffs have impacted interlibrary loans in various ways for different libraries.”

Happy 99th birthday, Opal Lee, Grandmother of Juneteenth.

“Arch is all over our televisions. He is the most well-known active college football player. Your casual fan uncle has no idea who Trinidad Chambliss, Fernando Mendoza or Dante Moore is, but he knows Arch. That he is playing so poorly — or at least that he is not dominating, and his team is losing — makes him a Classic Flop: a guy who can’t live up to the hype. And we love mocking guys who can’t live up to the hype.”

RIP, Ronnie Rondell, stuntman and actor whose movie credits include Lethal Weapon, Thelma and Louise, and Star Trek: First Contact. He was also the man who was on fire in the photo on the Pink Floyd Wish You Were Here album cover; scroll down in the story to see for yourself if you’re not familiar. This story is from August but I only just heard about it, so.

Put this guy very high on the list of people who need to be very thoroughly investigated when the power shifts back.

RIP, Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, Loyola Chicago men’s basketball team chaplain, iconic sports figure, national treasure.

RIP, John Lodge, singer, songwriter, and bass guitarist for The Moody Blues.

RIP, Diane Keaton, Oscar-winning actor, director, producer, known for too many good roles and movies to list.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged | 2 Comments

The latest UH/Hobby poll has some red flags for Republicans

First, the headline stories, which don’t interest me much.

Ken Paxton and John Cornyn are effectively tied in the Republican primary race for U.S. Senate, with 34% of voters backing Paxton and 33% supporting Cornyn. 22% support Wesley Hunt.

Jasmine Crockett leads an expanded field of potential and declared candidates in the Democratic Senate primary, with 31% of the vote. Beto O’Rourke and James Talarico have 25% each, followed by Colin Allred at 13%. Crockett and O’Rourke have not formally entered the race.

Allred holds a slight lead over Talerico in a head-to-head matchup between the leading announced Democratic candidates, 46% to 42%.

I will continue to side-eye the inclusions of Beto and Rep. Crockett in these polls, at least until such time as there’s at least a rumor that they’re thinking about getting in. I think the Allred-Talarico situation is fluid, as Talarico’s name ID is still not where it needs to be. That said, don’t underestimate Allred.

What I’m more interested in, part 1.

Survey respondents who voted in the 2024 presidential election had over the course of the year been asked who they voted for in the 2024 presidential election. In this September survey the respondents were asked if they could vote again today in the 2024 presidential election, who would they vote for, with the options being Republican Donald Trump, Democrat Kamala Harris, Libertarian Chase Oliver and the Green Party’s Jill Stein, with additional options of saying they were unsure or would not vote.

Figure 9 provides the distribution of who the respondents that voted in the 2024 presidential election voted for, with 56% reporting that the cast a ballot for Trump, 43% for Harris and 1% for other candidates. When asked again in September how they would vote if they could turn back time and go back and do it all over again, 49% say they would still vote for Trump, 45% for Harris and 2% for other candidates, with 2% saying they are unsure how they would vote and 2% saying they would not vote.

In all, Trump’s vote share dropped from 56% to 49% (a 7 percentage point decrease) while Harris’s vote share rose from 43% to 45% (a 2 percentage point increase). While Trump bested Harris by 13 percentage points among these voters in November 2024, if the election were held today among these same voters, he would defeat Harris by only 4 percentage points.

[…]

Figure 10 draws on the data in Table 9 to display the range in the percentage point decline in Trump’s vote among 15 key socio-demographic sub-groups. In no case did Trump’s vote intention increase among any of these sub-groups. Trump lost the least ground among Republican (2 percentage points), Black (3 percentage points), Silent Generation/Baby Boomer (4 percentage points), and White (5 percentage points) voters. Trump lost the most ground among Democratic (10 percentage points), Latino (12 percentage points), Gen-Z (16 percentage points) and Independent (20 percentage points) voters.

While Trump’s advantage over Harris among these Latino voters in 2024 was 8 percentage points (53% to 45%), if these Latino voters could vote again for president, Harris would lead Trump by 11 percentage points among Latinos (52% to 41%), marking a 19 percentage point shift. This finding suggests that any modeling of Latino voter behavior based on Trump’s unprecedented success with Texas Latino voters in 2024 could be significantly overestimating the 2026 Latino vote intention for Republican congressional candidates in the recently redrawn Texas U.S. House districts. And, as a result, Republicans may have a more difficult time than expected defeating Democratic incumbents Henry Cuellar in the 28th Congressional District and Vicente Gonzalez in the 34th Congressional District, while also suggesting that Republican victories in the 9th, 15th, and 35th Congressional Districts, though still the most likely outcome, are not nearly as certain as they would be if Latino voters cast ballots for Republican candidates in 2026 in the same way that they did back in 2024.

I’ve been talking about this for awhile. I’ll stipulate, it’s one poll, with a subsample of voters, and next November is a long way off. But this result is consistent with what we’ve seen in national polling, and I have to ask, what do you think is likely to happen that will make these disaffected Trump voters go back to him? I think it’s more likely that these numbers get worse for Republicans between now and then.

Part 2:

Based on a combination of a prospective intention to participate in the November 2026 general election and a past record of participation in the 2022 and 2024 general elections, a total of 1,183 registered voters (with a margin of error of +/- 2.85%) were determined to be likely to vote in the November 2026 U.S. Senate election.

In all, 12 unique two-candidate November 2026 election scenarios were evaluated, featuring three potential Republican candidates (Cornyn, Hunt, Paxton) and four potential Democratic candidates (Allred, Crockett, O’Rourke, Talarico). The vote intention for each candidate as well as the proportion of likely voters who reported that they were unsure how they would vote is contained in Table 11.

Figure 11 displays the Republican margin of victory in these 12 hypothetical November 2026 races (in no instance did a Democratic candidate lead in vote intention). With this election still more than a year away, much of this vote intention is explained by partisanship, although within the relatively constant support for Republican and Democratic candidates based on partisanship, there is some variation in the Republican candidates’ margins of victory.

The GOP candidates’ margins of victory range from 1 percentage point to 6 percentage points, with a median margin of victory of 3 percentage points. The four races where the Republican candidate enjoyed the largest lead were Cornyn vs. Crockett (6 percentage points), Hunt vs. Talarico (6 percentage points), Hunt vs. Crockett (5 percentage points), and Hunt vs. Allred (5 percentage points). The four races where the Republican candidate enjoyed the smallest lead were Paxton vs. Allred (1 percentage point), Paxton vs. Crockett (2 percentage points), Cornyn vs. Allred (2 percentage points) and Hunt vs. O’Rourke (2 percentage points).

Among the three Republican candidates, the top performer was Hunt, with leads of 6, 5, 5, and 2 percentages points, followed by Cornyn, with leads of 6, 3, 3, and 2 percentage points. The weakest performer was Paxton, with leads of 3, 3, 2, and 1 percentage points. Hunt’s average margin of victory was 4.5 percentage points, Cornyn’s was 3.5 percentage points, and Paxton’s was 2.25 percentage points.

Among the four Democratic candidates, the top performer was Allred, with margins of defeat of 1, 2, and 5 percentage points, followed by O’Rourke with margins of defeat of 2, 3, and 3 percentage points, Talarico with margins of defeat of 3, 3, and 6 percentage points, and Crockett with margins of defeat of 2, 5, and 6 percentage points. Allred and O’Rourke both had an average margin of defeat of 2.67 percentage points, followed by Talarico with a margin of defeat of 3 percentage points and Crockett with a margin of defeat of 4.33 percentage points.

You can click over and see the individual results, but filtering for the two declared Dems and the two original Republicans – sorry, I don’t think Wesley Hunt will win – we get

Cornyn 48, Talarico 45
Cornyn 48, Allred 46

Paxton 49, Talarico 46
Paxton 48, Allred 47

Again, one poll, it’s early, etc etc etc. But these are some encouraging numbers. Now we have to build on them.

UPDATE: Here’s the Chron story on this poll.

Posted in Election 2026 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The latest Loving County shenanigans draws a response

Are we sure this isn’t all just performance art?

Local, state and federal officials have called for separate inquiries a week after a Houston Chronicle investigation detailed how a group of people from out-of-state was moving to wrest political control of a sparsely populated, but oil-rich West Texas county.

Their leader, Malcolm Tanner, calls his movement the Melanated People of Power. In numerous social media posts, he has declared his intention to take over Loving County’s government by moving in enough of his supporters, who he has attracted there by promising free homes and a $5,000 monthly stipend.

“Not too often do you see a brother that looks like me come into the county and take the entire county over,” he said in a July TikTok post. “Well, I have taken the entire county over, out here in Loving County, Texas. When these elections hit in 2026, we’re going to wipe the board. Everybody that I selected will be elected.”

News of the plan has alarmed Texas officials. “What is happening in Loving County should concern every Texan,” U.S. Rep. Chip Roy said in a written statement. In a separate Oct. 6 letter, Roy, a Republican whose Hill County-area district does not include Loving County, asked the U.S. Attorney’s office to investigate.

“We write to request immediate action and coordination among agencies to address serious election irregularities and threats of manipulation in Loving County,” added state Sen. Kevin Sparks, R-Midland, and Rep. Brooks Landgraf, R-Odessa, in an Oct. 3 letter to Secretary of State Jane Nelson, whose office oversees elections, and Attorney General Ken Paxton. “We urge your offices to use all available authority to investigate and address election fraud in Loving County.”

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Paxton suggested he was already on it. “My office is taking a very serious look at this situation,” he wrote on Oct. 1.

District Attorney Sarah Stogner, whose sprawling West Texas jurisdiction includes Loving County, said that her office, too, had begun scrutinizing Tanner, who according to public records is based in Indiana. “We are actively investigating a plethora of potential crimes into what he is doing,” she said. Tanner has not been charged with any crime.

[…]

In their letters, Roy, Sparks and Landgraf also cited what they said were long-standing criminal and electoral problems in Loving County that extended beyond any new challenges Tanner may present to the community. Some of the county’s problems are self-made.

“The county is facing increased interstate theft operations, including oilfield thefts, human trafficking and other illicit activity” often tied to gangs, Roy wrote, adding that local law enforcement hasn’t received enough support to pursue the crimes.

Meanwhile, “multiple court rulings from recent election cycles have confirmed illegal voting, fraudulent registrations, and improper election conduct,” Sparks and Landgraf wrote. “Repeat offenders have been identified across multiple cycles, with many illegal votes in 2022 and 2024 directly tied to county officials.” Landgraf referred questions to Sparks, who did not respond to requests for an interview.

[…]

The roiling political waters also have contributed to the defunding of local law enforcement agencies. Last year, county commissioners, whose members had been sparring with the sole constable and sheriff, cut the sheriff’s salary in half and eliminated two of his six deputy positions. They slashed the constable’s salary from $126,000 to $30,000.

Police say the cuts make crime fighting a challenge. But even when deputies arrest people, the county has struggled to prosecute cases, said Stogner, who took office in January.

At the time, she said, Loving County had dozens of cases pending, some of them years old. Many had languished because of the fraught local politics, as well as the difficulty of convening juries in a jurisdiction of a few dozen residents.

“It has been a struggle getting a grand jury seated in Loving County,” she said. “And I don’t think they’ve had a criminal jury trial there in the past 30 years.”

See here for the background. First of all, Chip Roy, Loving County has plenty of money, as this story also noted. It’s drowning in money, which is the single biggest reason why its local politics are so effed up. They did indeed defund their police, which despite being illegal in Texas is a subject that no one in state leadership seems to want to address, for some odd reason. Are you going to propose deploying the Texas National Guard, where they might actually be of use in dealing with a crime wave and a dysfunctional local government?

But all of this is just a sideshow. The real question is why does Loving County need to exist as its own political entity? Its tiny population is also a big part of the problem here. Loving County used to be part of Reeves County, its neighbor to the southwest, which has a much more normal population of around 12,000. Why not just disband it as a county and merge it back into Reeves? Seems to me that would solve a whole lot of these problems. Who’s with me on this?

Posted in The great state of Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Dash for sale

Of interest.

Houston Dynamo and Dash Owner Ted Segal is in “advanced talks” to sell the Dash for $120 million to the RHC Group, according to Sportico.

The Dynamo and Dash declined to comment on the story to the Houston Chronicle.

A group led by Segal bought the Dynamo and Dash, along with Shell Energy Stadium, in 2021.

The RHC Group is described on its website as “an investment and philanthropic platform dedicated to empowering organizations, programs and individuals at the intersection of sports, entertainment and the community.”

Richard Hsiao, 24, is the founder of the RHC Group.

Sportico reports Hsiao is the son of a businessman who is imprisoned in China on charges including embezzlement. Xiao Jianhua, a billionaire in China and Hsiao’s father, was sentenced to 13 years in prison in 2022 after being charged with embezzlement and bribery, according to the BBC. The NWSL is “currently seeking additional information on the source of RHC’s money,” Sportico reports, but notes sources say the organization “was funded via money from the independent wealth of Hsiao’s mother.”

[…]

Hsiao announced on his Instagram in July that RHC Group had become the majority owner of Aris BC, a basketball team in Greece.

The RHC Group website lists three pillars for the company: women’s sports; emerging and established sports leagues and teams; and entertainment and consumer trends.

LinkedIn post from the RHC Group from last year on the NWSL Championship says the following: “It’s clearer than ever that continuing to invest in women’s sports pays off – we’re excited about the future and the growth that lies ahead.”

The Houston Dash first began play in the 2014 NWSL season. Reports that Segal was looking at potentially selling the Dash first emerged in January.

Richard Hsiao is clearly not your typical sports team owner, but he does have some experience with that, so here’s hoping he’ll do well if this deal goes through. The Dash have not been as successful overall as the Dynamo have been, and they were one of the NWSL clubs that fired a coach for abusive behavior – as it happens, few months after Segal bought the team – so they could benefit from having an owner that might be more focused on them. We’re going to be Dash season ticket holders next year after two years of doing the same for the Dynamo, so I’m rooting for them to emerge from this in a better place. Good luck, y’all.

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

Three ridiculous voting and election stories

“Silly season” doesn’t begin to cover this stuff.

Item 1: Paxton sides with Texas GOP, against secretary of state in lawsuit seeking to close primaries

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Last month, the Republican Party of Texas sued over a state law that allows anyone to vote in any primary election, regardless of party affiliation.

On Thursday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton responded, not to defend the state law, but to side with the GOP in asking a federal judge to strike down parts of the election code that allow for open primaries.

“The unconstitutional law stopping the [Republican Party of Texas] from closing its primaries is completely indefensible and a slap in the face to the Republican Party and voters,” Paxton said.

This is the latest in a string of cases where Paxton, as the state’s top lawyer, has not only declined to defend a state law, but actively campaigned for the courts to strike it down.

Earlier this summer, the Department of Justice sued Texas over a law providing in-state tuition for undocumented college students. Paxton agreed to a consent decree striking down the law just six hours after the suit was filed.

Paxton indicated in a press release that he hoped to see a similarly swift resolution in this case, discouraging the Secretary of State’s office from “fighting this lawsuit with expensive out-of-state lawyers.”

Typically, the attorney general’s office defends state laws when they are challenged. But investigations from The Texas Tribune and ProPublica have identified at least 75 times when his office declined to defend state agencies in court; in other cases, Paxton’s office has hired expensive private lawyers to take on Big Tech companies and other high-profile litigation.

Paxton’s office gave Secretary of State Jane Nelson less than an hour’s notice that they would be siding against her agency in the lawsuit, a lawyer for Nelson said in a brief filed Thursday afternoon. She intends to oppose the motion, the brief said.

The GOP argued in its original lawsuit that the state’s open primary system, in which people can vote in either primary, regardless of party affiliation, is a violation of their rights under the First Amendment. They want a closed primary, where voters must register with a party before gaining access to the first, and in many cases, most important, round of voting.

The suit alleges that crossover voting, where people affiliated with one party vote in the other primary, leads to the selection of more moderate candidates and gives non-party members unfair influence.

“In Texas, Republicans, and only Republicans, should select Republican nominees,” Republican Party of Texas Chair Abraham George said in a brief statement posted on social media.

[…]

Texas has more than 18 million registered voters, all of whom would have to re-register with a party affiliation. The state would have to redesign its forms and software to allow for party affiliation.

“Re-registering the entire state’s universe of voters would be impossible in a five-month to six months,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “There’s no way to get around that.”

See here for the background. Insisting on being allowed to do the impossible is pretty much baked into the modern Republican Party. Good on Jane Nelson for standing up for her office. I wish her luck. The hand-picked judge for this case is our old buddy Matthew Kacsmaryk, so expect the usual level of deferential treatment.

Item 2: How the Texas GOP’s bid to block lawmakers from the ballot defies a century of court precedent

The year was 1930, and Texas Democrats had a problem.

State Sen. Thomas B. Love had declared his intention to run for governor as a Democrat, just months after he campaigned for Republican presidential nominee Herbert Hoover. For this unacceptable breach of party loyalty, the State Democratic Executive Committee wanted him off the primary ballot.

But they could do no such thing, the Texas Supreme Court said, ruling that Texas’ election laws “jealously guard the voters’ power” by compelling state political parties to place otherwise qualified candidates on the ballot, regardless of their adherence to party rules or loyalty tests. The state’s high court has repeatedly upheld this ruling, remarking in 1958 with some frustration that “no other holding would comport with sound public policy.”

But 95 years after Democrats were forced to keep Love on the ballot, Republicans are on the brink of testing the issue once more.

The State Republican Executive Committee is meeting Saturday to decide whether to censure lawmakers they consider insufficiently loyal, over infractions that include voting for an establishment-aligned speaker candidate over a rival backed by the House’s rightmost faction. Under party rules passed last year, these censures could bar candidates from the Republican primary ballot for two years.

As private ideological groups that run state-sanctioned primaries, political parties occupy a liminal space in our democracy. Courts have struggled to balance their free speech rights with their role as government actors, allowing parties to remove candidates from the ballot in some states while striking down such efforts in others.

But in Texas, the courts have been consistent: Party leadership cannot enforce its own purity tests to remove candidates from the primary ballot. The state party’s willingness to consider testing this precedent has frustrated even some staunch Republicans.

“We’re the party of less government and local control,” Smith County GOP chair David Stein said. “I don’t want 64 members of the SREC deciding who gets elected out of Smith County, Texas. That’s up to our voters, and I feel very strongly about that.”

[…]

Most cases where parties have been allowed to remove someone from the ballot involve candidates who are plainly antithetical to the party’s values, like [David] Duke, or a member of the opposing party seeking an electoral advantage, Kang said. In Texas, the lawmakers facing censure are longtime Republican elected officials, including current and former speakers of the House, who represent one of the party’s major factions.

“This is a much tougher case, when it’s someone in the mainstream of the party, and what party leadership is trying to do is enforce some sort of orthodoxy or party-line position that isn’t necessarily the consensus view within the party,” Kang said.

Some county GOP parties have condemned this effort as undemocratic, noting that it’s exactly the type of party-level control that voter-led primaries intended to get rid of.

“Such a concentration of authority in a small, centralized body resembles not the open democracy envisioned by our Founders, but instead echoes the undemocratic practices of the old Soviet Politburo, where a handful of elites determined who could or could not stand for election,” Burrows’ hometown Lubbock County GOP wrote on Facebook.

GOP megadonor Alex Fairly has vowed to tap into his $20 million political action committee to challenge any potential removals. The effort is “not only unlawful, it’s disastrous for the Republican Party of Texas,” he said in a statement.

A group of seven House Republicans facing potential censure, led by Burrows, sent party leadership a letter Wednesday asking them to reconsider.

“It sends a message that loyalty to the grassroots and to the national conservative agenda is subordinate to the whims of the local or state party insiders rather than Republican primary voters,” they wrote. “Candidate choice in Republican primaries must rest with the people, not party bosses.”

See here for more on Alex Fairly, the would-be billionaire overlord with some modicum of self-awareness. I say embrace the chaos, Republicans. Let their be a big ripping fight over who are the Real Republicans for everyone to see. If it gets a few people unaccountably mad at their colleagues, it’s all to the good.

Item 3: Dallas County GOP’s push to hand-count 2026 ballots could upend voting for Democrats

Republicans in Dallas County, one of Texas’ largest voting jurisdictions, say they want to count ballots in their coming March primary by hand, if they can afford to, a change that could delay the reporting of election results and have far-reaching consequences for all of the county’s 1.5 million voters.

The decision could force Dallas Democrats, as well as Republicans, to return to casting ballots at their assigned local precincts, rather than countywide vote centers, which would require finding scores of additional polling locations and hundreds more workers. It could also vastly increase the cost of holding both primaries, an increase that the parties would have to be prepared to cover on their own.

Cost is one reason why Dallas County Republicans decided in 2023 against hand-counting ballots. At the time, Jennifer Stoddard Hajdu, then the county GOP chair, estimated the party would need more than $1 million to hand-count the more than 70,000 ballots cast in the 2024 primary.

Two years later, Hajdu is still skeptical. “I just think there are so many parts to this that it’s going to be very difficult to get it done,” she said.

But Allen West, a former Florida congressman and Army veteran who is the new chairman of the Dallas County Republican Party, said that the size of the challenge shouldn’t deter the party. He said that party members distrust electronic voting equipment, and that the county’s problems with some of its electronic pollbooks last year contributed to the renewed push to hand-count ballots.

The Dallas County Republican Party’s executive committee voted in September to hand-count primary ballots, and set a goal to raise $500,000 to get it done, West said.

“Let’s not forget this is the way it used to be done,” West said, referring to hand-counts and precinct-based voting. In the Army, he said, “we don’t take that excuse of anything being too hard.”

Calls for hand-counting ballots have grown in recent years amid skepticism and misinformation campaigns about machines used for voting and tabulating ballots. But experts agree and studies show the method is time-consuming, costly, less accurate, and less secure than using machines.

In Gillespie County, in the Hill Country about 80 miles west of Austin, Republicans spent months training hundreds of workers to hand-count ballots in 2024. Republicans also designed ballots that couldn’t be tabulated by machines, and paid the printing costs.

On Election Day that year, 350 workers spent nearly 24 hours counting more than 8,000 ballots. In 12 out of 13 precincts, the party found errors in their tallies. And since state law does not require a post-election audit of ballots that are counted by hand, those results have yet to be checked for accuracy.

Even so, Gillespie County Republicans are planning to hand-count their primary ballots in 2026.

In Austin, Travis County Republicans hand-counted 2,000 mail-in ballots in 2024, which was a fraction of the total ballots cast. The group reported discrepancies in its own count that had to be corrected. Officials there told Votebeat that they have yet to decide if they’ll do so again in 2026.

In Williamson County, north of Austin, Republicans considered hand-counting for the 2026 primary, but have now decided against it. The county is home to about 450,000 registered voters.

“Once the logistics started to get fleshed out a little bit more, that’s when reality hit,” said Michelle Evans, the Williamson County Republican Party chair. Evans said requirements in state law mean it’s difficult to do a hand-count “without an extreme amount of manpower and a budget that we may not be able to fulfill.”

See here for more on the Gillespie County experience. Trying to argue facts with Allen West is like trying to explain linear algebra to a cat, so I’m not going to bother. I will just say that the position of the Dallas County Democratic Party should be that they do not support anything that would prevent them from doing countywide voting centers. I wish them, and all the poor souls in the Dallas County Elections office, all the best.

UPDATE: The censure effort was much ado about not much.

The Texas GOP has voted to censure five of its own in the Texas House yet stopped short of banning them from the 2026 primary ballot, rejecting an untested provision that some House members say would have violated their constitutional right to appear on the ballot.

The State Republican Executive Committee, the party’s governing board, met in the state Capitol on Saturday to consider whether to reprimand 10 Republican House members for being insufficiently conservative. In the end, the board rejected half of the censures and dismissed attempts to bar them from the March primary, a deescalation of intraparty tension that reached a fever pitch at the start of this year.

Whatever. Please keep the discord going, you guys. Fight more among yourselves, it’s good for the rest of us.

Posted in Election 2026, Legal matters, Show Business for Ugly People | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Another Kerrville flooding lawsuit filed

I wish them luck.

The family of a man killed in the July 4 floods in Central Texas has sued the RV park where he and his wife were staying, alleging the campground’s owners knowingly placed its guests in an area that carried a high risk of flooding.

The lawsuit filed this week by the children of Jeff Ramsey, 61, of Lewisville, Texas, alleges their father’s death was caused by the negligence of the owners and operators of the HTR TX Hill Country RV park and campground, where at least 37 people died. Ramsey, whose body has not been found, is presumed to have died along with his wife, Tanya, after the Guadalupe River surged to record levels, sweeping away RVs, trailers and vehicles at the park in Ingram.

The legal action, which is among the first taken by relatives of the Texas flood victims, alleges that HTR TX Hill Country’s owners and managers did not instruct Ramsey and other guests to evacuate despite an imminent flood threat. The company also did not establish proper plans to respond to emergency floods, the lawsuit states.

Jeff Ramsey and Tanya Ramsey, 46, were awoken by heavy rain in the early morning of July 4 and were unable to leave their camper due to the rapidly rising water, the lawsuit states. Ramsey made a final call to his children to tell them he loved them before floodwaters surrounded their camper and swept it away, the lawsuit adds.

It also alleges that the Davis Cos., a Boston-based real estate firm that owns HTR, and a managing partner of HTR Resorts, Minh Tran, housed guests in a “known floodplain with a history of dangerous flooding.”

“This tragedy was both foreseeable and preventable,” attorneys at Webster Vicknair MacLeod, which is representing the Ramsey family, wrote in a news release. “By disregarding repeated emergency alerts and keeping guests in harm’s way, these companies … placed profit over people.”

[…]

Washington Post investigation found that HTR TX Hill Country was the site of the largest known cluster of deaths from the July 4 floods. It also found that Tran had dismissed concerns about flooding at a 2021 city council meeting, when HTR Investors — the company that had just purchased the park — was planning upgrades to its campgrounds that would have left RV sites in the Guadalupe’s high-risk floodway, known as “Flash Flood Alley.”

The company said the tiny homes it was adding to the site were portable, despite being built with roofed porches and stairs.

The Post also found that a dozen campgrounds in surrounding Kerr County had RV lots within the river’s floodplain. Seven of those, including HTR, sat at least partly within an even more dangerous floodway.

In August, the parents of another victim living at HTR filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the park and its general manager. Several more families of people killed at the park and one survivor joined that suit last month. HTR said again in statements to local news outlets that it rejected the “fundamental premise” of that lawsuit.

See here for more on that first lawsuit. I don’t have much to add here, this remains a terrible tragedy that really didn’t get adequate attention during the special sessions. It will be interesting to see, at the start of next summer, the news stories about the reopened camps and what measures they have or haven’t taken to mitigate risk and improve safety, and the items that the Lege didn’t address. The Hill Country is a beautiful place, but I don’t know that I’d want to sleep anywhere within a mile of the Guadalupe River, not without some real reassurances about alerts and preparedness.

On the subject of that first lawsuit, there are now more plaintiffs, as noted above.

The families of 12 Hill Country flood victims have been added to the lawsuit against a Hill Country campground

They were added to an amended court petition, originally filed by the family of Jada Floyd, seeking at least $1 million in monetary damages from the HTR TX Hill Country Resort.

The lawsuit alleges the Kerrville resort’s owners, developers, general manager and management companies were negligent in the preparation and evacuation related to flooding on July 4.

“Defendants were objectively aware of the extreme risk posed by the conditions which caused Plaintiffs’ injuries,” the petition said, “but did nothing to rectify them.”

[…]

The defendants in the petition are listed as The Davis Companies Inc., investors of the HTR TX Hill Country; HTR Kerrville, which owns the land of the resort; Blue Water Development, believed to be the company that operates the resort; and Ilana Callahan, the general manager of the campground.

According to the suit, the defendants continued to operate the resort despite being aware of the risk of flooding and allegedly did not warn guests of this risk.

“Defendants lacked proper plans, protocol, and equipment to respond to the flooding,” the lawsuit states. “Defendants failed to implement sufficient infrastructure improvements and maintenance to establish and maintain a safe means of egress from the property to safety.”

The suit stated that there were 11 Flash Flood Warnings from officials between July 2 and July 4, which “were ignored” by the defendants.

“Surviving guests of the HTR TX Hill Country Resort campground report that it was someone honking a car horn that awoke them, and they were barely able to escape with their lives as the water rose from ankle deep to waist deep in minutes,” the lawsuit alleges.

Again, not that much to add here, I’m just keeping an eye on this. If these lawsuits actually go to trial, I expect they will be riveting, heartbreaking, and likely very revealing about just how much danger a lot of people over many years had no idea they were in.

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Endorsement watch: Chron for Menefee in CD18

Special election endorsement #2 is in the books.

Christian Menefee

Let’s get this out of the way: the 18th Congressional district is a storied district with a rich legacy of trailblazing Black Houston leaders from Barbara Jordan to Mickey Leland and Sheila Jackson Lee. The district, created in 1972, slices through large swaths of north, northeast and northwest Houston as well as the historic Black hub of Houston, Third Ward.

That said, who in their right mind wants the job now?

After two incumbents in a row died suddenly while in office, Gov. Greg Abbott showed just how much he valued the district by slow-walking the special election to fill the empty seat until this November. In the meantime, his party redistricted the whole thing, meaning that whoever wins this race would face a primary next year in a dramatically different district. Not to mention the winner, likely to be a Democrat, will head to a U.S. House of Representatives where Democrats have little to no voice on the floor.

So again, who wants it?

Well, plenty of people. Sixteen to be exact.

We’d love to tell you about each of them but we’ll cut to the chase and share our pick:

Christian Menefee.

The accomplished Harris County Attorney has made a name for himself taking on Republican state leaders. Not only has he challenged Attorney General Ken Paxton and former State Comptroller Glenn Hegar in court when they wanted to discount thousands of votes or accuse the county of defunding law enforcement, he’s won.

Now, Menefee, 37, promises to bring his legal acumen to Washington, D.C., hoping to spearhead Democrats’ still emergent strategy to take on the overreaches of President Donald Trump’s administration. Again, he’s already had some success here, helping the county claw back nearly $20 million in public health funding that Trump tried to cancel earlier this year.

“Those lawsuits can be incredibly powerful,” he told the editorial board.

It’s unusual to run a campaign for a lawmaking seat with the hopes of focusing on the courtroom strategy but we believe that this reveals his deep thinking about the political reality of our moment.

I’ll cut to the chase too and say you should go read the rest. They have good things to say about the other top contenders – in their star rating system, Menefee is given four stars, Amanda Edwards and Jolanda Jones get three and a half, and Isaiah Martin gets three – and give a “people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing that they like” nod to Republican Carmen Montiel. If you do read the whole thing you’ll see why I rolled my eyes at that part of it.

I’ve got interviews with the top four contenders set to roll next week. I’m also awaiting the October finance reports, which should be mostly up by the end of next week, to see who’s been doing what. Polling suggests that this will end in a runoff between Menefee and either Jones or Edwards. Isaiah Martin is running a good campaign and I’ve been favorably impressed by him, but he’s having trouble getting traction with the wider (and older) electorate, who’s not quite ready to trust someone as new to the scene as he is.

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Interview with Robbie McDonough

Robbie McDonough

At the end of my HISD interview cycle, I noted that I had reached out to District V candidate Robbie McDonough but had not heard back from him. That happens sometimes, campaign-related email addresses are not always reliable. Well, McDonough reached out to me earlier this week, having found the email that had fallen through the cracks, and so we had that interview. That happens too, and I’m glad we were able to work this out. McDonough is an attorney and an HISD parent, and made his issues with Mike Miles plain in an op-ed he wrote for the Chron last year. Here’s the interview:

PREVIOUSLY:

Felicity Pereyra, HISD District I
Bridget Wade, HISD District VII
Audrey Nath, HISD District VII
Maria Benzon, HISD District V
Michael McDonough, HISD District VI
Monica Flores Richart, HCC Distict I
Renee Jefferson Patterson, HCC District II
Desmond Spencer, HCC District II
Alejandra Salinas, Houston City Council At Large #4
Jordan Thomas, Houston City Council At Large #4
Dwight Boykins, Houston City Council At Large #4
Al Lloyd, Houston City Council At Large #4

More information about the candidates for these and other races can be found in the Erik Manning spreadsheet, where the the occasional detour off the beaten path is welcomed. Next week as noted we get into the race we’ve been waiting for the longest, the special election in CD18.

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Checking in on SD09

Our attention here in Houston is focused on the long-overdue special election in CD18, but it’s not the only special election of consequence on the ballot. One could argue that the special election in SD09, which was called to fill the vacancy left when Kelly Hancock was appointed as Comptroller, is more consequential as there is the (unlikely, but not non-existent) chance of a partisan flip. I was intrigued by this Quorum Report story from this past week:

Taylor Rehmet

Special election to succeed Sen. Hancock creates strange bedfellows and possibility of an upset

The race pits some top capitol insiders and the “new right” in Tarrant County against the local establishment

The special election for Senate District 9 in Tarrant County is anything but normal.

The safe Republican seat vacated by acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock includes two Republicans – former Southlake Mayor John Huffman and Patriot Mobile Chief Communications Officer Leigh Wambsganss along with Democrat and labor leader Taylor Rehmet.

It’s a race pitting the Austin establishment and the county’s new right coalition, who back Wambsganss, at the urging of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick against the Tarrant County establishment who support either Huffman, or more quietly Rehmet.

Huffman was mayor of one of the most conservative cities in the county’s hot bed of conservativism. Yet he’s being attacked for backing Black Lives Matter activists. That’s the allegation, anyway.

That’s the free excerpt, so I can’t tell you if the possible upset hinted at is Rehmet or whichever of the two wingnuts is the “wrong” one. In a year where Democrats have been overperforming in special elections around the country, you’d think that a district that Donald Trump won 58.0 – 40.6 last year and Ted Cruz won 55.6 – 43.6 in 2018 might draw some more attention, but so far not really. I found nothing remotely recent in a Google News search for “Taylor Rehmet”, and I sure haven’t been getting any emails or other notices about that race.

That may be a reflection of, or a consequence of, the fundraising. In the 30-day reports, John Huffman reported raising $575K, with $393K on hand. Leigh Wambsganss raised $844K, with $617K on hand. And Taylor Rehment…raised $70K, with $31K on hand. That’s not a good way to win a district that’s larger than a Congressional district.

Fundraising is always on the candidate first and foremost, but this should be a featured election, and the radio silence about it surely isn’t helping. Where’s the TDP? Where are the Democratic Senators? Sen. Roland Gutierrez was recently stumping for Rehmet, which is very much to his credit. Senators Sarah Eckhardt and Nathan Johnson each contributed $1,000, and State Rep. Chris Turner kicked in $500 (former State Rep. Lon Burnam added $250), to theirs as well. But we can do better than that.

There’s still time, and if the overall Democratic vote is more or less in line with the normal-year partisan level, Rehmet should be in good position to make the runoff. The main problem is that with an underfunded campaign and an off year special election, there’s no mechanism to ensure a normal-ish partisan mix. In a district like this, in a year like this, it would be embarrassing if Rehmet couldn’t break thirty percent, which ought to be enough to qualify for overtime. I’m too far away to have any feel for this. I sure hope Rehmet can get there. I just wish there were more eyes on this one. Let’s please not be an outlier for the wrong reason.

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Endorsement watch: Chron goes with Jordan Thomas

The Chron makes their recommendation for the City Council At Large #4 special election.

Jordan Thomas

Voters should try to find someone among the current crop of candidates who has the vision and knowledge to actually make something productive out of a largely undefined role — a Houstonian who can use their position at City Hall to drive the change our city needs even as just one vote out of 16.

That is why we endorse Jordan Thomas for At Large 4.

More than any other candidate, Thomas has a real sense of how our municipal government can make Houston a better, more resilient place to live.

“I almost feel like we’re directionless, and someone out of the 17 voices that sit on City Council needs to be painting a positive vision of the future,” he said during the endorsement meeting. “For me, in a word, that is urbanism. We need a more dense city to combat our sprawl. We need a city that attracts the workforce of the future, not the jobs of yesterday.”

Thomas combines a youthful passion — he’s 36 — with a wonky knowledge about urbanism and road safety. At a time when more Houstonians die in car crashes than homicides, we need someone who will be an unabashed advocate for smarter road design, better sidewalks, and cutting the red tape that forces developers to build suburban-style construction in our urban core.

Houston is testing the limits of how sprawl can deliver growth and affordability, and Thomas is one of the few local politicos plugged into the national movement pursuing bipartisan policies to lower the cost of housing and help cities deliver services in an efficient, effective manner. His campaign website might as well be a think tank in miniature, filled with whip-smart ideas for tackling housing, infrastructure and flooding. Incumbents at City Hall should give it a read.

[…]

Finally, we endorse Thomas because he has the unique ability to fill a much-needed role at City Hall — dedicated opposition.

Since the election of John Whitmire, we have watched as the City Council has been cowed by our strong mayor system. With 50 years of political experience, Whitmire has had little difficulty using his power to steamroll his opponents and force his allies to fall in line. Behind the scenes and off the record we hear elected officials and civic leaders muttering about how the mayor has gone astray, but few are brave enough to speak up out of fear that they’ll earn his ire and political punishment.

The city is worse off as a result. Political silence means the mayor has little incentive to stop unilaterally altering infrastructure projects, or substituting anecdotes and personal opinion for data and community input. He has not been challenged to explain his many surprise decisions about road projects, or lay out plans to solve the city’s financial woes in a way that doesn’t cut services to the bone.

Meeting with the editorial board, Thomas said he wants to be the “tip of the spear” — someone who can give voice to community concerns about the Whitmire administration, rally much-needed effective opposition, and use Council’s new powers from Proposition A to force votes on key policies. Iron sharpens iron, and having Thomas at City Hall would help make Whitmire a better mayor.

But Thomas is no mere obstructionist. He demonstrates a depth of knowledge about municipal policy that eclipses many longtime elected officials, and a real sense about how Houston can and should navigate a changing energy landscape that threatens to undermine our economic success and civic well-being.

We don’t have any illusions about the uphill battle Thomas faces to win this race. He has done little fundraising and has a dearth of serious endorsements. But Thomas is a candidate for this moment. He is the sort of candidate this City Council needs today — someone with policy chops, much-needed courage of conviction, and an optimistic vision for Houston’s future.

That’s an interesting rationale, to say the least. Might raise an eyebrow or two in the Mayor’s office, if any of them are reading the Chronicle. Can’t say I’m unhappy with it, that’s for sure.

The Chron used its star rating system in this endorsement, giving Thomas four stars, Alejandra Salinas three and a half, Dwight Boykins two and a half, Al Lloyd and Martina Lemond Dixon two stars each. I wonder how many of the other candidates were in for the interview.

Anyway. Speaking of interviews, here are the interviews I did with AL4 candidates:

Alejandra Salinas
Jordan Thomas
Dwight Boykins
Al Lloyd

I’ve got a post in the works for the thirty day finance reports, which I will have up in the next day or two.

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Interview with Al Lloyd

Al Lloyd

We wrap up our tour of the Houston City Council At Large #4 landscape today with Al Lloyd, who was one of the first candidates out of the gate when the seat became open. Lloyd is a Houston native and Bellaire High School grad who got his start in the automotive industry, as a mechanic and in fixed operations management, and later owned and operated businesses in sports injury rehabilitation and home health care. There were some issues with his WiFi connection as well, though not as much as with the Boykins interview. Here’s what we talked about:

PREVIOUSLY:

Felicity Pereyra, HISD District I
Bridget Wade, HISD District VII
Audrey Nath, HISD District VII
Maria Benzon, HISD District V
Michael McDonough, HISD District VI
Monica Flores Richart, HCC Distict I
Renee Jefferson Patterson, HCC District II
Desmond Spencer, HCC District II
Alejandra Salinas, Houston City Council At Large #4
Jordan Thomas, Houston City Council At Large #4
Dwight Boykins, Houston City Council At Large #4

More information about the candidates for these and other races can be found in the Erik Manning spreadsheet, where the stars at night are big and bright. Next week we get into the race we’ve been waiting for the longest, the special election in CD18.

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The recall effort is out there collecting signatures

Good luck, you’re gonna need it.

After more than a year of posting to social media and reaching out to news media, Ethan Hale stood alone — aside from a Houston Public Media journalist — at the Houston City College campus on Monday, seeking more than 63,000 signatures for an effort to recall Mayor John Whitmire from office.

“I don’t think he’s taking the city on a good path. I think we’re funding the wrong things. We’re not funding the right things,” said Hale, who took the semester off to focus on the recall effort. “I feel like he’s kind of anti-democratic. I think a lot of us in this effort would say that much, but I think it’s gonna be worth it.”

Over the course of the first hour of canvassing, Hale collected about ten signatures. The number might have been higher if more of his fellow students were willing to share their addresses, a required component for the petition.

He held clipboards with misspelled signature forms reading “petiton.” The Houston City Secretary did not immediately respond to a question about whether those forms would be valid despite the misspelling.

According to Hale, there are “probably 100-plus” people involved in the recall effort, including four in leadership positions and “people scattered throughout a whole bunch of groups … maybe 200 to 300ish.” The group is primarily motivated by opposition to Whitmire’s mobility policies — including the removal of traffic safety features and cyclist infrastructure — as well as increased funding for the Houston Police Department, among many points of disagreement.

[…]

While the first hour of canvassing took place on the community college campus, Hale said the signature collection will focus on commuters on METRO’s Red Line light-rail route. The recall organizers highlighted the canvassing event in Midtown on their social media pages, but Hale said there were also “at least a few” canvassers in other parts of the city, though he was unable to name the neighborhoods they were working in.

Over the past year, the effort to recall Whitmire from office was the subject of multiple news stories from local media outlets, including Houston Public Media. In March, the group began reaching out to reporters with the stated goal of raising public awareness and fundraising. Hale subsequently added his name to the ballot for an upcoming special election to fill a seat on the Houston City Council.

The group has stated different fundraising goals over time. In April, one organizer told Community Impact the group had raised $3,600 of a $250,000 goal. In June, the same organizer told Houston Public Media they had raised more than $1,500 of a $100,000 goal. Hale said the group had raised $4,500 as of June, and the effort would rely heavily on volunteers.

To put the recall question on the ballot in May, the organizers need to collect more than 63,000 signatures in a 30-day window. By contrast, amendments to the city charter require 20,000 signatures in an 180-day window.

Successful efforts to place charter amendments on the ballot — like Propositions A and B, giving the city council more power over policymaking and pushing the city government to obtain more representation in a regional planning group — barely met that threshold in 2023 with 23,665 verified signatures and 20,482 verified signatures respectively.

See here for the previous update. In re: the claims about fundraising, I will just note again that Recall Houston did not file a campaign finance report for July. Maybe they will file one in January, and we can clear up just how much money they have raised/did raise, but as of today none of those figures can be verified. And even if one of them is accurate, none of them are anywhere close enough to finance this effort.

Asked about the difficulty of the task, Hale acknowledged the possibility of failure.

“I think this is a Hail Mary play,” Hale said. “The odds, they’ve been stacked against us from day one. But I think, to me, it doesn’t matter. It’s about doing what’s right, even if we might fail. But we’re gonna put them on blast. We’re gonna get the eyes on everything going on in the city.”

Whatever you think about this effort, a viable attempt to do a recall on Mayor Whitmire would be fascinating, and historic. It might be the most exciting thing to happen in Houston politics since Orlando Sanchez almost unseated then-Mayor Lee Brown in 2001. I’m firmly in the non-Whitmire camp, and I can envision the energy this would bring, if it were real. We have grievances to air, that’s for sure. I don’t mean to dump on Ethan Hale and this effort, because they are trying to do a very hard thing with little to no help. Maybe they can build some support for whoever will run against the Mayor in 2027, which would certainly have value. It remains to be seen whether all this will have been worth the effort. I’ll get back to you on that when I see how many petitions they gathered to turn in.

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HISD wants you to read its own coverage of itself

Oh, good lord.

Houston ISD is looking to lessen its reliance on external news media and instead lean more on its own internal news team, according to the 2025-26 District Improvement Plan obtained by Chron. The shift comes amid mounting community frustration over transparency, ongoing staffing cuts and broad district changes.

The internal plan outlines HISD’s intention to prioritize its in-house news platform, HISD Now, citing challenges posed by misinformation and the viral nature of social media content.

HISD, led by Superintendent Mike Miles, sent the plan to the District Action Committee (DAC) ahead of its Tuesday meeting. The DAC is composed of a diverse group of stakeholders, including parents, teachers, campus staff, community members, and business leaders. The 2025-26 document lists 36 members.

The plan cites the evolving media landscape as a driving factor, noting that “the viralness of information—especially misinformation—has grown exponentially.” It warns that “people seem to be more willing to believe almost anything that supports their point of view regardless of the facts,” complicating the district’s ability to communicate effectively.

“Our efforts to persuade and inform in this type of media environment have suffered from the immediacy of misinformation and entertaining social content,” the document states.

In response, HISD plans to prioritize its own media platform, HISD Now, over traditional news outlets. At the time of writing, the district’s live news channel had yet to air a live report but aims to be fully operational by the 2025-2026 school year, with goals including 50,000 YouTube subscribers and consistent weekly coverage in local media.

The district’s communications plan includes hiring a mobile news crew, building a two-month content calendar and marketing HISD Now beyond employees and parents—signaling a major shift away from traditional media toward district-controlled messaging. It does not provide details on the cost of hiring a news crew to expand the platform.

The district’s media push follows news of the district cutting nearly 450 employees amid ongoing enrollment declines.

Here’s an image from the story that I assume comes from this District Improvement Plan. I’ll discuss the goals on the other side:

Just curious, but I wonder what happens if they don’t meet those goals of 50K subscribers and HISD Now being “repeated (whatever that means) in local print or television media 5 times a week”, or the number of parents who believe the district is headed in the right direction increases by fifteen percent? If any of this is tied to Mike Miles’ next incentive package, we ought to know that. Well, first we ought to know how much this is costing and how many of those recently terminated employees could have been retained if the district wasn’t doing this. Maybe we’ll read a story about that on HISD Now. I’ll blog about it if that happens. Will that count towards the five-times-a-week goal? Who knows? Is this a dumb idea? That one I think we do know.

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Texas blog roundup for the week of October 6

The Texas Progressive Alliance never shuts down as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Continue reading

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Interview with Dwight Boykins

Dwight Boykins

Next up for Houston City Council At Large #4 is a familiar name, Dwight Boykins. That name is familiar because Boykins served two terms on City Council, in District D, having been elected in 2013 and 2015. The amended terms limit law passed in 2015 allows Boykins, who made an unsuccessful run for Mayor in 2019 instead of a final term in D, one more term on Council. In addition to his time on Council, Boykins is the founder and principal of a consulting firm, and served as Director of Government Affairs at TSU. I spoke to him in 2013 for that election, which you can listen to here, and you can listen to this interview here. Please note, his WiFi connection was spotty and at one point the connection was lost and had to be re-established.

PREVIOUSLY:

Felicity Pereyra, HISD District I
Bridget Wade, HISD District VII
Audrey Nath, HISD District VII
Maria Benzon, HISD District V
Michael McDonough, HISD District VI
Monica Flores Richart, HCC Distict I
Renee Jefferson Patterson, HCC District II
Desmond Spencer, HCC District II
Alejandra Salinas, Houston City Council At Large #4
Jordan Thomas, Houston City Council At Large #4

More information about the candidates for these and other races can be found in the Erik Manning spreadsheet, where the buffalo roam and the deer and the antelope play. One more from Houston City Council At Large #4 coming at you tomorrow.

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Tarrant County redistricting map gets cleared

Can’t say I’m surprised.

An effort to stop Tarrant County’s new commissioner precincts was shot down Thursday.

Multiple groups suing the county over the maps asked Judge Megan Fahey to enact an injunction against the county’s new maps, claiming that the map is not legally valid because it focuses on population and partisanship without consideration for other state constitutional requirements for redistricting.

It was part of a lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters of Tarrant County and the League of United Latin American Citizens Fort Worth Council 4568.

The lawsuit alleges the county’s mid-decade redistricting is unconstitutional, naming Tarrant County, the commissioners court and County Judge Tim O’Hare as defendants.

Karla Maradiaga, a staff voting rights attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, said she believes the evidence presented was sufficient to achieve a temporary injunction.

“We believe that the evidence provided by our witnesses and our experts were sufficient to show that we would likely get relief on the merits and that the motion should have been granted,” Maradiaga said.

Still, plaintiffs in the lawsuit weren’t surprised, she said.

“Unfortunately, they were not surprised by the outcome,” she told KERA News. “I think they live on a daily basis with these policies and just how opaque they are.”

[…]

Maradiaga said the denial means attorneys suing the county will need to take “a two pronged approach moving forward.”

“We need to do more work at kind of explaining that law and why it doesn’t apply as the county has framed it,” Maradiaga said. “Then also continuing to provide more evidence, to seek more evidence, particularly from the county … to put before the judge about why we are right on the law and on the facts.”

See here for the previous update. With the failure of the federal lawsuit as well, this means that the new map, which was designed to draw one of the two Democratic commissioners out of their seat, will be in effect for 2026. At least, that’s what I think it means. I’m not sure what to make of that last comment above. Might there be another lawsuit, with different plaintiffs and/or a different argument? Maybe, I guess, but we’re now about a month out from the start of filing season for the primaries, and I don’t think that would be enough time for a new suit to get heard, even if everything moved at maximum speed. I could be wrong, but my money at this point is on the new map being used. That’s a bad outcome and I wish it weren’t true, but it’s where we are.

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The 2025 constitutional amendments

There’s a bunch of them, but not many I’d recommend.

On Nov. 4, Texas voters will get the final say on 17 constitutional amendments — usually listed as statewide propositions at the top of the ballot — including billions of dollars in property tax cuts for homeowners and businesses.

Earlier this year, a two-thirds majority of the state Legislature passed the joint resolutions calling for the constitutional amendment elections, along with the state’s budget for the next two years, which includes $51 billion for property tax cuts.

Texas lawmakers have used multibillion-dollar budget surpluses, the result of inflation and temporary federal stimulus dollars during the COVID-19 pandemic, to pay for tax cuts in recent years. Proponents of tax cuts and bans, including Gov. Greg Abbott, have said they will maintain Texas as a competitive, business-friendly state and contribute to economic growth.

But some lawmakers and budget analysts have raised concerns that passing more tax cuts, especially on school district taxes which the state helps pay for, could be unsustainable.

“We always have to kind of balance giving folks tax relief versus making sure that we still preserve revenue for those public services,” said Shannon Halbrook, a fiscal policy director for the left-leaning Every Texan.

With lots of tax cuts and tax bans, especially through these upcoming constitutional amendment elections, the state and local governments could face a hard time paying for public services such as education, health care, and infrastructure needs in the future, Halbrook said.

Officials with Texas cities and counties say they are already being forced to either cut spending or raise taxes and fees to make up for budgets stretched thin by economic uncertainty, inflation, strict state limits on property tax collections and uncertainty around future federal funds. That’s why some Texans, like voters in Austin, will also see local propositions asking them to approve increasing local property tax rates.

If the constitutional amendments are approved, a majority of state lawmakers and Texas voters would need to pass new constitutional amendments to undo measures. Constitutional amendments are the only ballot propositions Texans get to vote on at the state level and will appear on the top of voters’ ballots, above any local races or measures they may be deciding.

Read on for the details. Most times I’m generally neutral-to-favorable on the bulk of the proposals. This year, I range from “eh, maybe” to “no” to “oh, hell no”. None of these could be on your ballot without some Democratic support, and there are a number of Dem reps who have some explaining to do as far as I’m concerned. All of the items in the second group above and the first three of the last group are all strong “No”s, the rest I will need to figure out and see who endorses what. Go read about these propositions and be prepared to vote accordingly. Some of the last batch of props failed, so don’t take anything for granted. The Barbed Wire, which has a few brief takes on the proposals, has more.

Posted in Election 2025 | Tagged , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Interview with Jordan Thomas

Jordan Thomas

We continue our journey through Houston City Council At Large #4 with Jordan Thomas, who is a familiar presence on Twitter with the Houston urbanist community. Thomas served as Chief of Staff to now-former Council Members Amanda Edwards and Letitia Plummer, and now works as a Project Manager at Grid United, an independent electric transmission company. He has been a union organizer with SEIU, on the Board of Directors of LINK Houston, and on the Board of the ACLU of Texas. He’s a big transit and infrastructure policy wonk and we go into that in the interview, which was done in person so there’s a bit of background noise on this one:

PREVIOUSLY:

Felicity Pereyra, HISD District I
Bridget Wade, HISD District VII
Audrey Nath, HISD District VII
Maria Benzon, HISD District V
Michael McDonough, HISD District VI
Monica Flores Richart, HCC Distict I
Renee Jefferson Patterson, HCC District II
Desmond Spencer, HCC District II
Alejandra Salinas, Houston City Council At Large #4

More information about the candidates for these and other races can be found in the Erik Manning spreadsheet, where mornings are always cool and crisp. More from Houston City Council At Large #4 coming at you.

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Wesley Hunt says he’s running for Senate

Sure, why not?

Rep. Wesley Hunt

Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Houston, entered the Republican primary for U.S. Senate on Monday, complicating an already contentious race between two of the biggest names in Texas Republican politics.

Hunt, a close ally of President Donald Trump, has laid the groundwork for a potential run for months. While the second-term congressman spent the summer publicly avoiding the fray between Sen. John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton, groups affiliated with Hunt dropped some $6 million on ads boosting his profile around the state. And Hunt’s allies have been busy pressing the case that he would carry stronger appeal than Cornyn among the MAGA-dominated primary base, while bringing none of Paxton’s political baggage to the general election.

“The U.S. Senate race in Texas must be about more than a petty feud between two men who have spent months trading barbs,” Hunt said in a statement. “With my candidacy, this race will finally be about what’s most important: Texas.”

A 43-year old former Army captain, Hunt will need to quickly familiarize himself to voters outside his Houston district, as he looks to outpace two opponents who have been elected statewide numerous times. He will also have to overcome the war chest of groups like the National Republican Senatorial Committee — Senate Republicans’ multimillion-dollar campaign arm — which is backing Cornyn and recently discouraged Hunt from entering the race.

Cornyn senior adviser Matt Mackowiak said in a statement that Hunt’s “quixotic quest for relevancy” would only boost Democrats by sparking a more expensive primary “that will endanger the Trump agenda from being passed.” The Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC allied with Majority Leader John Thune, also maligned Hunt’s entry into the race.

“It’s unfortunate that Wesley Hunt has decided to abandon President Trump’s efforts to protect the House majority and instead pursue his political ambitions, also turning his back on the Texans who entrusted him with their vote,” SLF Communications Director Chris Gustafson said. “With every credible poll showing him in a distant third place, the only person celebrating today is a giddy Chuck Schumer.”

But Hunt believes the disapproval of establishment groups will not matter to Texas voters.

“Washington does not get to dictate what happens in Texas,” he said. “Bureaucrats in D.C. do not choose Texas’ leadership; Texans do. This race will be settled by Texans, not entrenched political figures from inside the beltway.”

The Paxton campaign was more receptive to Hunt’s entry.

“We welcome Wesley Hunt to the race,” Paxton adviser Nick Maddux said in a statement. “Primaries are good for our party and our voters, and Wesley and General Paxton both know that Texans deserve better than the failed, anti-Trump record of John Cornyn.”

The most important Washingtonian who could determine the outcome of the primary — President Donald Trump — has not endorsed any candidate.

[…]

Hunt’s decision to run for Senate also creates a vacancy in his 38th Congressional District, which voted for Trump by 20 percentage points last year. The 38th District will become one of at least seven open districts that favor Republicans, between retirements and the creation of new seats via mid-decade redistricting. The glut of competitive primaries will likely drive up ad prices for primary candidates in many Texas media markets, including those running statewide.

It’s fine by me for there to be a massive friendly fire competition for the Senate nomination. If it goes to a runoff and it gets even nastier, so much the better. I don’t really think that materially changes the odds in November, but I figure that chaos is usually to the advantage of the underdog, so bring it on. Hunt is the kind of guy who could have been a substantive member of Congress, someone who served for a long time and had a lot of legislation with his fingerprints on it, but Republicans don’t care about any of that these days. Whatever happens in that primary, it’ll be about vibes and whatever deranged things Trump says between now and then. I doubt he can win, but that’s not my concern.

In terms of electoral performance, the new CD38 is about the same as the old CD38. Hunt got some bonus points as the incumbent, so maybe his departure will make it a tiny bit easier for a Dem to win. Let’s see who comes forward for this seat, and how the current Dems do with their fundraising. If nothing else, I’d like to make the national Republicans sweat this one a little. Daily Kos and the Chron have more.

UPDATE: A few choice quotes from Rep. Hunt from the DMN.

“Texans want somebody who’s going to be an America First freedom fighter,” Hunt said. “They want somebody who’s going to support their Second Amendment rights. They want somebody who’s going to support border security, and they want somebody who endorsed President [Donald] Trump first in the country, before it was cool.”

[…]

Cornyn and Paxton have been trading shots for months, with Paxton questioning Cornyn’s conservative bona fides and Cornyn casting Paxton as ethically unfit for office.

Hunt said the back-and-forth has turned off Texas Republican primary voters, who would see him as a worthy option.

“People are sick and tired of hearing about a blood feud between Ken Paxton and John Cornyn,” Hunt said. “What I have seen from the primary voter in Texas is that they’re looking for an alternative and I’m that guy.”

[…]

Hunt is mounting his first campaign for statewide office, and running in a state as large and diverse as Texas can be challenging. He said his efforts would intensify.

“You have to work hard,” Hunt said. “What I have to do is focus on getting my name ID up statewide, which is what I’ve been doing for the past few months.”

[…]

Hunt said he expects much of the GOP establishment to be against him.

“They’re already against me,” Hunt said. “That means I’m right over the target zone, because the establishment swamp does not pick the leader of Texas. Texans do.”

Hunt said that if elected he would move to draft legislation “to give gun rights back” to Texans and “counteract the gun control legislation” Cornyn helped craft after the Uvalde school shooting.

Cornyn has rejected criticism the bill represented an infringement on the rights of law-abiding American gun owners.

Hunt said Cornyn has been in office too long.

“When John Cornyn first entered into public office, I was two years old,” Hunt said. “The United States Senate is not a retirement community, and it’s time for change, and it’s time for new leadership.”

Hunt said one of the reasons he got into the race is because Paxton isn’t fighting hard enough against Cornyn.

“Ken Paxton is a conservative warrior,” Hunt said. “Nobody’s going to argue with you on that, but the issue is that somebody has to fight for this seat, and you can’t sit back and do nothing.”

Boy, if you could have seen me shaking my head as I read this. I recognize the words he spoke as being English, but they have no meaning. A lot of self-hype and no small amount of self-delusion, but no meaning. Well, I will agree that I’m tired of the Cornyn ads that have been infecting football games, and I dread when Ken Paxton starts running his own. Now I also have to dread Wesley Hunt ads, when all I want to do is watch football. Who’s going to pass a law about that? Not Wesley Hunt, that’s for sure.

UPDATE: These quotes from The Downballot are brutal.

NOTUS’ Reese Gorman reported in July that Hunt had tried to pressure Cornyn to retire by spreading a rumor that Donald Trump might tap the senator to lead NASA. Hunt’s attempts to elbow Cornyn out while positioning himself as the best candidate to stop Paxton, though, did not have the desired effect.

“They’ve pissed off the White House because they’re so badgering,” a GOP operative told Gorman. “The way they’ve gone along operating is very arrogant and unsophisticated, and they’ve been told by multiple folks they need to pump the brakes.”

One unnamed member of the Lone Star State’s gigantic GOP House delegation also said of Hunt, “There’s 25 of us in the delegation, and I’d say he is the least liked out of everybody.”

You should always be wary of anonymous negative quotes like these, as they can serve an agenda, and that admonition to “pump the brakes” is something many an ambitious young political has been told by the old guard. Still, someone on the Republican side doesn’t like this guy, and if his pitch is basically that he’s the guy who can rescue the party from these two tainted squabblers, I’d say it needs some work.

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Measles isn’t done with us yet

The Texas outbreak may be over, but there are other outbreaks out there.

One of the largest measles outbreaks in the U.S. is now centered in bordering areas of southwestern Utah and Arizona.

In Southwest Utah, all but one of the 27 confirmed cases are among unvaccinated, school-age kids, the Southwest Utah Public Health Department reported. In Mohave County, Arizona, which health officials believe is connected to the Utah outbreak, there have been 42 confirmed cases of the highly contagious virus.

An NBC News investigation, done in collaboration with Stanford University, has found that much of the United States doesn’t have the vaccine protection to prevent outbreaks of communicable diseases such as measles.

About 79% of kindergartners in Washington County, Utah, are vaccinated against measles, according to NBC News data. That’s only slightly higher than rates in Gaines County, Texas, the epicenter of the 2025 outbreak earlier this year — and well below the 95% level of herd immunity experts say is needed to protect against an outbreak.

“I’ve worked for this health department for about 18 years, and we’ve never seen a case of measles that I know of up until this point,” said David Heaton, the public information officer for the Southwest Utah Public Health Department. “We are just at that low rate of (vaccine) uptake that does leave us open for this kind of an outbreak.”

Heaton said many community members were vaccine-hesitant before the pandemic, but Covid mandates made some people even more reluctant to get their shots.

“About a month ago, we started getting cases where we could see evidence of community spread, meaning that there was measles being passed on the ground in our five-county district,” said Heaton.

Cases have been steadily increasing in the district of more than 287,000 people and more are expected, health officials said.

The Mohave County Department of Public Health, which borders Utah, first announced a case on Aug. 12. Of the 42 confirmed cases, one child has been hospitalized.

In a statement, the Arizona Department of Health Services said that it’s working closely with officials in Mohave and Utah in a coordinated response to the ongoing outbreak. “This is the highest number of cases we have seen since the 1990s.”

The Arizona outbreak is primarily in Colorado City and the surrounding area, which is separated geographically from the rest of the state by the Grand Canyon. The rural area, which was founded in the 1930s and associated with fundamentalist Mormon leader Warren Jeffs, has a history of isolation.

“This is exactly what you expect to see when you have a highly infectious vaccine-preventable disease drop into a community with low vaccination rates, almost inevitable,” said Dr. Bob England, a former Arizona public health official affiliated with The Arizona Partnership for Immunization.

As of the 2024-25 school year, not a single school in Mohave County had kindergarten classes with herd immunity protection against measles.

Different states, same story. The total number so far is a lot smaller than what we saw in Texas, but this one is still new and the potential for growth is there. I wish everyone who is working to stop this all the best, and I wish everyone who has a kid they haven’t vaccinated would come to their senses.

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Interview with Alejandra Salinas

Alejandra Salinas

We move this week into Houston City Council At Large #4, one of two special elections on my ballot (and yours if you’re in CD18), to fill the seat left vacant by Letitia Plummer after she announced her candidacy for Harris County Judge. There are fifteen candidates in this race, a mix of Democrats, Republicans, and various others, including a write-in. I’ve got four interviews lined up for you, and the first one is the first candidate to make herself known for the race, Alejandra Salinas. Salinas is an attorney who served on the legal defense team for Harris County elected officials who had to fend off the whiny sore loser election challenge lawsuits in 2022. She is a past president of the College Democrats of America, and serves on the boards of Greater Houston LGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce, Second Mile Haiti, a non-profit that works to provide pre-natal and family care to mothers and families in Haiti, and C. 60, a non-profit dedicated to the restoration of LULAC’s first clubhouse in Houston. Here’s the interview:

PREVIOUSLY:

Felicity Pereyra, HISD District I
Bridget Wade, HISD District VII
Audrey Nath, HISD District VII
Maria Benzon, HISD District V
Michael McDonough, HISD District VI
Monica Flores Richart, HCC Distict I
Renee Jefferson Patterson, HCC District II
Desmond Spencer, HCC District II

More information about the candidates for these and other races can be found in the Erik Manning spreadsheet, where mornings are always cool and crisp. More from Houston City Council At Large #4 coming at you.

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