Border security overpowers school vouchers and Paxton impeachment in Republican Texas House primaries

By Patrick Svitek, The Texas Tribune

Feb. 9, 2024

Turn on the TV in northeast Texas, and it would be hard to guess it has become a battleground in the GOP war over school vouchers.

State Rep. Gary VanDeaver of New Boston — one of nine Republicans that Gov. Greg Abbott is trying to unseat over their opposition to vouchers — is running an ad bragging about boosting border security funding as a House budget writer. His Abbott-backed challenger, Chris Spencer, is airing a spot promising to work with former President Donald Trump to “make our Texas border secure again.” And another Abbott-endorsed challenger in the region, Joanne Shofner, is running a commercial that pitches her as a “true border hawk.”

Those ads, exclusively about the border, are underscoring a key dynamic in Texas’ extraordinary primary season: Despite all the hubbub about vouchers and Ken Paxton’s impeachment — it’s still about the border, stupid.

Immigration is dominating the primaries far more than anything else, overshadowing the issues that initially set the stage last year for a high-octane primary. Abbott is endeavoring to unseat the House Republicans who joined Democrats to kill his school voucher plan, while Attorney General Ken Paxton set out to defeat the House Republicans who voted to impeach him last May.

In a recognition of the dominance of border concerns, some vulnerable House Republicans are now trying to tap into those concerns to explain their opposition to school vouchers.

“Last year I stopped a bill that would have handed out school vouchers — your tax dollars — to illegal immigrants,” VanDeaver says to the camera in a new commercial.

Rep. Glenn Rogers, R-Graford, is also running a TV ad that accuses his opponent, Mike Olcott, of supporting a voucher program that “gives taxpayer dollars to illegal immigrants.” It is an apparent reference to the lack of citizenship requirements for the recipients of the proposed initiative last year.

Pro-voucher groups say the argument reeks of desperation. Abbott’s chief strategist, Dave Carney, said Friday on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the talking point was “nonsense” and suggested his side already has a counterargument.

With less than a month until the primary, Abbott has kept the border center stage, visiting Eagle Pass on Thursday with nearly two dozen House Republicans who he has endorsed for reelection. While his office promised a “border security announcement,” they had no such announcement and Abbott said he was there to applaud the lawmakers’ for their help in passing his border agenda.

“The wire that you see preventing illegal entry … the soldiers that you see, the Texas Department of Public Safety that you see — none of that would be here but for the people who stand with me today,” Abbott said.

Abbott has been battling the Biden administration in court to install razor wire at a park in Eagle Pass along the border.

Abbott has spent the past month crisscrossing the state to stump for House incumbents and challengers he has endorsed in the wake of the defeat of his school voucher plan. And while he mentions the plan briefly in his stump speeches, it is often his national-headline-making efforts on the border that get more words — and crowd reaction.

The House GOP does not have many political vulnerabilities on the border given that they virtually all backed Abbott’s proposals. But pro-voucher groups are still seizing on the issue as a means to an end.

The Family Empowerment Coalition PAC recently co-opted the issue in a wave of digital ads against anti-voucher House Republicans. In the spots, a narrator introduces the incumbent and says they “brag he helped close the border, even though he didn’t.”

“That’s why Greg Abbott didn’t endorse him,” the narrator says.

One of the ad’s targets, Rep. DeWayne Burns of Cleburne, recently expressed frustration with the tactic in a Facebook post, saying “these FECPAC characters created an attack ad against me using an A.I. generated voice without any sources or citations.”

Leo Linbeck, one of the PAC’s leaders, said the strategy is simple: They are playing to win, and that means messaging against incumbents beyond just one issue.

“For people who oppose us on school choice, we will use the issues that are most important to voters to communicate our preference,” Linbeck said.

Another pro-voucher group — a national PAC, the School Freedom Fund — is leveraging multiple issues beyond education. It has even launched a TV ad against House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, touting his primary challenger’s endorsement from former President Donald Trump. Phelan declined to stake out a personal position throughout the voucher fight last year.

The polling was clear going into primary season: For Republican primary voters, school vouchers may be popular but not nearly as popular — or top of mind — as securing the border. The border regularly ranks as primary voters’ top concern — often by a wide margin — and they overwhelmingly back specific proposals.

A University of Houston poll released Tuesday found that Republican primary voters support “tax-funded school vouchers to all parents” 64% to 29%. But when it came to empowering state authorities to arrest undocumented immigrants — a new Texas law — the support widened to a gaping 89% to 9%.

“With a Republican primary voter, you can’t go wrong with stressing the border,” said Mark Jones, a political science professor at UH involved in the polling. “They literally all support the same position.”

The ads in northeast Texas are not an outlier. In Central Texas, the first House Republican who got an Abbott-backed challenger, Rep. Hugh Shine of Temple, is also running a TV ad solely about the border, boasting about how he “passed the strongest border security bill in the nation.”

That is a reference to Senate Bill 4, which Abbott signed into law last month. It allows Texas law enforcement authorities to arrest undocumented immigrants anywhere in the state and has already drawn a constitutional challenge from the Biden administration. Every House Republican voted for it, as well as for bills to ramp up state funding for a border wall and to increase penalties for smuggling immigrants or operating a stash house.

It all underscores a great irony for Abbott: As he kept lawmakers in Austin last year for five sessions trying to pass school vouchers, he also tasked them with tough border measures that they are arming themselves with in their reelection campaigns.

To be sure, school vouchers and Paxton’s impeachment are still coming up in primaries — at forums, in mailers and even some TV ads. The most striking example came earlier this week, when Phelanreleased a commercial addressing Paxton’s impeachment head-on, saying “Vengeful Paxton” is the only reason Trump has endorsed Phelan’s primary challenger.

But Phelan has been airing TV ads in his southeast Texas district for over two months, and the earliest ones were exclusively about the House’s border efforts.

For other TV ads, if they even mention school vouchers, the reference is glancing.

“Backed by Greg Abbott and Ted Cruz, LaHood is running to close down our border,” a narrator says, “and protect our kids from woke indoctrination.”

 This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/02/09/texas-republican-primary-2024-house-border-ken-paxton/.

The Texas Legislative session has begun. Here are 6 things we’re watching.

By James Barragán and Patrick Svitek, The Texas Tribune

Jan. 10, 2023

Lawmakers returned to Austin today for their biennial assembly to pass new laws and decide how to spend the state’s money for the next two years.

Republicans maintained their nearly 30-year dominance over Texas politics in last November’s midterm elections, growing their majorities in both legislative chambers and keeping their grasp on every statewide elected office. That means Texans can expect the Legislature to continue to swing conservative on both fiscal and social matters.

Just how conservative they go will be the main question, as the battle between far-right, socially conservative Republicans and business-oriented GOP legislators, who have tried to move away from fights over social issues, continues within the party.

Democrats, who have been in the minority in both chambers of the Legislature for 20 years, will have limited tools to fend off Republican advances and will have to choose their battles wisely.

With a record-breaking budget surplus, lawmakers will be putting out their hands for funding for their pet projects across the state, and top leaders will no longer have the ready excuse of limited means. But with rising costs due to inflation, lawmakers will also have to factor in how much more they’ll have to spend in the state budget to cover infrastructure and staffing costs that keep the state running.

Texas has seen major challenges since the last time lawmakers assembled in Austin in late 2021: a school shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, higher inflation hitting Texans in their pocketbooks, a record number of migrants attempting to cross the state’s southern border, the outlawing of abortion following a U.S. Supreme Court decision and parents who have grown increasingly agitated about what public schools are teaching their children about gender, sex and race.

With major issues at play in the Capitol, here are six things we are watching as Texas’ 88th legislative session kicks off.

How to spend the budget surplus

The biggest topic of conversation heading into today is how to spend the state’s $32.7 billion budget surplus, and everyone — including top legislative leadership — is chomping at the bit over how to use that cash.

“It’s always easiest to spend other people’s money, so everyone is going to try to get their pet projects done,” said Brian Smith, a political scientist at St. Edward’s University in Austin.

The surplus, or one-time money that was left over from the previous budget cycle, is historic in its enormousness. But not all of it is up for grabs. A share of it is reserved for highway funds, and some of it will flow into the state’s rainy day fund, also called the Economic Stabilization Fund.

Gov. Greg Abbott promised during his campaign to deliver “the largest property tax cut in the history of the state.” He said he wanted to use half of the budget surplus to deliver on that promise. But Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, another property tax relief hawk, has introduced a note of caution, warning the Legislature could not spend half of the surplus without busting its self-imposed spending cap. (The Legislature can vote to spend beyond the cap.)

Patrick, whose railing against property taxes swept him into the Senate in 2007, has said he is committed to cutting property taxes but wants to move cautiously to ensure the state has enough money left over in its rainy day fund for emergency spending and for other state priorities.

In the House, Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, has suggested allocating some of the surplus to one-time infrastructure spending. That plan carries the advantage of not having to reproduce that spending in the budget every two years, like with property tax relief, which is a recurring state cost.

But there are also other factors to consider. A property tax cut, for example, would more directly benefit homeowners rather than renters. And since a considerable chunk of the surplus comes from an increase in the revenue generated by sales tax, some lawmakers have raised the question about the fairness of rewarding only homeowners when that money has come from Texans across the board.

It’s also unclear how much homeowners would even notice a property tax cut in the form of a homestead exemption. In 2021, lawmakers increased the homestead exemption from $25,000 to $40,000, which would save the average homeowner of a $300,000 home about $175 a year.

Lawmakers will also have to weigh additional costs to running the state. Because of inflation, the costs for state services will be more expensive, and state employees will be lagging behind without a cost-of-living adjustment in their salaries.

“Spending is not keeping up with inflation. So we need to do something about what we pay state workers and how we deal with the agencies,” said Eva DeLuna Castro, a budget analyst at Every Texan, a liberal think tank.

“Parental rights”

Republican leaders and lawmakers have targeted “parental rights” at the center of their agendas this session. They want to give parents more say in their children’s education, whether it be the school they attend or the books they read.

How exactly that goal manifests itself in the session remains to be seen. Abbott campaigned for reelection on a “parental bill of rights” that, among other things, seeks to increase the transparency of school curricula and crack down on what he’s called “pornographic” materials in books available to schoolchildren. In some ways, it is a continuation of GOP efforts from 2021 that led to restrictions on how teachers talk about race and gender in classrooms in an effort to ban critical race theory from being taught in schools.

A more divisive concept inside the GOP could be the revival of an effort for school vouchers, or redirecting tax dollars to let parents take their kids out of public schools and send them to other kinds of schools. Abbott voiced his clearest support yet for the idea during his campaign, but it has historically run into opposition from rural Republicans in the House.

Patrick, who oversees the Senate and has considerable power over legislation, has long supported the concept. In a podcast interview posted Sunday, he said he sees it as part of this session’s focus on “parental freedom.”

“Those who oppose school choice, [they say], ‘Oh, vouchers are terrible!’ No, parents deserve the freedom to decide where their kids go to school,” Patrick said.

But in a sign that voucher supporters know they need to try a different tactic this session, Patrick has pitched “bracketing out” rural Texas in any proposal, hoping to appeal to GOP lawmakers in those areas who are fiercely protective of their public schools.

LGBTQ issues and women’s health

Social conservatives are also attempting to crack down on LGBTQ rights this session. Around three dozen bills targeting LGBTQ people had been filed as of last week.

These bills vary from putting restrictions on drag shows to restricting gender-affirming care for transgender children and even criminalizing it. Such care is recommended by major medical associations to treat gender dysphoria, but socially conservative legislators have decried gender-affirming care as “genital mutilation” and “child abuse.”

Still, major leaders like Abbott have supported the push by conservatives to launch child-abuse investigations of parents who provide such care to their children.

Backlash against drag shows has also grown, with far-right groups targeting the shows and accusing performers of “grooming children” — a trope that has historically been used against LGBTQ people.

Lawmakers will also have to figure out how to tackle access to abortion in the state after the procedure was outlawed in Texas law following the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion case last summer.

Before the November elections, some Republican candidates and lawmakers had expressed an openness to creating exceptions to the state’s abortion ban in cases of rape or incest. But after Republicans maintained their dominance in state politics on Election Day, Smith said he does not see a political motivation for GOP leaders to revisit the issue.

Patrick has been noncommittal about revisiting the restrictions but has suggested he does not see a “groundswell” to do so among Republicans.

“We may see them be proposed and discussed, but they won’t be moving,” Smith said. “And I think the same is true about guns.”

Border security

Last session, the Legislature allocated a record $3 billion toward border security efforts, including Abbott’s highly touted border mission, Operation Lone Star, which has sent thousands of state troopers and National Guard service members to the Texas-Mexico border. Some of that money has also been used to build a border wall, the first in the country funded by state coffers.

But with a record number of migrants trying to cross into the country — U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded 2.4 million attempts to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in 2022 — the funding could not keep up with the large number of resources sent to slow the crossing of migrants.

State lawmakers had to transfer another $1 billion to keep Abbott’s border mission going through 2022, often taking money from underfunded state agencies like the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the Texas Juvenile Justice Department. More money — ranging from hundreds of millions of dollars to another billion — is expected from the state to continue the effort until the end of the fiscal year in August, DeLuna Castro said.

Still, the number of migrants crossing the southwest border has remained stubbornly high, and state lawmakers will have to decide whether they want to continue spending multiple billions of dollars on an effort that has failed to produce a resounding success.

Patrick has answered in the affirmative, saying the state must continue its spending on border security because Democrats in Washington have abandoned their responsibility on the issue.

“People say, ‘Well, they’re still crossing.’ Yes, they’re still crossing because of President Biden,” Patrick said at a news conference unveiling his legislative priorities. “Without our DPS, without our National Guard, without the state doing what we’re doing, the situation would be far worse ... so we have to keep that up until we get a new president in the White House who hopefully will make border security No. 1 in 2024.”

The issue was also central to Abbott’s governing strategy and his reelection campaign, so he’s expected to also support continued spending on border security.

But there could also be other ramifications and questions lawmakers will attempt to respond to legislatively. As Abbott ramped up the mission to deploy 10,000 service members to the border in the fall of 2021, troops began complaining about poor living conditions, a lack of pay and no sense of mission. The mission has also seen the deaths of 10 troops tied to Operation Lone Star, including five suspected suicides and the death of Bishop Evans, a servicemember who died in the Rio Grande while trying to rescue drowning migrants. The migrants survived.

“Who signs up for the Texas State Guard if you think you’re going to get sent [away for a long time] and not come home?” DeLuna Castro said. “Who signs up for that?”

 The “Big Three” dynamic

Sessions always hinge on the relationship among the Big Three — the governor, the lieutenant governor and the House speaker. This time around, there is ample cause for tension from the outset of the session.

The two chamber leaders do not like one another, especially after the marathon of sessions in 2021. Patrick repeatedly criticized Phelan’s management of the House after Democrats broke quorum over the GOP’s priority elections bill. And then Patrick wielded his clout with former President Donald Trump to try to gin up primary opposition to Phelan, who ultimately ran unopposed.

“We have to get along to do the business of the state,” Phelan said in September before dryly adding, “and I have to tell you, our staffs get along very well.”

Phelan, speaking at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin in September, added it had “been a while” since he talked to Patrick.

Abbott and Patrick are also a duo to watch. Like Phelan, Abbott saw Patrick meddle in his primary and took note. And more recently, they are especially at odds when it comes to the fallout from the 2021 power grid collapse.

After Abbott declared later that year that lawmakers had done all they needed to do to fix the grid, Patrick campaigned on improving the grid and has named it a top priority for this session. He wants to build more natural gas capacity, a topic on which Abbott has been silent.

Patrick has sought to downplay any leadership tensions on the issue.

The grid is “fixed for now, but we need to fix it forever,” Patrick told Spectrum News in December.

Democratic strategy 

Democrats are returning to the Legislature with very similar numbers — 64 members in the House and 12 in the Senate. But in the House, they have a new caucus chair, Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer of San Antonio, who is known as more sharp-elbowed than his predecessor, Rep. Chris Turner of Grand Prairie.

“Trey is a much different leader,” Rep. Ron Reynolds of Missouri City, chair of the Texas Legislative Black Caucus, said in a recent interview. “I anticipate there’ll be a more aggressive nature when combating Republicans on the issues.”

House Democrats already showed a new willingness to fight in 2021 when they broke quorum for weeks in protest of new voting restrictions. Martinez Fischer has not ruled out doing that again as a last resort for trying to derail Republican legislation.

Democrats in the House are also watching to see how much of a seat at the table they get as Phelan faces pressure to do away with committee chairs from the minority party, a longtime tradition. Phelan is highly unlikely to give in, as he has defended the practice as one that sets the Legislature apart from the gridlock in Washington. But he could take other steps to reduce Democratic influence in the House.

If there is any floor fight over committee chairs, it would come on the second day of the session — Wednesday — when the lower chamber typically considers its rules for the session.

House Republicans have a new leader, too. On Monday, their caucus elected a new chair, Rep. Craig Goldman of Fort Worth, previously the treasurer of the caucus. The chair during the 2021 sessions, Rep. Jim Murphy of Houston, did not seek reelection to the House.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/01/10/texas-legislature-2023/

Republicans, Democrats prioritize legislative races targeting Collin County and South Texas seats

By Patrick Svitek, The Texas Tribune

Aug. 8, 2022

Two years ago, Democrats were gearing up for a rare opportunity in modern times: capturing the Texas House majority.

But after they came up woefully short — and Republican-led redistricting reduced the number of competitive races — the battlefield heading into November is notably smaller.

Still, both sides see important stakes in the state House races this time around. While the majority is not on the line, the hottest races are unfolding in key areas that each party understands is critical to their growth for the next decade.

Look no further than the three districts that both Democrats and Republicans see as their highest priorities. Two of them are in South Texas, where Republicans are working to make inroads with Hispanic voters, while the other is in North Texas’ Collin County, a place emblematic of the fast-growing suburbs where Democrats have gained ground over the last few election cycles.

The GOP is especially serious about the two seats in South Texas — House District 37, a new open seat in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley, and House District 118, a San Antonio-based seat that Republican John Lujan flipped last year in a special election. House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, and the Republican State Leadership Committee, a national group that works to elect Republicans to state legislatures, are announcing Monday that they are funding $360,000 in TV ads aimed at the two districts, a substantial opening salvo on the battlefield.

“Democrats are hemorrhaging support with Hispanic voters in South Texas because they have taken them for granted, but Texas Republicans are surging in these communities because they are offering a commonsense, freedom focused agenda that gives their constituents the opportunity to thrive,” the RSLC’s president, Dee Duncan, said in a statement.

Republicans currently control 85 seats in the 150-member House. It is a modest 10-seat majority, but due to redistricting, neither side expects the balance of power to tilt much either way even in their most rosy scenarios. It’s a frustrating reality for Democrats, especially as optimism rises at the top of the ticket, where Beto O’Rourke is posing a serious threat to Gov. Greg Abbott.

“It’s gonna be hard, I’m just gonna be clear-eyed about this,” O’Rourke said recently when asked about the potential for a Democratic majority in the Legislature. O’Rourke added there is an “extraordinary” lineup of statewide candidates, but the “state House districts are a little tougher because they have been so effectively gerrymandered.”

Still, he said, the gerrymandering is “not impossible to overcome.”

While Democratic candidates may not be able to argue this time that they are in contention for the majority, some are pitching the Legislature as increasingly important after the latest U.S. Supreme Court decisions, including the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which have cemented the power of states’ rights.

“Now more than ever, we’re seeing the onus of a lot of large federally protected laws being put on the state legislatures due to the Supreme Court decisions we’ve seen over the past months,” said Frank Ramirez, the Democrat challenging Lujan again after losing in the special election. “All of these things are on the chopping block now.”

The battlefield

Millions of dollars are expected to pour in to HD-37 and HD-118 — the two South Texas seats — and then HD-70, the one in Collin County. President Joe Biden would have carried each of the three seats over Donald Trump in 2020 if the new redistricting maps had been in place then, but only by margins of 2 to 11 points, which gives them battleground status in the current environment, according to operatives. HD-37, which Republicans rammed into the map overnight during redistricting, is the closest on paper, with a Biden margin of only 2 percentage points.

Lujan is easily the most endangered Republican incumbent, but a few others can be expected to have competitive races, including Reps. Steve Allison of San Antonio, Morgan Meyer of Dallas and Angie Chen Button of Richardson. However, all three have had tough general elections before — especially Meyer and Button — and Republicans have faith in their ability to defend themselves.

There are also some additional open seats that the GOP will have to monitor, like the Houston seat where Republican state Rep. Jim Murphy is retiring.

On the Democratic side, the most endangered incumbent may be Rep. Eddie Morales of Eagle Pass, who represents a massive district covering most of the Texas-Mexico border.

As for the issues, the GOP messaging is set to take on a national tone, seeking to tap into Biden’s deep unpopularity in Texas, especially on border security and inflation. The House Democratic Campaign Committee said its candidates are focusing on “good jobs, strong public schools and access to affordable health care.”

“In contrast, Republicans are obsessed with banning abortion with no exceptions and making sure anyone can carry a gun with no training or license,” an HDCC spokesperson, Stella Deshotel, said in a statement.

With the primaries over, candidates across the races are sounding notes of independence and bipartisanship. Mihaela Plesa, the Democratic nominee for HD-70, said in an interview it was important for representatives to go to Austin and “not just be another vote for the party line.” Her Republican opponent, Jamee Jolly, said she was optimistic she would appeal to the Biden voters in the district, which he would have carried by 11 percentage points.

“I think a lot of people chose Biden because they didn’t like the Republican option. I know that for a fact because I have friends who have said that,” Jolly said, adding that her friends found Trump “divisive” and that she would legislate as “much more of a convener, a solutions-seeker,” reaching across the aisle.

Plesa said the No. 1 issue she hears about is public school finance, along with concerns about the “social wars” that are erupting in the classroom. But she said she is also hearing a lot about abortion after the Roe v. Wade decision, which triggered a ban without exceptions in Texas. Jolly said that her focus is now on “how we continue to support maternal health care.”

The candidates were also not fully aligned on how to prevent the next school shooting, an especially salient topic after the May massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. Jolly said her priority was “harden[ing]” campuses rather than new gun restrictions. Plesa said she is also discussing school hardening with voters but she also supports gun proposals like raising the age to buy an assault rifle.

South Texas

In their drive to make a new battleground out of South Texas, the GOP is banking on Biden’s unpopular presidency, both when it comes to the border and economy.

“It’s very difficult for the Valley down here,” said Janie Lopez, the Republican nominee for HD-37 in the Rio Grande Valley, referring to the low median income across the region. “The Biden administration, how they’re handling things, it’s extremely unpopular right now down here in the Valley.”

Lopez’s Democratic opponent, Luis Villarreal, does not entirely disagree. He said “there’s a lot more to be done” on the border by the Biden administration and all elected officials need to listen more to border communities about the best solutions. Villarreal also wants to see the federal government pick up more of the tab for the state’s massive border security efforts.

Farther up in South Texas, Republicans face a savvy Democratic incumbent in Morales, who has shown an independence from his party on occasion. Trump carried his district by 8 percentage points in 2020, and it was redrawn to be a district that Biden hypothetically would have carried that year by 5 percentage points.

Morales stayed behind when House Democrats broke quorum last year over the new elections law, and he opposed Biden’s decision earlier this year to end the Title 42, the Trump-era policy that allowed border officials to rapidly expel migrants due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Speaking Thursday in San Angelo, Morales said the United States is currently incentivizing drug cartels and human smugglers “because there’s nothing that is being done.”

“I have been, as a Democrat, one of those opponents to some of the measures that the White House has taken,” Morales said, “but more importantly also … it’s not just the White House’s fault and it’s not just this president or the previous one.” Congress has failed to act, he added, and that’s been true throughout multiple presidencies.

Morales has drawn a well-funded GOP challenger in Katherine Parker, an Alpine businesswoman who easily outraised Morales on their latest campaign finance reports. In a statement, she scoffed at the idea he has broken from his party, noting he has financially supported “two of the most radical Democrats there are, Bernie Sanders and Beto O’Rourke.”

As for Ramirez and Lujan, it is a rematch after they battled in last year’s special election. Lujan has been here before: He captured the seat on San Antonio’s South Side in a 2016 special election, only to lose it months later in the November election. This time, the district is less blue thanks to redistricting.

Lujan said the biggest difference to him is the lack of straight-ticket voting. He said he remembers well in 2016 that an older woman came up to him at a polling place and said she wanted to vote for him but that she loathed Trump and thus voted straight-ticket Democratic.

Ramirez said much has changed since the special election, pointing to the two major events this spring that have galvanized Democrats: the Uvalde school shooting and overturning of Roe v. Wade. And he said Lujan has shown a lack of leadership in office, declining, for example, to say how he would have voted on the controversial elections law.

“The 118 district — I have no choice but to reach out to the other side,” Lujan said. “I’m not that far-right candidate.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/08/08/texas-house-battleground-races/.

Texans deserve resilient energy portfolio that we can depend on

Austin American-Statesman JUN 15 2022

By Drew Darby

Texas is the leader in domestic energy production and far sur[1]passes every other state in electricity net generation. In 2021, Texas produced 43% of all crude oil and 25% of all-natural gas in the U.S., and produced 26% of its wind power. West Texas oil and gas, Panhandle and Gulf Coast wind, and Hill Country sun are all power derived from our state’s natural resources that help drive economic development, generate income for landowners, fund roads and education, and strengthen our national security. The current state of affairs demands we fortify our energy resources to respond to any crisis, and we can do this by continuing our more comprehensive 'all-of-the-above' approach to energy.

Unpredictable market events, projected population growth, and periods of drought and extreme weather trigger considerable electricity demand and strain our electrical grid. In worst-case scenarios, the consequences from unplanned outages trickle down and across our entire integrated infrastructure, which depends heavily on electricity to operate. Safe drinking water, internet ser[1]vices, and certain at-home medical devices, for example, depend on a functioning electrical grid.

To keep pace with growth and adapt to changes, policymakers must continue to embrace an 'all-of-the-above' approach to developing and deploying Texas’ abundant resources. This means everything must be on the table when it comes to readying our energy reserves, and we must cut the red tape preventing Texas from fully harnessing renewables like wind or extracting tried-and-true commodities like Permian Basin oil and gas. This also means embracing generation that uses less water, encouraging new and emerging technologies like green hydrogen, and emphasizing the addition of battery storage to dispatch electricity on demand. And finally, this means incentivizing companies to choose Texas for new energy development, especially as aging power plants retire.

Texans deserve a resilient energy portfolio that we can trust. We do not need to pit renewables against traditional fossil fuels or seek to replace one with the other; we must use both essential sources to generate electricity for residential, commercial, and industrial users. Renewable power generation and thermal power generation complement each other and we must ensure this relationship is successful.

An 'all-of-the-above' strategy also requires we advance our state’s transmission capabilities. Although Texas is a leading producer of electricity, we must effectively move it, sell it, and buy it to accommodate our thriving state. Transmission constraints and congestion prevent the lowest-priced electricity from reaching customers, particularly during high-demand times or power out[1]ages. Congestion is an expensive problem and a hidden cost that consumers absorb in our electricity bills, made more burdensome now as we pay record-high food and gasoline prices.

According to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ Independent Market Monitor, congestion costs exceeded $2 billion in 2021 and continue to trend upward. Already this year, congestion costs approached $800 million in a single month. Modeling shows that optimizing the Texas power grid by 2035 would result in enormous economic, energy, and environmental benefits, including more than $11 billion in local tax revenue and as many as 25,300 new jobs. Without strategic investments and policy reforms now, our inadequate transmission infrastructure will continue to aggravate grid reliability and the overall competitiveness of the Texas economy.

In 2021, state lawmakers prioritized legislation to prepare Texas’ electric market for weather emergencies. These efforts go far to strengthen the reliability and resiliency of our electrical grid, but lawmakers cannot lose steam in our efforts to ensure long-term sustainability and modernity. Providing affordable and reliable power for homes, businesses, schools, and hospitals across every region of our state must be today’s urgent priority. As we approach the 88th Texas Legislative Session, it is critical that we focus on developing all of our energy resources synchronously with building out our energy infrastructure. Our vision and action will secure a better future for all Texans.

Darby, a Republican, represents District 72 in West Texas

Texas government’s favorite local tax

By Ross Ramsey, The Texas Tribune

March 23, 2022

If you think about it, property taxes in Texas are a pretty sweet deal for the state government.

Owners of homes and other properties don’t like it so much, and neither do renters, who pay the tax invisibly through the owners of the properties they rent. Texans pay some of the highest property taxes in the U.S. The state ranks sixth nationally in property taxes paid as a percentage of owner-occupied housing value, according to the Tax Foundation. That organization ranks Texas 13th among the states in property tax collections per capita. It also says only three states rely more heavily on property taxes than Texas, where 44% of all local and state tax collections come from property taxes.

But the state of Texas itself doesn’t levy a property tax. Only school districts, counties, hospital districts and local government entities can do that — and they often use those locally raised property tax dollars to cover holes left in their budgets by the state.

It has proven almost impossible to get meaningful property tax relief from the same state politicians who campaign on that issue every two years. Not only are they insulated from collecting property taxes, but the only way to lower property taxes is to either cut services and programs that Texans want, like public schools and public health, or to raise other taxes themselves.

Making sympathetic noises about Texans’ high property taxes while not actually doing anything meaningful to lower them is much easier — and, so far, has provided legislative and statewide incumbents with a powerful and perennial political issue that doesn’t require them to do anything they’d consider painful.

In the case of school district taxes in particular, that means Texans pay higher property taxes because the state relies on school districts to lower its own bill for public education. It’s baked into the state budget, as pointed out, most recently, by the Texas Association of Appraisal Districts.

“An increase in property taxes is sometimes needed to keep the police and fire departments adequately funded, along with our schools, hospitals, and other vital services for our communities,” TAAD wrote in a recent news release. “The State of Texas also benefits from property taxes to the tune of over $5.6 billion in a two-year budget cycle. That’s 75% more than the state makes from the lottery.”

That money is the difference between what the state spent on local schools and what it would have spent without increases in local property values. If you haven’t been looking, those values are soaring, which has the effect of raising property tax bills and lowering what the state needs to send to your local school district for its share of the costs.

The state has more money to spend — $5.6 billion — as a direct result of higher property taxes. And state officials don’t have to answer for it, really: They just say theirs is not the government collecting property taxes. They have cleverly outsourced that political liability — collecting a hated tax — to your local school board.

Schools is the big one, but not the only case where what happens in Austin affects the size of your local property tax bill.

For years, the Legislature has refused to expand Medicaid to cover more people, or do much else to get the state out of its worst-place position when it comes to the number and rate of people without health insurance. Those 5.4 million people — that’s a bigger population than 28 states — instead rely on uncompensated health care, when they get any health care at all. Who pays for uncompensated health care? County hospital systems and other patients. Those county systems are funded, in large measure, with property taxes.

It’s a roundabout circuit, but it’s safe to say there would be less pressure on your local property taxes if the state government would find a solution to the uninsured care problem. Other states have done it, with varying effects: All 49 of them have better results than we do when it comes to health insurance coverage.

State officials in Texas like to say that they hate property taxes just as much as you do.

Maybe.

Property taxes are levied by local officials, and state officials can complain about it without being blamed for the trouble taxpayers have with it. Texas doesn’t have a personal income tax, a bragging point for everyone involved in economic development, and a relief for anyone with a personal income. The cost of that is higher-than-average sales and property taxes.

The state sets sales taxes, though changes in the rate are rare. And it more or less requires property taxes by requiring local governments to provide services and programs and to rely so heavily on those taxes to pay for the work. And state officials get a bonus: Their local counterparts get stuck with the blame.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/03/23/texas-property-taxes/. The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.