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The “Come and Take It” Flag Now Symbolizes Something It Never Stood For
In late 1835 the Mexican Army sent a hundred cavalrymen to the town of Gonzales to retrieve a cannon it had lent to the settlers a few years before. Revolutionary sentiment was mounting, and the...
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How to Survive the Texas Legislature
Have you heard? The Eighty-eighth session of the Texas Legislature is underway. For the next 124 days, the Lege, as it’s known ’round here, will meet in its regular session until it adjourns sine die...
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Don’t Be Fooled by the Legislature’s Tough Talk About Ken Paxton
On paper, one of the most important functions of the Texas Legislature is to provide oversight of state agencies and to hold wrongdoers and incompetents accountable. In practice, state lawmakers do...
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How Dan Patrick Made the Texas Senate in His Image
Gather round, my friends, to hear true stories about the knights of the rectangular tables, the misshapen band of 31 adventurers we call the Texas Senate. Today we consider news from Charles...
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Loathsome Dud: Jared Patterson’s School-Library Bill Would Ban Larry...
State representative Jared Patterson has never claimed, through campaign literature or any other medium, to be a reader. If he had, he might not have walked into the trap set for him last night during...
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In Waco, Donald Trump Parties Like It’s 1993
Unlike the various members of Congress who gave perfunctory speeches at former president Donald J. Trump’s rally in Waco on Saturday, Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick seemed genuinely happy to be...
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One Angry Man
After seventeen hours of deliberation spanning a Thursday and Friday in April, a jury of Daniel Perry’s peers unanimously convicted him of murder in the 2020 shooting of Garrett Foster at a Black Lives...
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Since the Lege Has Been in Session, There’ve Been Eighteen Mass Shootings in...
You’ve probably heard of the shooting in Allen this weekend—nine dead, seven injured. You may have heard some of the more terrible details. Three members of a family of four Korean Americans were...
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The Texas Legislature Finally Comes for Ken Paxton
At the start of this week, the Texas Legislature was sliding toward the conclusion of yet another underwhelming, but basically normal, session. Lawmakers had wasted a lot of time and effort, and soon...
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2023: The Best and Worst Legislators
Sound and fury signifying nothing: that’s the Texas Legislature, the overwhelming majority of the time. Lawmakers yell and scrap for 140 days every other year, nibble around the edges of issues that...
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How to Lose Friends and Alienate the Legislature
The best thing about the Texas Legislature is that it ends. Each regular session wraps up around Memorial Day, and then, God willing, lawmakers go home. That hasn’t happened yet this year. May 29 was...
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Before Uvalde, Roland Gutierrez Was Just Another State Senator. Now He’s...
On Monday morning, state senator Roland Gutierrez announced the start of a campaign against Ted Cruz, a prominent podcaster who also serves in Congress as Texas’s junior senator. Gutierrez, from San...
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Greg Abbott’s Border Policy Is at Once Cruel and Ineffective. Many State...
For years, liberals have been criticizing Texas’s border-militarization program, Operation Lone Star, as useless, cruel, and a waste of billions of dollars a year. They’re not alone, it turns out. In...
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Ken Paxton Managed to Delay His Trial on Securities Fraud Charges for Eight...
At long last, Ken Paxton, the disgraced and suspended attorney general of Texas, will appear in a courtroom eight years after he was first charged on two counts of felony securities fraud in 2015....
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Yes, George W. Bush Changed Texas. But Not the Way You Think.
There’s a good case to be made that Texas’s 1994 gubernatorial election is the most consequential event in the state’s modern history. On November 8, George W. Bush defeated Democrat Ann Richards by...
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Why Is a Midland Billionaire Spending So Heavily to Support Ken Paxton?
When Attorney General Ken Paxton was impeached in May, many Texans posed an obvious question: Why were some Republicans finally turning on him? It’s a good question, but flip it and it becomes more...
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The Texas Senate Votes to Acquit Attorney General Ken Paxton
Ken Paxton’s many haters have spent the last decade channeling Jesse from Breaking Bad at his lowest: He can’t keep getting away with it, they think. Well, sure he can. This is Texas. On Saturday, the...
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First They Came for Those Who Met With Nazis
On Sunday, the Texas Tribune reported that the irrepressible and reprehensible alt-right influencer Nick Fuentes was a guest at Pale Horse Strategies, a newly important political consulting firm run by...
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Sinners in the Hands of an Angry GOP
Why are Texas Republicans “so terrible”? Why do they abet tyranny and persecute the vulnerable? That was the subject of a January episode of the podcast Conservative Review, hosted by Daniel Horowitz...
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Greg Abbott Had Great Ambitions. Donald Trump Had Other Plans.
Life, they say, is what happens while you’re making other plans. In May 2016, at a bar during the state Republican convention in Dallas, a senior aide to Governor Greg Abbott was explaining to a...
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What If They Held an Election and Every Special Interest Came?
As a general principle, voters should not be held personally responsible for the shortcomings of the men and women they elect to office. If we were to hold them to that standard, though, the...
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Greg Abbott’s Voucher Push and Ken Paxton’s Revenge Tour Fall Flat in the...
Ain’t democracy grand? On Tuesday night, 13,549 folks in North Texas elected a state representative. The campaign to win those votes has been going on for about nine months, has consumed the time and...
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How the Texas House Could Become More Radical
The nation is beset by dangerous radicals, according to those who lead the Republican Party of Texas. But some are more dangerous than others. To see the face of radicalism in Texas today—to bear...
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Dade Phelan Was Uninvited From His Own Party. He’s Trying to Crash His Way...
When the Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives calls, money comes running. This is the natural order of power asserting itself. The Speaker helps regulate the world’s eighth-largest economy,...
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Texas Primary Elections Results and Analysis
As expected, Donald Trump won the GOP primary, and Joe Biden the Democratic primary. Colin Allred has defeated Roland Gutierrez and eight other opponents in the Democratic race for the nomination to...
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