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All Coverage

  • Location, Location, Location

    By Ross Ramsey

    Geography played as big a role in the primaries as politics. The Panhandle outvoted the Permian Basin again, keeping new Sen. Kel Seliger, R-Amarillo, in office for five years instead of just one. Travis County overpowered Hidalgo County in a congressional race, giving U.S Rep. Lloyd Doggett room to run against a Republican in a heavily Democratic district in November. In another, Bexar County was enough to barely overcome Webb County, and with 126 votes to spare after the unofficial count, U.S Rep. Ciro Rodriguez, D-San Antonio, staved off a challenge from his former buddy in the Texas House, Democrat Henry Cuellar of Laredo. (Keep watching: Cuellar's campaign manager told us "Ciro received a stay of execution, but not a pardon.") Cities outvoted towns in East Texas, sending state Rep. Wayne Christian, R-Center, home in a congressional race that will now pit two Republicans from Tyler and Longview in a runoff. Full Story 

  • No Talking Until Tuesday

    By Ross Ramsey

    House Speaker Tom Craddick isn't showing any preference for school finance plans, but he's been quietly meeting with members to talk about some of the possibilities. Nobody wants to talk out loud until Election Day, which should tell you that there's no way to fix or even patch the state's school finance system without a tax bill. Full Story 

  • The Best Laid Plans

    By Ross Ramsey

    One way to torture public officials is to say or imply negative things about them while taking away their chance to respond. Travis County prosecutors are spreading the net on their investigation of campaign finance practice in the 2002 elections, adding five-dozen subpoenas to the half dozen revealed last week. They're working with a grand jury that will remain in business through the end of March. And lawyers frown when their clients spit at prosecutors while grand juries are in session. Full Story 

  • Prosecutors Call on the House

    By Ross Ramsey

    The grand jury investigating campaign contributions and expenditures in the 2002 legislative elections sent subpoenas to House Speaker Tom Craddick and a number of other House members, asking for their testimony and/or records relating to Texans for a Republican Majority, a political action committee set up that year to win more GOP seats in the Texas House. Full Story 

  • Bang! Bang! Bank! Bank!

    By Ross Ramsey

    Texans for Lawsuit Reform, which spent huge amounts of money to knock off trial lawyers in two recent East Texas Senate races, is on its way to a new record. With a week to go before the special election in SD-1, the group had spent $843,397 kicking Democrat Paul Sadler around. TLR gave nominal amounts — $5,000 — to two of the Republicans in the first round. Other than that, all of the group's money has gone into a third-party campaign tearing into Sadler, a trial lawyer and former House member who hopes to succeed Republican Bill Ratliff in the Texas Senate. Former Tyler Mayor Kevin Eltife was one of the recipients of the $5,000 contribution, but TLR hasn't done any advertising touting him. Their goal is to whack Sadler, and they're doing it to such an extent that the Democrat's campaign is fighting a two-front war, against Eltife on one hand and TLR on the other. Full Story 

  • False Start

    By Ross Ramsey

    Ever dent the fender driving a new car off the lot? The coalition of school boards and school administrators formed to lobby state government to spend more money on public schools is looking, unexpectedly, for professional help. Public Strategies Inc., the Austin-based public affairs firm that had been doing the group's polling, public relations and marketing – an effort that put them on the wrong side of the governor – dropped out less than a week after the coalition was publicly announced, citing conflicts between the school clients who want more money and clients who hired the firm to work on the tax bill that would fund that and other state spending. Full Story 

  • School Finance Grows a Beard

    By Ross Ramsey

    Gov. Rick Perry wants to call a special session on school finance this spring to try to cut property taxes and end the Robin Hood formulas that have rich-district voters in uproar. But he's leading with "education excellence" instead of finance, adding $500 million to the price and diverting attention from the funding emergency that's driving the issue. And the lack of consensus over that plan, and over schemes to re-jigger the school finance system, threatens plans to call lawmakers to Austin. Full Story 

  • The Storm in the East

    By Ross Ramsey

    If he didn't have his hands full already, state Rep. Tommy Merritt, R-Longview, got hit with an ad campaign from a conservative third-party group called Americans for Job Security, blasting a proposal he made that would have broadened sales taxes in Texas (while cutting local school property taxes around the state). The ads don't mention the property tax cut, but say the higher sales taxes would "mean fewer jobs around here." Full Story 

  • All Over But the Shoutin'

    By Ross Ramsey

    The judges who approved the Legislature's new congressional map acted like health inspectors who don't like the food in a particular restaurant but still find the kitchen clear of cockroaches and other violations of the health code. The results are a matter of taste; the restaurant's legal. Full Story 

  • Part Bragging Rights, Part Strategery

    By Ross Ramsey

    In the last presidential election, George W. Bush easily beat the field, at least in Texas. He got 3,799,639 votes while Al Gore was pulling in 2,433,746 votes here. That's a difference of 1,365,893 – quite a safety buffer when it came to tallying the state's 32 electoral votes (the state will have two more electoral votes in 2004, because of the two congressional seats added after the last census; state's get a vote for each person they elect to Congress). Full Story 

  • All the Marbles

    By Ross Ramsey

    Picture a room with no windows, with three judges and courtroom staff assembled in one corner, 30 attorneys (yes, really) seated and passing notes around a couple of large tables, a couple of dozen reporters squirming on hard wooden pews on one side in the back, and an assembly of officeholders, political hacks and all manner of aides seated on the other side in the back. At the door, a bailiff has been stationed to make sure nobody comes in unless one of the seats is emptied. Full Story 

  • Endangered Species

    By Ross Ramsey

    Robby Cook III, one of several conservative Democrats living in GOP-targeted statehouse districts, was on the verge of a party switch when he decided late last week not to run for reelection. The Eagle Lake farmer, who's been a House member since 1997, is clearly conflicted about his partisan affiliations at the moment. He says he's out of sync with his own party's liberals, but also didn't like what the GOP's congressional redistricting maps do to rural Texas. Full Story 

  • Ratliff Leaves the Stage

    By Ross Ramsey

    Bill Ratliff, a Republican engineer who upset a Democratic incumbent 15 years ago and then became a moderate voice as his party took over the Legislature, is leaving the Senate in the middle of his term to return to Mount Pleasant, his family, and political retirement. Full Story 

  • No Magic Beans

    By Ross Ramsey

    Some of the state's school finance mechanics are looking — again — at splitting the property tax rolls to put business property taxes into a state fund for all schools while leaving residential property tax revenues in control of local school districts. Full Story 

  • A Guaranteed Loss

    By Ross Ramsey

    At the end of March, the state's prepaid tuition plan was $226 million in the hole, primarily because the money invested by parents was doing the same thing everybody's 401k has been doing. And with the Legislature's decision this year to deregulate tuition, it'll be that much harder for the fund's investments to keep up with the cost of higher education in Texas. Full Story 

  • Keep Your Peepers on that Back Burner

    By Ross Ramsey

    The prospect of a special legislative session in an election year is making some Texas lawmakers nervous, especially because the subject — school finance — is a hazardous political substance. On the surface, special committees and other experts are studying complete revisions of the state's current school finance mechanism, involving everything from studies on how much it takes to educate an average student to a particular level, to a diagnosis of what's wrong with the current tax system, to whatever else can be attached to the school finance question. A full remodeling would require some new state taxes to replace the local property taxes causing much of the outcry. And a growing number of school districts are signing onto the latest legal challenge to the Texas school system, which could go to court next summer if lawmakers haven't applied enough patches by then. Full Story 

  • Two Parties in One

    By Ross Ramsey

    The political trunk sale that follows every round of redistricting is underway in earnest, with candidates checking out the new goods and signing up for the stuff they want. Full Story 

  • Outside Help

    By Ross Ramsey

    With Gov. Rick Perry out of the state and U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on the scene to bridge the gap between lawmakers on either end of the Texas Capitol, Republicans finally ended their 10-month quest for a congressional redistricting map that's kinder to their candidates. Full Story