Paxton and aides ordered to sit for depositions on whistleblower trial

Posted on December 21, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Good.

A crook any way you look

A Travis County district judge has ordered Attorney General Ken Paxton and three top aides to sit for depositions in the 3-year-old whistleblower lawsuit against him.

At a hearing Wednesday in Austin, Judge Jan Soifer granted the whistleblowers’ motion to compel the depositions of Paxton; Brent Webster, the first assistant attorney general; Lesley French Henneke, chief of staff at the agency; and Michelle Smith, Paxton’s longtime political aide.

Paxton himself was coincidentally served earlier in the day at a restaurant in Austin, according to a whistleblower lawyer, Tom Nesbitt.

“In this case, I believe the plaintiffs have shown good cause that these four people have unique and superior knowledge of discoverable information,” Soifer said from the bench, adding that the four people were “not just figureheads” but people who knew about issues “at the heart” of the case.

The whistleblowers asked the court last month to force Paxton and his aides to sit for depositions. They said their filing was a last resort after they could not reach an agreement with lawyers for the Office of the Attorney General.

It remains to be seen if Paxton’s side will further fight the depositions. His office’s attorney, Bill Helfand, declined to comment to reporters as he left the courthouse.

“They lost badly,” Nesbitt told reporters after the hearing. “I don’t put anything past Ken Paxton. There’s no limit to the amount of taxpayer money he will spend to hide from accountability, so I’m sure they’ll try some kind of appeal.”

The whistleblowers are four former top deputies — Blake Brickman, Ryan Vassar, David Maxwell and Mark Penley — who sued Paxton in 2020, arguing he improperly fired them after they reported him to the FBI. They alleged he was abusing his office to help a wealthy friend and donor, Nate Paul.

[…]

Soifer ruled against Paxton’s side earlier in the hearing, rejecting their motion to enforce the tentative settlement agreement. It had been their latest effort to effectively shut down the case in Travis County by arguing it was already settled.

They have made that argument despite the Legislature still not approving the $3.3 million, one of the provisions of the agreement.

“It says [it] in plain English,” Soifer said.

When it came to the depositions, Nesbitt argued Paxton’s testimony was especially relevant. His office has publicly said Paxton is the “decision-maker” for the hiring and firing of employees.

“Ken Paxton made these decisions,” Nesbitt said, telling Soifer that it is virtually unheard of for someone to argue in an employment case that the “decision-maker … somehow doesn’t have special knowledge, doesn’t have unique knowledge.”

See here and here for the latest updates. It sounds like the whistleblowers got what they wanted, and based on Paxton’s lawyer’s arguments, they knew it was coming. They took one more shot at claiming that the never-approved settlement agreement meant the case was moot, and had it batted aside. Paxton can appeal this, I presume, and as a big part of his strategy is to delay as much as possible, who knows how that could go. But stories like this give me just a tiny bit of hope that malefactors like Ken Paxton can eventually be held accountable for something.

And this was delightful:

As for Paxton’s deposition, Nesbitt said it was a coincidence that he was served on the same day of the hearing.

“We’ve been trying to find him for a long time,” Nesbitt said. I mean, the dude hides. … And so we finally found him. We got a tip that he was going to be at a restaurant at a particular time.”

Nesbitt did not name the restaurant where Paxton was served. He said Paxton was having “some kind of little holiday lunch” when it happened.

Apparently Angela wasn’t there to haul him away in an escape vehicle. Such a pity all around. The Chron has more.

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DOJ sues Colony Ridge developers

Posted on December 21, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Major plot twist.

The federal government is suing Colony Ridge, accusing the Houston-area developer of using fraudulent lending practices targeting tens of thousands of Latino buyers with false statements and predatory loans in rural Liberty County.

The U.S. Department of Justice and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau lawsuit filed Wednesday in the Southern District of Texas echoes many of the findings in a recent Houston Landing investigation that examined the business practices of the sprawling subdivision.

“Today’s complaint alleges that Colony Ridge targeted Hispanic consumers with predatory loans, misled borrowers about the water, sewer, and electrical infrastructure on its lots, and exploited language barriers by conducting most of its marketing in Spanish while offering important transaction documents only in English,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland wrote in a statement.

“Discrimination in lending harms families and neighborhoods for generations, it is wrong, and it has no place in our country.”

The federal government says the developer’s practices violate four federal laws: the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Consumer Financial Protection Act and the Interstate Land Sales Full Disclosure Act.

The federal government is seeking to halt the lending practices, provide relief for those harmed by them and impose a civil penalty on the developers, according to the news release.

[…]

The lawsuit lays out a bait-and-switch land sale scheme in which the developers allegedly target potential buyers with advertising almost exclusively in Spanish, featuring Latin American flags and regional music from Latin America.

The lawsuit alleges the developers were able to lure tens of thousands of vulnerable Latino borrowers by offering properties for minimal down payments and above-average interest rates. Federal officials said Colony Ridge “continuously fails to assess borrowers’ ability to repay the credit,” contributing to an “extraordinary” foreclosure rate.

At least 30 percent of all seller-financed lots sold between 2019 and 2022 were foreclosed on within three years of their purchase, 15 times the national average, federal officials wrote in their lawsuit. Liberty County reported more foreclosures than some of Texas’ largest counties, including Dallas and Bexar, with Colony Ridge accounting for 92 percent of Liberty County foreclosures, federal officials said.

This is the first predatory mortgage lending case brought by the Justice Department, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said during a news conference Wednesday.

The Colony Ridge scheme is a consequence of historical redlining in the U.S. that leaves vulnerable communities without options for credit, creating ripe targets for homeownership scams, Clarke said. Wednesday’s lawsuit is the Justice Department’s first attempt at “reverse redlining” through its Combatting Redlining Initiative.

See here for my most recent post relating to Colony Ridge, and here fore all of those posts, which covered the absolute bananas reactions to this one housing development. The Chron adds some details.

Colony Ridge’s CEO and president, John Harris, called the lawsuit “outrageous and inflammatory” in a statement sent from a spokesperson.

“Our business thrives off customer referrals because landowners are happy and able to experience the American Dream of owning property. We loan to those who have no opportunity to get a loan from anyone else and we are proud of the relationship we have developed with customers.” Harris said in the statement.

Colony Ridge has been a space for low-income and immigrant families to buy property for themselves amid rising housing costs. The 33,000-acre development northeast of Houston has been the target of anti-immigrant theories, including unfounded claims that the area was a hotbed for crime tied to Mexican cartels.

In October, General Ken Paxton wrote to members of Texas’ congressional delegation and said the development was “attracting and enabling illegal alien settlement in the state of Texas.”

Gov. Greg Abbot, who referred to the area as a “so-called no-go zone,” also called in lawmakers to investigate it as part of the special section in October. Lawmakers would later set aside $40 million for the Department of Public Safety so that it could send more troopers to the area.

The allegations in the lawsuit sound serious. I suppose the wingnut brigade could point to it as proof of their belief that Something Bad Was Going On Over There, but then they’d have to credit the Biden Justice Department, and I don’t see that happening. They’re pretty creative and not at all constrained by fact or reality, so I’m sure there will be something. I’ll need to go back and read the Landing’s previous reporting on this. In the meantime, I’ll keep an eye on it. The Trib has more.

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Another complaint filed over SpaceX launches in South Texas

Posted on December 21, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Have at it.

Credit: Trevor Mahlmann for SpaceNews

Several organizations have filed a new complaint about the environmental impacts of SpaceX Starship launches even as government agencies face criticism for delaying such launches for environmental reviews.

Several environmental groups announced Dec. 15 that they had filed a supplemental legal claim in federal court regarding licensing of Starship launches from SpaceX’s Starbase site near Brownsville, Texas. Those organizations initially filed suit against the Federal Aviation Administration in May, shortly after the first Starship launch April 20.

In the supplemental complaint, the groups — Center for Biological Diversity, American Bird Conservancy, Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas, Inc., Save RGV and Surfrider Foundation — allege the FAA failed to properly analyze the environmental impacts of the first Starship launch before issuing a revised license for the second launch that took place Nov. 18.

That new licensing process included an environmental review by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) regarding a pad deluge system that SpaceX installed on the pad to prevent damage like that the pad suffered during the first launch. The FWS concluded that the deluge system would produce no significant environmental changes.

The environmental groups argue that both FAA and FWS fell short of what was required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to review the environmental impacts of Starship launches. The FAA, it stated in the complaint, “once again failed to take the requisite ‘hard look’ at the impacts of the Starship/Superheavy launch program through a supplemental NEPA analysis.”

FWS, it added, “likewise failed to fully analyze the impacts of the April 20 launch and the potential for further harm to listed species from subsequent launches.” The FWS review, it stated, focused only on the deluge system and not on the environmental effects of the debris from the April launch. The deluge system was intended to prevent the creation of such debris and appeared to be successful, based on the lack of damage to the pad after the second launch.

“Failing to do an in-depth environmental review and letting SpaceX keep launching the world’s largest rockets that repeatedly explode shows a shocking disregard for wildlife and communities,” Jared Margolis, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement about the new complaint. “SpaceX should not be given free rein to use this amazing area as a sacrifice zone.”

[…]

The FAA is overseeing a SpaceX-led investigation into the second Starship launch Nov. 18. Both the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage were destroyed during the flight, with Super Heavy exploding shortly after stage separation and the flight termination system on Starship triggered near the end of the powered phase of flight. Neither SpaceX nor the FAA have provided technical updates on the status of that investigation, including what caused the destruction of both vehicles.

“We’re moving ahead pretty well” on that investigation, Coleman said in an interview after the Dec. 13 hearing. That investigation is occurring in parallel with the application for a license modification needed for the third Starship test flight.

“I don’t suspect there will be any major surprises” with the investigation, he said. “The investigation is going well as progressing as expected.”

See here for the background. The story notes that Ted Cruz was complaining in a hearing that the FAA and other agencies were doing too much and thus slowing down the launch of these rockets, so draw your own conclusions. As things now stand, the next launch will likely happen in early 2024. Bring some protective headgear if you plan to attend, that’s my advice. The Current has more.

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Texas blog roundup for the week of December 18

Posted on December 21, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance is looking forward to the Nakatomi Tower holiday party as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Continue reading →

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ACLU and immigrants rights groups sue over our latest legislative atrocity

Posted on December 20, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Here we go.

Immigrant rights organizations have sued Texas after Gov. Greg Abbott approved one of the strictest state immigration enforcement laws, which authorizes police to arrest immigrants suspected of crossing the border illegally.

In their lawsuit, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Texas Civil Rights Project claim that Senate Bill 4, which Abbott signed on Monday and is scheduled to take effect March 5, violates the U.S. Constitution because Congress has given the federal government sole authority over immigration enforcement.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in an Austin federal court, says SB 4 would prevent immigrants from requesting asylum in the U.S., a right they have regardless of how they enter the country.

The groups filed the lawsuit on behalf of El Paso County and two immigrant rights organizations — El Paso-based Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center and Austin-based American Gateways. The groups are asking a federal judge to prevent Texas from implementing SB 4 and declare it unlawful.

They name Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, and Bill Hicks, El Paso’s district attorney, as defendants.

“Governor Abbott’s efforts to circumvent the federal immigration system and deny people the right to due process is not only unconstitutional, but also dangerously prone to error, and will disproportionately harm Black and Brown people regardless of their immigration status,” said Anand Balakrishnan, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “We’re using every tool at our disposal, including litigation, to stop this egregious law from going into effect.”

[…]

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on Tuesday criticized Abbott and said his government will challenge the law.

“With those policies he wants to win popularity,” he said. “He’s not going to win anything, on the contrary, he’ll lose.”

Neither Biden nor the U.S. Department of Justice have publicly commented on the Texas law, but a White House spokesperson said in a statement that SB 4 “is an extreme law that will make communities in Texas less safe.”

“Generally speaking, the federal government — not individual states — is charged with determining how and when to remove noncitizens for violating immigration laws,” the spokesperson said.

The new law would make it a state crime to cross the Texas-Mexico border between ports of entry. Police who suspect that a person crossed the border illegally can arrest them and charge them with a Class B misdemeanor, which carries a punishment of up to six months in jail. Repeat offenders could face a second-degree felony with a punishment of two to 20 years in prison.

The law allows a judge to drop the charges if a migrant agrees to return to Mexico.

Migrants who decline to return immediately to Mexico would serve their sentence, then be transported by police to a port of entry — and they could face a felony charge for refusing to return to Mexico at that point.

Federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have ruled that immigration laws can only be enforced by the federal government.

I did not follow this bill as it made its way through the Legislature, as I have tried to give a little less head space to these abominations before they become reality. My prediction here is that the plaintiffs will get their restraining order, the Fifth Circuit will put the restraining order on hold, and nobody knows what SCOTUS will do. It’s a big goddam mess, and that’s what Greg Abbott wants. El Paso Matters, Daily Kos, and Texas Public Radio have more.

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Republicans are not going to do anything to loosen abortion restrictions

Posted on December 20, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Even those who want to do so will be forced to back down. The only way forward is to win more elections.

When the Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to abortion last year, strict abortion bans in more than a dozen states snapped into effect. Known as “trigger laws,” many of the bans were passed years earlier, with little public scrutiny of the potential consequences, because few expected Roe v. Wade to be overturned.

Most of the trigger laws included language allowing abortion when “necessary” to prevent a pregnant person’s death or “substantial and irreversible” impairment to a major bodily function. Three allowed it for fatal fetal anomalies and two permitted it for rape victims who filed a police report. But those exceptions have been nearly inaccessible in all but the most extreme cases.

Many of the laws specify that mental health reasons can’t qualify as a medical emergency, even if a doctor diagnoses that a patient might harm herself or die if she continues a pregnancy. The laws also carry steep felony penalties — in Texas, a doctor could face life in prison for performing an abortion.

The overturn of Roe has intensified the struggle between those who don’t want strict abortion bans to trump the life and health of the pregnant person and absolutists who see preservation of a fetus as the singular goal, even over the objections of the majority of voters. In the states where near-total abortion bans went into effect after Roe’s protections evaporated, the absolutists have largely been winning.

And the human toll has become clear.

On the floors of state legislatures over the past year, doctors detailed the risks their pregnant patients have faced when forced to wait to terminate until their health deteriorated. Women shared their trauma. Some Republican lawmakers even promised to support clarifications.

But so far, few efforts to add exceptions to the laws have succeeded.

A review by ProPublica of 12 of the nation’s strictest abortion bans passed before Roe was overturned found that over the course of the 2023 legislative session, only four states made changes. Those changes were limited and steered by religious organizations. None allowed doctors to provide abortions to patients who want to terminate their pregnancies because of health risks.

ProPublica spoke with more than 30 doctors across the country about their experiences trying to provide care for patients in abortion-ban states and also reviewed news articles, medical journal studies and lawsuits. In at least 70 public cases across 12 states, women with pregnancy complications faced severe health risks and were denied abortion care or had treatment delayed due to abortion bans. Some nearly died or lost their fertility as a result. The doctors say the true number is much higher.

Early signs indicated Republicans might compromise, as voters in red states showed strong popular support for protecting abortion access and polls revealed the majority of American voters do not support total abortion bans. That opposition has only hardened since then, as reproductive rights drove a wave of Democratic electoral victories in Kentucky, Virginia and Pennsylvania in November. In Ohio, voters approved an amendment to the state’s constitution guaranteeing the right to an abortion.

But in the most conservative states, Republicans ultimately fell in line with highly organized Christian groups. Those activists fought to keep the most restrictive abortion bans in place by threatening to pull funding and support primary challenges to lawmakers that didn’t stand strong.

Their fervor to protect the laws reflects a bedrock philosophy within the American anti-abortion movement: that all abortion exceptions — even those that protect the pregnant person’s life or health — should be considered the same as sanctioning murder.

This article was published before the Kate Cox situation, which among many other things should make the points made here even clearer. So click over and read the whole thing, it’s worth your time. The story notes that the Texas legislature managed to pass a very small exemption to its draconian anti-abortion law, which it notes was done quietly so as not to stir up the rabble. Extreme gerrymandering plays a role in all this, since so many legislators have only their primaries to worry about. That makes the task of winning more elections a lot harder in many of these states, but I don’t see how that can be avoided. Winning a federal trifecta to pass a national abortion rights bill would help as well, but at some point this has to also be fought at the state level. It’s going to be a long fight.

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A deeper look at de-extinctioning

Posted on December 20, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Really good stuff.

“Finding a dodo bird…”

You are wandering the forests of Mauritius, an oyster-shaped island east of Madagascar, when you spy a dodo, a bird famous for being as dead as one can possibly be. Yet this dodo waddles before you, pecking at fallen fruits and nuts with its bulbous beak, like a ghost whose reincarnation may in some way atone for the human sin of driving the species extinct in the first place. What if I told you that, for hundreds of millions of dollars, this future could be ours? Would you say it was worth it?

Before you answer, there are caveats. The dodo* may not be able to roam free and unbounded in its ancestral forests, where the invasive cats, rats, goats, pigs, and macaques that helped extinguish it in the first place will eagerly extinguish it once again. Barring some interventionist miracle of conservation, the bird would likely be placed in a large fenced enclosure or small, uninhabited island nearby Mauritius. As the asterisk implies, the dodo* wouldn’t be a real dodo, in the strictest sense. It would be a genetic hybrid, a calculated reinterpretation of a dodo—ideally bearing some traits of its namesake but perhaps also those of the Nicobar pigeon, the dodo’s closest living relative, whose cells will be manipulated to express the physical traits of the extinct species. A Nicobar pigeon in all its gothic iridescence is certainly beautiful, but it is not a dodo. And with no real dodos around to teach this new bird how to be a dodo, it may behave like a different bird. Is this dodo* worth it?

If taken at face value, de-extinction is a word that overpromises. It is not possible to reverse extinction and resurrect a dodo or a mammoth as they existed. It is possible to fashion a hybrid, an animal manipulated into being by genetically editing the desired traits of the lost species into the genome of a living relative. This proxy is the realistic dream of de-extinction. The term first entered public consciousness in the spring of 2013 after a series of TEDx Talks at National Geographic headquarters explored the idea of using DNA to bring species back from extinction, coinciding with the publication of a skeptical and measured feature. In the decade since, de-extinction has remained a fixture in the popular-science spotlight, enjoying press reserved for only the most audacious, best-funded research.

The buzziest company in the business of extinction is the venture-capital-funded Colossal Biosciences, which was founded by Harvard geneticist George Church and serial entrepreneur Ben Lamm and rakes in headlines whenever it announces its plans to bring back a new animal. (Colossal has yet to de-extinct an animal.) When Colossal launched in September 2021 with $15 million in private funding, its first target was the mammoth. By the time the company announced plans in August 2022 to bring back a striped Australian marsupial called the thylacine, it had amassed $75 million in private funding. In January 2023, the dodo joined the to-do list. Other organizations have entered the de-extinction game, such as the nonprofit Revive & Restore, but none have the resources and profile of Colossal, which has now raised $225 million in investment capital and is valued at $1.45 billion. It is the mammoth in the de-extinction race.

De-extinction proponents have assembled a profusion of scientific, ecological, cultural, and aesthetic arguments to support the project. Perhaps the most intoxicating argument for de-extinction is the moral one: Bringing back lost species could undo some of the unfathomable destruction people have wrought on the planet. By this logic, de-extinction becomes a feel-good, even heroic story, fulfilling our yearning for atonement. But as I see it, even the wildest, most ambitious promises of de-extinction do not really offer atonement, but instead a grand gesture—even if it works, it will not change the path of shortsighted greed that got us here, meaning a world where 1 million species are racing toward extinction, many in a matter of decades, according to a UN report from 2019. It cannot restore what has been lost, and overlooks all that we have left to lose.

See here and here for some background, and go read the rest. It’s a nuanced and philosophical look at what “de-extinctioning” even means, what are the costs and possible opportunities, and how much of this is achievable. There are some recent antecedents to this idea of bringing a species back from extinction, and there was a whole lot I didn’t know. I’ve expressed enthusiasm for this idea, because it seems cool and wants to do good, but I need to give it a lot more thought. Check this out for yourself and see why.

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Precinct analysis: At Large #5

Posted on December 19, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

PREVIOUSLY:

Mayor’s race
Controller’s race
Harris Health bond referendum
At Large #1
At Large #2
At Large #3
At Large #4

Returning to this as promised for the November elections. I will be doing the same for the runoffs shortly, as the data is now available.


Dist   Alcorn  Batteau Hernandez
================================
A       8,788    2,126     4,230
B       7,634    3,685     2,747
C      25,524    3,829     5,914
D      11,193    5,194     3,578
E      11,141    3,461     6,100
F       3,957    1,487     2,280
G      18,781    3,077     4,559
H       8,277    1,845     5,637
I       5,592    1,969     4,963
J       3,367    1,111     1,920
K       9,636    2,831     3,291
			
Dist   Alcorn  Batteau Hernandez
================================
A      58.03%   14.04%    27.93%
B      54.27%   26.20%    19.53%
C      72.37%   10.86%    16.77%
D      56.06%   26.02%    17.92%
E      53.82%   16.72%    29.47%
F      51.23%   19.25%    29.52%
G      71.09%   11.65%    17.26%
H      52.52%   11.71%    35.77%
I      44.65%   15.72%    39.63%
J      52.63%   17.36%    30.01%
K      61.15%   17.97%    20.88%

This is what you call a dominating performance. Sallie Alcorn won a majority in every district except I, and still won a plurality there. She stomped her two opponents (a perennial and a guy whose name I never bothered to learn) in Districts C and G. Some credit here has to go to Alcorn’s performance as a Council member – she is, by all accounts, one of the best; well-informed, hard working, responsive, you name it. Some credit goes to her incumbency, which gives her a leg up in name recognition; she also had the good luck to draw two non-entities as her opponents, unlike her colleague Letitia Plummer, who drew a much more prominent perennial candidate as her main challenger. Some credit goes to the fact that she raised enough money to advertise, which goes again to name recognition. This is as good a combination as you could want.

One thing that I think was consistent in these At Large races, which has been a theme for some time now, is that especially in a large field the candidates are not at all well known to the voters. With that noted, I want to bring up a comment left on an earlier post asking why the city doesn’t move to holding its elections in even-numbered years, which would once and for all take care of the anemic turnout we get. As I noted in my reply, this was a question recently raised by Houston Landing writer Maggie Gordon. To quote myself:

My main concern is that having city elections at the same time as the Presidential elections is it would totally drown out the local races. Nobody knows who’s running for the At Large seats now, it would be a total crapshoot in an even year. It would also mean that HISD and HCC elections are completely orphaned in the odd years, or we’d have to move them as well and make them even more obscure. Oh, and it would make our already super-long ballots that much longer.

I’m not opposed to this idea. I’d most likely vote for it right now. I’m just saying there would be downstream effects that we ought to think about before we make such a move.

Having them in the non-Presidential years would slightly address the drowning-out issue, but remember that the off years have even longer ballots, as there are more judicial races on them. My point in bringing this up here is that the lawsuit to end At Large Council seats is still out there. I think that suit is an underdog, but if the plaintiffs somehow prevail, then I at least would be more amenable to moving our city elections to even-numbered years. For one thing, we’d only be casting three votes in those elections instead of eight, and for another I feel like we’d be less likely to know little to nothing about the candidates in any of those races. Be that as it may, I’m glad we were still able to elect Sallie Alcorn to an At Large position. She remains one of the best arguments in favor of keeping things as they are now.

I will do an analysis of the two city propositions next, and then move on to the runoffs. Let me know what you think.

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The Texas Medical Board can’t do anything about abortion

Posted on December 19, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

I’m sorry, but this is a complete waste of time, and everybody involved knows it.

In its ruling this week denying a Dallas woman’s petition for an emergency abortion, the Texas Supreme Court said it was the responsibility of physicians — not the courts — to interpret exceptions to the state’s abortion bans. And it suggested that the Texas Medical Board can do more to help them.

The government-appointment board can “assess various hypothetical circumstances, provide best practices, identify red lines,” the court wrote, adding that the board also can seek an opinion from Attorney General Ken Paxton.

But the medical board has so far been silent on how physicians should navigate the legal gray areas around patients like Kate Cox, the 31-year-old Dallas woman, despite requests from people on both sides of the abortion debate. And in a phone call with Hearst Newspapers, Dr. Sherif Zaafran, the president of the board, said it would be impractical to weigh in on specific situations.

“We can’t put up every single hypothetical scenario that’s out there,” Zaafran said. “At the end of the day, what you can reference is what the attorney general put out there, and that’s what we put on our website.”

Zaafran declined to say whether the board would issue guidance, citing pending litigation. Asked about existing guidance, he referred to a July 2022 advisory from Paxton after the reversal of Roe v. Wade, emphasizing that his office will pursue civil and criminal penalties against anyone who violates the state’s bans.

[…]

Given the strict penalties for abortion law violations, it’s unclear whether the board’s guidance would give physicians and hospitals enough confidence to decide what qualifies for an exception. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists also says it’s dangerous for states to create lists of qualifying medical conditions — as Louisiana public health officials did last year — because it’s impossible to include every complication that can arise during pregnancy.

Some lawyers, however, say any guidance from the medical board would be helpful.

“Specific guidance would reassure physicians that they could exercise their medical judgment in these urgent cases and be backed up by state authorities,” said Elizabeth Sepper, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Sepper acknowledged the “downside” to providing specific advice. But [SMU law professor Seema] Mohapatra said the board doesn’t need to list conditions. More generalized guidance could encourage hospital legal teams to act quickly. The advice also could support legal arguments that a doctor used reasonable judgment.

“It’s not going to cover every single situation,” said Mohapatra, who specializes in health law and bioethics. “But in some of those situations, people have said that this (condition) clearly fits within the exception, yet they had care delayed or denied. If there had been hypotheticals or some kind of guidance from the medical board, then the hospital and hospital counsel could say ‘OK, go ahead.’ That would have helped.”

The state Supreme Court’s decision this week provided “limited” help in understanding the law, said Sepper. The court opinion explained that a patient’s risk of death or loss of a bodily function does not need to be “imminent.” But the court introduced more confusion, by saying that physicians have “discretion” while insisting that they use “reasonable medical judgment,” Sepper said.

That language “may allow a prosecutor to second-guess the doctor and argue that her determination of the severity of the patient’s condition wasn’t reasonable after all,” Sepper said.

Emphasis mine. We can talk legal theories and hypotheticals all we want, but the bottom line is that Ken Paxton will go full scorched earth maximal penalty on any doctor or hospital that attempts to exercise its judgment, no matter how horrifying the situation is for the woman. He will never concede that anyone’s condition is sufficiently imminent or life-threatening, he will never agree that any doctor’s judgment is sufficiently reasonable, and he will never back down or admit defeat. There’s exactly one institution in the state that could possibly slow his roll, and that’s the Supreme Court. And as I’m sure that every sitting member of SCOTx is fully aware of Paxton’s vendetta against the Court of Criminal Appeals for daring to rule against him on another matter, they’re even more incentivized to wash their hands of the whole thing.

And so here we are. The next Kate Cox can go out of state if she can afford it, or she can risk her life and health and hope to make it to the other side. And that’s how it will be until we either get a national law allowing abortion again or we elect a new government in this state that will undo the deep, scarring damage this Legislature and this Attorney General have wrought. Point a finger at the Texas Meidcal Board all you want, they didn’t create this mess and they can’t get us out of it.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

What the Texas State Aquarium will be doing this winter

Posted on December 19, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Rescuing freezing animals, for one thing.

The patient, rescued by a concerned stranger, had been in the hospital for almost a year since suffering in the cold around last Christmas.

She had been eating well and gaining weight after her medical team — among the best around — introduced her to some new foods. But it had been a lonely sojourn despite plenty of visitors She was the only patient in the hospital and her name, if she has one, remains unknown.

Still, the green sea turtle was seemingly content last week. She paddled slowly around her personal pool, occasionally surfacing to take a bite of a lettuce leaf or a half-moon nibble of a zucchini slice.

The turtle was being cared for at the Texas State Aquarium’s $16 million Wildlife Rescue Center in Corpus Christi, which opened in March. The nonprofit aquarium, which opened in 1990, has long been one of the region’s most popular tourist attractions, drawing more than half a million visitors each year. And the new rescue center, Texas’ largest, promises to raise the aquarium’s education and conservation efforts to new heights just as climate change increases the potential for more large-scale rescue events.

“I would say the big numbers (of rescues) are driven by cold weather,” said aquarium President and CEO Jesse Gilbert, adding that his team is ready to work at scale. “We engineered a (rescue) basket to lift a ton — literally, a ton — of turtles.”

[…]

Along with a massive pool inside the building, Gilbert said, the center can care for several thousand turtles, birds and other marine animals at once, if such a need arises, as it did during 2021’s Winter Storm Uri.

The 26,000-square-foot facility also features a surgery center, a hospital wing, and an emergency operations center co-owned by the aquarium and several state agencies that can be used during a natural disaster to coordinate wildlife rescue efforts across Texas. The building can withstand a Category 5 hurricane and is equipped with emergency generators, and the aquarium is continuously staffed by marine biologists and others who care for the animals every day.

Read on for more, it’s good stuff. You can go here to learn more from them as well. The winter outlook for Texas is that near normal temperatures are likely, but I doubt anyone is going to dismiss the possibility of another freeze. Whatever happens, the Aquarium should be ready to handle it.

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Title IX complaint filed against Katy ISD

Posted on December 18, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Good, but more will be needed.

A student activist group has filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Department of Education against Katy ISD, claiming that the district’s gender fluidity policy is discriminatory.

The policy, approved by the school board in August, instituted multiple new mandates concerning transgender students, including a measure that requires teachers to report a student if they ask to be identified as transgender so the district can inform the student’s parents.

As of early December, 23 students had been reported to their parents as transgender since the policy took effect in August, according to documents obtained from the district through a public information request.

The youth-led organization Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, or SEAT, on Nov. 17 delivered the complaint to the federal department’s Office of Civil Rights, “asserting violation of Title IX rights with Gender Identity discrimination and perpetuating harmful sex stereotypes and heteronormative gender roles,” according to the complaint.

[…]

In addition to reporting transgender students, the policy also requires staff to use pronouns that correlate to the sex listed on a child’s birth certificate unless they have written parental consent.

“Katy ISD now has a comprehensive anti-trans policy that targets trans students for their identity,” said Cameron Samuels, a SEAT organizer. “(Katy ISD has) conducted an attack on students, questioning our validity and challenging our existence as students who undeniably are in schools, yet they face hostility and policies made against them.”

The policy is also a violation of privacy, said Katy ISD senior and SEAT organizer Pooja Kalawani.

“By enforcing this discriminatory policy, Katy ISD will be intruding on students’ free expression and privacy,” Kalawani said. “Our lives are not something to manipulate with narrow beliefs — cis or trans.”

Through the complaint, Samuels said, SEAT is seeking a “complete repeal of the policy and direct resources for students who are impacted (by the policy) and training for district personnel that would foster LGBTQ inclusion in the district.”

See here for the background. A couple of points need to be made. One, as the story notes, this isn’t really what the Title IX law is for. It’s about ensuring access to programs, and there isn’t a privacy aspect to it. There may be merit to the discrimination claims, but it’s not a clear fit as well. Be that as it may, the students’ goal is to engage the district in mediation, and that may work. I hope it works. But there’s a decent chance the district will consult with their lawyers, decide the students don’t have a leg to stand on, and simply choose to defend themselves until this gets resolved. Keep your expectations modest, is what I’m saying.

The more productive route to fighting this is the same old story we’ve been talking about here ad infinitum: Vote out enough of the problematic Board members until there’s a better majority that will implement better policies. I think we all understand the promise and the limitations of this approach. I’m not here to lecture anyone, I applaud these students for taking the action they have, especially since the next Katy ISD Board elections are a year and a half away and the most recently added members have another two years beyond that before they can be voted out. They’re taking the steps they can take for now, and we’ll deal with the other things when it’s time.

Finally, it’s important for the rest of us to remember that these students shouldn’t be fighting this on their own. The students have organized themselves for this fight, and I hope that other existing orgs are reaching out to them to see how they can help, and to offer those students the opportunity to build their network and get involved in other matters. We’re all in this together.

UPDATE: Katy ISD has elections this May as well. Thanks to Jesus in the comments for the correction.

Posted in Legal matters, School days | Tagged , , , , , , | 26 Comments

SCOTx declines to revive oligarch nuisance lawsuit against Beto

Posted on December 18, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Good.

The Texas Supreme Court said Friday it would not consider Republican megadonor Kelcy Warren’s defamation lawsuit against former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke after a state appeals court dismissed it earlier this year.

The all-GOP court denied Warren’s petition for review without comment, bringing an end to the nearly two-year legal saga.

Warren, a Dallas pipeline billionaire, sued O’Rourke in early 2022, saying O’Rourke defamed him with his critical comments about his company’s windfall profits after the Texas energy-grid collapse in February 2021. Warren’s Energy Transfer reportedly made $2.4 billion in profits as demand for gas skyrocketed during the freeze. Warren later gave a $1 million campaign contribution to Abbott, which O’Rourke used to argue Warren was bribing the governor to go easy on the energy industry as lawmakers were considering power-grid reforms.

The case made its way to the all-Democratic 3rd Court of Appeals in Austin, which dismissed it in June, saying O’Rourke’s comments “fell within the bounds of protected speech.”

The next month, Warren’s lawyer asked the state Supreme Court to review the ruling, saying the ruling from the Austin court gave politicians “carte blanche to defame anyone — rich or poor, strong or meek — without recourse.”

See here for the previous update. What a whiny little crybaby that guy is. They just aren’t making billionaire overlords like they used to in the old days, I tell you. The ones we have today, they’re just not made of the same stuff. A shame, really.

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Let’s host the Women’s World Cup, too

Posted on December 18, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

I’m all in.

The United States and Mexico submitted a joint bid Friday to co-host the 2027 Women’s World Cup that, if successful, would see the North American neighbours stage global soccer’s two showcase events in back-to-back years.

Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands earlier Friday put in a joint bid to be the 2027 hosts, while Brazil put forward its bid to world soccer governing body FIFA last month.

U.S. Soccer said in a statement that bringing the Women’s World Cup to North America would capitalise on a moment of extraordinary growth in women’s sports to deliver a tournament of unprecedented success.

The United States and Mexico, along with Canada, are set to co-host the 2026 men’s World Cup, but rather than viewing that as negative, U.S. Soccer president Cindy Parlow Cone described it as a huge plus.

“This is a pivotal time for women’s soccer,” said Parlow Cone. “The U.S. and Mexico are in a unique position to host a World Cup that will leverage the same venues, infrastructure, and protocols used for the Men’s World Cup just a year prior.

“This will not only unlock the economic potential of women’s soccer, it will send a message to young players around the world that there is no limit to what they can achieve.”

I’m very much looking forward to the 2026 Men’s World Cup being played in part in the US, with at least a couple of games here in Houston. My assumption is that if this bid is successful – probably an underdog, but we can hope – the same sites now hosting for 2026 will be at the top of the list for 2027. That would be awesome.

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

Weekend link dump for December 17

Posted on December 17, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

“Fun fact: In re-recording his old tracks, some of which are over 40 years old at this point, Yankovic had the opportunity to do a studio version of “Another One Rides the Bus,” which he’d never actually recorded in a studio before.”

USA Network made some very watchable shows in the 2000s and 2010s. I was particularly fond of In Plain Sight and Covert Affairs. So, I’m delighted to hear that they are talking about bringing back original scripted programming again. Maybe the best way for linear television to stave off obsolescence is to, you know, be good.

“Which is why the story of “the lemonade that kills you” is really the story of the United States’ uniquely weird and patchy regulatory regime. Rather than double-check that products of all kind are safe and healthy in advance of their release to the people, our great republic relies on these kinds of lawsuits to product Americans from dangerous products. This is far from ideal, and it means the mere existence of such a suit has little bearing on its ultimate merit. The Charged Lemonade suits, for example, have received outsized press attention not because it’s indisputably lethal, but simply because it seems so absurd that something as innocuous as lemonade could (but probably doesn’t) kill you.”

“The pro-Trump lawyer who helped devise the 2020 fake electors plot and already pleaded guilty to the conspiracy in Georgia is now cooperating with Michigan and Wisconsin state investigators in hopes of avoiding more criminal charges, multiple sources told CNN.” Lock them all up.

“Now, in addition to comedy, U.S. conservatives are using action films, dramas and even kids’ cartoons to build their own alternative entertainment industry, one shielded from the alleged liberal biases of Hollywood.” And unfortunately, it’s something we need to take seriously. How to do so, I don’t know. But ignoring it and laughing at it isn’t the best idea.

RIP, Frank Wycheck, former Tennessee Titans tight end who threw the lateral on the “Music City Miracle” play.

The “How To Die In Yellowstone National Park” coloring book makes a nice gift.

“The “Billy Graham Rule” in which Christian men pledge to never be alone with a woman is more about appearance than behavior, but note that there’s no version of such a rule involving a Christian man never being unchaperoned in the presence of a banker or a corporate lobbyist or a hedge-fund manager or a white supremacist or an antisemite or a misogynist. The “Billy Graham Rule” didn’t keep Billy Graham from falling into sin while meeting alone with Richard Nixon.”

“How Former Fundamentalists Are Finding Healing On Reddit”.

“In 2021, Dominion Voting Systems filed a $1.6 billion lawsuit against Newsmax Media, claiming the far-right news channel had defamed it by falsely claiming it had rigged the election. Last week, a Delaware judge ruled that Newsmax had to turn over the personal communications and text messages of Newsmax Media journalists.”

“Lawyers for Moss and Freeman said they would ask the jury to award tens of millions of dollars in damages at the close of the trial. If the jury awards Freeman and Moss what they are seeking, his lawyer, Joseph Sibley said, it “will be the end of Mr. Giuliani.”” Is that, like, supposed to be bad? Because it doesn’t sound bad at all.

“Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville is accidentally the most effective anti-Pentagon politician in recent history. ”

“Kate Cox is a woman who has already been to the emergency room four times “for pregnancy symptoms including severe cramps, leaking fluid and elevated vital signs.” She is a woman who is simply asking to be viewed as an adult human capable of making a medical decision with her physician. And in response, the people in power are decidedly saying to her that there is essentially no medical authority that they trust more than themselves to make that decision—oh, and their decision is always no, and if an actual doctor dares to contradict them, that doctor could be facing a 99-year prison sentence.”

“The Texas abortion ban, no matter what anti-abortion activists and lawmakers say, was meant to prevent women like Cox from getting abortions as much as it was to ban young women from ending unwanted pregnancies early in the first trimester.”

And Donald Trump is the first person to blame for all of this.

RIP, Andre Braugher, two-time Emmy-winning actor best known for Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Homicide: Life on the Street.

“The case of the tomato missing for months in the International Space Station has been solved: Astronauts found the evasive produce onboard.” And justice at last for NASA astronaut Frank Rubio. Oh, and Space Tomato is the name of my next band.

RIP, Craig Watkins, former Dallas County District Attorney. Elected in the 2006 Dallas blue wave, he was a pioneer in creating Conviction Integrity units that reviewed past cases for clear miscarriages of justice. He and his office had some issues in later years, but the legacy he leaves is solid and long-lasting. Rest in peace.

“How The GOP Finally Went All In Against Ukraine“.

“The Story Behind Trump’s Gag Order Involves a Man Under Criminal Investigation for Stalking”.

“On Friday, a jury unanimously ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay $148 million in compensatory and punitive damages to two Georgia election workers he defamed.”

“It’s a stunning damages amount, one which reflects not only the vicious campaign of harassment that Giuliani unleashed by falsely claiming that a video showed the two tampering with ballots at a Georgia voting center, but the extent to which Trump’s consigliere went out of his way to make things as bad as possible for himself. Giuliani earned Howell’s wrath throughout the pre-trial phase by repeatedly ignoring evidence requests from Freeman and Moss’ attorneys. During the trial itself, Giuliani stood outside the courtroom and repeated the claims which led to the defamation claim in the first place, further enraging the judge.”

Now do this guy next.

“It turns out that abortion rights vanished in America because five conservatives barely tried to hide the fact that they could do that, simply because they could do that. And it turns out that they’re increasingly bad at covering their tracks.”

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged | 1 Comment

City ordered to negotiate a contract with the firefighters

Posted on December 17, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

A day of reckoning is arriving.

The city of Houston and the firefighters union are sparring over who bears responsibility for their years-long legal battle, following a judge’s request for them to start renegotiating the firefighters’ contracts within the next month.

The city usually negotiates contracts with the union every few years. Mayor Sylvester Turner’s administration and Houston firefighters hit an impasse in 2017 when the firefighters latest contract expired. Unable to reach a new agreement, the union sued the city, alleging that Houston had broken a state law that sets guidelines for how police officers and firefighters should be paid.

In May, the Texas Legislature passed a bill mandating arbitration for such disputes. The bill’s primary sponsor, state Sen. John Whitmire, is set to succeed Turner in January and has been a vocal supporter of Houston firefighters during his mayoral campaign. The city has since challenged the constitutionality of the new state law.

On Thursday, State District Judge Lauren Reeder affirmed the constitutionality of Whitmire’s legislation. Reeder declined, however, to grant immediate arbitration in this case, stating that the bill cannot be applied retroactively.

At the same time, the judge approved the union’s request for the two sides to start collective bargaining within 30 days. They will negotiate benefits and back pay for each fiscal year since the firefighters have not had a contract or reached an impasse.

[…]

Whitmire has long positioned himself as an ally of law enforcement and first responders, promising “help is on the way” for firefighters when he formally launched his mayoral campaign last year. He secured the endorsement of the Houston’s firefighters union in September, after successfully championing the binding arbitration bill in the Legislature.

The mayor-elect could not be reached for comments on Friday but has previously vowed to prioritize ending the long-standing stalemate once he takes office.

“We will meet with them and give them a contract that is fair to Houstonian taxpayers and the firefighters,” Whitmire said at his victory party earlier this month. “Can you imagine a city suing their first responders? We couldn’t make it without them.”

Turner has repeatedly warned of the fiscal consequences of additional pay raises. As federal COVID-relief dollars are set to dry up, officials have forecast deficits between $114 million and $264 million during the next mayor’s first term.

“The binding arbitration bill may play well for some politically, but it will not bode well for Houston and its financial future,” Turner said earlier this year of Whitmire’s bill. “At a time when we are trying to eliminate structural financial barriers, this bill imposes another structural barrier.”

See here for the previous update. The quoted bit after the ellipsis captures the situation the new Mayor is inheriting. He will need to come to an agreement with the firefighters, which will cost the city more money, at a time when he will also need to deal with near- and long-term budget issues. In the same way that Mayor Turner had to deal with pension reform before he could really do much else, Mayor-elect Whitmire will have to get this done before he can move on to other things. In all sincerity, I wish him luck.

Posted in Local politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Paxton versus the CCA

Posted on December 17, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

He’s on a revenge tour.

A crook any way you look

Attorney General Ken Paxton is turning up the heat in the Republican primary for Texas’ highest criminal court, where three judges are up for reelection.

Paxton has long made clear he would be going after the Republican judges over their 2021 ruling that struck down the attorney general’s ability to unilaterally prosecute voter fraud, saying that his office must get permission from local county prosecutors to take on such cases. The three judges up for reelection next year — Sharon Keller, Barbara Hervey and Michelle Slaughter — were all in the 8-1 majority.

Now, Paxton’s plan to unseat the judges is coming into focus. Primary challengers to all three judges filed Saturday, two days before the deadline. And in an announcement first shared with The Texas Tribune, Paxton’s allies have started a new political action committee, Texans for Responsible Judges, that will work to defeat the incumbents.

“Despite Texas’ reputation for conservative leadership, the Court of Criminal Appeals remains plagued by judges who’ve abandoned their conservative roots,” the PAC’s executive director, Sam Vrana, said in a statement. “Their decision to strip the Texas Attorney General of the power to prosecute voter fraud has left Texas undefended against liberal district attorneys.”

The attack on the judges dovetails with Paxton’s more recent commitment for political revenge targeting Texas House members who voted to impeach him in May. Paxton was acquitted of abuse-of-office charges by the Senate after a trial in September.

Keller, the presiding judge who has served on the court since her first election in 1994, is being challenged by David Schenk, a former state appeals court judge. Hervey’s challenger is Gina Parker, a Waco attorney. And Slaughter’s opponent is Lee Finley, a lawyer from Paxton’s native Collin County.

Both Schenk and Parker have run competitive races for statewide judicial office before. Schenk ran against Texas Supreme Court Justice Evan Young in the 2022 primary and got 45% of the vote. Parker challenged another Court of Criminal Appeals judge, Bert Richardson, in the 2020 primary and received 48%.

[…]

The 2021 ruling came just days after the filing deadline for the 2022 primary, so Paxton was unable to recruit challengers back then.

In the 2021 opinion, the court said the law had violated the separation of powers in the Texas Constitution, letting the executive branch intrude on the judicial branch by attempting to prosecute election cases without being asked by a local prosecutor.

Paxton attacked the ruling, saying the court handed “Soros-funded district attorneys” the exclusive power to determine whether to prosecute voter fraud. And he called for the electoral defeat of all eight judges who supported the ruling.

“We got to make sure the next round that we pay attention to those people and get rid of everybody but Kevin Yeary,” Paxton said while campaigning for reelection last year, referring to the lone dissenting judge in the opinion.

The case stems from when Jefferson County’s district attorney declined to prosecute Sheriff Zena Stephens over campaign-finance allegations related to the 2016 election. Paxton’s office stepped in and obtained an indictment from a grand jury in neighboring Chambers County.

[…]

Asked for comment on the efforts to unseat the judges, Slaughter touted her record.

“As a constitutional conservative and originalist judge with over a decade of judicial experience, I am confident that the people of Texas will reelect me to the Court of Criminal Appeals,” Slaughter said in an email.

Harvey also responded with a statement pitching herself for reelection, saying has been on the court for 23 years and has “consistently followed the Constitution.”

“I have also run the Judicial Education Grant for more than 20 years and am the co- chair of the Judicial Commission on Mental Health,” Hervey said. “I hope my dedication to the citizens of Texas speaks for itself.

Keller provided a brief response when asked about Paxton’s focus on the 2021 ruling.

“We just followed the Constitution,” she wrote in an email.

See here, here, and here for the background. It takes a mighty unusual set of circumstances for me to feel a twinge of sympathy for Sharon effing Keller, but here we are. It would be best if these three won their primaries, and it would be even better regardless of that outcome for the Democrats running for those benches to prevail in November. They are Holly Taylor (running for Keller’s seat), Nancy Mulder (running for Hervey’s seat), and Chika Anyiam (running for Slaughter’s seat). It took the Secretary of State’s candidate listing a couple of days to list them all – I had originally fretted about the possibility of not having candidates for several statewide judicial races – but in the end we got a full slate. And this is definitely the year to have one.

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Autonomous Metro shuttle 2.0

Posted on December 17, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Cool.

Metro is restarting its delayed study of autonomous transit, with the full-throated support of outgoing Houston mayor Sylvester Turner as a vital step toward a region not further choking on cars and trucks.

“Those objectives do not end at the end of anybody’s term,” Turner said at a Metropolitan Transit Authority event touting the agency’s new shuttle and electric bus. “Those are things you have to continue if you want to get where you are going.”

Both the shuttle and bus will go into service in the coming weeks, officials said, once they complete all the needed testing. Each are part of efforts, largely supported by federal funds, to transition Metro away from diesel-powered buses toward cleaner fuel types such as electric, fuel cell and hydrogen.

Metro Chairman Sanjay Ramabhadran said the agency remains committed to change, but not to any one technology. The agency is also balancing where it is deploying new technologies to add services where there is demand, Ramabhadran said, and where Metro can improve air quality by lowering its emissions in neighborhoods affected by poor air quality.

“There is a growing desire for robust, equitable transit,” he said.

There is also interest in transit that can be scaled to neighborhoods that need better access but do not need a full-sized bus, driving some of the interest nationally and in Houston with autonomous vehicles. The autonomous shuttle is operated by a system called ToNY, an acronym for To Navigate You, developed by Perrone Robotics. Metro, the Houston-Galveston Area Council and others are involved in the upcoming testing.

See here for some more on the initial version of this, which involved smaller vehicles just on the TSU campus, and here for a mention of the new version in the context of Cruise and other autonomous vehicles operating in Houston. There’s a fuller explanation of this service later in the article – it will run in a loop from the Eastwood Transit Center to the TSU library, and there will be an operator on board, among other things. This is a 12-month pilot funded by a Federal Transit Administration grant, and what happens after that depends on how this goes. I’ll be very interested to find out.

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

HISD Board approve District of Innovation plan

Posted on December 16, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

No suspense there.

Houston ISD will be allowed to extend the school year and begin it earlier after the district’s state-appointed board of managers unanimously approved a “District of Innovation” plan Thursday, marking the end of a process that began in September.

The plan, which exempts the district from seven state laws, is part of a Texas initiative designed to give districts more flexibility. In addition to changes to the academic calendar, the plan also opts the district out of requirements to use the state’s teacher evaluation tool, seek state waivers before hiring uncertified high school teachers and more. (A full description of all the changes can be found here.)

HISD Superintendent Mike Miles, who was appointed along with the board in June as part of state sanctions against HISD, has argued the plan is necessary to drive gains in student achievement, and that the current 172-day academic calendar is too short. HISD’s calendar will be no longer than 180 days next year and no longer than 185 days after that under the plan.

HISD has said it plans to present the proposed 2024-25 academic calendar based on the new exemptions from state law to the school board on Feb. 8. The first day of next year will be between Aug. 7 and 14, HISD has said.

But community members voiced concerns that hiring uncertified instructors could lower academic standards and extending the school year could spur an exodus of teachers.

The eight board members present for Thursday’s vote did not discuss the plan. Miles was not present at the meeting but released a written statement after the board passed the plan.

“We are making the bold changes required to improve instruction and help students develop the competencies they will need to succeed in the future,” he said. “Having the (District of Innovation) designation is long overdue and will allow us to accelerate our work in important ways.”

The vast majority of Texas districts have already received the District of Innovation designation, but the step has been controversial in HISD. A district committee shot down a similar proposal in 2021 when HISD’s elected school board governed the district, halting the approval process.

[…]

The final draft of the plan included key revisions in response to community feedback. After pushback from families, the final plan abandoned measures that would have raised elementary school class size limits and nixed a requirement that families be notified when their child’s teacher does not have a certification. The original proposal included 10 exemptions to state law, compared to the final draft’s seven.

Another key provision of the final plan allows HISD to decide the punishment for students caught in possession of vapes on a case-by-case basis, rather than automatically sending them to a Disciplinary Alternative Education Program, as required under a new state law.

Exactly how some of the components of the innovation plan will function in practice remains an open question.

The plan includes “implementation guidelines” that are not legally binding, but Miles has promised to follow. For example, the guidelines limit the hiring of uncertified teachers without state certification waivers to high school positions.

Community members have expressed concern that there is no legal avenue to hold HISD to the implementation guidelines.

See here for the previous update. Again, I have no objection to the idea of the DOI designation, and I think some of the specific items on it are unquestionably good. I commend the District Advisory Committee for their work, and for their responsiveness to community feedback, which has not exactly been a hallmark of the Mike Miles regime. There are still a lot of details to be filled in, and as noted many times before we are all being told to trust Mike Miles and his process when there’s often little transparency and no oversight or mechanism of accountability on him. We are so often left in the position of hoping like hell it all works without any reason to truly believe it. I’m almost used to it by now.

On a related note:

Three of HISD’s elected trustees — Dani Hernandez, Sue Diegaard and Judith Cruz — spoke in favor of an agenda item which will add annual student achievement benchmarks for NWEA MAP testing to the district’s goals, and a monitoring calendar that will require the board to hear monthly updates on their progress.

“Fifty-nine percent, over half, of our third graders are not reading at grade level. That happened on our watch, and yet I don’t hear any outrage about that,” Diegaard said. “I commend the board for setting the most ambitious goals in the history of this district, and in achieving them will make more progress toward closing the achievement gap than any district in the nation. I hope you can achieve what we couldn’t.”

Jane Friou, a parent of a special education student, however, urged the board to wait until the parameters for those benchmarks were fully completed. The baseline data for special education students will not be available until January 29, 2024, according to the district, and thus their NWEA MAP goals have not been set.

“It would be wise to delay this important vote until the public can review the completed documents and make an informed comment on them,” Friou said. “The superintendent works for you, and you can ask for more.”

The district’s goals are commendably high, and I believe that the change to a phonics-based reading curriculum (third item) will be a big step towards those goals. We still have to actually achieve those goals – note in that linked story, Miles warns that the year one progress is likely to be minimal, which I can understand but also recognize as a bit of ass-covering. This comes back again to the enforced hope about the Miles agenda, which also means hoping that all of the other chaos Miles is bringing to the district won’t have other negative effects. And now we’re being told we won’t really know if any of this is working for at least two years. That’s asking for a lot of faith. It better be worth it. The Press has more.

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

Media Matters sues Ken Paxton

Posted on December 16, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Turnabout is fair play. Whether it’s justiciable or not, we’ll see.

A crook any way you look

Media Matters for America sued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in federal court late Monday, alleging that Paxton violated the First Amendment last month and chilled its work when he opened an investigation into the organization over its reporting into Elon Musk’s X app.

Media Matters, a progressive watchdog group, said Paxton’s investigation was unlawful retaliation designed to punish it for stories it reported that alleged that major ad campaigns were running next to white nationalist content on X.

The stories contributed to trouble for Musk and X and seemingly helped inspire a massive wave of pullouts by advertisers from the social media platform, including Apple and Disney.

Paxton, a Republican, announced Nov. 20 that he was opening an investigation into Media Matters “for potential fraudulent activity” related to its investigation of X. Musk at the time applauded the probe, saying on X, “Fraud has both civil & criminal penalties.”

Paxton’s announcement coincided with X’s suing Media Matters, claiming it unlawfully interfered with X’s relationships with advertisers.

The lawsuit does not allege that Musk and Paxton are colluding, but it says Paxton was one of several “politicians and media figures” who “swiftly jumped to Musk’s cause” after Media Matters’ reporting.

Lawyers for Media Matters said in the lawsuit Monday that “the chill imposed by his retaliatory scheme injures Plaintiffs’ ability to investigate and publish news stories and further chills their ability to participate in a robust public discussion around political extremism on the X platform.”

The lawsuit asks a judge to block Paxton’s investigation permanently. It was filed in federal court in Maryland, where the Media Matters reporter who wrote the articles, Eric Hananoki, lives and works. It alleges violations not only of the First Amendment but also of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of due process and the reporter “shield” laws in Maryland and Washington, D.C., which were designed to protect journalists from being compelled to disclose their sources in certain situations.

[…]

The lawsuit also says Media Matters is outside Paxton’s jurisdiction. It is based in Washington, and it says it does not transact business in Texas, as defined by the state’s business code.

“That Plaintiffs may be dragged to court in an unknown, unfamiliar, and untouched venue in Texas at the option of Attorney General Paxton further chills their speech,” the lawsuit says.

See here for the background. I don’t know what the legalities are here, but this is what Paxton deserves. Well, he deserves a lot more than this, but it’s a start. The Daily Beast has more.

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Where are we going to count the primary votes?

Posted on December 16, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

I’m a little puzzled by this.

With the March primaries around the corner, Harris County still does not have a confirmed location to run its election operations. Two of the county’s regular sites – NRG Arena and George R. Brown Convention Center – are booked already, leaving county officials scrambling to find a large enough space that is available.

Texas primaries will be held on March 5, but the county needs a location before early voting begins Feb. 20. That’s when NRG will be focused on a different kind of horse race. It serves as the primary horse competition facility for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. George R. Brown Convention Center will host the Texas Association of School Business Officials, followed by Commodity Classic, the annual convention and trade show of the wheat, corn, soybeans and sorghum industries.

After years of turnover of Harris County election officials, County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth recently took over running elections on Sept. 1, following a new state law abolishing Harris County’s appointed elections administrator went into effect.

Weeks later, Hudspeth still hasn’t gotten a moment to catch her breath. She inherited the job just in time to sprint through the Nov. 7 election and Dec. 9 runoff. In January, there likely will be a special election to fill a seat vacated by the winning Houston mayoral runoff candidate, either state Sen. John Whitmire or U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Hudspeth said.

On Tuesday, Hudspeth told Harris County Commissioners Court that while the county is still looking for a location to run the March primaries, the Office of County Administration, Harris County Engineering Department and Harris County Attorney’s Office are all working with Hudspeth to find a solution.

“The one thing that’s keeping me up most at night is where the heck are we going to go for the March primaries,” Huspeth said.

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo asked Hudspeth when the county needs the location confirmed.

Hudspeth answered, “Now.”

Jan. 1 is the realistic deadline for securing a site, Hudspeth added.

Hudspeth offered some possible solutions, including a former Sam’s Club store and Northwest Mall, an abandoned shopping mall.

At Tuesday’s meeting, First Assistant County Attorney Jay Aiyer said officials have the issue under control.

“I know the engineering folks have been looking for a suitable location, and we’ve already started the process to expedite any real estate contract that would be needed to make sure the clerk’s in by Jan. 1 at the latest,” Aiyer said.

While Reliant Stadium has been used regularly for counting the votes in November elections, the Rodeo happens every year at that time as the story notes. I have to think this isn’t the first time that the GRB has been unavailable as well, but maybe that’s not true. In any event, Houston is a big city with plenty of potential locations. I’m sure this will get sorted. Indeed, this story was from last week, so it’s possible this has already been resolved. It’s still a little weird.

(For what it’s worth, my first thought was the Toyota Center, but the Rockets have a home game on March 5, so no dice.)

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One key takeaway from the SCOTx ruling in the Kate Cox case

Posted on December 15, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

I’m sure you’re as mad about the Kate Cox case as I am. The thing you need to know is there is very much something you can do about it. Like, right now.

When a majority of Texans want the Legislature to expand access to abortion, it’s a bold political move to throw the weight of the state against an “extremely sympathetic plaintiff,” [UT law professor Elizabeth] Sepper said.

“It shows that Texas politicians feel so shielded from any sort of electoral consequences related to attacks on women’s equality that they’re just going to keep on keeping on,” she said.

[…]

When the U.S. Supreme Court threw the abortion issue back to the individual states, it handed a great deal of authority to state supreme courts, which have typically drawn less attention than their federal counterparts. Texas’ Supreme Court is unique in that it handles only civil cases, and is one of just a handful of states that selects justices through a partisan election system.

All nine justices are Republicans, a mix of longtime jurists, acolytes of Gov. Greg Abbott, and at least one anti-abortion activist.

Justice John Phillip Devine was first elected in 2013, when he unseated a Republican incumbent and ran unopposed in the general election. Before joining the high court, he was best known for fighting to keep a copy of the Ten Commandments displayed in his courtroom, and during his campaign, proudly claimed he was arrested 37 times protesting outside abortion clinics.

He also made a campaign video about his wife’s seventh pregnancy, which she carried to term despite a lethal fetal abnormality. The baby died an hour after birth. According to the Texas Observer, the since-removed video asks, “What if your beliefs were so powerful, they allowed you to fearlessly risk your life for the life of your unborn child?”

Devine is up for reelection in 2024, alongside Justice Jimmy Blacklock, Abbott’s longtime general counsel. During his campaign, Blacklock attended an anti-abortion rally alongside Abbott, where the governor said he doesn’t “have to guess or wonder how Justice Blacklock is going to decide cases because of his proven record of fighting for pro-life causes.”

Blacklock told The Texas Tribune at the time that Abbott just meant he is confident in Blacklock’s judicial philosophy.

“I will be the kind of judge who looks only to the text of the Constitution and the text of the laws, and does not go beyond that to impose my own personal views on these cases,” Blacklock said.

After Monday’s ruling, the Texas Democratic Party said all three justices up for reelection will have challengers in the general election.

State Rep. Donna Howard, a Democrat, said this case, as much as any since the overturn of Dobbs, will hopefully shine a spotlight on the Texas Supreme Court

“The way the winter storm put ERCOT on everyone’s radar, abortion is going to put the Texas Supreme Court on people’s radar,” she said. “Voters may not have known who was on the Supreme Court or what the Supreme Court did before. But they will now.”

The third Justice on the ballot this year is Jane Bland. You might have heard me say a time or two that nothing will change in this state until the government changes. In particular, stuff like this will keep on happening until people who are now in office lose elections because of it. We can’t vote against Ken Paxton next year, but we can vote against these three. The best thing you can do towards that end is find the people in your life who aren’t committed Democrats – the low-information voters, the non-wingnut Republicans who don’t support complete abortion bans, you know who I’m talking about – and make sure they know about these three and why they need to be voted out. It’s not going to be easy, and it’s almost certainly going to take getting a substantial number of nominal Republicans to not vote for these Republicans, but it’s there to be done. If you’re mad about this and want to channel that into something constructive, this is what I suggest you do.

You may now be saying “Great! I know who to vote against! But maybe help me understand who I’d be voting for? Those people you want me to talk to, they like having a name and a reason to vote for them.” True, and good point. Christine Weems is running against John Devine. Weems is a District Court judge here in Harris County, elected in 2018 and re-elected in 2022. Randy Sarosdy, a trial and appellate lawyer in Austin, and DaSean Jones, another District Court judge in Harris County also elected in 2018 and re-elected in 2022, are in the primary against Jimmy Blacklock. Bonnie Lee Goldstein, a 5th District Court of Appeals justice out of Dallas, and Joe Pool, an attorney in Hays County who ran for SCOTx in 2016, are competing to run against Jane Bland. So take a look at them now and see who you’d like to support in March, and you’ll be better prepared to talk them up to your audience.

(It would also be very nice if some national money came in to run ads against these Justices and remind everybody of what they did. Might help the nominee for Senate in the process, which would have all kinds of beneficial effects. That’s not on you and me, that’s way above our pay grades, but it would be nice. I’m just saying.)

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School safety funding is still a farce

Posted on December 15, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Blame Greg Abbott and his voucher monomania.

Public school administrators were well aware that the Texas House’s vote to block a school voucher program last month would likely mean getting no new money for teacher raises and inflation adjustments this year. Gov. Greg Abbott had long threatened to veto any education funding bill without a voucher component.

But they were surprised and disappointed that proposals that would have provided them with additional funds for school safety — a stated priority for many lawmakers in the aftermath of the Uvalde school shooting — also fell apart.

The fourth special legislative session this year ended without a vote on separate House and Senate bills that would have boosted school safety funding — both of which came after school districts statewide complained they didn’t have enough money to fulfill new safety requirements passed earlier this year.

Now, with many districts already operating in deficit budgets, superintendents across the state say they will be forced to make significant budget cuts to meet the new safety mandates.

“Whether we’re rural, large, small, urban, suburban, when we superintendents get together and chat… all of us are like, ‘Where are we going to get the dollars? What are you cutting?’” Dallas Independent School District Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde said. She added that her district might have to nix extracurriculars, field trips and transportation for students in magnet schools — along with laying off teachers and increasing student class sizes.

House Bill 3 — which the Texas Legislature approved in May in response to the Uvalde shooting — requires districts to post an armed security guard at every school and provide mental health training to certain employees. To fund these measures, the law gave school districts $15,000 per campus and $10 per student, along with allotting $1.1 billion to the Texas Education Agency to administer grants that schools can apply for. In 2022, lawmakers also approved $400 million to help school districts pay for safety upgrades.

Last month, the House drafted a bill that would have boosted that funding by $1.3 billion. The Senate crafted its own $800 million school safety bill, which would have also increased the funding schools receive for safety upgrades and given the TEA $400 million more for its school safety grants. Both bills failed to advance for a vote in the opposite chamber.

Elizalde said Dallas ISD went into a $186 million deficit this year to keep up with costs, including the implementation of the new security measures ordered by HB 3. The district has recently acquired a grant of more than $20 million from the TEA, she said, but the one-time grant won’t ensure Dallas public schools can keep up with security mandates in the long term.

[…]

Elizalde said Dallas ISD has opted to hire trained security guards instead of licensed police officers, both because of a law enforcement officer shortage and because security guards typically cost less.

But even the cost of security guards is barely covered by HB 3’s funding, Temple ISD Superintendent Bobby Ott said. Hiring security guards across his 15-school district can cost up to $900,000, which would be on top of the $1.8 million Temple ISD needs to pay for all the required infrastructure updates, Ott said. The district only got $200,000 through HB3, and the state only awarded it $400,000 through the new grant program.

“I’ve always said that House Bill 3 has really just passed on debt to school districts,” he said.

See here for the background. You don’t have to just blame Abbott, of course – Dan Patrick is equally responsible, as is the Republican-majority Legislature. They’re the ones who passed this enormous unfunded mandate instead of doing almost anything tangible to try to reduce gun violence. And you know what I’m going to say about that. Same story, different chapter, and it’s a very long book.

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Dispatches from Dallas, December 15 edition

Posted on December 15, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

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

This week, in news from Dallas-Fort Worth, we have the end of the filing period for the March primaries, including a surprise primary matchup for a state Senate seat here in Dallas; competing proposals for next year’s bond election in Dallas have our city officials getting cranky; that big property in Irving that the Adelsons have bought; Pale Horse gets a new name; short-term rentals, both those in Dallas and those owned by AG Ken Paxton; a roundup of school district news; DPD’s new constitutional policing unit; the question of who’s bigger in rodeos, Fort Worth or Houston; and more.

This week’s post was brought to you by Apple’s Electroclash essentials playlist.

The big news this week is the close of filing for the March primary and the fallout around open seats and which incumbents have drawn primary opponents. KERA has a rundown of area races. The DMN has a good rundown of the Texas congressional delegation’s issues. For the Lege, D Magazine has an overview, plus this piece from KERA about Collin County and the Paxton primary opponents to the legislators who voted against him in his impeachment earlier this year. For complete and detailed news about who’s running in Tarrant County, I refer you to the Fort Worth Report’s election tag, which has stories about pretty much everybody who filed.

The state of the primary in CD 12, Kay Granger’s current seat, is pretty well known. It’s a heavily Republican district. Two Democrats have put their hat in the ring, plus a scrum of Democrats. You may recall that John O’Shea was already planning to primary her and that Craig Goldman, who currently represents HD 97 in the Lege, was the other name brand in what appears to be a crowded primary field. Goldman was on the pro-impeachment side of Paxton matters this summer so it’ll be interesting to see how the Tarrant County GOP tries to put a thumb on the scale against him, and for whom.

After Rep. Michael Burgess’ retirement, CD 26 has a crowded race. Five Republicans and one Democrat will by vying for his seat. I don’t have a good sense for what’s going on in this race, but like CD 12, I’ll be watching it to see which candidates get big GOP backing.

I’m in CD 24, represented by Beth Van Duyne, who is seeking her third term. Two Democrats are contesting the primary: Sam Eppler, whom I know nothing about, and Francine Ly, who has already been texting me for support. Before redistricting, I was in CD 5 and I’m sad but unsurprised to report that Lance Gooden has no primary opponent and no Democrat to oppose him in the general.

In the local state Senate filings, the most exciting news is in SD 16, putting me at ground zero. Nathan Johnson, my incumbent state senator, drew a last minute primary opponent in Victorian Neave Criado, currently holding HD 107 here in Dallas. This is over Johnson’s vote for SB4, which I didn’t like but I can see why he held his nose and voted for it. Johnson is canny and I appreciate his instincts, and as much as I like having a positive choice between two good candidates, I don’t know that Neave Criado can do as well in the Senate given her more confrontational style. That said, I am open to being convinced, and having John Bryant behind her, as mentioned in this KERA piece, is a point in her favor for me. You’ve probably already read this, but the Texas Tribune also has a piece on this race. At press time for these articles, nobody was clear on who was going to run for HD 107; I hope to have some information on that next week.

In other State House news, the big item is in Tarrant County, where HD 97 is now open as incumbent Craig Goldman is running for Kay Granger’s Congressional seat. There’s a good quick summary in the KERA piece I mentioned above and the Fort Worth Report has details on the two Republicans and two Democrats who’ve filed for it. I’m still wading through reports but it also looks like the Tarrant County Republican House members who voted to impeach Ken Paxton unsurprisingly drew primary opponents.

Last, but not least, Denton County has our first residential eligibility question of this cycle, as one of the Republicans vying for the open SD 30 seat says the other guy lives in SD 12. This is the first question of the cycle but it won’t be the last.

In other news:

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SCOTUS takes up mifepristone appeal

Posted on December 14, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Get ready.

The Supreme Court announced Wednesday that it will hear arguments on the accessibility of the abortion drug mifepristone in the biggest abortion case since Dobbs.

The case stems from a widely panned decision handed down by notorious Donald Trump appointee U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who last April suspended the Food and Drug Administration’s 20-plus-year-old initial approval of the drug.

Back in August, a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals panel reluctantly ruled that the initial approval was too old to challenge, but gave the greenlight to reimpose restrictions — including a shorter on-label gestational window, requiring multiple in-person visits to providers, barring the pills from being mailed — that the agency had lifted since 2016, finding them to be unnecessarily onerous.

The Biden administration and a drug manufacturer asked the Supreme Court to review the 5th Circuit ruling. In the meantime, the high court had stayed the lower court orders, keeping mifepristone available as usual until the case is resolved (Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from granting the stay).

In a possible sign of where this is headed, the Supreme Court also on Wednesday rejected a related cross-petition from the anti-abortion doctors, which asked it to revisit that initial approval.

That rejection coupled with the serious procedural issues with the case, may, depending on the bloodlust of the right-wing Supreme Court justices, keep the case from being a direct attack on abortion access. It’s far from clear that the anti-abortion doctors who brought the initial lawsuit had standing to do so. Their claimed injuries are of a hypothetical nature, including that some women might experience adverse reactions from the (very safe) drug and need treatment in their emergency rooms. The doctors have argued that they would then have to spend limited time and resources on the floods of women admitted (which have not yet materialized in the two decades the drug has been commonly taken) and could be sued for malpractice or otherwise open to liability.

There are also timeliness and exhaustion questions, concerning whether the groups brought their complaints soon enough and whether they went through the proper agency channels first. The high court might be more than happy to home in on the procedural issues and sidestep another (highly electorally motivating) abortion bombshell. Pharmaceutical companies, advocates and experts have also warned that upending the FDA’s approval of mifepristone could open the floodgates to an enormous tranche of drugs and medical devices being challenged too.

See here, here, here, and here for some background. I’m going to link to a bunch of other articles about this, but you should start with Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern.

There are good reasons to believe SCOTUS will chuck the case because the shady Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and its members simply lack standing to sue and really always did. To let the plaintiffs into court, both Kacsmaryk and the 5th Circuit shamelessly butchered the law of standing, a lodestar of judicial restraint which requires a showing of imminent, concrete harm. To arrive at such a harm, the MAGA judges theorized the following chain of events: (1) A doctor with no connection to the plaintiffs prescribes mifepristone; (2) a patient takes the medication and suffers complications; (3) the patient seeks treatment from one of the plaintiffs; resulting in (4) the plaintiff being forced to complete the abortion, and (5) this treatment causes him “trauma” sufficient to establish standing.

Never before has the Supreme Court held that a doctor faces a concrete harm under the Constitution by doing her job and helping a patient. But set that aside. The deeper problem is that the plaintiffs are merely speculating that on some unknowable day in the future, there is some statistical probability that they’ll treat a mifepristone patient. And the Supreme Court has expressly rejected this stats-based theory of standing. By embracing it, both Kacsmaryk and the 5th Circuit flouted binding precedent.

[…]

For those drawing comfort in the fact that not-losing at the court constitutes the new winning, there are three important cautions to keep in mind. The first is the standard warning that not-losing on a baseless and indefensible lawsuit never moves the goalposts but invariably moves the Overton Window. The second is that not-losing on standing while opening up the prospect of someday losing on Comstock in a case where plaintiffs can make a credible case for standing is a loss for abortion access nationwide. The final caution is that Dobbs itself is a disastrous loss for reproductive freedom. Just ask Kate Cox. A Supreme Court end-of-term surprise in which the headlines blare that the court protected abortion rights is nothing more than an election year valentine for Donald J. Trump, his three Supreme Court nominees, and the Ken Paxtons of the world who will all live to immiserate women another day, and the day after that. Don’t make the mistake of being lulled into snooze in the same year Dobbs’ full viciousness is laid bare nationwide. Until every pregnant person in the country has equal access to reproductive freedom, we’re all still just choosing our own ending inside the same Handmaids Tale.

Go read the rest, and read Law Dork, The 19th, and Mother Jones. And make sure you remember, and that everyone you know remembers, that all this is the result of Donald Trump being President, and of the bottomless cruelty and misogyny of the anti-abortion zealots, who are nowhere near finished with what they want to do. Our next chance to do something about that is eleven months from now.

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The Ogg admonishment

Posted on December 14, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

This happened last night.

Kim Ogg

District Attorney Kim Ogg was reprimanded on Tuesday night by the Harris County Democratic Party, which passed a resolution calling for her admonishment.

By a vote of 129 to 61, precinct chairs approved the resolution accusing Ogg of not adequately representing the values of the Democratic Party.

While the resolution does not limit her legal powers, it does put Ogg at odds with her own party as she heads into next year’s March primary. She is facing a challenge from Sean Teare, a former prosecutor who raised almost $750,000 in the first six months of the year – more than 10 times what Ogg raised during the same period.

Ogg, who attended the vote in person, downplayed its significance minutes after the resolution passed.

“It’s political drama within a party,” she said. “It’s the in-fighting that our American public has grown tired of. I would tell the public that this is damaging to the political process, and it hurts public trust. Anybody who pushed this is wrong.”

Daniel Cohen, a precinct chair and one of the organizers of the resolution, said its passage was the result of a grassroots movement of people who were tired of Ogg’s tussles with major figures in the party, as well as “every day working folks trying to make things work.”

“This is the future of the Harris county Democratic Party if we want to see success in elections,” Cohen said.

The resolution, first introduced in October, was signed by over 110 of the party’s 549 precinct chairs. It contained more than a dozen accusations, among them that Ogg “abused the power of her office to pursue personal vendettas against her political opponents, sided with Republicans to advance their extremist agenda, and stood in the way of fixing the broken criminal justice system.”

[…]

The resolution was narrowly approved by two party committees – the first in late November and the second in early December – before heading to the county executive committee, which is comprised of the party’s elected precinct chairs.

[…]

Once the debate concluded, precinct chairs cast their ballots. After about half an hour of counting ballots, Mike Doyle, the party chairman, announced the results, and the crowd quickly erupted into cheers.

“We’ve acted in accordance with the rules,” Doyle said above the din. “I very much appreciate that, and I very much welcome this as a show of Democrats having an important discussion, following the rules and doing it the right way. I know not everybody’s happy, but we’ve followed the rules. We’ve done what’s required.”

I’m a precinct chair and I was there last night. I did not vote on the resolution. I believe the people who put it together and advocated for it did a lot of hard work and made a strong case for themselves, and in the end expressed the will of a majority of the precinct chairs. Ogg’s supporters made some good points in her defense, and there was a great deal of passion on both sides. The meeting was well run, the rules were followed, and the people were heard. I don’t see why anyone should have a problem with that.

I did not vote on this resolution, after a lot of thought and consideration. While there are legitimate concerns about how Ogg has aimed her power at local officials, I am by nature squeamish about engaging in what might be perceived as political influence on the criminal justice process. I also have this pseudo-journalistic role in which I’m about to do a bunch of interviews with candidates running in the Democratic primary, and I want and need them to view me as a fair broker. I do these interviews and judicial Q&As to help my fellow Dems learn more about the candidates on their primary ballot, and I take that seriously. I had the experience a few years ago of a candidate refusing to talk to me because I had written something in support of his opponent in their race. I’m obviously happy to sling my opinion around, but after all these years I’m aware of some boundaries. It can be a little weird sometimes, and I don’t claim to always be consistent about it, but there it is.

Anyway. The Democratic precinct chairs followed a well-defined small-d democratic process to express their will. Whether you like the result or not, that’s the system working as designed.

Two more things: One, in case anyone who was not there is wondering, Sean Teare was not present at this meeting. While these meetings are an excellent opportunity for candidates to meet and mingle with party stalwarts, I think it was wise of him to steer clear, as the resolution was not about him. And two, for a hot minute this morning, around 5 AM, the front page of the Chronicle’s website had a photo of Ogg accompanying this story in which she was standing right next to where I was sitting. (Honestly, I’m glad I wasn’t fiddling with my phone in the picture.) I was up front with the other SD15 precinct chairs, and Ogg, who is also an SD15 resident, was there along with some of her supporters as the resolution was taken up. As it happens, when Chair Mike Doyle divided the room, the pro-resolution ballot box was on the opposite side of the room, and the anti-resolution ballot box was right where we were. I haven’t seen that picture since they changed it to a different one, but I’m sure it’s somewhere in their directory. I mention this in case anyone else was up at 5 AM refreshing the Chron homepage to see if they had a story up.

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Texas TiKTok ban upheld

Posted on December 14, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Sorry, professors.

A U.S. judge on Monday upheld Texas’ ban on state employees’, including public university employees, using Chinese-owned short video app TikTok on state-owned devices or networks.

The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed suit in July arguing that Texas’ state government TikTok ban “is preventing or seriously impeding faculty from pursuing research that relates to TikTok.”

U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman rejected the suit, saying the Texas restriction was motivated by data protection concerns and calling “a reasonable restriction on access to TikTok in light of Texas’s concerns.”

“Public university faculty – and all public employees – are free to use TikTok on their personal devices (as long as such devices are not used to access state networks),” he wrote.

Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, said the group was disappointed with the ruling, arguing the Texas ban impedes “public university faculty from studying TikTok — including from studying the very privacy concerns that supposedly motivated the ban.”

Pitman contrasted the ban to Montana that sought to ban all TikTok use in the state starting Jan. 1 but was blocked by another U.S. judge last month, whole ruled the state ban “violates the Constitution in more ways than one” and “oversteps state power.”

See here for the background, and here for more on the Montana case. I thought the plaintiffs had a reasonable First Amendment claim, but the judge decided that the ban was sufficiently limited in scope to be in bounds. The plaintiffs could appeal this but I don’t think they’ll get a more receptive audience at the Fifth Circuit. As such, I think this is more likely than not to be the end, but I’ll keep an eye on it anyway.

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Texas blog roundup for the week of December 11

Posted on December 14, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance is saving its pennies to buy a Cameo greeting from George Santos as it brings you this weeks roundup.

Continue reading →

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More filing deadline news and notes

Posted on December 13, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

I’m going to use the Erik Manning Spreadsheet, the Patrick Svitek spreadsheet, and the Secretary of State webpage to put together some notes and observations about the 2024 filing deadline and primary lineups. Note that some of this may still change, as data from county parties may still be coming in and there’s always someone who withdraws or gets disqualified at the last minute. We’ll do the best we can with what we have.

– Eight candidates are listed for the Democratic primary for US Senate, including Colin Allred, Roland Gutierrez, and Carl Sherman. Notably absent is Mark Gonzalez, former Nueces County DA who resigned his office to run for this office. I don’t see any news about him that suggests he changed his mind, and his webpage and Facebook page are both still up, so this may be a case of a delay in reporting. That said, neither his Facebook page nor his Twitter account have posted anything since November 10, so maybe that means something. I’ll keep checking on this. Delays in reporting who has filed are normal, we may not be fully certain of who has or has not filed for what until Friday.

– Lizzie Fletcher, Veronica Escobar (CD16), Sheila Jackson Lee, Jasmine Crockett (CD30), and Lloyd Doggett (CD37) have primary opponents. We’ve talked about SJL and Fletcher and their opponents (a third person named Robert Slater also filed in CD18), I know much less about the others. I don’t get the sense these are serious, but we’ll look at the January finance reports and see if there’s anything there. One person who gets to take it easy for the next couple of months is Henry Cuellar in CD28. Jessica Cisneros decided against a third challenge, and no one else appears to have filed.

– Eight people have filed for the open CD32 seat, including Julie Johnson and Brian Williams. Again, there may be some reporting delays. The two Republican open seats are CDs 12 and 26, and Dems have two filers in the former and one in the latter.

– The single biggest gap on the Democratic side as far as filings go are in the statewide judicial elections, where two of the three Supreme Court incumbents have Dem opponents but none of the Court of Criminal Appeals incumbents do. Filing for statewide judicial office is complicated because you have to collect signatures in all of the appellate districts. I’ll hold off on any conclusions until the weekend, but I am definitely watching this. (See Update below, three of the four races that didn’t have Dems listed for them originally now do. And we still may not be done.)

– There are now six candidates in the SD15 primary, as Michelle Bonton and Beto Cardenas hopped in on Monday. Bonton was a candidate for At Large #5 in 2019, and Cardenas is an attorney with some connections. I’m going to have to do so many interviews in the next two months…

– Three Democrats in the State House in Harris County drew primary opponents: Harold Dutton, Shawn Thierry, and Hubert Vo. All of the countywide executive offices have multiple candidates. Looks like a bit less than half of the judicial incumbents have primary opponents. There are three new District Criminal Court benches, all of which now have Abbott appointees on them, a new County Criminal Court and a new County Probate Court; those last two are open.

– All four Democratic Constables have primary opponents; there are two open Constable spots, in the Republican-held Precinct 5 and the Dem-held Precinct 7, and they both have multiple Dem candidates. Jo Ann Delgado in Precinct 2 is the only Dem Justice of the Peace to draw a primary challenger. Dems did not field a candidates for JP in Precinct 5 or for Constable in Precinct 8.

– HCDE At Large Position #3 incumbent Richard Cantu did file for re-election as noted yesterday, and he is opposed by Josh Wallenstein. HCDE Position 6 Precinct 1 has an incumbent whose name (John F. McGee), which says to me that Danny Norris must have resigned prior to filing against Harold Dutton. McGee also has an opponent, Richard Bonton, who was accused of being involved in the “Natasha Ruiz” incident from 2020. Looks like I need to pay a little more attention to this HCDE race.

– Though there were some rumors floating around during the filing period, HCDP Chair Mike Doyle appears to be unopposed.

I’ll have further updates when some of these filings have been clarified. The Trib, the Fort Worth Report, the San Antonio Report, and El Paso Matters have good roundups around the state.

UPDATE: This morning I see that two candidates have filed for the third Supreme Court seat, and two of the three CCA incumbents now have Democratic opponents. So much better there. Mark Gonzalez now shows up for the Senate race. Mark Veasey in CD33 now has a primary opponent listed. Still more to come, I’m sure.

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Fifth Circuit does its thing with Galveston redistricting

Posted on December 13, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Death, taxes, and the Fifth Circuit being terrible.

Commissioner Stephen Holmes

The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has blocked a new political map imposed on Galveston County by a lower court from taking effect. Plaintiffs are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene swiftly to ensure the county uses a map that complies with the Voting Rights Act.

Late Thursday, 5th Circuit issued a stay on the new map until May, when it plans to rehear the lawsuit challenging Galveston County’s 2021 redistricting plan. A district court recently imposed the map on Galveston, having earlier ruled Galveston’s 2021 redistricting plan violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bans racial gerrymandering.

“This morning, we have filed an emergency application at the Supreme Court to both vacate the stay, and we’ve also asked the (U.S.) Supreme Court to take this case on the merits,” said attorney Valencia Richardson of the Campaign Legal Center, who represents the plaintiffs in Petteway v. Galveston County. “So, the technical term for that is seeking certiorari before judgment.”

[…]

Richardson believes the Petteway plaintiffs are on solid ground with their appeal, given a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that upheld Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. “The court’s recent decision in Allen v. Milligan affirmed 40 years of precedent, insofar that it affirmed that the Voting Rights Act still prohibits racial discrimination against racial minorities in the voting process,” she said.

See here, here, and here for the background. Whereas Galveston had been ordered to use a least-changes map that preserved Commissioner Stephen Holmes’ minority-coalition precinct, allowing the map drawn by Galveston Commissioners Court would all but ensure Holmes’ defeat. The timetable is the critical aspect here, since the primary is in March, even if both nominees are unopposed.

You may be asking, isn’t there some legal principle that applies to election-related cases to ensure they don’t confuse voters on the cusp of an election? The answer is yes, it’s called the Purcell principle after a case in Arizona from 2006. It’s also being grossly misused here. I can’t explain it very well, but I have two things for you to read to see for yourself. Appellate lawyer Raffi Melkonian gives a brief summary of the Fifth Circuit’s ruling and why it was unusual. Law professor Steve Vladeck then goes customarily deep on the history and reasoning behind Purcell, how the Fifth Circuit applied it in this case, and why they’re completely wrong and more than a little disingenuous. You should read them both.

Bottom line: Unless SCOTUS intervenes, Galveston will get to neatly eliminate its one Commissioner of color this year, even though the map they’d use to do it with has been ruled unconstitutional. Maybe later, the courts will get back to that. This is the Fifth Circuit in action.

UPDATE: SCOTUS has spoken.

Galveston County will use an electoral map that a federal judge determined violated the Voting Rights Act after the U.S Supreme Court declined to intervene in the case Tuesday.

The decision comes after U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown found that the county’s precinct map “denies Black and Latino voters the equal opportunity to participate in the political process and the opportunity to elect a representative of their choice to the commissioners court,” in October.

Galveston County appealed the ruling and won a reprieve from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which overruled Brown and said that officials didn’t have to redraw the county’s voting map. The U.S. Supreme Court decision not to intervene means the appellate court’s ruling stands.

Three justices – Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Kentaji Brown Jackson – dissented, saying the appellate court “went far beyond its property authority” by allowing the county’s unlawful electoral map to proceed.

The Supreme Court’s decision will simply embolden politicians to use the same tactics as Galveston County, said Joaquin Gonzalez, senior supervising attorney for the Voting Rights Program at the Texas Civil Rights Project, which represented the plaintiffs who sued the county.

“We are disappointed in today’s ruling,” Gonzalez said. “The residents of Galveston have fought against this map since it was proposed and they deserve to have a resolution. This ruling emboldens more politicians to try the same tactics that the Galveston Commissioners used to create this blatantly discriminatory map.

“We will continue fighting for Galveston residents to have a fair shot to influence the decisions that shape their community,” he added.

The fix is once again in.

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Amtrak gets some federal high speed rail funds

Posted on December 13, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

It’s something.

Amtrak has been awarded a $500,000 federal grant to further study and develop a proposed high-speed railway between Houston and Dallas, a long-envisioned plan that until earlier this year had appeared to have fizzled out.

Amtrak, the national passenger railroad company of the United States, announced in August it was exploring a partnership with Texas Central, the Dallas-based company that a decade ago hatched the idea of building a 240-mile railway that could transport passengers between the state’s two largest cities in a matter of about 90 minutes.

The initiative is one of seven high-speed rail projects across the country that was awarded grant funding on Friday by the Federal Railroad Administration, as part of its new Corridor Identification and Development Program using resources allocated through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed by Congress in 2021. A total of 68 other rail projects in 44 states were awarded the same grant, while 10 ready-to-construct railway projects were selected for grants through the Federal-State Partnership for Intercity Passenger Rail Program.

A total of $8.2 billion was awarded for the rail initiatives, which include both high-speed and traditional rail service. The Houston-to-Dallas bullet train project is one of a few that aim to expand rail service in the Houston region.

“We are taking full advantage of the resources we have to advance world-class passenger rail services nationwide,” Amit Bose, the administrator for the Federal Railroad Administration, said in a news release from the U.S. Department of Transportation. “Today’s announcement is another step forward as we advance transformative projects that will carry Americans for decades to come and provide them with convenient, climate-friendly alternatives to congested roads and airports.”

The grant funding for the high-speed rail project between Houston and Dallas, which aims to use Shinkansen technology from Japan and utilize the former Northwest Mall site as the Houston terminal, does not mean it will come to fruition. The money will not be used for construction, but rather for further developing the project.

See here for some background. The Chron adds some details.

The money would be strictly for “preparing, completing, or documenting its service development plan,” and does not commit any funding for what is likely to be a $25 billion-to-$35 billion project.

“What we are doing is creating a pipeline for potential passenger rail projects,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in announcing 69 projects as part of the Corridor ID Program by the Federal Railroad Administration.

[…]

Texas, meanwhile, is years, if not decades, from construction, but progressing with some long-sought projects linking its major metros. In addition to the Amtrak award, federal officials also announced four other development studies, each totaling up to $500,00:

• Potential for high-speed service to add a stop in Fort Worth and continue into Dallas, Brazos Valley and Houston, sponsored by the North Central Texas Council of Governments.

• Making the Sunset Limited service by Amtrak from Los Angeles to New Orleans daily, from three times a week, which would mean daily train service for Houston to San Antonio and New Orleans.

• Creating a new daily intercity route along the Sunset Limited’s path for service between Houston and San Antonio that would include stops in Rosenberg, Flatonia and Seguin, sponsored by the Texas Department of Transportation.

• Returning conventional passenger rail service in the “Texas Triangle” by connecting Houston and Dallas, with stops between Dallas and Houston in Corsicana, Hearne, College Station and Navasota, also sponsored by TxDOT.

Proponents of more frequent passenger rail service applauded the announcements, noting the opportunity to better connect smaller cities to the metro cores.

“This is a big step forward for Texas, and if we have the full cooperation and buy-in from our state legislature, TxDOT and the Texas Transportation Commission this would give Texans a daily travel choice we do not have at present,” said Texas Rail Advocates President Peter LeCody. “This would benefit a lot of smaller Texas cities with few transportation choices and help them promote their cities for tourism, business and economic development.”

That many of the projects overlap or potentially replicate one another is by design, federal officials said.

“The range of applications we selected were based on the options we wanted Texas to have,” Federal Railroad Administrator Amit Bose said.

The first project is that other high speed rail line, which has been moving a lot more reliably than Texas Central has. I approve of all of this, I just hope to live long enough to see any of it.

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SJL files for re-election

Posted on December 12, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

We have our answer.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee

U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee will run for reelection in Texas’ 18th Congressional District, shaking up a Democratic primary that’s been in limbo since her resounding defeat in the race for Houston mayor on Saturday. Harris County Democratic Party Chair Michael Doyle said he accepted her filing at 10 a.m. Monday.

[…]

Former Houston At-Large City Council member Amanda Edwards, 41, originally filed to run for mayor but dropped out of the contest after Jackson Lee entered the race. Edwards then announced in June she was running as a Democrat for Jackson Lee’s congressional seat and endorsed her candidacy for mayor.

Edwards told the Houston Chronicle Monday she would not drop out of the race if Jackson Lee entered it. She already has filed to be on the ballot for the March 5 Democratic Primary.

Isaiah Martin, 25, is a former University of Houston student body president and former intern in Jackson Lee’s office. He announced in September that he would run for Jackson Lee’s Congressional seat but has not filed to have his name appear on the ballot.

See here for the background. This isn’t a surprise, there had been chatter to this effect before the runoff, probably earlier than that. Her concession speech on Saturday didn’t sound like someone who was ready to retire. I would not have been shocked if she had chosen to retire, but this is the outcome I expected, and I daresay most other people did as well.

And I’m fine with it. She’s been a member of Congress for a long time, she’s been good at it, the voters know and like her. The conversation with voters about why she tried so hard to get another job could and should be awkward, but again, she has that longstanding relationship to fall back on. People can be remarkably forgiving about this sort of thing.

Which is not to say she will have an easy time of it, or that she should avoid critical scrutiny. If you supported her for Mayor, especially if you live in CD18, you had to be comfortable at some level with the idea of someone else representing CD18. Amanda Edwards has been campaigning for over six months, she’s raised over a million dollars for her campaign, and she will easily be the best-funded candidate against SJL since she defeated then-Rep. Craig Washington all those years ago. (I might say that Edwards would be SJL’s best-known challenger as well, but former Council member Jarvis Johnson ran against her in 2010, so let’s call it a tossup.) Isaiah Martin raised a very impressive $316K in less than three months; if he continues his campaign, he’ll contribute to the strongest one-two punch SJL has ever seen. However hard she worked on her Mayoral campaign, SJL will need to do at least that much for at least the next three months.

We’ll see how it goes. It may be SJL versus Edwards, it may be those two plus Martin, and who knows, there may be others filing as well. You never know what can happen on deadline day. The Chron has more.

(UPDATE: Isaiah Martin is suspending his campaign and endorsing SJL.)

BTW, I will have a full roundup of who filed for what tomorrow, once the dust has settled a bit. In the meantime, a few news-y bits:

– The Erik Manning Spreadsheet is live! All hail Erik Manning, the wind beneath our wings.

– State Rep. Victoria Neave Criado will challenge State Sen. Nathan Johnson in SD16. Both were trailblazers of a sort. Neave Criado flipped HD107 in 2016, a cycle ahead of the blue wave in 2018. She was the first Dem House candidate to win a seat that hadn’t flipped due to redistricting or the 2010/2014 debacles. Johnson was one of two Democratic flips in the Senate in 2018, ridding us of the pestilence that was Don Huffines, and his seat was the one left uncracked by the 2021 redistricting. I like Sen. Johnson (to be clear, I also like Rep. Neave Criado) and would probably vote for him if I lived there, but I don’t. We’ll see what the people there do.

– Current HCDE Trustee Danny Norris has filed to run against State Rep. Harold Dutton in HD142. You know who I’m rooting for. HCDE Trustee Richard Cantu, who lost in the At Large #3 runoff on Saturday, had not filed for re-election as of Monday morning, but has since filed. Josh Wallenstein, who has run for HCDE Trustee before, has filed for that seat.

– As of Monday afternoon, two incumbent Democratic Constables had not yet filed for re-election: Constable May Walker in Precinct 7, and Constable Alan Rosen in Precinct 1. Multiple people have filed in 7, and so far two have filed in 1. The Manning spreadsheet says that Constable Walker is retiring, so that’s an open seat. Constable Rosen has long been rumored to be interested in other things – his name was all over the speculation for Sheriff when Ed Gonzalez had been nominated for ICE – and I’ve been wondering if he will be a last-minute filer for some other office, including possibly Sheriff. However, checking again after the deadline, Rosen has filed for re-election. So no drama there.

– Late in the day, someone named Umeka Lewis-Piccolo has filed to run for County Attorney, so no one holding a countywide executive office is unopposed. Danielle Bess has joined the field for Tax Assessor. The list of candidates from the HCDP website is less organized than the Manning spreadsheet but it looks to be pretty comprehensive.

As noted, I will have more tomorrow.

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Kate Cox leaves Texas to get her abortion

Posted on December 12, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

My heart goes out to her and her family.

After the Texas Supreme Court temporarily put a pregnant woman’s efforts to get an emergency abortion on hold, her lawyers said Monday that she had left Texas to get care in another state.

Kate Cox, the lead plaintiff in Cox v. Texas, initially received a temporary restraining order from a Travis County district judge on Dec. 7 allowing her to have the procedure. But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton petitioned the state’s Supreme Court to reverse Judge Maya Guerra Gamble’s order later that night, saying she had abused her discretion by issuing it. Paxton also penned a letter threatening liability to any hospital or doctor who facilitates an abortion.

The Supreme Court temporarily halted the order late Friday night, but indicated that it would consider the matter before issuing a final ruling.

“While we still hope that the Court ultimately rejects the state’s request and does so quickly, in this case we fear that justice delayed will be justice denied,” Cox’s attorney Molly Duane said in a statement on Friday, following the Supreme Court’s stay. “We are talking about urgent medical care. Kate is already 20 weeks pregnant.”

Cox’s fetus was diagnosed with trisomy 18, a condition that is almost always fatal. She was warned by doctors that continuing the pregnancy to delivery could have a severe impact on her health and ability to carry future pregnancies.

On Monday, Duane filed a notice with the Texas Supreme Court saying that Cox had left Texas to receive medical care. However, she said they intended to move forward with Cox’s case as the issues included in it are “capable of repetition.”

See here, here, and here for the background. The Trib adds some details.

“This past week of legal limbo has been hellish for Kate,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO for the Center for Reproductive Rights. “Her health is on the line … This is why judges and politicians should not be making healthcare decisions for pregnant people—they are not doctors.”

The Center for Reproductive Rights intends to continue litigating this case before the Texas Supreme Court, according to a letter sent to the court clerk Monday. The Texas Supreme Court also heard arguments in late November in Zurawski v. Texas, in which 20 women allege they were denied medical care for their complicated pregnancies as a result of the state’s abortion laws.

Cox’s lawyers declined to say where she was traveling to terminate her pregnancy, but noted in a statement that many women in Texas do not have the financial means to quickly leave the state. All but one of Texas’ neighboring states have banned the procedure, and Texans are flooding clinics in New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas, leading to delays in care. In October, the Texas Tribune documented the story of a woman who could not afford to leave the state for an abortion, and carried a non-viable pregnancy to term.

I don’t know what it means to pursue this case further – my non-lawyer brain assumed that this would moot the case. I’m happy to be wrong about that, because this deserves a legal resolution. Beyond that, I’m too goddamned angry to think. I’m going to stop here before I say something I regret. The Chron, TPM, Mother Jones, the Associated Press, MSNBC, the Dallas Observer, and the Austin Chronicle have more.

UPDATE: Jesus Christ.

The Texas Supreme Court on Monday overturned a lower court order allowing an abortion for a pregnant woman whose fetus was diagnosed with a fatal condition, hours after her lawyers said she had decided to leave Texas for the procedure in the face of the state’s abortion bans.

The court ruled that the lower court made a mistake in ruling that the woman, Kate Cox, who is more than 20 weeks pregnant, was entitled to a medical exception.

In its seven-page ruling, the Supreme Court found that Ms. Cox’s doctor, Damla Karsan, “asked a court to pre-authorize the abortion yet she could not, or at least did not, attest to the court that Ms. Cox’s condition poses the risks the exception requires.” Texas’ overlapping bans allow for abortions only when a pregnancy seriously threatens the health or life of the woman.

“These laws reflect the policy choice that the Legislature has made, and the courts must respect that choice,” the court wrote.

The ruling, which applied only to Ms. Cox’s current pregnancy, suggested that the court would not be open to readings of the law that would expand the medical exception in Texas beyond all but the most serious cases. The fact that Ms. Cox decided to leave the state rather than wait for a ruling underscored the difficulty of seeking court permission for an abortion in the midst of a pregnancy.

[…]

In its decision on Monday, the Texas Supreme Court suggested a general standard that could be applied beyond Ms. Cox’s case.

“The exception does not mandate that a doctor in a true emergency await consultation with other doctors who may not be available,” the court wrote. “The exception is predicated on a doctor’s acting within the zone of reasonable medical judgment, which is what doctors do every day.”

Sorry, but that sounds like the same “it’s totally up to you doctors, but we’re not going to define what the boundaries are and if you guess wrong you can be arrested for murder and also sued by Ken Paxton and every anti-abortion zealot in the state, so good luck with that” bullshit as before. The Chron notes that SCOTx wants the Texas Medical Board to clarify the exceptions, which sounds nice but won’t carry any weight with the Lege or the AG or the wingnuts. The government of the state of Texas as it exists now is never ever going to concede that any specific woman’s situation counts as an actual legal exception to the anti-abortion law. And you know what that means.

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The state of healthcare for trans kids today

Posted on December 12, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

It’s bad.

In the past three years alone, life as a young transgender person in the U.S. has changed dramatically. Before 2021, gender-affirming medical care was legal in all 50 states. None had even tried to ban it. Today, 22 states have passed restrictions on that care—and while several have been blocked in court or have yet to take effect, most are active law.

Treatment plans for trans minors are as unique as the teens themselves. But usually, if medically indicated for the patient, treatment starts with puberty blockers for young adolescents and sometimes progresses to hormone therapy (testosterone or estrogen) for older teens. Surgery is uncommon for trans youth, though some older teens with enduring gender dysphoria opt for chest surgery.

Health experts agree that gender-affirming medical care is an essential tool in treating gender dysphoria and helping trans youth live happy, healthy, well-adjusted lives. Dozens of medical groups—including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine—have issued statements recognizing the necessity of access to that evidence-based, time-tested care.

Some of the new laws ban gender-affirming care for all trans minors. Others allow youth who are already receiving care to be legacied in and continue their treatment, while banning new patients from initiating care. Many contain harsh penalties, such as felony charges, for providers who offer the treatments.

This fast-changing landscape has plunged families like Zeder’s into chaos, as parents attempt to keep track of laws, find new medical providers, and map out a future in which their trans children can thrive. News reports are filled with stories of families who have uprooted their lives and moved to friendlier states to protect their trans kids from laws that prevent them from participating in sports, using the appropriate restroom, and getting recommended medical care.

But families who move across state lines are the exception, said Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, executive director of the Campaign for Southern Equality, an organization that supports LGBTQ+ people in the Southern U.S. The vast majority of families with trans kids that CSE serves have no plans to relocate. Moving requires money, finding a new home (and often a new job), and a willingness to give up what may be a cherished, generations-old community. That’s a tough ask for many parents, especially if there are other children in the picture.

Early this year, CSE launched a program to help young people living in states that have banned gender-affirming care find new providers in states where it remains legal. The Southern Trans Youth Emergency Project connects families in the South with health care facilities that are currently taking new patients—usually in the closest possible state with access, or in a state where a loved one lives—and provides $500 grants to offset expenses. So far, the program has distributed more than $300,000 to about 600 people and families. The organization has also begun offering a second round of grants to families in the program, since gender-affirming care requires regular appointments.

“Our mindset is very much like the mindset you’d have in the wake of a hurricane hitting the coast,” Beach-Ferrara said. “This is a crisis. And it’s a crisis we can respond to.”

The project bears similarities to the abortion funds and practical support networks that have helped a growing number of patients find abortion providers, cover travel costs, and pay for abortion care following the overturning of Roe v. Wade. In both cases, a right-wing policy agenda has cut off access to essential, lifesaving medical care in roughly half the country, forcing patients to forgo that care or travel long distances at great expense. (Patients seeking abortions can also order medication in the mail, though that poses the risk of possible legal trouble.) Some patients in states with abortion bans have been able to get care under this system: In the year after Roe was overturned, as legal abortions all but ended in states with bans, rates increased elsewhere due to an influx of out-of-state patients and loosened restrictions that improved access in blue states. But an untold number of people have been successfully barred from terminating their pregnancies and forced to birth children against their will.

There are important differences between abortion care and gender-affirming care, however. Getting abortion medication or an in-clinic procedure does not require ongoing care; usually, patients have to make only one trip. That’s not the case for gender-affirming care, which, like most long-term medical treatments, necessitates consistent check-ins on a patient’s physical and mental health, in addition to periodic prescription refills. Even if a patient’s family is able to work out the finances and logistics for one trip out of state, they’ll need to make another trip in three to six months—and another several months later, and so on. Emergency measures are not sufficient here. Families must find a sustainable long-term solution.

As it stands, the nation’s patchwork system of laws requires trans and gender-nonconforming youth in broad swaths of the country to go to absurd lengths to fill their prescriptions. The medications they need can be prescribed in a video telehealth appointment, but at the time of the appointment, the patient must be physically located in a state where the treatment is legal, and they can get the medication only from a pharmacy in one of those states.

Zeder is a trans boy living in Austin, with whom we begin this story. The comparison with the way people in many states now have to try to get abortion care is instructive, and it makes me wonder if it’s just a matter of time before we see similar efforts to block their ability to travel out of state for any such care. The same insulting and dehumanizing language about “trafficking” would apply, if and when the same zealots get around to it. These and other related questions will be coming to SCOTUS sooner rather than later, and I have more fear than hope about it. As with an increasing number of things, it’s going to take federal action to ensure that everyone has the same rights. The scary thing is that federal action could also be taken to remove those rights for all. Elections have never had bigger consequences.

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Get ready for the SD15 special election

Posted on December 11, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

It’s closer than you think.

Sen. John Whitmire

The candidates looking to replace Mayor-elect John Whitmire in the Texas Senate may have to win as many as five elections next year before they ever get to vote on a piece of legislation.

Whitmire, who won in a landslide over U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee in Houston’s mayoral runoff, will resign his seat in the Legislature before he is inaugurated in early January. He has held the District 15 seat in the state Senate since 1983, making him the chamber’s longest serving member.

His current term in the Senate lasts through 2024, and Gov. Greg Abbott will have to call a special election to fill the seat for that year – even though the Legislature does not have a scheduled session. Harris County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth said the special election for the current term likely will be held in January.

An election was already scheduled in his district in 2024, so candidates also will have to compete in the March primary election and the November general election for a full, four-year term beginning in 2025. Candidates only have until Monday to file for office on the March primary ballot.

This means candidates could face a special election early next year to complete the rest of Whitmire’s current term, a runoff in that race if no candidate gets a majority of the vote in the first round, a March primary election for the next term, a potential runoff in the primary and finally the November general election.

Several candidates have already filed to run, including Democrats Molly Cook, an emergency room nurse and community activist who ran a spirited primary challenge against Whitmire in 2022; state Rep. Jarvis Johnson, who has served in the Texas House since 2016; Karthik Soora, a renewable energy developer and former teacher; and Todd Litton, a former congressional candidate.

We’ve discussed all this before. I will assume that all four of the candidates who have filed for the Democratic nomination will also file for the special election. The eventual winner, if they also win the nomination and then the November election, likely won’t do much beyond run for office multiple times this year, but they will get a leg up on their colleagues in the seniority department, which isn’t nothing. I’d imagine a Republican will enter, and maybe a fringe type or two, but the dynamic ought to be more or less the same as the primary.

Where it gets tricky is if the results of the special election and the primary election diverge. The special election is only for the term that ends next December 31; if that winner doesn’t also prevail in March and November, their career will be quite short. We faced a similar situation in HD147 last year, and as the story notes back in 2015 in HD139. That’s a good segue to note that if Rep. Jarvis Johnson is the special election winner, there will then need to be a special election in HD139. That would happen after the primary, though perhaps not after the primary runoff if there is one. Isn’t this fun? The bottom line is this: There will be a lot of elections this year. Be ready for it.

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