BERJAYA

The cost of hosting the FIFA World Cup

Posted on April 30, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

When Texas dedicated $22 million to host the 2017 Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons, state officials expected a return on their investment.

But a state analysis after the Patriots’ thrilling comeback win said it was “impossible” to tell if Texas taxpayers broke even on their investments.

If anything, Texas came up $14 million short, according to a breakdown of tax revenues in the same analysis.

Texas taxpayers likely will be on the hook again when Houston and Dallas welcome the FIFA World Cup this June and July. The cities are among 11 in the U.S. that have agreed to shoulder hundreds of millions of dollars in costs for the soccer tournament, subsidizing a World Cup expected to generate $11 billion in profits for FIFA.

Host cities and their local organizing committees will pay for security at the matches, cover the cost of retrofitting their stadiums to better accommodate soccer and operate fan festivals in addition to the main matches. Originally, they were supposed to pay to transport FIFA officials to all matches, as well, though that requirement has been waived, according to Houston organizers.

The cities get little tangible benefit in return. They do not see a slice of game-day revenues from ticket sales, concessions and merchandise, or parking. Even selling tickets or suites in exchange for corporate sponsorships — usually a key revenue generator for local organizers — was restricted by FIFA this year.

Cities had to agree to FIFA’s demands before the U.S., Mexico and Canada even submitted their bid in 2017 to host the World Cup, and many of those host city contracts remain secret. Now, as the event nears, some cities are questioning whether those agreements will leave them paying for more than they get in return.

“Everybody signed an agreement that was very, very one-sided,” said Alan Rothenberg, who is on the Los Angeles host committee for the 2026 World Cup and was the president of U.S. Soccer the last time the country hosted the tournament in 1994.

Then, some host cities would get a slice of game-day revenues, such as a share of the money made from selling food and drinks at the matches. U.S. Soccer also covered the bill for security at the games and other organizing expenses, Rothenberg said. That helped cities take in more money than they spent, making hosting a more attractive endeavor.

This time around, the agreement was so lopsided that at least one city, Chicago, withdrew during the bidding. And in some cities that moved forward, concerns have grown as the matches near. Officials in Foxborough, Massachusetts, threatened in February to withhold permits for the matches unless FIFA or the owner of the Patriots committed to paying $7.8 million in security costs ahead of time. Foxborough ultimately approved the permits after local World Cup organizers agreed to pay the bill in advance.

“At this point, I think a lot of people are looking at Chicago and thinking they were the smart ones,” Rothenberg said. “They looked at the terms of the agreement and said, ‘No, thanks.’ I don’t think anybody in the 11 host cities thought it would be as tough as it seems to be.”

[…]

In Houston, at least, most of the organizing costs are not expected to be borne by local governments.

“The host committee holds the contract with FIFA. We are 100% responsible for finding the funding to cover all of those expenses, and none of that comes from the city or the county,” [Chris Canetti, who runs Houston’s host committee] said about the agreements.

The contracts do not make clear who is on the hook if the host committee cannot cover the costs. Canetti said he is confident Houston’s committee will have more money than it needs for the expenses, and any surplus funds would be donated to charitable efforts. The host committee that Canetti runs uses a mix of revenue generated from corporate sponsorships, the money FIFA pays to rent NRG Stadium and subsidies from state and federal governments.

That includes $65 million from the federal government to help Houston pay for security, part of a broader $625 million investment by American taxpayers in the World Cup.

The committee also expects to draw tens of millions of dollars from Texas’ Major Events Reimbursement Program, an offshoot of the state’s Event Trust Funds established in 1999 when Texas was vying to host the Olympics. Canetti did not reveal the precise amount Houston believes it will receive, and the Chronicle is still waiting for the governor’s office to respond to records requests for its communications with the committee.

The reimbursement fund was key to ensuring Houston did not lose money when it hosted the Super Bowl. It is expected to be a difference-maker again in covering World Cup costs, helping ensure Houston and Dallas are in a better position than other host cities that don’t receive state money. (The Houston matches will be at NRG Stadium. Others will be at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, outside Dallas. Arlington has signed its own agreement with the organizing committee that seeks reimbursement for costs it will incur.) But it means Texas taxpayers bear a significant share of the costs.

Kelly Dowe, the city’s finance director when it hosted the Super Bowl in 2017, assumed the city would be left with the costs. He was surprised when the host committee for that event effectively paid the full bill, in large part with $22 million in state funds. But these big events, while a boon to specific industries like hotels, bars and restaurants, are hardly a driver in a city’s budget.

“It doesn’t make money for the city, per se,” Dowe said. “You’re glad to break even.”

There’s more, so read the rest. The story was done in conjunction with ProPublica and the Houston Chronicle, so you’ll see it there as well. That $65 million grant for security from the federal government was among the money that Greg Abbott took hostage in the HPD/ICE ordinance fight, in case you needed a reminder of how much Abbott hates Houston. The Major Events Reimbursement Program is also shrouded in mystery and goofy accounting, but honestly it’s kind of a rounding error in the state’s budget and most of us think the events that are attached to its efforts, such as the Super Bowl, are cool enough to not worry too much about the fine print. Anyway, read on for more.

Posted in Other sports | Tagged Chicago, Chris Canetti, Dallas, FIFA, Greg Abbott, Harris County-Houston Sports Authority, Houston, HPD, Reliant Stadium, soccer, Super Bowl, Texas, The Lege, US Soccer, World Cup | 1 Comment

It’s not just Corpus Christi

Posted on April 30, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

I feel bad for these people.

At least six small cities and towns in the Coastal Bend region of Texas issued disaster declarations in the last two weeks, begging not to be forgotten amid a spiraling water crisis.

All attention lies on the city of Corpus Christi as it grapples with the growing likelihood of an unprecedented disaster. But Corpus Christi, the eighth-largest city in Texas, doesn’t just provide water to its own industries and residents. It supplies the entire seven-county region, including 20 other municipalities.

“Everyone is like, ‘What the heck is going on and what do we do?” said Elida Castillo, mayor of the small town of Taft, which issued a disaster declaration on April 21. “I’m just trying to figure out what we could do.”

Castillo recently organized a town hall meeting on the water crisis for the 3,000 residents of Taft, but officials from Corpus Christi didn’t show up. She hasn’t heard much from county or state officials either. She is getting a sense that nobody knows what to do, and she isn’t alone.

Amy Hardberger, director of the Center for Water Law and Policy at the Texas Tech School of Law in Lubbock, said most Americans can’t wrap their minds around the grave implications of empty reservoirs. Those who can feel deeply unsettled by what is happening in Corpus Christi.

“It’s not my goal for other people to be panicked,” she said. “But many of us are very scared.”

If Corpus Christi becomes the first modern American city to run out of water, it would take most surrounding communities with it. Up the coast of Corpus Christi Bay, the cities of Ingleside and Aransas Pass, with a combined 19,000 residents, issued disaster declarations on April 22.

“There should be some type of legislation that will assist us now, rather than in the future,” said Ingleside City Manager Brenton Lewis. “All these small cities that have declared disasters are looking at alternate water supplies.”

The towns of Three Rivers, Orange Grove and Alice also issued disaster declarations in the week prior.

“Regional water demand is exceeding available supply,” said an April 14 declaration from the City of Alice, population 17,000. “Continued drought conditions threaten public health, safety and welfare, as well as essential public services.”

Alice, however, expects to fare better than other communities. Last July it cut ribbons on a groundwater desalination plant, a decade in the making, owned and operated by an investor-backed water treatment company called Seven Seas.

“They have a profit margin,” said Alice City Manager Michael Esparza. “We are paying a private company to do something for us. It’s no different than we do with a lot of things. Although, this one is pretty big because it’s our water.”

[…]

Castillo thought lawmakers focused too much on developing new water sources and not enough on conserving what they already have. For example, she pointed just five miles from Taft, where an enormous Exxon-SABIC plastics plant, booted up in 2022, uses more water than all 300,000 residents of the City of Corpus Christi combined.

Last week Corpus Christi leaders announced plans to require a 25 percent cut in water use in September for facilities like Exxon-SABIC and the other 14 large industrial users, including companies like Occidental Chemical, Valero, Flint Hills and Lyondell Bassel.

Castillo, whose family goes back generations in Taft, thinks emergency cuts should be required immediately. She said Corpus Christi leaders are prioritizing the profits of global corporations over the lives of residents here.

“They’re not taking this as seriously as they should be,” she said. “There needs to be more pressure put on Greg Abbott.”

Good luck with that. I’ve been following this story, and I have no idea what’s going to happen. I agree that these small towns are basically blameless in this disaster, and that some kind of policy that would have either restricted the water usage of these industrial sites or made them pay a fair price for using it would have been a wise thing to have a long time ago. But here we are now, with the boulder rolling full speed down the hill, and you better hope you’re not in its path. Godspeed, y’all.

Posted in The great state of Texas | Tagged Alice, Corpus Christi, desalinization, drought, Evangeline Aquifer, Greg Abbott, H2O4Texas, Ingleside, Jasper Aquifer, Orange Grove, Taft, Texas, Texas Water Development Board, Texas Water Infrastructure Network, Three Rivers, water | Leave a comment

RIP, Voting Rights Act

Posted on April 30, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

JFC.

Wednesday’s 6–3 party-line decision in Louisiana v. Callais will go down in history as one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the last century. All six Republican-appointed justices on the court signed onto Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion gutting what remained of the Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters, while pretending they were merely making technical tweaks to the act.

This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils, by ending the protections of Section 2 of the act, which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation. It’s the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy, and a brazen willingness to reject Congress’ judgment that fair representation for minority voters sometimes requires race-conscious legislation. It gives the green light to further partisan gerrymandering. It protects Alito’s core constituency: aggrieved white Republican voters. It’s a disaster for American democracy.

[…]

And now comes Callais. Let’s not sugarcoat things: Alito’s opinion eviscerates Section 2 as applied to redistricting. He throws out the Gingles test—while denying he is doing so—and has restored a requirement that plaintiffs prove discriminatory intent when challenging district lines. Only if a computer algorithm would protect minority voters by chance do they have a chance to win such a case. What’s worse, the state can defend their maps by claiming that they were merely engaging in partisan gerrymandering. This move is thanks to what the Supreme Court wrote in the 2019 Rucho case—that though partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, it is out of the court’s realm to fix.

So when, say, Louisiana goes back and eliminates many Black opportunity districts in its state, it can claim it is doing so to help Republicans, not white people. That’s an outrageous proposition given the considerable overlap between those two groups in Louisiana.

What this means for the 2026 elections is uncertain. In many states, primaries are over or nearly so. It is hard to imagine a state ordering a rerunning of primaries under new districts to gut old Section 2 districts. But it’s possible. And it could affect places still redistricting for 2026, including, most importantly, Florida. It could also affect state and local elections, from school boards and city councils to state legislatures.

Justice Elena Kagan’s strenuous dissent notes all the history I’ve recounted. She then considers the retrograde turn of the Supreme Court in Shelby County and elsewhere, making the correct point that the current Supreme Court is the most hostile to voting rights in at least a century. And it is all done by Alito with subterfuge. The opinion adopts—though Alito denies it—Alito’s dissent in a 2023 case, Allen v. Milligan, holding Alabama violated the voting Rights Act in drawing its congressional districts. Callais brings back the requirement that minority voters prove discriminatory intent while denying it is doing that either—in contravention of Section 2’s text, congressional intent, and common sense.

Kagan is not fooled: It is not hyperbole when she writes: “Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.”

In other words, Alito knows exactly what he’s doing: making it seem like he’s not gutting the Voting Rights Act through technical language, turning both the statute and the Constitution on its head. It’s the product of his long mission: to favor the white Republicans he seems to think he represents on the Supreme Court, rather than all Americans.

This was more or less what everyone was expecting and worried about, but it doesn’t make it any less disgusting. The question is not whether Texas will do more redistricting in 2027, assuming there is still unified Republican control, it’s how ambitious the GOP will be. At this point there are no limits, and we’ve seen what that looks like in other contexts, so. We should really try to elect enough Democrats this year to make that impossible for them to accomplish.

The one minor bright spot is that any Democrat or non-wingnut pundit who still cavils at radically overhauling the corrupt SCOTUS when Dems have the opportunity can safely be pelted with rotten tomatoes and laughed out of public visibility. There’s no going back. The Trib, Texas Public Radio, The 19th, TPM, and TPM again have more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged Congress, Election 2026, Election 2028, lawsuit, Louisiana, redistricting, SCOTUS, Texas, The Lege, voter suppression, Voting Rights Act | 1 Comment

Texas blog roundup for the week of April 27

Posted on April 30, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance has never attended the White House Correspondents Dinner but it always brings you the weekly roundup.

Off the Kuff rounded up the Q1 campaign finance reports for Texas Democratic candidates for Senate and Congress.

SocraticGadfly read The New Republic’s interview of George Conway, and realized that Never Trumper Republicans and Blue Anon Democrats remain largely clueless about the actuality of the 25th Amendment.

Neil at the Houston Democracy Project offered six observations from the gutting of the ICE/City of Houston ordinance. At bottom line, there is no abuse from our authoritarian, white-supremacist state & federal governments that will cause Houston city government to meaningfully advocate for our rights.

============================

And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

Steve Vladeck breaks down the moment when SCOTUS decided that the rules no longer applied to it.

The Dallas Observer wonders what will happen with primary runoff voting after the ouster of Allen West.

Law Dork digs into the disgraceful indictments of the SPLC filed by the Trump Justice Department.

The Barbed Wire reminds us that we have always had Tony Gonzaleses, and we still have them now.

Texas Monthly documents the damage the border wall is doing to locals and the environment.

Chris Tackett demolishes a few “Christian European” myths.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged blog roundup, TPA | Leave a comment

TPOR poll: Talarico leading both Cornyn and Paxton

Posted on April 29, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

This will never get old.

Rep. James Talarico

Democratic state Rep. James Talarico is leading both of his prospective Republican opponents in a new poll of Texas’ U.S. Senate race — though the result is within the margin of error in either scenario, suggesting a close contest in November.

The poll, conducted by Texas Public Opinion Research from April 17 to 20, found Talarico leading Sen. John Cornyn by three percentage points, 44% to 41%. The Austin Democrat leads Attorney General Ken Paxton by a margin of five percentage points, 46% to 41%. The survey included 1,865 likely general election voters and had a margin of error of +/-2.5 percentage points.

[…]

Cornyn and Paxton are competing in a May 26 runoff to be the Republican nominee for Senate and take on Talarico, who won a competitive primary of his own in early March. A handful of polls throughout the cycle, some nonpartisan and some sponsored by Democrats, have found Democratic candidates with narrow leads or within the margin of error in hypothetical general election matchups.

Closely watched by politicos around the country, Texas’ Senate contest already features the most expensive primary on record, with most of the money coming on the Republican side in support of Cornyn. The Cook Political Report considers the seat to be “likely Republican,” but the messy Senate Republican runoff, Talarico’s fundraising prowess and a wave of Democratic overperformances in special elections have both parties eyeing the race with heightened interest.

Cornyn and his supporters have argued the longtime senator would be a stronger general election candidate than Paxton in a cycle in which the national environment is expected to be tough for Republicans. The TPOR poll found little variance in how the two Republicans perform in hypothetical matchups with Democrats.

In both scenarios, Talarico’s support is heavily powered by voters of color, college-educated Texans and independents. Among Black voters, Talarico leads Cornyn by 51 percentage points and Paxton by 56 percentage points. Among Latino voters, Talarico leads Cornyn by a 32-point margin and Paxton by a 27-point margin.

Independents broke heavily for the Democrat in both matchups: Talarico leads 51% to 29% among the group against Cornyn, and 53% to 28% with independents against Paxton.

The poll also found that more voters had a favorable impression of Talarico than those with unfavorable views — 41% to 34%, with the rest saying they were unsure. Meanwhile, Paxton and Cornyn are underwater by 10 and 15 percentage points, respectively, the two lowest favorability marks among all candidates in the survey.

Most polling of the Republican runoff has found it to be a neck-and-neck contest or Paxton leading by single digits. A TPOR poll of the runoff, conducted April 6 to 7, found Paxton up by 8 percentage points.

Beyond the Senate race, the TPOR poll found Republicans leading in the high-profile contests for governor and attorney general — though the former race is also within the margin of error.

In the survey, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott led the Democratic nominee, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa of Austin, 48% to 43%.

The poll found that while Hinojosa is leading with both Latinos and independents, Abbott has stronger support than Cornyn and Paxton among those groups.

Paxton’s decision to run for Senate opened up the attorney general seat for the first time in over a decade, drawing crowded Democratic and Republican primaries that are both being decided by runoffs. On the Democratic side, Dallas state Sen. Nathan Johnson is facing former Galveston mayor Joe Jaworski. In the Republican runoff, voters will pick between Galveston state Sen. Mayes Middleton and Austin U.S. Rep. Chip Roy.

The TPOR poll asked voters whom they would pick between the Democrat and the Republican, rather than measuring each hypothetical general election matchup. It found Republicans leading the attorney general race, 45% to 39%.

See here and here for previous polls showing Talarico leading in the November race. More data from this poll is here. My thoughts:

– It was shocking to see both Republicans at just 41% against Talarico in this poll, but that’s not unprecedented, as Talarico led Cornyn 43-41 in the previous poll. The five-point lead over Paxton is the biggest advantage Talarico has had in any poll so far.

– As nice as it is to see these numbers, I continue to believe that both Paxton and Cornyn are held down a little by the voters who oppose them in the runoff, some of whom are unwilling to say they support the other guy in a general election poll but will come home eventually afterwards.

– But not all of them will, and that’s a big problem for Republicans Cornyn (77%) and Paxton (78%) not only haven’t consolidated the Republican vote – Talarico gets 88% of Dems against Cornyn and 89% against Paxton, for comparison – they both lose a non-trivial amount to Talarico, with 7% voting for Talarico against Cornyn and 9% against Paxton. Another 15% are undecided or won’t vote for Cornyn, 13% for Paxton; those numbers are 10% and 8% respectively for Talarico. This is how the normal Republican advantage erodes.

– Much has been written about how Talarico needs to mend fences with Black voters to have a chance to win, and there’s some support for that in this poll, as he leads Cornyn 65-14 and Paxton 69-13 among Black voters. He’ll definitely need to improve those numbers, but 1) this is a small sample, so the error bars are large, and 2) in my experience, voters of color are more likely to be undecided, especially in earlier polls. We should keep an eye on this, of course, but I don’t see any red flags here.

– The flip side of this is that Talarico is more competitive among white voters than we have seen in the past. He trails Cornyn 51-36, and Paxton 50-38. I tried to find some comparative data from past polls, but not all of them publish that data and quite a few links to old polls no longer work, but I did find these two, both from Presidential races: A July 2, 2020 UT/Texas Politics Project poll that had Donald Trump with 59% of the white vote against Joe Biden in a result that had Trump leading 48-44 (I couldn’t find what Biden’s number would be, but most likely it would be in the 36-38 range, possibly a bit lower), and this September 2012 Wilson Perkins Allen Opinion Research that had Mitt Romney up by a ludicrous 77-17 margin among white voters over President Barack Obama; Romney led 55-40 in the poll, which wasn’t far off from the final 57-41 result.

Again, I want to strongly caution against any broad reading of these numbers, which are sure to be volatile, but the big-picture point is that white voters have given Republicans commanding margins in statewide races for many years now, and any dip in that support is going to cost them. As above, we’ll keep an eye on this.

– We don’t have any further data about the Governor’s race, but I’d bet Abbott has a wider lead among white voters than either Republican Senate candidate. Of note, in re: the earlier point about Talarico and Black voters, is that Gina Hinojosa leads Abbott by 57 among Black voters, which is six points better than Talarico against Cornyn and one point better than Talarico against Paxton. Talarico does better than Hinojosa in this poll with Latino voters, having leads of 32 against Cornyn and 27 against Paxton, compared to Hinojosa’s +22.

– Finally, the approval numbers for Trump (48/50) and Abbott (48/46) are similar to the most recent UT/Texas Politics Project approval numbers. We should be getting an update on those soon.

That’s what we have for now. Let me know what you think.

Posted in Election 2026 | Tagged Attorney General, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Election 2012, Election 2020, Election 2026, Gina Hinojosa, Governor, Greg Abbott, James Talarico, Joe Biden, Joe Jaworski, John Cornyn, Ken Paxton, Lite Gov, Mitt Romney, Nathan Johnson, polls, primaries, runoff, Senate, Texas | 1 Comment

Early voting for the May 16 District C runoff starts today

Posted on April 29, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

It’s now time for Election #2 of 3 in the month of May. This one is the runoff for Houston City Council District C, between Joe Panzarella, who led with about 33% of the vote in April, and Nick Hellyar, who had 22%. This is from the press release yesterday morning announcing a media availability for the Harris County Clerk on the start of early voting:

Early Voting

Wed., April 29 – Sat., May 2 (7 a.m. – 7 p.m.)

Sun., May 3 (Noon – 7 p.m.)

Mon., May 4 – Sat., May 9 (7 a.m. – 7 p.m.)

Sun., May 10 (Noon – 7 p.m.)

Mon., May 11 – Tue., May 12 (7 a.m. – 7 p.m.)

Election Day

Sat., May 16 (7 a.m. – 7 p.m.)

Harris County will operate six vote centers during Early Voting and 20 on Election Day. For a list of vote centers and additional election information, visit HarrisVotes.com. Follow @HarrisVotes on social media for news and updates.

Specifically, the vote center info is here, and it looks like the same set of locations as for the original election. As you can see, there will be plenty of time to vote.

My interview with Joe Panzarella is here, and my interview with Nick Hellyar is here. Give them a listen if you’re in District C and haven’t listened to them yet.

This election begins just as the early voting for the special election in SD04 comes to an end. Here’s the daily EV report from that race; remember that only a smallish portion of Harris County is in that district. Runoff Day is Saturday, May 2, and you can find the Election Day voting locations for Harris County here. My interview with Democrat Ron Angeletti is here.

And hey, right after the May 16 election concludes, it will be time to begin early voting for the May 26 primary runoffs. What, you thought the County Clerk folks had it too easy this year? Pshaw. I’ll have more on that when I get it from the Clerk, who I hope is sitting on a lounge chair while being fanned and fed grapes. It’s voting time, get ready to get going.

UPDATE: Here’s the official press release about the start of early voting for the District C runoff.

Posted in Election 2026 | Tagged Abbie Kamin, Brandon Creighton, Brett Ligon, Democratic primary, District C, early voting, Election 2025, Election 2026, Harris County, Houston, Houston City Council, Joseph Panzarella, Nick Hellyar, Ron Angeletti, SD04, Senate, special election, Texas | Leave a comment

Texas Medical Board sanctions doctors in Ngumezi and Crane cases

Posted on April 29, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

It’s not enough, and it’s also not anywhere close to addressing the real problem.

The Texas Medical Board has disciplined three doctors ProPublica previously investigated whose patients died after receiving delayed or inappropriate pregnancy care under the state’s strict abortion ban.

Two of the doctors failed to properly intervene as a pregnant teenager repeatedly sought care for life-threatening complications, the board found. The third did not provide a dilation and curettage procedure to empty a miscarrying patient’s uterus, and she ultimately bled to death.

As ProPublica investigated those preventable deaths and five others across three states in the past few years, reporters found that abortion bans have influenced how doctors and hospitals respond to pregnancy complications. Facing risks of prison time and professional ruin, doctors have delayed key interventions until they can document that a fetus’ heart is no longer beating or that a case meets a narrow legal exception. Some physicians say their colleagues are discharging or transferring pregnant patients instead of taking responsibility for their care.

Doctors and lawyers have questioned why medical boards, which oversee physician licensing and investigate substandard care, have not played a more active role in guiding doctors on how to uphold medical standards within the constraints of the law. When asked by ProPublica in 2024 what recourse miscarrying patients had when a doctor denied them necessary treatment, the president of the Texas Medical Board said it had no say over criminal law but that patients could file a complaint and “vote with their feet” to seek care from another doctor.

Since then, the Texas board has taken more steps than those in other states, publishing guidance this year that provides case studies on how doctors can legally provide abortions to patients with certain medical complications. The state Legislature ordered the board to create the training materials as part of the Life of the Mother Act, which was passed after ProPublica’s reporting and made modest adjustments to the state’s abortion restrictions in an attempt to prevent additional maternal deaths.

[…]

Maternal care experts say health care providers will continue to hesitate to offer standard care as long as bans carry serious criminal consequences — Texas’ law can put a physician behind bars for 99 years. But those who spoke to ProPublica say that medical board sanctions are one of the few levers that can provide a counterweight, pushing hospitals and doctors to provide standard care despite uncertainty over vaguely written laws.

Michelle Maloney, who is representing the families of both Texas patients in malpractice lawsuits, said she was pleasantly surprised by the board’s recent actions. “Over the course of my career, I’ve had many horrific, horrific death cases. For someone to get disciplined by the medical board, especially while there’s ongoing litigation, is just extraordinarily rare,” she said.

[…]

Reproductive rights advocates welcomed the Texas board’s recent actions but said that it and medical boards in other states should do more. None of the Texas discipline orders, for example, directly sanction a doctor for failing to offer or provide an abortion for a high-risk medical condition.

The board has disciplined some doctors in recent years for failing to provide D&Cs to patients after a confirmed miscarriage or for substandard care of pregnant patients experiencing emergencies, and the orders are typically released quietly. The board could be making public statements and sharing more robust guidance to remind doctors of the consequences, said Molly Duane, the litigation director of Amplify Legal, which is part of the reproductive rights advocacy group Abortion in America.

“They should be saying loudly: This is what can happen if you don’t provide care in these circumstances,” Duane said. At the Center for Reproductive Rights, Duane represented 20 Texas women in a case against the state who alleged doctors inappropriately denied them abortions during medical emergencies. The Texas Supreme Court sided with the state and blamed doctors for misinterpreting the law. Duane is not aware of any doctors in those cases who received discipline from the board.

Read the article and see here and here for more on Porsha Ngumezi and Nevaeh Crane, whose doctors were among those punished. It’s clear from this story that this is a story of malpractice and mistreatment of these women by their doctors, and they died as a result. As far as that goes, that the doctors did receive some consequences is a good thing, albeit an insufficient one. To whatever this can improve things for women in the future, that’s also good. But hanging over all of it is the undeniable fact that any doctor in the position these doctors were in has to make the decision to risk being harassed and arrested, not just by Ken Paxton or potentially the even worse Republican wannabees running to succeed him, but also by rogue prosecutors and litigious forced-birth zealot lawyers, all of whom are empowered by our state’s insane and deeply harmful anti-abortion laws. The Texas Medical Board is scapegoat dressed up to look like a reasoned enforcement mechanism so that the forces that are truly responsible for what’s going on here can keep operating in the shadows. Say it with me again: Nothing will change until the people in charge of our state are changed.

Posted in The great state of Texas | Tagged abortion, Abortion in America, Amplify Legal, Attorney General, Election 2026, Ken Paxton, misoprostol, Nevaeh Crain, Porsha Ngumezi, SCOTUS, Supreme Court, Texas, Texas Medical Board, The Lege | Leave a comment

SCOTUS approves Texas redistricting map

Posted on April 28, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

I mean, obviously.

Texas’ newly redrawn congressional map is officially cleared for use, after the U.S. Supreme Court formally overturned a lower court’s ruling Monday.

In November, the high court allowed the map to be used temporarily. Monday’s ruling maintains that status quo permanently, ensuring the new lines will be used for the 2026 midterms and going forward. The ruling ends the lengthy legal battle over Texas’ efforts to add as many as five more Republican seats to the U.S. House.

Texas took up this unusual mid-decade redistricting effort over the summer, after President Donald Trump pushed the state to help shore up the GOP’s narrow majority in what is expected to be a difficult midterm election for the party. The effort drew significant pushback, including from state House Democrats, who left Texas to temporarily deny the chamber the headcount needed to pass the map.

After the Democrats returned, the map passed, and legal challenges immediately followed. Several civil rights groups who were in active litigation over Texas’ 2021 maps sued again, saying the 2025 map was racially discriminatory.

In November, Judge Jeff Brown agreed, writing in his 160-page opinion joined by Judge David Guaderrama that there was “substantial evidence” that this new map was racially gerrymandered. Brown, a Trump appointee, received a dressing down from the panel’s lone dissenter, 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jerry Smith, who said the opinion was the “most blatant exercise of judicial activism that I have ever witnessed.”

Lawyers for the state asked the Supreme Court to block Brown’s ruling and allow the map to be used for the fast-approaching 2026 primaries. In early December, the court agreed, saying Texas was likely to succeed on the merits of the case.

Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, saying the temporary ruling “disrespects the work of a District Court that did everything one could ask to carry out its charge — that put aside every consideration except getting the issue before it right.”

Monday’s ruling fell along similar ideological lines. Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson again dissented; no additional comments from the justices were included in the summary ruling.

See here, here, here, and here for the background. Once they let the map be used, that was all there was to it. Technically, they could have come back and said “oh, wait, the lower court was right”, but it would be too late to do anything about it this time around. We all knew that wasn’t going to happen. Either we get a federal law that strictly limits redistricting shenanigans – and comes with a side order of court reform to prevent the current corrupt SCOTUS from batting it down – or this is how we live now. Steve Vladeck, Law Dork, the Lone Star Project and Mi Familia Vota have more.

Posted in Election 2026, Legal matters | Tagged Adam Kincaid, Attorney General, CD09, CD18, CD22, CD27, CD28, CD30, CD32, CD34, CD35, Congress, Donald Trump, Election 2026, filing deadline, Greg Abbott, Jeff Brown, Justice Department, Ken Paxton, lawsuit, LULAC, MALC, MALDEF, NAACP, National Redistricting Foundation, Phil King, primaries, redistricting, SCOTUS, special session, Texas, The Lege, Todd Hunter, Voting Rights Act | Leave a comment

Virginia Supreme Court hears redistricting challenge

Posted on April 28, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Monday was redistricting day in court.

The Virginia Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday on the legality of a constitutional amendment voters approved last week that allows Democrats to implement a more favorable congressional map ahead of the midterm elections.

Attorneys for the Democrats in the case were peppered with tough questions by the justices, signaling some skepticism of their arguments.

Republicans have challenged the process in several court cases, arguing that the Democratic-controlled legislature made procedural errors in putting the amendment on the ballot, which in turn invalidates the results of Tuesday’s special election.

To amend the constitution, lawmakers must pass an amendment in two consecutive legislative sessions with an election in between. Republicans have argued that Democrats first passed the amendment when early voting had already begun ahead of Virginia’s 2025 elections, meaning they failed to meet that requirement.

Democrats have said that Election Day itself, not the start of early voting, is the key date and that voters had plenty of time to educate themselves on the issue.

“If we’re talking about the purpose of protecting the people’s vote and protecting the people’s ability to weigh in, then I feel like it would be patently unfair to override the people’s vote because of a concern that they had not gotten the opportunity to voice their opinion months earlier,” Virginia Solicitor General Tillman Breckenridge said in court.

“What is your position — your client’s position — regarding a constitutional amendment that is adopted at 6 p.m. on Election Day with an hour left at the polls? Is that the next general, is that still the next general election?” one justice asked.

Breckenridge said the state’s position is that the amendment must come before Election Day, not on it.

Earlier this year, the Virginia Supreme Court had permitted the special election to take place, but reserved the right to rule on the merits of the case at a later date. Voters approved the redistricting referendum by 3 points.

See here for the background. On the AmicusPlus podcast last week (for SlatePlus subscribers), Mark Joseph Stern criticized the Republican arguments as being weak and expected the VA Supreme Court to uphold the map; the fact that they didn’t block it in the first place was the key tell, he said. I presume they will rule quickly one way or the other. The conventional wisdom right now is that the Great Redistricting Wars of 2025-26 at best a draw for Trump and Republicans, with a nontrivial chance that Dems could end up netting more seats out of the exercise than the GOP. That’s subject to this court ruling and whatever happens in Florida, which may yet take a crack at squeezing a couple more red districts out of their map, which comes with some downside risk since their map is already pretty skewed towards Republicans. The voters will eventually get a say as well, and then the likely demise of the Voting Rights Act will force us all to go through this again for 2028…it’s all quite exhausting. As I say in the post above, we could choose to do something about this.

There is other litigation in Virginia as well.

A Virginia circuit court has refused to block the implementation of Democrats’ new congressional map, which voters approved in a statewide special election last week.

The order comes in one of several Republican lawsuits aiming to overturn redistricting in the state.

In February, the Virginia legislature passed a new congressional map, contingent on voter approval, in an effort to counteract President Donald Trump’s push to use unprecedented mid-decade gerrymanders in GOP-led states to give Republicans an advantage in the 2026 midterm election. The new map could give Democrats up to four more seats in Congress.

In the lawsuit in question, the Republican National Committee (RNC) alleged that the Democrat-controlled Virginia legislature exceeded its authority when it passed a constitutional amendment on redistricting. The RNC also argued that Democrats’ proposed “10-1 map” did not comply with compactness requirements under the state constitution. They asked the court to grant a preliminary injunction blocking the map’s use.

But the Circuit Court of the City of Richmond concluded that the Virginia General Assembly indeed had plenary authority to pass such legislation. It also found that, while the new map was less compact than its predecessor, the issue of compactness was “fairly debatable” and the RNC’s claim was unlikely to succeed.

“Many a tradition and law has been laid down in the advancement of a national quest for political power, and the winds that will blow cannot yet be known. Nonetheless, this Court knows its role is clear. It is not to assess the wisdom of public policy nor to engage in policy making from the bench,” Judge Tracy Thorne-Begland wrote in his order. “Instead, it is to decide if those with whom we have entrusted power have exercised that power in conformance with their constitutional mandate. On this question, the Court’s answer is in the affirmative.”

Significantly, the court also declined to overrule the will of Virginia voters.

“Millions of Virginians voted in an election,” Thorne-Begland wrote. “On the issues raised before this Court, in these early stages of the proceedings, the evidence suggests the election and the proceedings leading to it were conducted in conformance with the applicable constitutional and legal principles and controlling authorities. As such it is in the public interests to allow the amendment to take effect. Granting the extraordinary relief requested would imperil the public interests.”

That’s a federal case, and that Democracy Docket story was the first I’d heard of it. Seems clear that the real action is in the state courthouse, but you never know. I’ll keep an eye on all this.

Posted in Election 2026, Legal matters | Tagged Abigail Spanberger, California, Congress, Donald Trump, Election 2026, Election 2028, Florida, Gavin Newsom, Greg Abbott, lawsuit, Louise Lucas, redistricting, special election, Texas, The Lege, Virginia, Voting Rights Act | Leave a comment

A brief history of shield laws

Posted on April 28, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Here’s a long and detailed story about abortion shield laws and the significant effect they’ve had on abortion access post-Dobbs. You should read the whole thing but I wanted to focus on this bit from Texas that I had not known before reading this.

The numbers are even more stunning in Texas. Abortions began plummeting in the state after lawmakers enacted SB 8, also known as the Heartbeat Act, which banned terminations after six weeks of pregnancy. Shortly after Dobbs, the state outlawed abortion almost entirely. But this past June, almost 4,200 women in Texas managed to access abortion care via telehealth, #WeCount found.

“Anti-abortion extremists thought, ‘we’re going to overturn Roe, we’re going to ban abortion, we’re going to trap people [where they live], and they’re not going to get care,’” says Lizzy Hinkley, legal director of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, which advocates for shield protections across the country. “Because of shield laws and telehealth providers, that’s not the case—and they’re furious.”

Murrill’s frustration has been increasingly evident in her public pronouncements. Blue states “don’t agree with the laws of our state, and so they have this whole system set up to nullify our laws,” she complained to NOLA.com last month. Last summer, she and other Republican attorneys general urged GOP Congressional leaders to pass federal legislation rendering shield laws invalid. “These laws are blatant attempts to interfere with states’ ability to enforce criminal laws within their borders and disrupt our constitutional structure,” their letter said.

Also signing the letter was Texas Attorney General—and GOP senatorial hopeful—Ken Paxton, who expanded on his grievances in a press release. Shield protections, he wrote, “embolden lawlessness, weaken our ability to enforce Texas laws, and trample on the rights of sovereign states to protect the unborn.”

Yet it was a 2021 Texas law—legislation that Paxton strongly supported—that prompted abortion advocates and blue-state policymakers to start looking for creative and expedient ways to protect abortion providers and patients. SB 8, the brainchild of far-right legal strategist Jonathan Mitchell, banned abortions early in pregnancy in flagrant violation of Roe (indeed, one of Mitchell’s goals was to use the law as a vehicle to reverse Roe). Even more ominous, it created a novel “bounty hunter” provision that gave any private citizen the power to sue anyone who “aided and abetted” an abortion for $10,000 per violation.

The law was a clear sign that if and when Roe was reversed, red states would try to enforce their anti-abortion policies across their borders. “The end game wasn’t just to stop abortions in Texas,” says Rachel Rebouché, a law professor at the University of Texas in Austin who previously was dean of Temple University’s law school. “It was to stop abortion everywhere.” SB 8 also showed that abortion foes intended to be audacious in their strategies; if abortion supporters wanted to stave off disaster, they needed to be innovative and fearless, too.

Soon Rebouché and two fellow legal scholars, Drexel University’s David Cohen and the University of Pittsburgh’s Greer Donley, were brainstorming about some of the measures the Biden administration and Democratic-controlled states might take to safeguard patients and providers. What began as a conversation over lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Philadelphia in May 2021 morphed into a series of influentia l op-eds and journal articles. “We put every idea on the table,” Rebouché says.

At the time, there was no such thing as a shield law because there was no need. True, in America’s federalist system of government, states frequently pass laws that conflict with each other—on issues like gambling and recreational marijuana, for example. But to function, federalism also depends on interstate “comity”—the principle of mutual respect and deference to the laws and sovereignty of other states. “No local prosecutor is going to be that upset that someone from a state where casinos are illegal spends a weekend going to Las Vegas to gamble,” Cohen says. But abortion has never been this kind of an issue. “Because of its unique position in American politics and law,” Cohen says, “abortion highlights the complications of the [federalist] system in a different way.”

Perhaps the closest analogy to abortion shield laws is the “personal liberty laws” that Northern states enacted to resist the Fugitive Slave Act before the Civil War. Some laws required that fugitive slaves be given a jury trial before being returned to the state from which they had fled; others prohibited state officials from arresting or returning fugitive slaves and local jails from housing them.

“The liberty laws were something we were consciously emulating,” says Connecticut state Rep. Matt Blumenthal, who reached out to the law professors after reading an op-ed they published in the New York Times. Within weeks, he co-sponsored his state’s abortion shield law, which was signed in May 2022—the first in the country. Blumenthal brushes aside complaints by the likes of Paxton and Murrill that by passing shield laws, blue states somehow weren’t playing fair. His favorite response to the red-state critics: “Put down your sword, and we’ll lay down our shield.”

There’s more, so read the rest. As noted before, some of the red state attacks on shield laws, in particular on the civil judgments rendered in those states against blue state doctors, have yet to be tested before SCOTUS. There remain more direct threats at the federal level to mifepristone, and not every blue state has adopted all of the shield laws that have been passed in other states. (It helps that many of the lawsuits that have been filed have been losers, but that’s not a thing you can count on forever.) For now at least, the defenses are holding. I fear the pressure will just ratchet up as Trump gets weaker and more deranged, but let’s not borrow trouble. The reason things aren’t nearly as bad as they could be is because a lot of people on our side, specifically a lot of people with power on our side, took action to prevent the worst from happening. Let’s not forget that.

Posted in National news | Tagged abortion, California, Gavin Newsom, Illinois, Ken Paxton, lawsuit, Liz Merrill, Louisiana, mifepristone, New York, SCOTUS, Texas | Leave a comment

Some insight into Ken Paxton’s finances

Posted on April 27, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Fascinating.

Still a crook any way you look

In 2019, hostile attorneys questioned Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton about his conduct as a lawyer: Had he turned over a former client’s communications to an attorney suing that client?

Paxton acknowledged that he had, one of the nuggets in an old deposition, viewed by The Wall Street Journal, that sheds new light on his legal behavior, past business dealings and blind trust that has shielded his rapidly expanded assets.

[…]

Paxton, in his second term, was made to sit for the six-hour questioning for a lawsuit involving a falling-out between two of his former friends. Charles Loper III, trustee of Paxton’s blind trust, sued Byron Cook, a former business associate, claiming fraud by Unity Resources, an energy investment company. Paxton wasn’t a defendant in the suit, but was Unity’s former lawyer, board member and investor.

The deposition marked a rare instance of Paxton being made to answer questions under oath. It remained effectively sealed when the case’s judge, a donor to Paxton’s wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, delayed ruling on its sealing for more than four years until the case was settled in 2023.

Attorneys pressed Paxton on having given Unity records to his own attorney Mitch Little—who was also representing Loper in suing Unity—but not to Unity itself.

“I’m sure I did,” Paxton said of giving the communications to Little, saying that he had done so to see if they were privileged.

Legal ethics experts declined to read the deposition because it is under a protective order, but said giving former client communications to anyone—especially someone suing the client—is a violation of attorney-client privilege. And, records belong to the client and can’t be withheld, they said.

“That’s a violation on his part on two counts,” said Randy Johnston, a Dallas lawyer specializing in legal malpractice.

Little, a Republican Texas state representative, disputed that the records he received were privileged and said there was no conflict of interest. Paxton said in the deposition that he saw no issues with the conflicts of interest raised. He testified that he probably no longer had the “old computer” containing Unity’s records.

Paxton’s early investments have gotten attention amid the Senate campaign. The Journal found that he went from being a middle-class lawyer to a multimillionaire during two decades on a public official’s salary.

In this case, records indicated that Paxton, who represented Unity from its formation in 2008 until around the time he was elected attorney general in 2014, received 2.5% interest in Unity in exchange for providing legal services, and an additional 4.5% for a $50,000 investment. Attorneys also asked about records suggesting Paxton received $500,000 in investments to help generate investment leads.

Paxton said he didn’t recall receiving interest in exchange for his legal work and didn’t recall soliciting other investors. “It doesn’t sound like something I did,” he said.

Some 90 times during the deposition, Paxton said he couldn’t remember the answer to a question. He didn’t recall his own prior role in Unity, forming the company, or the purported fraud, which involved inflating the value of flipped mineral acreage.

At several contentious moments, Paxton declined to answer questions seeking to draw a parallel between his work at Unity and his then-pending securities-fraud case, in which he was accused of recruiting Cook and others to invest in a tech company without disclosing that he received compensation to do so. Paxton settled the charges, paying nearly $300,000 to Cook and the other accusers.

At one point, he said he didn’t recall details of his biography posted on the attorney general’s website. “I don’t remember all of these awards,” Paxton said.

Here’s a bit of background on the lawsuits involving Byron Cook and Charles Loper. It references a deposition Paxton was ordered to sit for in 2022, while this story is about one from 2019. I’m not sure I knew about that. How Paxton made all his money while earning a government salary is another question we’ve pondered before; that post references some previous reporting by the Wall Street Journal. Kudos to them for keeping that ball rolling. We’re not going to get enough answers before the next elections, but we know more now than we did before. Except for Paxton himself, who seems to have forgotten it all. There are probably supplements that can help with that, Kenny.

Posted in Show Business for Ugly People | Tagged Angela Paxton, Byron Cook, Charles Loper, Collin County, Election 2022, Election 2026, Joel Hochberg, Ken Paxton, lawsuit, primaries, runoff, SEC, Senate, Servergy, Texas, William Mapp | Leave a comment

Dallas gets to keep voting centers for the primary runoff

Posted on April 27, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Good, but perhaps not the end of the story.

A North Texas appeals court rejected a petition from a Dallas County republican trying to force the county to hold a precinct-specific Election Day for the upcoming primary election.

The petition came after former county GOP Chair Allen West agreed to countywide voting for upcoming runoffs — in the wake of a chaotic March election marred by confusion and legal challenges.

The filing from petitioner Barry Wernick, a Republican Party precinct chair and commissioners court candidate, requested the Dallas-based Fifth Court of Appeals order the county elections administrator to conduct the upcoming runoff Election Day with precinct-based polling places.

The judges declined Friday, finding they had no jurisdiction to do so. They also found Wernick had no standing for relief, in part because he won his primary race outright and wasn’t in a runoff.

He also was not a party to the election services agreement between the GOP’s County Executive Committee and the county, the court said, calling Wernick “a stranger to the contract.”

“(Wernick) is a party precinct chair and, therefore, a member of the CEC. He also serves as a chair of a committee of the CEC,” Friday’s opinion said. “But he is not the county executive committee, nor is he chair of the CEC.”

The court did not weigh in on the merits of the challenge itself — namely, whether the contract to go back to countywide voting between the county and the GOP under West was valid.

Wernick said he was disappointed by the decision. In a thread on X, he said he was weighing his next steps including a possible appeal to the Texas Supreme Court.

See here for the previous update. I’m not worried about this dude appealing – even to my non-lawyer’s eyes it’s clear he has no standing and I’d fully expect the Supreme Court to swat him aside. There’s still time for someone who does have standing to file a writ with the appellate court, and I don’t know enough to have a sense of how that might go. More likely than not this is the end of it – for this year, because as we’ve discussed before, the overall issue of voting centers versus precinct location voting isn’t going away – but I’m not ready to hoist a victory flag just yet.

Posted in Election 2026, Legal matters | Tagged 5th Court of Appeals, Allen West, Dallas County, Democratic primary, early voting, Election 2026, hand counting, lawsuit, primaries, runoff, Texas, voter suppression, voting centers | Leave a comment

Other cities’ scooter issues

Posted on April 27, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

I am fascinated.

Growing concerns over reckless scooter use in cities south of Houston have prompted officials to update ordinances, launch awareness campaigns and plead with parents to educate young riders.

League City officials say call lines have been flooded with complaints, while Pearland and Friendswood police have contended with scooter-involved collisions and injuries. The uptick in incidents mirrors a trend in scooter and e-bike popularity among young people, according to Chad Rogers, spokesperson for the Pearland Police Department.

“If you’re a parent and you plan to purchase a scooter for your kid, or if your kid has a scooter, you really need to pull them aside and have a conversation about being safe,” Rogers said.

Pearland has seen several instances of scooters and e-bikes riding into crosswalks or streets and colliding with vehicles, according to city attorney Katie Leininger. The city updated its code of ordinances last year to enhance safety surrounding the use of scooters and similar devices.

Scooters cannot be used on a roadway unless the person is crossing the street at a crosswalk, or if there isn’t a sidewalk. When a person crosses the street on a scooter, they must stop completely before crossing and wait until it’s safe to cross.

“Drivers are already distracted; if they’re on the phone or not paying attention and not expecting to see kids, that combination is extremely dangerous on the roads,” Rogers said, particularly at stop signs and intersections.

It’s common to see kids leaving school in scooters during dismissal, and Rogers said authorities are working on educational programs for schools. But because there are no age restrictions on who can drive scooters, police are relying on parents to help ensure their child follows the law and may cite parents whose children do not.

Officials in Pearland and nearby cities have made similar pleas on social media, urging community members to build awareness around safe scooter use. Friendswood, in a recent Facebook post, noted complaints from residents about reckless riding, including two incidents involving scooters that caused serious injuries to children.

League City is also making a social media pitch about scooter safety. This all presents an interesting contrast to Houston’s approach. Which, it must be said, had some initial success, though I’d be very interested to hear about further updates. I don’t have a point to make here, I just saw the story and thought it was worth noting.

Posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged electric bicycles, Friendswood, Houston, League City, Pearland, scooters, Texas | Leave a comment

Weekend link dump for April 26

Posted on April 26, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

“How Viktor Orbán Got Rolled by His Own Gerrymander”.

“When people consent to have sex with each other, they also generally agree, implicitly or explicitly, to a specific risk level: birth control methods, sexually transmitted infection (STI) status, whether someone is on PrEP to prevent HIV. Going back on that agreement is a form of violence and, in the case of stealthing, can be sexual assault.”

“Can Dumb Phones Save Us From Our Phone Addictions?”

“What The Pitt Gets Right (and Wrong) About ‘Pittsburghese’“.

“The central question is not whether states can, in principle, authorize lawsuits against law-breaking federal agents: For most of American history, that is exactly how victims of federal misconduct collected damages, and it remains permissible under the Constitution. The issue is that, in 1988, Congress enacted a law known as the Westfall Act that curtailed such suits. Its goal was to limit state tort claims, like assault and trespass, against federal officials acting under federal authority. But it included an exception for suits “brought for a violation of the Constitution.” Under a straightforward reading of the act, then, a plaintiff like Carvajal-Muñoz cannot sue ICE agents for assault, battery, or false imprisonment under Maine law. But he can sue these agents for violating the Constitution by committing these wrongful acts.”

Back in the 90s I had a coworker whose voice mail greeting said that while he wasn’t available to take your call, a virtual version of himself was standing by and ready to talk to you. It was funny and in character, and apparently way ahead of its time. For the record, I will not be making any AI clones of myself, and I do not use AI to write this blog. The interview transcripts that Greg Wythe has been generating for me do use AI, but that’s it, and those tools are just improved versions of already-existing voice-to-text technology.

An AI agent opened a store in San Francisco. So far, not so good.

You don’t have bixonimania, because it doesn’t exist. But an AI chatbot may tell you that you do.

“Part of me is glad he’s wasting his time on bullshit, because it’s less dangerous for rule of law, for the American public, but it also means we don’t have a real functioning FBI director.”

“John Becker and Maureen Magarity are believed to be the first married Division I men’s and women’s basketball coaches to coach at the same school simultaneously.”

“As such, we now must contend with a bunch of absolute freaks who are somehow upset about the teen birth rate going down.”

“Is Trump Taking Taxpayer Dollars for Contraception and Spending it on Erectile Dysfunction, Porn Addiction, and Faster Sperm?”

Two Marcias Brady are better than one.

“No one knew it at the time, but 2014 — more precisely, Ellen DeGeneres’ star-studded selfie moment — marked the peak of a monoculture that no longer exists. The numbers show a long decay ever since.”

“Meet the new boss. Worse than the old boss.”

“What these systems can’t currently do, and arguably may never be able to do, is to decide what problems to attack and what to prioritize. These generative models make it easier to do a wide range of things by automating various technical processes— dividing up data sets, extracting fit values, etc.— but deciding which of the nearly infinite number of possible analyses are worth doing and what actions to take based on the results are questions of a different sort. These are ultimately decided not by technical factors, but by individual and societal priorities and values.”

RIP, Alan Osmond, musician and oldest member of The Osmonds.

“As we see from that Times article, in addition to creating a kind of electoral strongman rule it also created an engine perfectly suited to corruption. Obviously there’s a ton of money sloshing around Washington and there always has been. But the old model was persuasion. Or there was at least a significant role for it. But why bother persuading Donald Trump? Or, really, what would that even mean? Why not just cut him a check? Or cut him in on a real estate deal. It’s more direct. It’s more reliable. It may even be cheaper. And we see it happening everywhere across the federal government today.”

My kids don’t ask me for advice very often – they don’t need to, for one thing. But when they do, I promise I will not outsource my thinking to some dumb chatbot. I will not disrespect them like that.

“The people who tell us that AI will dominate our future and take our jobs are the people who are hoping that will be true. They may be hoping this because it makes them feel important, or because they want to be billionaires, or because they simply do not understand other people. I think that final point is underestimated. If you are going to provide me with a robot servant, I have a very clear bar: It’s gotta be at least as much bang for my buck as my dishwasher.”

“But in John Roberts’s worldview, no statute or executive action is really “solid” until he, John Roberts, has had the opportunity to pass judgment on it. He has spent his entire career demonstrating that if he agrees with the policy, he will find a reason to conclude that, as a matter of law, he has a solemn obligation to preserve it. If he doesn’t, he will find a reason to conclude that, as a matter of law, he has no choice but to stuff it in the garbage.”

Bakrupt them. See here for more.

”For years, [Alex Jones] has not controlled Infowars, has not controlled personnel decisions, hasn’t had access to Infowars cash, and has had his personal belongings and one, or maybe two, houses have to be sold. He’s now on the verge of losing all the IP that he spent 20 years building up. That’s not just the Infowars logo: that’s the video inventory, all of his customer data. All of that has been under the control of the bankruptcy trustee, and now the receiver, for years.”

“But here’s the bigger issue for the country, as the Iran episode indicates: Kash Patel is simply bad at his job.”

“A day after FBI Director Kash Patel filed a $250 million lawsuit against The Atlantic, he has lost a different defamation claim, against news analyst and pundit Frank Figliuzzi.”

RIP, Dave Mason, guitarist, songwriter, co-founder of the band Traffic.

RIP, Riccie Johnson, longtime makeup artist who worked for over 50 years with 60 Minutes and worked with The Beatles on their Ed Sullivan Show appearance.

“Haven’t they read Isaiah chapter one? Yes. Yes they have read that. They read through the entire book of Isaiah right after they read through the entire book of Song of Solomon and right before they read through the entire book of Jeremiah. They got through it all, cover to cover. But all they remember is what they expected to find.”

RIP, Dean Tavoularis, Oscar-winning production designer on the Godfather movies, Apocalypse Now, and more.

Suck it, Laura Loomer.

A brief history of the Ed Sullivan Theater, soon to be looking for a new tenant, post-Colbert.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged linkdump | Leave a comment

Some poll news and other tidbits

Posted on April 26, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

From Somos Votantes:

Today, Somos Votantes released new polling data showing Latino voters in key states and districts are rejecting President Trump and Republicans ahead of the 2026 midterms, driven by mounting economic pain, widespread disapproval of Republican’s tariff and healthcare policies, and intense alarm over the costs of Trump’s war with Iran. This marks the fifth consecutive installment of Somos Votantes’ quarterly tracking series — and the first to focus exclusively on the key states where control of Congress and governorships will be decided: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin.

The findings reveal a Latino electorate that is not only deeply pessimistic about the direction of the country under Republican leadership — but increasingly disapproving of Republicans. Yet the data also makes clear that Democrats have not secured a victory in November: real vulnerabilities on government waste, crime and fiscal credibility mean Latino voters are demanding their support to be earned.

Key findings of the poll:

‍

Partisan dynamics are currently showing Latino voters in key states lean heavily Democratic and are breaking decisively toward Democratic candidates. Democrats hold a +15 partisan advantage in surveyed states (50% Democrat vs. 35% Republican) and a +6 advantage in surveyed districts (49% D vs. 43% R). On the generic ballot, Democrats lead by +20 in states (55% / 35%) and +12 in districts (53% / 41%).

Trump is a significant electoral liability, with deeply negative ratings on every measure — and his worst numbers on the economy. His personal favorability is deeply negative (net -24 in states; net -18 in districts), his job approval is worse (net -26 states; net -21 districts), and his handling of the economy is his single worst rating (net -30 states; net -24 districts).

Republicans in Congress are deeply underwater, Democrats hold an advantage but face uneven standing of their own. Republican congressional favorability is deeply negative in both states (net -23) and districts (net -20). Democrats in Congress receive mixed reviews — slightly negative in states (net -3: 45% favorable / 48% unfavorable) and narrowly positive in districts (net +2) — outperforming Republicans but not earning voter confidence entirely.

The cost of living, across all measures, is a dominant and intensifying concern. Roughly two-thirds of Latino likely voters say the cost of living has gone up “a lot” over the past year (64% states / 63% districts), with more than eight-in-ten reporting costs have risen overall in program states and three-quarters saying the same in program districts. The sharpest concerns center on grocery prices (62% extremely concerned in states / 57% in districts) and rising healthcare and prescription drug costs (59% states / 58% districts).

Latino voters overwhelmingly blame politicians more than corporations for price-gouging — arguing they are not doing enough to hold corporations accountable by a 3-to-1 margin (73% states / 74% districts). When the parties are compared directly, a strong majority (2-to-1 margin) blame Republican economic policies — including tariffs, overseas military spending, and cuts to health and food programs — for rising costs (64% states / 63% districts), compared to just over a third who blame Democratic economic policies (36% states / 37% districts).

Trump’s Iran war has emerged as a top Republican vulnerability, driving the highest levels of Latino voter concern in the poll. The top five most alarming statements tested all involve Republican actions tied to Trump — led by concerns that Trump’s war with Iran is pushing inflation higher (65% very concerning in states / 62% in districts), that it has driven gas prices up (64% states / 63% districts), and that it is costing American taxpayers in military spending (63% states / 63% districts). Trump tariffs and Medicaid cuts also rank among the top concerns.

Democrats face real and significant vulnerabilities. While Latino voters broadly trust Democrats more on healthcare and jobs, Democrats trail on crime and safety (36% trust Democrats vs. 38% Republicans in states), and a perceived failure to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending ranks as a top concern — directly undercutting one of the qualities voters most want to see in candidates. Roughly half of Latino voters also express concern that Democrats prioritize issues disconnected from families’ economic reality.

Candidates who promise to cut waste in government spending while protecting core programs and creating good jobs hold a decisive advantage. Latino voters are overwhelmingly more likely to support candidates who cut waste while safeguarding Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (88% more likely in states / 91% in districts) and who create good-paying jobs (88% states / 92% districts).

Democrats hold advantages on healthcare, jobs, and tariffs — but the margin is competitive. Latino voters trust Democrats more on healthcare (47% vs. 26% in states; 52% vs. 32% in districts) and jobs and the economy (44% vs. 33% in states; 45% vs. 38% in districts). However, roughly one-third of voters still trust Republicans more on economic issues, and up to one-fifth trust neither party.

The polling memo doesn’t add much to the press release, but there must be more data out there. I say that because I found this via the Current, which had some horserace numbers.

Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Gina Hinojosa leads Republican Gov. Greg Abbott by 19 points among Latino voters, while Democrat James Talarico is ahead of incumbent U.S. Sen. John Cornyn by 24 points with that demographic, according to polling conducted for Somos Votantes by predominantly Democratic public affairs firm Global Strategy Group.

[…]

In Texas’ 15th District, Democrat Bobby Pulido leads Republican incumbent U.S. Rep. Monica de La Cruz by just two points. The 28th District is even tighter, with Democrat U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar holding a single-point edge over Republican Tano Tijerina, 40% to 39%. In the latter race, 21% of voters remain undecided.

Republicans currently hold an advantage in the state’s redrawn 35th District, where Carlos De La Cruz is ahead, 54% to 39%.

I saw a fundraising email from the Gina Hinojosa campaign on Friday that touted this finding, in which she was up 58-39 on Abbott among Latinos. That’s better than a lot of alternatives, but it would have been seen as not terribly impressive not that long ago. Talarico’s margin is closer to Biden 2020 numbers. The biggest eye-opener is in CD15, where even a small lead by Bobby Pulido is a huge swing from 2024 and 2022. Still not back to “Beto in 2018” territory, but there’s some room to get closer. And we’ll need them to for CD35 to get more competitive.

There will be a lot of money spent in these races.

In the fight for control of the U.S. House this fall, Democrats are targeting two San Antonio-area districts that are considered quite red.

Texas’ 35th Congressional District was bright blue before Republicans redrew it this summer to create a GOP pickup opportunity on San Antonio’s Southeast side.

Now it’s a new seat that would have supported President Donald Trump by more than 10 percentage points under its new boundaries and neither party will know who their nominee for November is until after the May 26 primary runoffs.

Another surprising opportunity, Texas’ 23rd Congressional District, hasn’t been on Democrats’ target map since redistricting added Republican voters after the 2020 Census.

It supported Trump by nearly 15 percentage points in 2024, but U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-San Antonio) just resigned from the seat, and Democrats are feeling optimistic about their chances against the new Republican nominee Brandon Herrera.

The 30-year-old gun content creator’s social media posts range from entertaining to shocking, and Democrats hope they can capitalize on it in a November race against child welfare attorney Katy Padilla Stout.

“Brandon Herrera’s nomination is a gift to Democrats and a full-blown crisis for Republican leadership,” said Katarina Flicker, a spokeswoman for the pro-Democrat House Majority PAC. “His candidacy puts TX-23 firmly on the House battlefield.”

[…]

The pro-Democrat PAC currently has 48 congressional targets nationwide, including districts in Alaska, Montana, Florida and Tennessee that Trump carried by more than 10 percentage points.

They’re also on offense in Texas’ 15th Congressional District, where incumbent Republican Monica De La Cruz (R-Edinburg) is up against Democrat Bobby Pulido, the famous Tejano signer. De La Cruz’s district supported Trump by nearly 18 percentage points under its new boundaries.

This week the House Majority PAC laid down a total of $272 million in television and digital advertising reservations for the fall.

About $6.1 million of that is in San Antonio for TX23 and TX35, where the group’s leaders believe they can capitalize on Hispanic voters leaving the GOP.

I’m happy to see all this, if a bit surprised that some of it is aimed at CD35. I stress the “happy” of it, since I’ve been on the “CDs 09 and 35 are winnable” bandwagon from the beginning, but I wonder if it’s contingent on Johnny Garcia winning the runoff. He’s doing modestly well in fundraising, and he’s far outpacing Maureen Galindo there. I consider myself neutral in that race, but Galindo needs to make a financial case for herself if she doesn’t want to be totally left to her own devices. We’ll see.

Two other things, neither of which are specific to any campaigns but which I wanted to make note of. One is whether anyone who supported Trump’s “draw me five new districts” demand now feels regret over how things have turned out.

Texas made sense as the first state to move, because it had famously done power-grab mid-decade redistricting before, in 2003, at the behest of Sugar Land Republican Tom DeLay. That redistricting was deeply shocking to many Americans at the time for its cynicism, and it led Texas Democrats in both the House and Senate to leave the state for a while to try to block it. When Dems returned to the Capitol and the new map passed, the whole thing succeeded in weakening the Democratic Party in Texas, but when it came to affecting the balance of power in the U.S. House, the move was mostly futile. Between 2004 and the end of the decade, the new Texas districts never made the difference in the control of Congress.

This round of mid-decade redistricting, which Texas House Democrats also left the state in response to, appears to be something worse than futile: It is shaping up to have been a top-to-bottom omnishambles for the GOP. Texas did set off a redistricting wave, as intended: Six other states have now redrawn their maps. But the nationwide struggle Texas incited, it turns out, was one that Democrats were much more eager to contest than Republicans.

“Omnishambles” is a great word. I am aware of the legal tussle now going on in Virginia, which has the potential to complicate all this. But whatever the Republicans of 2025 thought would happen once Texas did Trump’s bidding, I doubt it looked anything like this.

And finally:

Revelers at Night In Old San Antonio (NIOSA), one of Fiesta’s best-attended events, got a surprise Thursday night when State Rep. James Talarico, Texas’ Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, showed up unexpectedly.

Talarico has been on something of a campaign hiatus since winning the Democratic nomination against U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett this spring. His team has been awaiting the results of the May 26 Republican runoff to find out whether he’ll take on U.S. Sen. John Cornyn or Attorney General Ken Paxton in November’s general election.

After an exhausting primary, Talarico — who represents an Austin district but once taught school in San Antonio — said there are few better ways to spend downtime than enjoying Fiesta.

“I’ve always been partial to the Battle of the Flowers Parade, but I’m so excited to be here tonight and looking forward to trying some of the food and meeting a lot of the folks that are here,” he said.

Indeed, some NIOSA-goers were left gobsmacked to see Talarico wandering around La Villita, his shirt heavy with Fiesta medals from vendors. He shook hands and mingled with attendees, occasionally posing for photos.

“I think it’s incredibly cool,” NIOSA attendee Amanda Rothbauer said. “I think it shows that he’s relating to Texans on a Texan level. It feels like he’s here to have a good time.”

And a good time he had.

Although the former Rhodes Middle School teacher didn’t get a chance to grab chicken-on-a-stick — his favorite Fiesta food — he did scarf down some beef tacos from a vendor and a piña agua fresca.

“I didn’t know he loved beef tacos,” said the vendor, who didn’t give his name. “But hey, that’s a man of the people.”

Nice. I cannot under any circumstances imagine Ken Paxton doing this, let alone getting the warm welcome Talarico got. I could picture John Cornyn doing it sometime in the pre-Trump era – he is, alas, a Trinity grad and got his start as a district court judge in Bexar County, so at the very least he’d be on familiar ground at NIOSA – but not now, mostly because of Trump poisoning. Ted Cruz would try to do this. It would be an utter debacle because he’s such a stiff, and in the end the Alamo would get sacked, because the curse of Ted Cruz remains undefeated.

Posted in Election 2026 | Tagged Bobby Pulido, Brandon Herrera, CD15, CD23, CD28, CD34, CD35, Congress, Democratic primary, Donald Trump, Election 2018, Election 2020, Election 2022, Election 2024, Election 2026, fundraising, Gina Hinojosa, Governor, Greg Abbott, Henry Cuellar, James Talarico, John Cornyn, Johnny Garcia, Katy Padilla Stout, Ken Paxton, Latino voting, Maureen Galindo, Monica de la Cruz-Hernandez, polls, redistricting, runoff, Senate, Somos Votantes, Ted Cruz, Texas, Tony Gonzales, Vicente Gonzalez | 1 Comment

Morath names the new Lake Worth ISD superintendent

Posted on April 26, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Noted for the record.

Lake Worth ISD has new leadership after Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath on April 23 appointed a new superintendent and five-member board of managers who are tasked with overseeing improving student outcomes for the 3,200-student district.

Ena Meyers is the new superintendent of Lake Worth schools. Meyers is a longtime public educator with more than two decades of experience in Texas schools. She most recently served as deputy chief of strategic initiatives at Houston ISD and has worked as a teacher, principal and district leader.

[…]

The appointments follow months of uncertainty in the small district northwest of Fort Worth, where community members, teachers and elected trustees pressed state leaders for clarity on why former Superintendent Mark Ramirez was forced out despite early signs of academic improvement. Meanwhile, as opposed to the hundreds who applied to be a Fort Worth ISD manager, only 14 initially sought to serve on Lake Worth’s.

In a press release, Morath said the newly appointed leadership team brings the experience needed to improve academic outcomes, strengthen district systems and build a foundation for long-term success.

“Lake Worth ISD students deserve a school system that prepares them for success in college, career or the military,” Morath said. “The newly appointed Board of Managers and superintendent bring the experience and commitment necessary to improve academic outcomes, strengthen district systems and build a strong foundation for long-term success in Lake Worth ISD.”

The takeover stems from years of low academic performance, including five consecutive failing ratings at Marilyn Miller Language Academy under Texas’ academic accountability system.

[…]

In September, district leaders adopted what they called ambitious goals to raise reading and math performance, improve attendance and lift every campus to at least a B rating by 2028. Ramirez said then that Lake Worth had no choice but to move with urgency as Morath weighed the intervention.

A month later, Morath visited Lake Worth schools and said state action was ultimately required, though he had not yet decided whether that would mean closing Marilyn Miller or installing managers.

By December, he announced the takeover and said Lake Worth needed “a completely new leadership environment.”

Ramirez, who was hired in May and drew strong public support during his short time in the district, was later told he would not be a candidate to remain superintendent. Elected trustees repeatedly questioned that decision, arguing Ramirez brought structure, urgency and optimism to a district that had long struggled.

I haven’t paid that much attention to Lake Worth ISD since its takeover was announced. It’s a small district that’s not like HISD in many ways, and I’ve been more focused on Fort Worth ISD because I want to see how its experience compares to ours, to see what lessons we can take from that. However, while the Fort Worth Report does a lot of good reporting on both of these takeovers, they kind of skimped on a key aspect of this story.

Meyers’ appointment likely signals Miles’ controversial education reforms — centered on a strict instructional model and district-issued learning materials — will continue to spread across the state.

Her appointment occurs as school districts seek to avoid takeovers and improve struggling schools by outsourcing certain schools’ management to the Colorado-based charter network, Third Future Schools, that Miles founded. At least seven Texas districts are moving to partner with Third Future Schools to improve a total of 12 schools. Two other districts are expanding existing partnerships with the charter operator.

Meyers was hired by HISD in July 2023 shortly after Miles was named as superintendent in the district’s takeover. Meyers is deputy chief of schools for New Education System schools and earns $223,600, according to HISD records. She was a principal in Third Future Schools before joining HISD, her LinkedIn page shows.

Her appointment is the latest in a series of HISD officials joining districts undergoing state takeovers across Texas. Fort Worth ISD hired an HISD official to be deputy superintendent, and HISD executive directors were hired to be Fort Worth regional chiefs.

My point in following these stories was to see what I could learn about how Mike Morath and the TEA view the HISD and Mike Miles experience. I figured even in a small, not-at-all-like-HISD district such as Lake Worth, I’d get some clues. That sure is what happened here. Good luck, Lake Worth. You’re gonna need it. Feel free to reach out to our veterans of the process as you go.

Posted in School days | Tagged Board of Managers, Ena Meyers, Fort Worth, Fort Worth ISD, HISD, Lake Worth ISD, Mark Ramirez, Mike Morath, schools, Texas, Texas Education Agency | Leave a comment

Thankfully, a lot of those recent forced birth lawsuits are crappy

Posted on April 26, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

They have a key thing in common, beyond the misogynist zealot lawyer who runs them.

Jerry Rodriguez appeared to be a deeply aggrieved man—the victim of a scheme orchestrated by his girlfriend’s domineering ex-partner to “murder” not one, but two, of his “unborn children.” In a lawsuit filed in Galveston, Texas, last summer on behalf of “all current and future fathers… in the United States,” Rodriguez was portrayed as a devoted boyfriend who accompanied his girlfriend to ultrasound appointments and, eventually, pleaded with her not to go through with abortions that her ex was trying to force her to have.

Weirdly, the villain in this anguished narrative story wasn’t the girlfriend’s estranged husband, but a California-based provider named Dr. Rémy Coeytaux whom Rodriquez accused of “wrongful death” for allegedly supplying the abortion pills used to terminate her pregnancies.

Demanding justice on Rodriguez’s behalf was anti-abortion legal mastermind Jonathan F. Mitchell, who was seeking an injunction to stop Coeytaux—and all other medical providers—from sending pills to Texas, where abortion is banned. This winter, Mitchell amended the lawsuit to incorporate a new Texas law, House Bill 7, that allows private “bounty hunters” to sue abortion-pill providers for at least $100,000 per violation.

The suit was part of a larger legal strategy by Mitchell, a former Texas solicitor general who has helped craft some of the most radical and punitive anti-abortion laws in the country, including Senate Bill 8, a six-week ban enacted in 2021, and HB 7 itself. Four years after the end of Roe v. Wade, abortion pills have become so widely available that the number of abortions across the US has actually risen, with medication now accounting for 63 percent of the total. Mitchell is trying to use the courts to resurrect the Comstock Act, a Victorian-era anti-obscenity, anti-abortion law that has been dormant for decades. If Comstock is revived, it would outlaw the mailing of abortion pills nationwide, amounting to a federal ban.

Sympathetic-sounding plaintiffs like Rodriguez are an essential part of Mitchell’s strategy. But a few months after the case was filed, Rodriguez’s story has fallen apart, highlighting just how ineffective Mitchell and his allies have been—so far—in using such lawsuits to push their sweeping anti-abortion agenda.

According to an investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle, at the same time that Mitchell was promoting his client as a symbol of aggrieved fathers-to-be, the Galveston man was evading a felony arrest warrant for allegedly beating up the girlfriend whose abortions he claimed to mourn. In October 2024—a few months before filing his lawsuit—Rodriguez had a violent altercation with his girlfriend at a motel. He allegedly grabbed the woman’s neck as if he was trying to “crush” it, the article detailed, to the point where she “believed she was going to die.” She told police the attack was the eighth time in five months that Rodriguez assaulted her. He then proceeded to slam her to the floor, climb on top of her, and punch and slap her until she finally broke free and escaped, the Chronicle said.

It wasn’t Rodriguez’s only alleged incident of domestic abuse. According to police records, he pleaded guilty to assaulting a woman he lived with in 2006 and to harassment for threatening to kill a different woman in 2009, spending a total of two days in jail.

Now attorneys for Coeytaux have asked a judge to dismiss the lawsuit, in part due to Rodriguez’s abusive history. As it turns out, HB 7 specifically excludes anyone who has committed a “family violence” offense from suing under the state law, making Rodriguez ineligible to be a plaintiff. In a 43-page motion filed last Thursday evening, lawyers at the Center for Reproductive Rights offer a list of other arguments for why they thinks the suit should be thrown out—including the fact that all the allegations Rodriguez raised against Coeytaux occurred more than a year before HB 7 took effect. The law is not retroactive. The attorneys also argue HB 7 has “serious constitutional defects” that violate both the Texas and US Constitutions.

Mitchell did not respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones.

Marc Hearron, a senior counsel at CRR who is representing Coeytaux in the case, draws parallels between Rodriguez’s alleged violence and his lawsuit. “The decision to have an abortion is a personal, intimate choice,” Hearron says. “Who would have the gall to file a lawsuit over someone’s decision like that and splash it all over the papers, except for someone who intends to further abuse? This is not something an average person would ever do.”

Other legal experts were perplexed at the suit’s apparent conflicts with a law—HB 7—that Mitchell helped write. “The retroactivity part seems quite obvious,” says David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University and expert in abortion rights.

See here for more on this lawsuit. I had not heard about the updates to or flaws with the case, but that’s a key component to this story. Most if not all of the big-swing lawsuits that radical zealot Jonathan Mitchell has filed have had deeply flawed – to put it gently – plaintiffs. See here and here for a couple more examples. That doesn’t mean there’s a zero chance of success – Mitchell knows how to shop a courtroom, at least – but it’s good to know. Go read the whole thing, and then read this Slate piece about how the main effect of the Dobbs decision has been to stop the life-saving abortions first and foremost. We still have a lot of work to do here.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged abortion, Aid Access, Amy Carpenter, Briscoe Cain, California, Christopher Cooprider, Comstock Act, Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Galveston, Jackie Noyola, lawsuit, Liana Davis, Marcus Silva, mifepristone, Mikal Watts, privacy, Rebecca Gomperts, Remy Coeytaux, SCOTUS, Supreme Court, Texas, Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act, The Lege | Leave a comment

The Book-Loving Texans’ Guide to the May 2026 elections

Posted on April 25, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

More valuable insights from Franklin Strong.

GCISD Parents PAC has gotten the message: Book-banning and attacking students from marginalized groups won’t win school board elections in Texas.

Year after year after year after year, I’ve written recaps after school board elections in Texas. And—after the initial surge of PAC-backed wins in 2022—those recaps have repeatedly shown that Texans don’t want what the book banners are selling.

But the book banners kept coming, reasoning (I assume) that in certain places they were invincible, that with enough money, they could still win.

2025—during which extremist majorities in Katy, Keller, Cy-Fair, and Fort Bend all lost dramatically—seems to have finally disabused them of that notion. This year, many book-banning incumbents are choosing not to run again. PACs and groups that shrieked about “CRT” and library books have either folded entirely or scrubbed their websites of those topics.

Does that mean the stakes are lower for those of us who care about the freedom to read? No. Unfortunately, that wave of book-banning energy in 2021 and 2022 seeped up to the state legislature, which passed new laws that have drastically reduced the availability of books to students in Texas. And that makes a good school board more important than ever.3

That said, this is the first year where the challenge is less about defending districts from bad candidates; instead, we have the opportunity to elect a slew of great candidates.

I mentioned this in Tuesday’s TPA roundup. I look forward to these every cycle now. The May 2026 guide itself is here, it’s still a work in progress but it includes or will include what you need to know about such local races as Clear Creek, Spring Branch, Pearland, and Katy ISDs. There are still bad candidates out there and some good ones that need defending, but it is nice to be able to move the ball forward a little. The Chron noted the tonal shift in Katy ISD in making their endorsements – they also endorsed in Spring Branch here – and they have coverage of Katy, Spring Branch, and Clear Creek here, whilethe San Antonio Report has more on Alamo Heights ISD. Read up and go vote for some good candidates.

Posted in Election 2026 | Tagged Alamo Heights ISD, Clear Creek ISD, Election 2026, Frisco ISD, Grapevine-Colleyville ISD, Katy ISD, Keller ISD, Lake Travis ISD, Lewisville ISD, Mansfield ISD, Pearland ISD, Spring Branch, Texas, Texas Freedom to Read Project | Leave a comment

Unelected HISD Board votes to fire HISD union leader

Posted on April 25, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

What the hell are we doing here?

Michelle Williams

Houston ISD’s appointed board of managers voted Thursday to terminate a teacher union leader even though an independent hearing examiner initially recommended that the district reinstate the longtime educator.

All six members who were present voted in favor of terminating Michelle Williams, president of the Houston Education Association and third grade teacher. The attorneys’ arguments showed that questions went beyond the individual case, such as whether a teacher can deviate from the curriculum, including when they believe it is necessary to accommodate student needs.

The board’s decision goes against a February recommendation from a state-appointed independent hearing examiner, who found that Williams was wrongfully terminated after a two-day hearing. The examiner decided HISD “did not provide a preponderance of credible, admissible evidence” and therefore “has not established any of the reasons for the proposed termination” with enough evidence.

But Wednesday night, HISD submitted a brief to the board, asking members to approve a modified recommendation that would reverse the examiner’s recommendation to mean there was sufficient evidence to fire Williams, said Williams’ attorney, Giana Ortiz. She questioned how the board could make that change after the independent examiner found no wrongdoing.

“We’re going to be exploring that and really diving into what they’ve asked,” Ortiz said. “Because we just got it last night. And so we’ve not had a chance to fully digest it, nor has the board.”

[…]

Ortiz said Thursday the district wants to convince the board in 10 minutes that the hearing examiner got it wrong after two days of hearing.

“Your lawyers want to convince you that, based on one email, Michelle Williams refused to implement HISD curriculum,” Ortiz argued. “But that is not the case. The evidence showed that Michelle Williams agreed to and did implement HISD curriculum in a way that complied with the law.”

Ortiz said the teacher raised concerns that the curriculum, pacing and sequence did not allow her to accommodate the needs of special education, emergent bilingual, and gifted and talented students.

“Mike Miles knows Michelle Williams,” Ortiz said. “The evidence bore that out. The evidence bore out that she is a problem for him. Witness testimony said she speaks at board meetings. She speaks to the media. And she makes complaints to TEA (the Texas Education Agency). She speaks for the children and the teachers in this district.”

I didn’t quote the HISD flunky who argued in favor of firing her, but it’s a gift link so read it for yourself. Maybe there’s an explanation for this that isn’t the appointed Board, who are accountable to Mike Miles, doing Mike Miles a solid. But if there is, I’m not seeing it. What the hell are we doing here?

By the way, Michelle Williams is also a candidate for State Rep, in HD127. I look forward to interviewing her this summer. I’m sure this will come up in the conversation.

And while we’re pondering unfathomable things, there’s this.

Houston ISD expects to lose another 4,000 students next school year and, with them, $50 million in funding. But state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles is still aiming for a balanced budget with expenditures roughly matching revenue of just over $2 billion.

According to the district’s preliminary budget at a Thursday workshop, HISD plans to cut expenses — including $35 million in cuts to the central office and $15 million in savings from closing schools — and end with a fund balance of $753 million for the next fiscal year.

“In other words, if we get to the projected fund balance of $751 (million), our expenditures will almost match our revenue this year. And that is a balanced budget, and that would be huge,” Miles said at the Thursday meeting.

The district is battling declining enrollment, which is linked to student funding, as it seeks to fund Miles’ plans to tie teachers’ compensation to performance and pilot artificial intelligence-focused schools. The district is also changing the school funding formula to separate teacher salaries from per-student funding.

HISD’s preliminary budget shows it expects revenue to drop by $55.4 million next fiscal year, for an estimated total revenue of about $2.019 billion. On the other side of the budget, HISD is forecasting its expenditures will decrease by $46.75 million, for total expenditures of $2.052 billion. This means current projected expenditures are roughly $33.5 million more than revenue.

I shudder to think how small and underfunded a district we’re finally going to get back when we’re done with this debacle. What the hell are we doing here?

Posted in School days | Tagged Board of Managers, budget, deficit, Election 2026, HD127, HISD, HISD Board of Trustees, Houston, Michelle Williams, Mike Miles, New Education System, Texas, Texas Education Agency, The Lege | Leave a comment

Plaintiffs win other Addicks and Barker lawsuit

Posted on April 25, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Once again I say, it’s hard to keep track of these things.

A federal judge vindicated Houston homeowners who have argued for years that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ decision to open Addicks and Barker dam gates during Hurricane Harvey flooding — sending water into their downstream homes — was no act of God.

Judge Loren A. Smith ruled Wednesday in a test case of 12 plaintiffs that first went to trial in 2024, finding that the government’s actions amounted to a “taking” of private property and that homeowners were eligible to be compensated for the damage it wrought.

Smith’s decision said the property owners proved they flooded more than they would have if the Army Corps had kept the dam gates shut. He dismissed the government’s argument that the closure was necessary given the exceptionally devastating flood levels, saying operators opened the spigot “before an actual emergency posed an imminent danger to the structural integrity of Addicks and Barker.”

The ruling reversed Smith’s stance in 2020, when he dismissed the downstream case outright and said that the hurricane itself was responsible for the damages.

[…]

A separate group of homeowners with properties sitting upstream of the two large reservoirs also sued the federal government after flooding during Harvey, arguing that the overflowing reservoirs spread onto their properties in a way that was similarly controlled by the Army Corps’ operations. Their wins came more quickly: A lower court found in their favor in 2019, and that decision was largely upheld by an appeals court panel in December.

In the downstream case, government lawyers did not dispute that the properties in question also flooded; instead, they argued that Addicks and Barker offered an overall flood benefit to those homes. They said its detention gates prevented the worst of the area’s potential flooding, compared to how water would have spread had the infrastructure never been built.

The judge’s original ruling to dismiss the lawsuit was overturned in 2022 by the Fifth Circuit. As noted, the plaintiffs in the other lawsuit – the “upstream” lawsuit, while this was the “downstream” lawsuit – had the judgment in their favor upheld last year. Maybe this one gets appealed, maybe the Army Corps just takes their licks and hopes for the best. I suspect there may be more lawsuits as a result, but maybe not – there must be some statute of limitations? Maybe? I guess we’ll see.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged Addicks Reservoir, Army Corps of Engineers, Barker Reservoir, flooding, Harris County, Houston, Hurricane Harvey, lawsuit | Leave a comment

Everyone’s talking about the CD23 special election

Posted on April 24, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Except for Greg Abbott, of course.

Rep. Tony Gonzales

It’s been about a week since now-former Rep. Tony Gonzales resigned from Congress after the Texas Republican admitted to having an unethical sexual relationship with at least one former aide, who later died by suicide.

Yet the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has yet to set a special election to fill Gonzales’ seat—and that silence is telling.

President Donald Trump carried Gonzales’ seat by just over 15 percentage points in 2024, according to data from The Downballot. In a normal year, that would make this seat a GOP lock.

However, this election cycle has been anything but normal.

Last year, Trump pulled New York Rep. Elise Stefanik’s nomination to serve as ambassador to the United Nations because he worried her seat would be competitive in a special election. And Trump carried Stefanik’s seat by nearly 21 points—making her Upstate New York district even stronger Republican territory.

That’s because Democrats are overperforming Trump’s margin in special elections by an average of about 13 points, according to The Downballot. Some Democratic overperformances have been especially strong, including the 25-point overperformance they notched in former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s seat in Georgia.

In other words, Gonzales’ former seat is likely way too close for comfort for Republicans.

[…]

Already, local leaders in Gonzales’ district are growing worried they will be without congressional representation until after the midterm elections, with John Ferguson, mayor of Presidio, Texas, telling a local television station that Abbott’s silence on his plans for the special election is politically motivated.

“I understand why they would maybe not say much on it, but my goodness, we’re Texans, and sometimes you just have to stand up and do what is right,” Ferguson told NewsWest 9. “So, that’s what I’m waiting for.”

Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time Abbott played politics with special elections. He kept Texas’ 18th District—a safely Democratic seat—vacant for over 330 days after Democratic Rep. Sylvester Turner died. Leaving Turner’s seat vacant for nearly a year gave Republicans’ slim House majority more breathing room.

Ultimately, if Abbott doesn’t hold a special election until November for Gonzales’ seat, it will be yet another sign Republicans know they are screwed in the midterms.

See here for some previous discussion on this topic. I got a comment on that post suggesting that while the May 2 uniform election date is as I said too soon to be legal as a possibility, perhaps Abbott could set it for the May 26 primary runoff date. I feel like that’s not a legal option, but I scanned through the election code again and couldn’t find something to clarify one way or the other. For what it’s worth, the special election in 2018 for CD27, which Abbott did set early because it was a reliably red seat, occurred on June 30 of that year; the primary runoffs were on May 22.

Whatever Abbott decides, and he has to set a date sooner or later, he’s not going to share his reasoning with us. He’ll announce the date and then go back to scrolling Twitter. But he always does what he thinks is best for himself and for the Republican Party, so we’ll know by his decision what he was thinking.

Posted in Election 2026 | Tagged Brandon Herrera, California, CD18, CD23, CD27, Congress, Donald Trump, Election 2018, Election 2025, Election 2026, fundraising, Gavin Newsom, Greg Abbott, Katy Padilla Stout, polls, special election, Texas, Tony Gonzales | 1 Comment

Elmo and the fake election sweepstakes

Posted on April 24, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Gather round for another story of Little Eldon Musk and his Big Fake Promises.

Elon Musk appeared to be totally serious when he announced at a Pennsylvania town hall in October 2024 that his political action committee America PAC would give $1 million to randomly selected people who signed a pledge to support the Constitution. Leading up to the 2024 presidential election, the 18 giveaways did actually occur, but two class-action lawsuits arose contesting that they were in no way random.

And now Musk appears to be trying to avoid sitting for a deposition, according to the Austin American-Statesman. Attorneys for the plaintiffs put in a request with the judge to force Musk to take part and for the PAC to release internal documents as well. But the billionaire’s attorneys are instead opting for a summary judgment, arguing there were no false statements, no contract, and, in an ironic nod to the original promise, that his statements were merely a form of protected speech.

At the time, Musk stressed in particular freedom of speech and the right to bear arms when discussing the giveaway in person and on X.

Obviously, none of the 18 recipients of the $1 million seems to have any problem with getting that much money. But those who didn’t receive the money took issue with a February deposition, in which America PAC Director Chris Young seemed to admit the selection was in no way random and that there were “no sweepstakes” and had “no winners.” Rather, he said the people who were given the money were selected based on criteria that they’d be ideal spokespeople for the PAC itself.

These aren’t the first suits related to the promised giveaway. A previous case filed in Michigan last year was dismissed, and that seems to be what Musk’s attorneys are hoping for in the two current suits with the U.S. District Court in Austin.

It remains to be seen whether they’ll get any traction. But none of the cases seem to be slowing down Musk’s promises to give away $1 million. In January on X, he once again promised “$1M prize for the top X article.” Surely there won’t be any issues with that one either.

The Statesman story, which is paywalled, ran in the business section of the print version of the Chron on Wednesday. Here’s their Facebook post about it, with a non-gift link to their story. The Law360 article about the dismissed suit in Michigan is also paywalled but the brief excerpt of it that I could see indicated that the suit was tossed for lack of standing by the plaintiffs. Which may end up being the case with this one as well, I have no idea. A motion to dismiss by Musk last year was denied, so that’s something. Here’s hoping Musk is forced to testify, or handed his ass if he refuses.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged America PAC, Election 2024, Elon Musk, lawsuit, Michigan, President, Texas | Leave a comment

And another voter purge lawsuit filed

Posted on April 24, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

As I said before, it’s hard to keep track of them all.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Voting rights group Common Cause and four voters sued the Justice Department on Tuesday to block it from compiling a national voter database that the watchdog warns allows the government to surveil and disenfranchise millions of Americans.

Common Cause, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union for D.C., argue the database’s creation and its use of the Department of Homeland Security’s Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements system clearly violates federal statutes, the separation of powers doctrine and the Constitution.

“The U.S. Department of Justice has launched an illegal and unprecedented quest to stockpile millions of Americans’ confidential voter data in a system of records within its Civil Rights Division,” Common Cause claims in the 58-page lawsuit. “Never before has a federal agency centralized this volume of Americans’ voting data in a single system of records. And in so doing, DOJ has flouted statutory safeguards designed to ensure transparency and public participation in the federal government’s collection of Americans’ personal information.”

The lawsuit includes four named plaintiffs, each a U.S. citizen in states that turned over their voter rolls to the Justice Department: Anthony Nel, Haley Smith, Linda Duckworth and Ruth Nasrullah.

Nel, a derived U.S. citizen and Texas resident, received a letter from the local Denton County Voter Registrar on Oct. 21, 2025, informing him he had been identified by Homeland Security’s SAVE system as not being a citizen and instructing he provide proof of citizenship within 30 days or his registration would be cancelled.

Of the sufficient documents, Nel only had an expired passport, which by the time he renewed it two months later had his voter registration cancelled. He was ultimately able to have his registration reinstated, but Common Cause argues Nel continues to worry he will be deemed ineligible again.

“Being caught in such a cycle, with his voting rights on the line, is distressing to him,” Common Cause said. “He feels compelled to continue regularly checking his voter registration status to ensure it is not wrongly cancelled again.”

[…]

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, which has tracked the Justice Department’s nationwide effort, those 12 states have received confidential memorandums of understanding that indicate the feds plan to review the lists and “cure” them of voters deemed ineligible if states themselves do not.

So far just Alaska and Texas have signed the agreements, while Mississippi, South Dakota and Tennessee refused to while handing over their voter rolls.

Nikhel Sus, chief counsel at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and lead counsel on the case, said in a statement the Justice Department’s actions would upend the Constitution’s structure of national elections that puts states in charge.

“This effort to consolidate millions of Americans’ confidential voter data in a master federal database is part of a larger illegal scheme to take over states’ constitutional roles and federalize election administration,” Sus said. “The states’ responsibility for maintaining their voter rolls is enshrined in the Constitution and federal law, and we look forward to stopping this egregious overreach in court.”

According to Common Cause, the Department of Homeland Security “haphazardly” expanded its SAVE system, which was previously a limited tool for certain immigration-related databases, to conduct mass citizenship checks based on unreliable data.

“The faulty new system and flawed comparison methodology has already falsely identified significant numbers of U.S. citizens as noncitizens, imperiling their fundamental right to vote,” Common Cause said. “And the system has proven especially unreliable for citizens born outside of the United States (e.g., naturalized, derived and acquired citizens), who are at a higher risk of being falsely identified as noncitizens.”

Further, by centralizing over 340 million Americans’ sensitive data, the effort creates a target for hackers and foreign actors.

Another lawsuit was filed by LULAC in March. While there have clearly been some harms caused already, as there always are with these hamhanded purge attempts, I see these lawsuits are more prophylactic than reactive. We know there’s going to be some more serious shit coming, so let’s get out ahead of what we can now. I’ll keep an eye on it. This story in Votebeat is what led me to look for more on this, and there’s more from Nebraska Public Media, Democracy Docket, and the ACLU.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged ACLU, Anthony Nel, Common Cause, CREW, Denton County, Donald Trump, immigration, Jane Nelson, LULAC, Nebraska, Ruth Nasrullah, Secretary of State, Texas, Travis County, USCIS, voter registration, voter suppression | Leave a comment

Council amends ICE ordinance

Posted on April 23, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

What a waste of time.

Mayor John Whitmire

Houston City Council amended its recently approved policy limiting police officers’ interactions with federal immigration agents after Gov. Greg Abbott’s office threatened $114 million in city grants, despite some council members saying the changes will dilute the policy’s effectiveness.

The 13-4 vote capped a chaotic two weeks at City Hall that tested Mayor John Whitmire’s relationships with state leaders, drove dozens of residents to protest or address the council, saw Attorney General Ken Paxton sue the city — and which appeared to leave in doubt key questions about how exactly Houston police will implement the amended policy.

The council’s original policy, passed 12-5 two weeks ago, eliminated a prior rule that officers wait 30 minutes for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to arrive when they encounter someone with a civil immigration warrant.

Officers may temporarily detain someone “as long as reasonably necessary to complete the legitimate purpose of the initial stop or investigation,” the initial policy said, in keeping with the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The newly amended policy, which Mayor John Whitmire’s staff negotiated with Abbott’s office, added “and for other legitimate purposes discovered during the detention” after that phrase. The changes deleted text stating that an ICE administrative warrant alone does not justify a stop or arrest, and that the person must be released if “reasonable suspicion” of another crime does not exist.

Council Member Tiffany D. Thomas joined the policy’s original authors, Council Members Alejandra Salinas, Abbie Kamin and Edward Pollard, in opposing Wednesday’s amendments. Some council members who supported the changes said they feared the financial repercussions of voting no.

Council Member Martha Castex-Tatum said she had heard the many residents begging the council to fight back, get creative and stand firm, but she said the risks of doing so were too high.

“You can have real concerns about the constitutional questions here,” she said. “And you can also recognize that the city of Houston cannot responsibly put millions of dollars at risk in a fight that we are not positioned, in my opinion, to win.”

Before the vote, Whitmire spoke to his colleagues about the city’s financial strength, and said few state or federal grants come without strings attached.

“All have conditions, all are making a difference,” Whitmire said. “So today we have to decide, do we want to remain strong or not?”

Whitmire said he had begged Salinas to consider the worst case scenario – “which is before us today,” he added – and said Salinas told him the governor wouldn’t intervene.

“I know Abbott, I voted against him more than any living person,” said Whitmire, who served in the Texas Senate from 1983 to 2023. “And quite frankly, y’all played right into his hands.”

“You voted for it,” interrupted Pollard.

Whitmire boasts of his relationships with state leaders, Pollard added, but “my partners don’t sue me.” Letting the governor control this process, he said, was “a slap in the face.”

[…]

It’s unclear how the amended policy will affect what Houston police do when they encounter someone with a civil immigration warrant, but some council members and legal experts said the changes undermine the council’s original policy.

In response to questions from Salinas, City Attorney Arturo Michel said the changes wouldn’t change the fact that local police can’t hold people with a civil immigration warrant for ICE to arrive. Michel added the city could not return to its prior policy of giving ICE agents 30 minutes to pick up someone with a civil immigration warrant.

But Whitmire offered a conflicting explanation, saying HPD sergeants called to the scene in such cases would consider “the totality” of the situation before deciding whether to release the person.

Salinas tried to get clarification on which was true, but Whitmire said both explanations were consistent.

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

See here, here, here, and here for the background. For a better understanding of what this means:

Texas Civil Rights Project attorney Travis Fife said the ordinance as passed effectively spelled out the role of administrative warrants, such as by stating that they are “civil in nature and, alone, (do) not justify a stop, arrest, or continued detention by local law enforcement.” By proposing to delete that language, Fife said, the amendment risks police prolonging someone’s detention solely on the basis of an administrative warrant.

“This is a feeble attempt by the mayor to have his cake and eat it too,” Fife said. “But it dilutes the effectiveness of the original ordinance so as to render it almost meaningless.”

Jennefer Canales-Pelaez, Texas policy attorney and strategist with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, agreed.

“This proposal is effectively a repeal of the ordinance’s provisions that prohibited HPD from making unlawful seizures,” she said. “The Supreme Court in Arizona v. United States said clearly that state officers don’t have power to arrest people for immigration violations. This amendment runs afoul of that by giving HPD virtually no guidance at all on how to respond to ICE warrants, although such papers are clearly not legally enforceable by HPD.”

The amendment, Fife added, appears to redefine what an ICE administrative warrant is in a legally incorrect way. The amendment cuts language saying these “civil” documents are “not probable cause for a criminal arrest,” and instead would define the warrants as “commanding the arrest of an individual.”

Nikki Luellen, an ACLU of Texas criminal justice expert, added that the proposal is “a greenlight for deeper collaboration between ICE and the Houston Police Department.”

Thomas Hogan, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, took a different view of the amendment, saying the deleted language is “a necessary concession to the politics of the situation.”

“The mayor and city council are caught in a political bind,” he said. “They need to allow HPD to comply with the law and do not want to risk their state funding, but they also do not want to be seen as cooperating with ICE. From a legal and political standpoint, these changes are a reasonable attempt to thread the needle.”

For sure, this was about Greg Abbott slapping us around. If you, like me, wanted to see Whitmire mayor up and tell Abbott to improve his reading comprehension skills, well, you were disappointed. This is the Whitmire experience in a nutshell. The Dallas Observer provides another perspective, and the Trib has more.

Posted in Local politics | Tagged Abbie Kamin, Alejandra Salinas, Arturo Michel, Austin, City Attorney, Dallas, Edward Pollard, Greg Abbott, Houston, Houston City Council, HPD, ICE, immigration, John Whitmire, Ken Paxton, Kirk Watson, lawsuit, Mayor, Tiffany Thomas | 3 Comments

Virginia approves its new Congressional map

Posted on April 23, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

How’s that plan to hold onto the Republican majority in Congress going?

In yet another loss for president Trump and his floundering gerrymandering blitz, Virginia voters approved a Democratic-led redistricting measure on Tuesday that will likely give Democrats four additional congressional seats and a chance to take control of the U.S. House this year.

With 97% of the vote in, the measure had passed with 51.5% approving and 48.5% voting against it. State and national Democrats celebrated Tuesday’s win, which still has to face a number of hurdles as legal challenges to the proposal continue to play out in court.

“Virginia voters have spoken, and tonight they approved a temporary measure to push back against a President who claims he is ‘entitled’ to more Republican seats in Congress,”Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger said in a statement following Tuesday’s referendum. “Virginians watched other states go along with those demands without voter input — and we refused to let that stand. We responded the right way: at the ballot box.”

“Tonight, Virginians refused to let Trump play games with Americans’ right to fair representation,” DNC Chair Ken Martin said in a statement on Tuesday. “Voters are turning out in droves to put an end to Trump’s billionaire-first agenda and Republicans see the writing on the wall.”

Former president Barack Obama, who has been an outspoken supporter of the proposal, also cheered Tuesday’s Democratic victory.

“Congratulations, Virginia! Republicans are trying to tilt the midterm elections in their favor, but they haven’t done it yet,” he wrote in a post on X on Tuesday night. “Thanks for showing us what it looks like to stand up for our democracy and fight back.”

“Fairness won,” Democratic Majority Leader of the Virginia Senate Scott Surovell chimed in in a statement. “Accountability won. And the Commonwealth that gave America its constitution has once again reminded the nation what the Constitution is for.”

[…]

Tuesday’s referendum will change Virginia’s state constitution, and gives the Democratic-controlled General Assembly the authority to redraw the state’s congressional district lines. Since 2020, this authority is typically reserved for the state’s nonpartisan redistricting commission. The referendum gives the General Assembly the authority to temporarily bypass that commission to redraw lines.

The new map will give Democrats four additional congressional seats — meaning Democrats are expected to hold 10 of the state’s 11 seats in the U.S. House after the midterm elections. This is a significant change: up until Tuesday, Democrats held six of the state’s 11 seats.

See here and here for a bit of background. There’s still litigation before the Virginia Supreme Court that could derail this, but no one seems too worried about it now. Slate’s Jim Newell provided some more details.

Last summer, when the White House was kicking off its attempt to insulate the House GOP majority by taking on midcycle redistricting, a GOP operative told Politico that Trump’s team was applying “maximum pressure on everywhere where redistricting is an option and it could provide a good return on investment.”

The unofficial launch date of this process, the brainchild of White House political aide James Blair and Republican mapmaker Adam Kincaid, was July 15, 2025, when Trump told the Texas Republican delegation that he was eyeing a five-seat pickup in the state with redrawn maps.

“This totally set our world on fire, and flipped us upside down,” John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, told me in an interview on Tuesday. The NDRC had been founded by former Attorney General Eric Holder, in coordination with President Barack Obama and then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, ahead of the 2020 Census to narrow the yawning structural advantage in the House that Republicans had formed over the previous couple of redistricting cycles.

“Donald Trump was clearly, I would say very clearly, threatening to bring us back to that age of 2014, 2010, when it was nearly impossible for both parties to compete for the House of Representatives,” Bisognano said.

The logic of Blair and others was that the party coalition had changed the previous five years—especially with Hispanic voters in south Texas shifting sharply red—so if they had the opportunity to solidify those shifts into seats, they should take it. Trump had a more characteristic description of the dynamic in Texas.

“I got the highest vote in the history of Texas,” Trump said in early August, “and we are entitled to five more seats.”

Republicans further believed that Democrats would struggle to respond in kind because of the way blue states had hamstrung their own mapmaking discretion. Blue states like California, Virginia, Colorado, and Washington had amended their constitutions to put redistricting into the hands of bipartisan commissions. Red states didn’t futz around with such good-government preciousness, and after Texas changed its map, the push would continue in Missouri, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, and Indiana.

“And so we found ourselves in this current moment, with this massive decision before us,” Bisognano said. “AG Holder”—who still chairs the NDRC—“quickly was able to come to the reality that we need to adjust our own tactics in order to try to rebalance the playing field.” Blue-state constitutional safeguards against gerrymandering, in other words, needed to be put on hiatus—and quickly.

And so California moved first and set the model for Virginia to follow. Through a referendum that voters approved late last year, California suspended the maps drawn by the California Citizens Redistricting Commission through the 2030 cycle and replaced them with new maps giving Democrats up to five new seats. That neutralized Texas’ move.

[…]

The Virginia gerrymander is, on its own terms, a dirty job. This is a light-blue state that Kamala Harris only won by 5 points in 2024, and the proposition was to give Democrats a 10-to-1 representational advantage in Congress. The districts in the new map are painful on the eyes. Four districts extend southward from the northern Virginia suburbs of D.C. to drown out rural communities with which they have nothing in common. The 7^th District, which looks like a scorpion, is appropriately dastardly, stretching from mountainous country in the western part of the state straight to expressways over the Potomac River into Washington D.C.

What especially upset Virginia Republicans already apoplectic over this, though, was the language of the referendum itself: It asked voters whether they wanted to suspend the existing, neutral map through the 2030 census and adopt the new map in order to “restore fairness in the upcoming elections.”

There’s nothing fair about this map for Virginia Republicans. And by all means, they should address their many reasonable complaints to James Blair.

Oh, there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth over this. And as in every 80s coming-of-age movie in which the picked-on protagonist finally decks the bully after being pushed too far and summoning up the will to stand up for himself, it’s so delightful to see.

Now, this isn’t the end of the story. As noted, there’s the litigation, and Florida may take a crack at some further mapmaking mayhem, if they’re not too spooked by recent special election results. And then there’s this, also from the Slate piece.

The end of the 2026 battle, then, may be within sight, with a rough outcome determined: basically a wash, but possibly favoring Democrats if the political wind stays at their back. But the war will rage on into 2028.

One shoe that hasn’t dropped in time to affect 2026 maps is the Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which could neuter Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and, with it, its protection of majority-Black congressional districts. If the Supreme Court does land that way, Republican states across the South will eliminate one majority-Black district after another, giving Republicans an opportunity to net maybe another dozen seats. That would compel more Democratic states like Colorado, Washington, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and others to respond in kind by further gerrymandering their states.

It’s probably too late in most states to do any further mapmaking, but for sure if the Voting Rights Act is thrown in the trash it will be open season for 2028. Remember that the first map drawn in Texas – by some random dude, but still – would have given the Republicans something like 33 seats, at least under 2024 conditions. I have no idea what it might look like for 2026, but it would still be ugly and there may be stronger versions of it. The best defense against that is going to be electing a lot of Democrats this year. And maybe, in the world we would like to have in 2029, some new laws to defang both the mad redistricters and the corrupt Supreme Court that has enabled them. More from TPM here.

Posted in Election 2026 | Tagged Abigail Spanberger, California, Congress, Donald Trump, Election 2026, Election 2028, Florida, Gavin Newsom, Greg Abbott, lawsuit, Louise Lucas, redistricting, special election, Texas, The Lege, Virginia, Voting Rights Act | Leave a comment

Fifth Circuit allows Ten Commandments law to be enforced

Posted on April 23, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

They do what they always do.

Texas can enforce a state law requiring public schools to display posters of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

A 9-8 majority of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Texas officials’ favor, concluding that the law does not establish an official state religion.

“It does not tell churches or synagogues or mosques what to believe or how to worship or whom to employ as priests, rabbis, or imams,” according to the ruling. “It punishes no one who rejects the Ten Commandments, no matter the reason.”

The court heard arguments in January after 16 families sued over the law, alleging that it amounted to state leaders promoting their interpretation of Christianity over other faiths.

All 17 active judges on the court listened to the case — Rabbi Nathan v. Alamo Heights Independent School District — alongside a similar challenge in Louisiana, the first state to pass a Ten Commandments requirement for its public schools. The court cleared the way in February for Louisiana to fully implement its law.

After Tuesday’s decision, the civil rights organizations representing the families expressed disappointment.

“The court’s ruling goes against fundamental First Amendment principles and binding U.S. Supreme Court authority,” the groups said in a statement. “The First Amendment safeguards the separation of church and state, and the freedom of families to choose how, when and if to provide their children with religious instruction. This decision tramples those rights.”

See here for the previous update. They did the same thing with Louisiana, so I guess we can’t say we didn’t see this coming. I’m too exhausted to be outraged right now, so I will just say that whatever reforms we may have in mind for the corrupt SCOTUS in 2029 (hopefully no later than that), they go double for the even more corrupt Fifth Circuit. The Fifth Circuit cannot stand as it is now, and they’re not the only appeals court for which that is true. If we don’t fix that problem as well, we’re doing it wrong.

UPDATE: Slate points out how the Fifth Circuit directly defied SCOTUS precedent in this ruling, which if we are lucky will come back to bite them in the ass.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged ACLU of Texas, Alamo Heights ISD, Americans United, Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Freedom From Religion Foundation, Greg Abbott, HISD, Ken Paxton, lawsuit, Louisiana, Mara Nathan, Mike Morath, SCOTUS, ten commandments, Texas, Texas Education Agency, The Lege | Leave a comment

Interview with Alex Maldonado

Posted on April 22, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Alex Maldonado

I promised you two interviews for Harris County District Clerk, and today we have the second of them. Alex Maldonado is a high school math and statistics teacher in Clear Creek ISD. Maldonado got an associate’s degree when he graduated high school at 17, and later got a master’s in education from Rice. He’s now back in school at UH, in industrial engineering, where he also serves as musical director for the Catholic Newman Center. All that and he’s just now 23 years old, as per this Chron profile of him following the primary. Here’s our conversation:

cakuffner · Alex Maldonado interview 042026

PREVIOUSLY

Ron Angeletti – SD04 (special election)
Rep. Vikki Goodwin – Lt Governor
Marcos Vélez – Lt Governor
Annise Parker – Harris County Judge
Letitia Plummer – Harris County Judge
Darrell Jordan – Harris County District Clerk

Courtesy of Greg Wythe, you can find a transcript for this interview here. I’m working on interviews for the two CD18 candidates, which will likely be in May. Let me know what you think.

Posted in Election 2026 | Tagged Alex Maldonado, Democratic primary, District Clerk, Election 2026, Harris County, interviews, runoff | Leave a comment

Dallas Republicans demand a return to precinct voting chaos

Posted on April 22, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Oh good lord…

Some Dallas County Republicans on Monday sued the county elections department in a bid to require voters to cast ballots for the May 26 primary runoff at specific polling places in their precincts rather than any location in the county. That precinct-based voting system on primary election day in March created chaos.

Local party leadership is trying to reverse a decision made by its former chair, who resigned last week after facing backlash for agreeing to use countywide voting on election day in the runoff. But early voting for the runoff election starts May 18, and Dallas County election officials say it’s too late to change course.

The lawsuit, filed in the Texas Fifth Court of Appeals by Barry Wernick, a Republican precinct chair and a candidate for Dallas County Commissioner District 2, is asking the court to require the county to use precinct polling places for the runoff election.

Wernick is arguing the former party chair, Allen West, didn’t have the authority to agree to the use of countywide voting. Thirty-one party members signed declarations supporting the lawsuit, according to the filing. In addition, the county party’s executive committee voted Monday night in favor of using precinct polling places for the runoff election.

[…]

But Dallas County election officials are already deep into preparations for the election.

“We’re going to continue preparing for the election under the contract that we have, and that’s the countywide vote center model, unless otherwise directed by a court,” said Nic Solorzano, a spokesman for the Dallas County Elections Department. “We are equipping more than 200 Election Day locations, training thousands of poll workers — all of that is a massive operation that’s already underway.”

The office has already programmed voting equipment in accordance with the plan to use countywide vote centers, Solorzano said. Logic and accuracy testing — a public test required by state law to check the accuracy of election equipment — has been done and would have to be done again if the plan changes. And mail ballots have been sent out, which means election officials are tied up handling those and other necessary tasks.

Wernick’s attorney, Warren Norred, said he doesn’t believe that the county isn’t easily able to change course, and that county election officials shouldn’t have taken West’s decision as valid.

“They have created this problem,” Norred said, referring to the county elections department. “If it’s a mild inconvenience, and they’re going to have to really convince the court of appeals that they can’t do it.”

See here and here for the background. Many Republican voters had problems on Primary Day because of this, and with them likely to have higher overall turnout this time around, that problem will fall more heavily on them. I think attorney Norred has the issue exactly backwards, and I hope the court sees it that way. I’ll keep an eye on this. And for crying out loud, we need the Lege to fix this.

Tesla robotaxis arrive in Houston

Posted on April 22, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

And in Dallas.

Tesla’s Robotaxi service has taken to the streets of Houston. In a brief statement Saturday, April 18 on its X social media account, Tesla Robotaxi says the autonomous rideshare service just launched in Texas’ two biggest metro areas — Houston and Dallas.

“Try Tesla Robotaxi in Dallas & Houston!” Tesla CEO Elon Musk says in a reposting on X of the Robotaxi announcement.

One of Robotaxi’s competitors, Alphabet-owned Waymo, beat the Tesla service to the Dallas, Houston, and Austin markets. Another competitor, Amazon-owned Zoox, has Dallas flagged for its autonomous rideshare service.

[…]

Of the three rides logged in a 31-square-mile area in Dallas as of Monday morning, the average fare was $7.96 and the average trip was 3.5 miles, according to an online tracker of autonomous rideshare services. The tracker showed only one Robotaxi was on the roads in Dallas.

As of Monday morning, a 25-square-mile area in Houston had two Robotaxis on the road, according to the online tracker. The average fare for five recorded rides was $11.34 and the average trip was six miles.

“We want Robotaxi pricing to be simple and easy for you to understand,” according to the Robotaxi website. “Initially, as part of our introductory program, we will charge a simple, affordable rate plus applicable taxes and fees for all rides within the available service area.”

The tracker shows the Robotaxi in Dallas did not have a human aboard to monitor each trip, and only one of Houston’s two Robotaxis did not have a human monitor in the driver’s seat.

For now, all passengers ride in Tesla Model Y cars. Robotaxi operates from 6 am-2 am daily.

You can see a map of the current service areas in Houston and Dallas here. The Houston one is quite curious, as it doesn’t seem to incorporate any obvious destinations. I assume they have their reasons. The Dallas map looks a lot more robust to me. Anyway, Tesla has been promising service in Houston for a few months, and as noted Waymo was here first. I’m not inclined to take one of these in any event, and I’m super not inclined to do anything to put money in Elmo’s pocket, but you do you.

As it happens, the day after that story came out, this happened.

Self-driving taxi company Waymo is temporarily suspending services in San Antonio after one of its robo-vehicles was swept away in Monday’s floodwaters, News 4 SA reports.

The unoccupied vehicle was swept away after it entered a flooded road, the station reports, citing company officials. Some parts of San Antonio experienced more than 6 inches of rainfall in a 24-hour period, according to the National Weather Service.

Waymo officials said they’re working with local authorities to recover the automobile. Meanwhile, the automated vehicles will be taken off the streets — and during Fiesta no less.

“Safety is our highest priority at Waymo, both for people who choose to ride with us and those with whom we share the streets,” a Waymo spokesperson said in a statement provided to the NBC affiliate. “As a result of the flooding in San Antonio, we temporarily paused our local operations and are continuing to monitor road conditions.”

Yikes. It’s probably not as well known for it as we are, but San Antonio can flood pretty dramatically, too. It’s a very good thing that this car didn’t have anyone in it, but the fact that this happened really ought to usher in a sweeping regulatory review, to make sure that all of these vehicles, regardless of the maker, have multiple systems in them to ensure that they take proper precautions when flood conditions exist. Bad things can still happen, but we need to know that the risks are being properly minimized. I suppose that would fall to TxDOT here, but this isn’t just a Texas issue. I hope it won’t take a tragedy for this to get the attention it demands.

Posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged Austin, California, Dallas, Department of Motor Vehicles, driverless cars, Elon Musk, flooding, Houston, San Antonio, taxis, Tesla, Texas, TxDOT, Waymo, Zoox | 1 Comment

A brief look at the runoffs

Posted on April 21, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

The Lite Guv runoff is the highest profile statewide race on the ballot in May for Democrats.

After busting through turnout expectations for the party primaries, can Texas Democrats keep up that momentum for May’s runoff elections? Beyond that, will voters turn that attention and enthusiasm to races they hadn’t been following before?

State Rep. Vikki Goodwin and labor organizer Marcos Vélez, the Democratic candidates vying to challenge incumbent Republican Lt. Gov Dan Patrick, certainly hope so. The pair face off in a May 26 runoff to decide who will be the party’s nominee for lieutenant governor this November.

For the primaries, many of the state’s Democrats came to the polls focused on one race: The closely watched U.S. Senate primary between U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett and state Rep. James Talarico.

“What I found as I was standing at the polls is that a lot of people came knowing about who was in that race, but not necessarily knowing a lot of the other candidates,” said Goodwin, a four-term Texas House member from Travis County. “Including mine.”

[…]

That brings us back to the big question for Texas Democrats looking to May’s runoffs: Will voters show up without a high profile race — and names — on the ballot like Crockett and Talarico?

While the party’s statewide runoffs are for important roles, Texas Lieutenant Governor included, there just isn’t the same star-power helping to turn out the vote.

For Goodwin’s part, she may have served four terms in the statehouse, but she has little name recognition outside her Travis County Texas House district. Goodwin’s most recent campaign finance report shows she has around $160,000 in cash on hand. That puts her at a significant disadvantage against Patrick in November, but at an advantage over her opponent.

Vélez, who’s running as the union-friendly candidate, has significantly less in his campaign war chest. Many observers of Texas politics expected Goodwin to win the nomination outright. But the Houston-area candidate snagged the endorsement of the Texas AFL-CIO, something he credits with drawing more votes his way during the Democratic primary.

Additionally, Vélez has said being the “lowest net worth candidate on the ballot” is something he thinks aligns him with voters. He reiterated that statement on a call with reporters once it was clear he was heading for the runoffs.

“When I talk about the experience on the campaign trail, I understand their struggles because I’ve lived them,” he said. “I think that’s what resonates most with working people.”

Vélez believes that is what will set him apart for voters ahead of May’s runoff, while Goodwin believes her years of legislative experience gives her an advantage.

“I think we need somebody stepping into the role of lieutenant governor who understands the legislature, who knows what it takes to get bills passed,” Goodwin told The Texas Newsroom. “Who knows the people that will be there in the Senate and in the House so that we can work together well.”

She added Vélez would need, “on-the-job training if elected,” something she thinks would make it difficult to lead the Texas Senate.

You can be certain that Republicans will have higher turnout in the runoff than Democrats will, because the Republican Senate runoff will be driving the turnout. We have that Republican Senate runoff because nobody dropped out after Trump chickened out on endorsing anyone. The Republican AG race will also drive turnout a bit, but the Senate race will be the big dog. Runoffs are very specific to what races they feature, so there’s no real point in speculating about what it will look like. There will be more Republican voters in May because the highest profile and most expensive race is on the Republican side.

As this story notes, Dems also have a runoff for AG, while Republicans also have a runoff for Railroad Commissioner.

Republicans also have more Congressional runoffs that will be in districts they will or will be favored to win: CDs 09, 19, 35, and 38, plus a couple in blue districts. (They were going to have a runoff in CD32 but one of the candidates withdrew before the deadline.) Dems have CDs 18, 24, 33, and 35, plus a few in redder districts. Again, the factors favor the GOP for more voters showing up.

In Harris County, both parties have runoffs for County Judge. Democrats also have a runoff for County Judge in Fort Bend. That and CD18 will push some turnout for Dems in both counties, with CDs 09 and 38 doing the same for Republicans. I expect Republicans to have the higher runoff turnout here too, for the same reason as they’ll have higher turnout statewide.

I’ve been busy with interviews for the runoffs lately:

Ron Angeletti – SD04 (special election)
Rep. Vikki Goodwin – Lt Governor
Marcos Vélez – Lt Governor (done for the primary)
Darrell Jordan – Harris County District Clerk

Here are the interviews I did for the Harris County Judge candidates from the primary:

Annise Parker – Harris County Judge
Letitia Plummer – Harris County Judge

I will have Alex Maldonado for tomorrow, and I expect to have both CD18 candidates lined up for publication in May. If there’s a pair of runoff candidates from another race you think I should try to reach, let me know.

Posted in Election 2026 | Tagged Al Green, Alex Maldonado, Annise Parker, Attorney General, CD09, CD18, CD19, CD24, CD32, CD33, CD35, Christian Menefee, Congress, County Judge, Darrell Jordan, Democratic primary, Dexter McCoy, District Clerk, Election 2026, Fort Bend County, Harris County, Harris County Judge, Joe Jaworski, John Cornyn, Ken Paxton, Letitia Plummer, Lite Gov, Marcos Vélez, Nathan Johnson, primaries, Ron Angeletti, runoff, SD04, Senate, special election, Texas, turnout, Vikki Goodwin | Leave a comment

Who wants to listen to the lawyers about the HPD/ICE ordinance?

Posted on April 21, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Not Mayor Whitmire, who already has the surrender documents drawn up.

Mayor John Whitmire

Mayor John Whitmire says the city must walk back its new policy limiting Houston police officers’ cooperation with federal immigration agents after Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to pull $114 million in grants over the measure, saying fighting back would be “a waste of time.”

But some council members are calling on the mayor to challenge state leaders – particularly since Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued the city over its policy. Legal experts say Houston could have a good case, and that a judge could block Abbott from following through on his threat.

[…]

Paxton’s lawsuit alleges Houston’s policy violates a 2017 state law prohibiting cities and counties from “materially restricting” cooperation with ICE. And Abbott says the ordinance falls afoul of the terms of Houston’s agreements to receive federal public safety grants that are passed through the state.

The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals largely upheld that 2017 law, called Senate Bill 4, after a lawsuit questioned whether parts of the bill were unconstitutional. But that case did not set a clear precedent, said Marc Levin, the Houston-based chief policy counsel for the Council on Criminal Justice.

“A court hasn’t ruled on whether or not SB 4 is in conflict with the U.S. Constitution,” Levin said. “There hasn’t been a ruling on the points at issue here.”

Levin added that there might even be an argument that SB 4 doesn’t apply to Houston’s ordinance.

As for the paperwork Houston signed to receive public safety grants, one legal expert who reviewed the documents described in the letter Abbott’s office sent Houston questioned whether the conditions apply to the city’s ICE policy.

The grant document requires cities to report information about immigrants in “custody” to federal authorities and prohibits cities from restricting cooperation with ICE agents.

But Krystal Gómez, an attorney with the Texas Immigration Law Council, said Houston’s ordinance does not deal with people in “custody,” only those briefly detained, such as during traffic stops. These are legally different situations, she said.

Council Member Alejandra Salinas, one of three council members who put forward the new ICE policy, has urged Whitmire to seek a court order temporarily blocking Abbott from taking the city’s grant funding while the case works its way to a trial on the merits.

“As legal experts have made clear, the state’s position is unlawful,” Salinas said to Whitmire during a Tuesday council session. “This ordinance, which we both voted for, is fully compliant with Senate Bill 4. It does not restrict communication with federal authorities or prevent enforcement of criminal law. It ensures officers remain focused on solving crime.”

[…]

Dustin Rynders, legal director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, spoke before council on Tuesday and gave the example of Harris County, which has battled the state on several items.

An appeals court, for instance, just a month ago struck down Paxton’s effort to halt the county’s immigrant legal services fund after Harris County filed a lawsuit against the state.

“When you fight, you often win,” Rynders said.

Both Abbott and Paxton have said they’re eyeing other cities’ policies. Late Thursday Abbott’s office sent letters to Dallas and Austin threatening them with a loss of grant funds over their ICE policies.

In response, Austin Mayor Kirk Watson said he “will not play into this political theater.” Watson said city leaders were confident their rules did not conflict with Senate Bill 4, and that the governor’s threats would actually put public safety at risk. In the state’s letter to Austin, the money at risk was about $2.5 million.

See here, here, and here for the background. Kirk Watson was also once a State Senator, in case anyone was wondering. The obvious downside to fighting is that we could lose, and that is a lot of money at stake. The majority of it is actually a federal grant to cover costs related to the FIFA World Cup, and it’s not clear to me how Greg Abbott has a say in that. I suppose another approach to that might be to say fine, we just won’t provide any cops for those events, but I will admit that would have some untenable risks. The downside to not fighting is, as the Chron editorial board correctly notes, that we outsource our governance to Greg Abbott. I think if we’re going to give him the final say on what we are and are not allowed to do in Houston, the least we can do is make it official and give him all of the responsibility for running the city. It would cut down on the amount of time he has to marvel at AI hallucinations on Twitter, but no one said this would be easy.

UPDATE: Mayor Whitmire is now talking about modifying the ordinance instead of repealing it, which would also take nine votes. We have no details as of this writing as to what that means, so I can’t tell you any more than that.

Mike Miles wants to foist a bunch of AI on us

Posted on April 21, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

I missed this originally, but now that I’ve seen it I must say, WTF?

Houston ISD’s state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles will convert four more schools into AI-focused “Future 2” schools, up from two previously announced kindergarten-to-eighth-grade schools.

But according to an internal email to campus leaders, Miles envisions the program expanding far beyond that, eventually reaching 100 HISD schools.

To start, Miles will expand the pilot of AI-focused programs to two additional elementary and two middle schools next school year, according to a March 24 email to school leaders.

That brings the total of AI-focused “Future 2” schools to six. The district’s board of managers approved the first two in February — for Gregg and Clemente Martinez elementary schools to be converted into K-8 Future 2 schools — alongside 12 school closures and consolidations.

School leaders at New Education System campuses — which follow Miles’ highly structured instruction model — can submit requests to be considered for the Future 2 pilot, according to the district document.

HISD did not respond to a request for comment about which four schools, if any, were chosen to join Future 2 and when the board of managers may vote on the expansion, if at all.

Miles wrote that he planned for 25 “Future 2” schools in the 2027-28 school year. Ultimately, he wants the district to convert up to 100 NES schools to “Future 2” schools by July 2031 — a year after his current contract with HISD ends in June 2030. The district has about 130 schools in the NES reform model.

“Beginning in that year (2027-28), the District will determine which schools will transition to the Future 2 model,” Miles wrote in the email. “While schools may express interest and those requests will be considered, participation in Future 2 will not be optional if selected; the District will make final decisions regarding the timing and selection of schools for conversion.”

Elected trustee Plácido Gómez warned against charging toward the creation of AI-focused schools. There was a big push to roll out iPads and laptops into classrooms when he started teaching in 2013.

“What these edtech programs tend to do is: they use the same model as social media addiction by having games and gimmicks and short bursts of dopamine… which really isn’t the same thing as learning,” Gómez said. He and other elected trustees have no decision-making power during the state takeover.

The big push toward that technology in the classroom was “a colossal waste of money,” Gómez said.

“I am extremely concerned that the field of education in general is extremely susceptible to fads, and we love the shiny new thing,” Gómez said. “So now shifting over to AI … it seems like it’s a shiny new toy that we’re jumping at. And is it true that AI is extremely important in the job market and will be more important in the very near future? Yes, absolutely it is. But that doesn’t mean that we have to be jumpy about making sure it’s in the classrooms. Reading is important. Knowing how to do that is important. Knowing how to do math is important.”

I almost don’t know where to start with this, because with Mike Miles it feels like we’re constantly having a barrage of bullshit hurled at us. My first question is how the hell is any of this within the scope of his mission to bring the performance of a certain number of schools on their accountability tests up to prescribed levels? If he wanted to install Bitcoin miners at the schools targeted for closure and create his own memecoin as a means to paying for his NES programs, would that be allowed as well? I mean, who would stop him – he’s the TEA’s golden child and the Board of Managers reports to him. Someone wake up Harold Dutton and ask him if this is what he had in mind with that takeover law he wrote.

Maybe if there was evidence that any of this improved academic and employment outcomes for students, this would make sense. But of course there isn’t any of that – this is all brand new and highly speculative. Plácido Gómez is right, we’re being sold a bill of goods by hucksters, and I’d say there’s a decent chance that somewhere along the line, Mike Miles or people he knows will be making a buck off if it, because he’s good at that. Maybe if there were actual oversight in place, I’d be less worried about that. But here we are.

On that topic, you should also read this article, in which research about the HISD takeover was presented by three researchers at a Rice University symposium. You can see the Zoom presentation, which includes an AI-generate transcript that is occasionally a bit hard to follow, here. The topics were on how Miles has modeled HISD on the military, how the future is “fixed” by HISD, and how it sucks to be a teacher in HISD now. That’s a gift article so go read it, but I want to highlight the second item, since it’s a bit hard to capture in a short description.

Pennsylvania State University’s Corey Brautigam found that under the takeover, teachers have lost their “discretionary spaces” — moments where a teacher can further students’ learning, care for their class or dive into a spontaneous chat that piques their curiosity.

In HISD, teachers used to have more control of their instruction time and classroom setup, like whether to close a door or turn off fluorescent lights.

To understand why teachers lost this autonomy, Brautigam examined what he described as an “algorithmic logic.”

Citing examples of Miles’ presentations of his vision for HISD, Brautigam observed how the superintendent used futuristic imagery, called the district’s plan “Destination 2035,” and depicted the future “radically different from the past or the present.”

Brautigam emphasized that Miles depicts the future as “fixed” and “imminent.”

“It’s already set,” Brautigam said. “2035 is determined, which positions the community, teachers, students as unable to act on the future. They are no longer dreamers, imaginers, visionaries. Instead, the best they can do is prepare for this future that is inevitably coming.”

Miles’ New Education System emphasizes efficiency, optimizes time on slides and creates pressure to keep lessons moving, Brautigam said.

“And it seems silly, but I think this is an important assertion, that the now-ness of now matters. That children, as children, matter. That the light in the classroom is important,” he said. “Not children as future adults. Not children as future workers. Not children as future producers of test scores.”

A lot to think about there. I hope more research is done on this in the future, which last I checked is still in development. Watch the presentation and read the rest.

Posted in School days | Tagged artificial intelligence, HISD, Houston, Mike Miles, Mike Morath, New Education System, Placido Gomez, Texas Education Agency | Leave a comment

Texas blog roundup for the week of April 20

Posted on April 21, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance is not currently blocking the Strait of Hormuz as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Off the Kuff considers the possibilities for a special election in CD23.

SocraticGadfly talks about “Death Valley Days” — the heart of his recent vacation, not a remake of the 1950s black and white TV oater.

Neil at the Houston Democracy Project said we must show up for ourselves to speak, or in protest, at Houston City Council at Public Comment Session, Tuesday, 4/21. We must contact Council. Repeal of the ICE ordinance at command of Abbott means Houston is run by the far-right such as the police union.

======================

And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

The Texas Signal wonders what will happen when Texas experiences another disaster.

G. Elliott Morris shows why high prices are at the root of presidential unpopularity.

Pete von der Haar contemplates the Pope.

Your Local Epidemiologist expounds on EKGs and women’s health, with a story line on The Pitt as a starting point.

The Dallas Observer checks in on Fort Worth ISD as it starts its taken-over journey.

Franklin Strong presents the Book Loving Texans’ Guide to the May 2026 Elections, which this time allows for more of a focus on good candidates than on bad ones.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged blog roundup, TPA | Leave a comment

Interview with Darrell Jordan

Posted on April 20, 2026 by Charles Kuffner

Darrell Jordan

The main runoff of interest in the Democratic primary is for District Clerk, which is an open seat as incumbent Clerk Marilyn Burgess is not running for a third term. There was a big field in March, so I decided to wait till the second round to do interviews. First up is probably the most familiar name from the primary, former County Criminal Court Judge Darrell Jordan. Briefly the only Democrat on the County Court benches – this was before 2018 – and one of only two judges to support the landmark bail reform lawsuit, Jordan has spent 24 years in the Army and the National Guard, where he is the head of the Texas National Guard’s Trial Defense Services Office. He has also been legal counsel to the Texas Legislature and a special prosecutor in the Sandra Bland case. He had a lot of opinions about the District Clerk’s office, and you can hear about them all here:

cakuffner · Darrell Jordan interview 040926

PREVIOUSLY

Ron Angeletti – SD04 (special election)
Rep. Vikki Goodwin – Lt Governor
Marcos Vélez – Lt Governor
Annise Parker – Harris County Judge
Letitia Plummer – Harris County Judge

Courtesy of Greg Wythe, you can find a transcript for this interview here. I will have an interview with District Clerk candidate Alex Maldonado later this week, and more interviews with runoff candidates soon.

Posted in Election 2026 | Tagged Darrell Jordan, Democratic primary, District Clerk, Election 2026, Harris County, interviews, runoff | Comments Off

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