Lead Stories

Widespread Microsoft outage continues, taking down Outlook and other 365 services

Microsoft suffered a widespread outage on Thursday and Friday, as engineers scrambled to fix server issues that caused disruption to millions of its customers. Connectivity issues began shortly before 1 p.m. ET on Thursday and continued into Friday, with Outlook and Teams, along with multiple Microsoft 365 services such as Sharepoint and Copilot, affected. Numerous external services that connect with Microsoft products such as Outlook Calendar were also hit. Microsoft said it was not aware of any malicious activity causing the outage, which it initially blamed on a traffic surge in part of its infrastructure and issues with a component responsible for processing server health. Email and related tools were unavailable for Microsoft users throughout the Asian business day on Friday and across the European and early U.S. morning.

In an update at around 5 a.m. ET, Microsoft said users may still be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 products — including Outlook on either web or desktop and any services that interact with email — and did not give a timeline for restoring full service. Most access to Teams was available. The company said recovery actions were progressing in phases across affected infrastructure and it was seeing “incremental improvement in several workloads.” But it added that service was variable and full capacity was not restored. Around 45 minutes earlier, it said it was seeing “early signs of stabilization.” Engineering teams are taking affected systems offline for fixes and bringing them back online in stages while looking at additional options, Microsoft said, adding that it was prioritizing efforts to preserve emails delayed during the recovery process. It is extending the timeout window, whereby delayed emails continue to attempt delivery, for up to 48 hours to help protect messages. Microsoft said in its initial updates on Thursday that the connectivity problems related to infrastructure “elevated load across multiple regions,” caused by a “number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure.” Some servers were failing automated health checks, it said.

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Ken Paxton divorce is finalized, his lawyer says

Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas, has finalized his divorce with his wife, Angela, who cited his adultery in her divorce petition last year, a lawyer for Mr. Paxton said on Thursday. The final agreement comes more than a year after Ms. Paxton first filed for divorce and just over a week after Mr. Paxton lost his race for the U.S. Senate. The terms of the divorce were agreed on and will remain private, the lawyer, Laura Roach, said in a statement. “The Paxtons and their respective attorneys, worked diligently to reach an amicable resolution of their divorce,” she said. “From my observation, they share mutual respect for one another and appear to be looking forward to the next chapter of their lives.” Ms. Paxton’s divorce lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but a spokesman for Ms. Paxton, a Republican state senator, did not dispute that the divorce was final.

In a filing with the court on Wednesday, Ms. Paxton said she and Mr. Paxton had agreed on the division of their property and debts that was “fair and equitable to both me and my husband.” The Paxtons were married on Nov. 1, 1986 and had “ceased to live together on or about June 1, 2024,” she said in the filing, which was made in state court in McKinney, Texas. On Thursday morning, Ms. Paxton posted an image of a Bible verse on social media that reads, in part: “And we know that in all things, God works for the good of those who love him.” She declined to comment on the divorce or the posting. Ms. Paxton cited “biblical grounds” in her petition last summer to end her marriage of more than 30 years to Mr. Paxton. She filed for divorce just months after Mr. Paxton announced his run for Senate, challenging Senator John Cornyn in the Republican primary. Mr. Paxton won the primary but lost by a 12-point margin to a Democrat, James Talarico, in last week's election. Mr. Paxton’s personal life was an issue at several points in the primary and general election campaigns. In the final weeks of the race, video emerged showing Mr. Paxton celebrating New Year’s Eve in 2024 in Dubai with two U.S. fugitives and Tracy Duhon, a Christian influencer.

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There's only one way back for the GOP in Texas, state senator warns

As bad as the November election was for Texas Republicans, it is not a permanent realignment so long as the party makes some changes, according to a key voice of the new GOP resistance. “This is not an extinction-level event for Republicans,” state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, said during an interview on the Texas Take Podcast released on Thursday. He said the Republican Party has to be self-reflective and learn that it simply can’t cater to white men during election season and hope to win in Texas. He pointed to Republicans like defeated Railroad Commission candidate Bo French, who railed against non-white University of Texas football fans, and others who used harsh language toward minority communities. He didn't name anyone else. But the state's top Republican leaders, from Gov. Greg Abbott to U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, spent much of the last year targeting Muslims in their push against Sharia law. And in Houston's Hindu community, voters have said the party has been pushing them away.

“We’ve got to get away from that,” Bettencourt said. “The only way that the Republicans come back is you've got to recognize the demographics have changed.” Non-Hispanic white residents make up less than 40% of the state’s 31 million residents. And about three of every four high school graduates in Texas this year will be Hispanic, Black, and Asian - a trend that has been developing over the last five years and shows no signs of changing. It means the only way forward is being open to Texans of varying backgrounds who are more conservative in their thinking on taxes, regulations, and other government policies, Bettencourt said. “You have to be able to work with basically everybody,” he said. “Because I've always said, I don't care what you look like, where you're from, who you sleep with. I'm trying to have one litmus test, which is the value of work performed. And we've got to get back to that because we have to build that multiracial coalition.” But whether that's possible in Donald Trump's Republican party remains to be seen. He has built his political brand off antagonizing immigrants, and has two more years left in the White House.

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Jensen Huang's departure as Nvidia CEO may dampen mood around AI boom

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s stunning resignation has sent ripples through the global technology industry, with rival chipmakers itching to take advantage of the uncertainty and others wondering if the downfall of one of AI’s biggest cheerleaders will dampen the mood around the civilization-altering technology. Huang, who stepped down Thursday following reports of extramarital affairs, including with a suspected Chinese spy, was the very public face of a company that dominates the market for computer chips used to train and run AI models. In March, Huang predicted Nvidia will be grappling with a $1 trillion backlog in orders for its chips by the end of the year, doubling his estimate from a year earlier. A linchpin of the AI boom, Nvidia trades off with Apple as Wall Street’s most valuable company and has invested heavily in other AI firms.

Some of Nvidia’s biggest rivals, such as Broadcom, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, saw their shares advance Thursday following Huang’s departure as investors predicted that its customers will look to diversify their suppliers. In the end, analysts say, this might not be a bad thing. “This could turn what has effectively been a monopoly into a horse race again, as competitors rush to meet growing demand,” said Bret Greenstein, chief AI officer at the global consultancy West Monroe. “Nvidia did not create that demand, and a shift in this part of the market could ultimately diversify the supply chain, create more choice for customers and strengthen the broader AI industry in the years ahead.” Nvidia carved out an early lead in tailoring its chipsets known as graphics processing units, or GPUs, from use in powering video games to helping to train powerful AI systems. Demand soared as tech companies scrambled for more chips to build and run AI systems. In annual filings, Nvidia has identified competitors including Advanced Micro Devices, or AMD, Intel, Broadcom and cloud services companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft. While these other players are established and respected within the industry for their chips, they have been trying to catch up to Nvidia. Nvidia has had an advantage from the start and as soon as a competitor releases something just as good, Nvidia has put out the next better chip, said Jay Aldebert, chief growth officer of International Services Inc. “Nobody’s just sitting still,” he said.

Read this article at Associated Press - Subscribers Only

State Stories

A Tarrant Dem exited a Texas House race, then won. Now she plans to take office.

A North Texas Democrat who won the race for House District 93 despite suspending her campaign amid eligibility questions related to a conviction says she is qualified for office and plans to assume the elected position. Ericka Lomick won Nov. 3 elections for the Fort Worth area district, defeating Republican Alan Blaylock, a former Fort Worth City Council member. She left the race in the weeks before Election Day for a full term beginning in January and a partial term to fill the remainder of former Rep. Nate Schatzline’s current term, after he left the office early and didn’t seek reelection. He went on to work as a senior advisor for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

Lomick’s campaign cited “questions” around her eligibility as the reason for the campaign’s suspension. Specific circumstances that would disqualify her from serving weren’t mentioned, but the announcement followed a news release from a political action committee claiming Lomick has a felony record. Given the timing of her exit, Lomick’s name remained on the ballot for the midterm election and special election. She won more votes than Blaylock in both instances. Federal court records out of North Carolina show that an Ericka Lomick was convicted in 2011 of mortgage fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering as part of a plea deal. Court records show she was sentenced to 63 months in prison. In a Thursday statement, Lomick confirmed that she does have a criminal history, but said she’s qualified to serve in the Texas House of Representatives. “I am fully qualified to take the office to which I was elected,” Lomick said in a written statement shared with the Star-Telegram. “Although I was convicted of a felony in North Carolina many years ago, I was fully released from the resulting disabilities. I am preparing to represent the residents of my district.” Lomick said the information shared was reviewed by legal counsel. The statement does not explain the means by which she was released from the “resulting disabilities” related her felony history.

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Texas faces a childcare shortage. Advocates want lawmakers to invest more

The nonprofit Children at Risk is urging Texas lawmakers to increase funding for childcare when the Legislature meets in January. More than 100,000 eligible Texas children who qualify for government assistance are on a waiting list for childcare. As lawmakers prepare to return to Austin in January, a child advocacy group is calling for additional funding and changes to how the state oversees its early childhood education system. More than 100,000 Texas children who qualify for government assistance are on a waiting list for subsidized childcare, according to the nonprofit Children at Risk. Vice President Mandi Kimball said the shortage primarily impacts low-income working families. Their research found there are nearly four children needing childcare for every available spot in Texas.

“Childcare is not just an early education issue, it’s a workforce issue, it’s an economic issue, it’s a family issue,” Kimball said during a presentation Thursday outlining the group’s legislative priorities. During the 2025 legislative session, lawmakers approved an additional $100 million for subsidized childcare by tapping into unused federal funding from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which helps low-income families. The money was intended to help thousands more families access affordable childcare. But advocates said rising childcare costs absorbed much of that investment. Kimball said the state also needs to improve how its childcare system operates. “We’re really looking at stronger governance structure and a more stable, efficient early childhood education system as we’re trying to keep up with demand,” Kimball said. Texas’ childcare programs currently interact with six different state agencies. Kimball said this creates a complicated system for families and providers to navigate. Children at Risk is asking lawmakers to establish a more unified system to improve coordination, streamline services and make better use of available funding. “When we strengthen childcare, we strengthen Texas families and our economy,” Kimball said.

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Sen.-elect James Talarico starts learning the Senate ropes

Sen.-elect James Talarico got his first taste of Capitol Hill this week as he and other freshmen Democrats arrived for orientation. Talarico left a Tuesday lunch with Senate Democrats saying he looks forward to working with his fellow Texan, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, and the rest of his new colleagues. “I’ve been trying to learn as much as I can over the last few days, but it’s certainly been a whirlwind,” Talarico told reporters before a staffer cut off questions. Newly elected senators won’t be sworn in until January, but they face immediate tasks such as hiring staff, deciding which committee assignments to seek and learning the often-arcane workings of Congress.

Talarico is the first Democrat Texas has sent to the Senate since 1988. He defeated Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton by roughly 12 percentage points after an intense, high-profile race that set spending records. The day after his historic victory, Talarico did a blitz of national media, appearing on morning news programs across the major broadcast networks. Talarico followed the example of other Texans last weekend when he placed an “I voted” sticker on a memorial in Houston to Lorenzo Salgado, who was killed in July during an ICE pursuit. He also made a cameo during the cold open of “Saturday Night Live.” After James Austin Johnson, portraying President Donald Trump, used the Republican nickname “Talafreako,” the senator-elect walked into frame. “That’s Senator Talafreako,” Talarico said. After arriving in Washington, Talarico met Monday with the man he’s replacing, longtime Sen. John Cornyn, who lost the Republican runoff in May to Paxton. Cornyn told reporters after the meeting he and Talarico have very different political perspectives but called his successor a “decent, honest person.” He predicted Talarico will face challenges operating in a Democratic majority while representing a state Cornyn said still leans conservative.

Read this article at Dallas Morning News - Subscribers Only

Harris County seeks another extension for Harvey flood control funds

Harris County officials said Thursday they will lobby newly-elected Democrats at the state and federal level to once again extend a spending deadline on hundreds of millions in federal Hurricane Harvey aid for flood control projects. Nearly all of the county’s 28 projects now appear on schedule for completion following a recent one-year extension the county received from federal officials and Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham, Harris County Flood Control District Executive Director Marcus Stuckett said in a progress update. But with Buckingham, a Republican, now leaving office next year following Democrats’ sweep of statewide offices last week, commissioners are now eyeing yet another reprieve. That could help the county better spend roughly $320 million in funding that remains uncommitted and expand projects that had been reduced in scope for the sake of speed.

Ben Flores, the Democrat who defeated Buckingham on Nov. 3, will take office in January. He does not appear to have taken a public stance on Harris County’s flood control funding, but Democrats on Commissioners Court said they hope he will take a different stance than Buckingham, who had criticized the county’s “incompetence” and said she would grant no more extensions. “All of us are reaching out to her successor to make that case,” said Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis. The court also unanimously greenlit a letter to U.S. Sen.-elect James Talarico and members of Houston’s congressional delegation, asking for help to ensure the congressionally approved Harvey aid remains available. All 28 projects combined account for more than $860 million in federal funding. Missing spending deadlines could force the county to repay funds and cancel projects. Several of the projects were reduced in scope to make them easier and faster to complete, Stuckett said. Partly for that reason and partly because several contractors’ bids came in cheaper than expected, he said, roughly $320 million remains uncommitted to projects. An extension by one or two years could help restore some of the original designs, he added. Commissioners also directed Stuckett to commit leftover funds to new projects and report back by February. It’s unclear if the county will be allowed to do so. Buckingham rejected one such request from Stuckett related to a portion of the unspent funds last month.

Read this article at Houston Chronicle - Subscribers Only

Texas Rep. Ana-Maria Rodriguez Ramos joins race to replace Nathan Johnson in state Senate

Texas state Rep. Ana-Maria Rodriguez Ramos is running for a seat in the Senate to replace outgoing Sen. Nathan Johnson, who was elected attorney general. She announced her campaign for the District 16 seat Thursday. Rodriguez Ramos said her campaign will focus on affordable healthcare for Texas residents and investing in public education across the state. She said in her announcement that her campaign is deeply personal to her experiences dealing with healthcare systems in Texas. “When I think about the future of North Texas, I think about my daughter, my sons, and the opportunity to fight for yours,” Rodriguez Ramos wrote in a Facebook post. “I’m running for Senate District 16 so our kids can see a future for themselves in Texas.”

She currently represents House District 102, which covers parts of Dallas, Richardson and Garland. She said she has secured endorsements from U.S Rep. Jasmine Crockett, state Sen. Roland Gutierrez and several other Texas representatives. Earlier this week Democratic former state Rep. John Turner announced his campaign for the seat. Turner previously served as representative for District 114 in Dallas from 2019 to 2023 and said he will focus his campaign on lowering the cost of living, as well as investing in public schools and access to health care. Turner also said he has secured Johnson’s endorsement. The date for the special election for the Senate seat has not been confirmed.

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Texas’ top courts have Democrats for the first time in years. They could reshape the legal system

Maggie Ellis was eating Indian takeout in her pajamas with her kids while she watched the midterm election results roll in last Tuesday. Ellis, who currently serves on one of the state’s appellate courts, was running to become the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court. She didn’t expect to win against the Republican incumbent, who was appointed to the role on a court that had been ruby red for decades. So when early voting returns showed Ellis leading the race, she was taken aback. “I was completely gobsmacked,” Ellis told The Texas Newsroom in an interview after the election. “I was shocked. And then I was fervently hitting refresh and going to the major counties and checking their election returns and thinking, 'oh my goodness, we might actually be able to do this.'”

No Democrat has been elected to a statewide seat in Texas since 1994. That drought included the state’s highest civil and criminal courts, which, at their most powerful, decide whether parents lose custody of their children and whether people are put to death. But as part of the “blue tsunami” that overtook Texas last week, Ellis and a slate of other Democrats who ran for statewide judicial positions flipped seven of the eighteen seats on the Texas Supreme Court and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Democrats swept all the seats on a newly-created intermediate appeals court, one which Republican Gov. Greg Abbott had previously stacked with three GOP judges. Republicans have dominated Texas’ statewide courts for so long, there’s no 21st-century playbook for how their liberal and conservative judges will get along. But party affiliation shouldn’t matter to judges who are supposed to remain impartial, and rule on the law as written, Ellis said. “We might not be politically aligned. We might not share the same values in regards to social issues,” Ellis said of her soon-to-be coworkers. “But they are all very good jurists, and I think I'm hopeful that they are looking forward to the opportunity to have balance on the court, and that we will bring different ideas and different perspectives.”

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Houston Chronicle Editorial: Dan Patrick lost. Texas Republicans don’t have to listen to him anymore.

Congratulations and well-wishes are owed to the soon-to-be former Texas lieutenant governor as he enters the next phase in his life: Being a political consultant at Patrick Strategies. You can tell Patrick is excited about this change because he hasn’t even left office yet and already his new business website is up and operating. Ethical concerns aside — we’ll let the prosecutors decide whether Patrick is violating the state’s requirement that politicians wait two years before serving as lobbyists — the website itself is worthy of some praise. Particularly the part that quotes a 2021 Houston Chronicle editorial. “Patrick’s predecessors — Ben Ramsey, Bob Bullock, Ben Barnes, Bill Hobby, Rick Perry — have taken up the gavel … but arguably none have used it more efficiently … than Patrick. His predecessors, in the words of the aforementioned insider, ‘are not in the same league, the same universe, the same galaxy.’” That’s quite the high compliment coming from us, but the well-placed ellipses leave out critical language that Patrick’s web designer must have accidentally skipped. Here’s the full quote, with our emphasis added.

“Patrick’s predecessors — Ben Ramsey, Bob Bullock, Ben Barnes, Bill Hobby, Rick Perry — have taken up the gavel and used the power of the office for good or ill, but arguably none have used it more efficiently or more ruthlessly than Patrick.” It’s hard to imagine why Patrick would want to leave out the reference to his ruthlessness. After all, ruthlessness has been critical to his political success. When future clients write a big fat check to Patrick Strategies, they’re going to expect some ruthlessness. Voters have come to expect it, too. Over the past 12 years, the Lone Star State has watched helplessly as Patrick gutted bipartisan cooperation in the Senate, killed the two-thirds rule that gave the minority party — whomever it may be — some power on the floor, and waged war on fellow Republicans who refused to acquiesce to his concentrating power in himself at the expense of senators and in Austin at the expense of local governments. Which is why nobody should be surprised that Patrick has been caught trying to meddle with the Texas Senate rules on his way out the door to disempower his Democratic successor, Vikki Goodwin. Besides, Patrick Strategies wouldn’t be all that lucrative if a bipartisan-minded Democrat like Goodwin returned power to individual senators and let them work for their constituents rather than just voters in Republican primaries. No, Patrick has been openly urging the Republican majority in the Texas Senate to transfer the lieutenant governor’s traditional powers — like appointing committee chairs and controlling the flow of legislation to the chamber floor — to a Senate majority leader position appointed by the 19 Republican members. This political scheme would set up a Senate where the Republicans maintain total control, shutting out Democratic influence — and essentially telling Texas voters to shut up after they spoke so clearly on Election Day. “If you lose the statewide offices and you still have the majority in the Senate, which we do, you shouldn't give up your majority because the governor lost or the lieutenant governor lost,” Patrick told conservative radio host Mark Davis this week. Again, that’s exactly what voters have come to expect from Patrick: Prioritizing partisan power grabs over the wants and needs of everyday Texans. Other states have endured similar antics where outgoing politicians undercut their successors — like in Wisconsin and North Carolina — but Patrick’s plan feels more at home in, say, Arizona or Georgia.

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Judge denies Texas’ request to pause order requiring it to air condition its prisons

A federal judge on Tuesday refused to pause his order requiring Texas to air-condition all 104 state prisons by the end of 2029, the Texas Tribune reported. That leaves the deadline in place while the state appeals the ruling to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman wrote that although the case raises serious legal questions, the public interest favors keeping the order in place, according to the Tribune. Pitman added that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) failed to demonstrate that it would suffer irreparable harm. As of Oct. 1, just over a third of the state’s prisons were fully climate-controlled, leaving roughly 90,000 inmates without air conditioning. TDCJ officials estimate that installing air conditioning in all of the state’s prisons would cost $1.5 billion.

In his Sept. 22 order, Pitman found that conditions in Texas prisons without air conditioning violated the Eighth Amendment, which protects against cruel and unusual punishment. In an Oct. 8 filing, TDCJ argued that its appeal would likely succeed because the legal standard for deliberate indifference is difficult to meet. The agency also said the order throws “chaos and confusion” into its plans to install air conditioning throughout the prison system. TDCJ officials expect the department to have 90,000 air-conditioned beds by 2028. The state’s prison population is expected to exceed 150,000 by then, however, leaving some 60,000 inmates without air conditioning. The legal fight began with a 2023 complaint filed by Bernie Tiede, an inmate who alleges he suffered a medical emergency due to the extreme heat. Pitman found that at least nine inmates died from the heat between 2023 and 2025 — an allegation TDCJ disputes. “While it’s not a surprise given TDCJ’s long history of refusing to take accountability for the people in its custody and care, it is still disappointing that they are spending the state’s resources fighting this case rather than just installing air conditioning,” Erica Grossman, an attorney for the plaintiffs, told Texas Tribune in October.

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Sheinbaum celebrates Hinojosa’s victory as Texas-Mexico ties put trade, water and families in focus

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum welcomed the election of Gina Hinojosa in Texas and Xavier Becerra in California, highlighting their Mexican roots as the two Democrats prepare to govern states deeply connected to Mexico’s economy and families. “I would like to highlight the victory of two people of Mexican origin,” Sheinbaum said Nov. 4. Without naming either governor-elect, Sheinbaum emphasized their family connections to Mexico and celebrated the recognition of Mexican Americans in U.S. politics. She stopped short of predicting whether the election results would ease tensions with Washington, saying discussions with the Trump administration would continue. Their victories put new administrations at the center of relationships that shape household incomes, manufacturing jobs and water supplies on both sides of the border.

About 12.7 million people of Mexican origin live in California and 9.5 million in Texas, according to American Community Survey estimates compiled by Neilsberg. That includes immigrants and U.S.-born residents; Mexican ancestry does not necessarily mean dual citizenship. For many families, the connection is financial. Mexico received $61.8 billion in remittances in 2025, down from a record $64.7 billion the previous year — its first annual decline since 2013. About 1.5 million Mexican households report receiving remittances, which average roughly 30% of those households’ income, according to BBVA Research. California and Texas account for close to half the money sent home. Economists have pointed to slower U.S. hiring, fewer new migrants and fears of deportation as pressures on that flow. The stakes extend from workers’ paychecks in Texas and California to the Mexican families relying on their support. Texas and Mexico exchanged $301.8 billion in goods in 2025, according to the Texas governor’s economic development office. Mexico is the largest export market for both Texas and California. Manufacturers on both sides produce goods together, connecting Mexican factories with Texas suppliers, trucking companies, warehouses and customers. For binational families and border residents, those connections also include commuting, school, shopping and visits with relatives.

Read this article at Texas Public Radio - Subscribers Only

After Texas Democrats’ sweep, Travis County steps up immigration aid

A week after Texas Democrats claimed every statewide office on the ballot, Travis County commissioners unanimously approved $500,000 to help residents facing deportation and other immigration-related proceedings. The money will go to American Gateways, a Central Texas-based nonprofit that provides no- and low-cost immigration legal services. Commissioners had declined earlier this year to approve $425,850 to fund a new immigration unit at the county public defender’s office amid the threat of legal action from Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton, who lost his election Tuesday, sued Harris and Bexar counties after they created publicly funded immigration legal aid programs, effectively pausing Harris County’s program while Bexar County’s program had already ended. But on Tuesday, Travis County Judge Andy Brown said the political landscape had changed.

“We have a new governor, we have a new attorney general,” Brown said at the Commissioners Court’s first meeting since the election. He said the funding to American Gateways was in addition to two, $250,000 payments the county quietly made to the group in September 2025 and April 2026. Commissioners “made a decision not to talk about that publicly because of who our attorney general was” at the time, he said. The move is the latest example of Texas city and county governments pursuing immigration-related policies that they weren’t able to implement previously because of legal and political threats from state GOP leaders. Attorney General-elect Nathan Johnson, a Democrat, has indicated he’ll take a different approach, saying in a recent Texas Standard interview that part of his job was ensuring that federal agencies “are not violating the rights of my citizens and residents here.” For months, Travis County residents and business owners have been asking commissioners to increase spending on legal aid for immigrants and enact other policies to protect residents and workers without legal status. This summer, about a dozen people spoke in favor of the Travis County Public Defender’s proposal to establish a “Family Protection Unit” for immigration cases, but ultimately, commissioners did not fund the program in their $2.3 billion budget.

Read this article at Austin American-Statesman - Subscribers Only

Austin-area officials and politicos eye Eckhardt’s Senate seat

Several Austin-area elected officials won higher office in Texas’ Democratic sweep, creating vacancies that will require special elections or a governor's appointment to fill. They include tthe Texas Senate seat Sarah Eckhardt will vacate when she takes office as state comptroller in January, and three seats on the Third Court of Appeals. A week after the general election, the American-Statesman has identified seven people who are considering running for Eckhardt’s Senate District 14 seat. They include Austin City Council members Chito Vela and Paige Ellis, and Pflugerville City Council Member Rudy Metayer.

Others who have expressed interest in the SD 14 seat or declared their intent to run include: Jocelyn Tau, chief of staff for U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett and a tax attorney, said she intends to run for the seat. Katie Naranjo, chief executive officer of A Pineywoods Home Health Care, said she was running for the seat. Naranjo previously served as chair of the Travis County Democratic Party and a superdelegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention from Texas. Lauren Peña, a policy advisor and legal advocate who ran against U.S. Rep. Greg Casar to represent Texas’s 37th Congressional District, launched her campaign for state Senate on Wednesday. Molly Quirk, the mayor of the Village of San Leanna and former chief of staff for Rep. Jim Murphy, said she was seriously considering a run for the state Senate. Stephanie Gharakhanian, a member of the Austin Community College District Board of Trustees, announced her campaign for the seat Tuesday. The timing of a special election to fill Eckhardt’s seat remains unclear. The sitting governor calls elections to fill legislative vacancies, but the office of outgoing Gov. Greg Abbott did not respond to inquiries about his plans. Eckhardt will become comptroller Jan. 1, while Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa won’t be sworn in until Jan. 12, which is the first day of the next legislative session. Blank said that Abbott is not likely to call a special election before he leaves office because Senate District 14 is a Democratic district and would give the state Senate less of a Republican majority. “There's no reason to suspect that he's looking to fill the seat immediately, so it's going to come down to Hinojosa probably calling an emergency election because it's during a legislative session and there's a vacancy,” he said. Hinojosa, U.S. Sen.-elect James Talarico and Texas Lt. Gov.-elect Vikki Goodwin are all finishing out Texas House terms representing Austin-area districts, but their seats were not left open after the election. That’s because they all decided not to seek re-election when they ran for higher office, even though they were not required to. (Their successors are state Reps.-elect Montserrat Garibay, Samantha Lopez-Resendez and Pooja Sethi, respectively.)

Read this article at Austin American-Statesman - Subscribers Only

National Stories

Chris Van Hollen says he will run for Senate majority leader

Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen said Thursday that he will run for majority leader, challenging longtime Democratic leader Chuck Schumer. Van Hollen said in a statement that the midterm election results are a sign Americans want “change” not only from “Donald Trump’s disastrous policies” but also from a “status quo that isn’t working for working people.” “It’s now on us to meet this moment, and to do that we need new leadership. This is not about any one person — it’s about answering the call of the American people,” he said in the statement. Van Hollen’s decision is a setback to Schumer, who remains favored to become leader but had previously predicted that he would not have a challenge. Democrats will hold their caucus elections next month.

Schumer has repeatedly predicted since the Democrats won a majority in last week’s midterms that he will be elected majority leader. In a statement after Van Hollen’s announcement Thursday, he said he has already locked up the votes in the race. “I welcome any discussion about the future of our caucus and the important work ahead. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished together — 55 seats and counting is an amazing result — and I have the votes to continue serving as Democratic Leader,” Schumer said in a social media post. “I look forward to leading our new Democratic majority and delivering for the American people,” he added. Van Hollen said in an MSNOW interview he had the support of more than 10 of the 55 Democratic senators who are known to be voting but acknowledged that he was the “underdog” in the race. “I’ve gotten feedback from members of the caucus,” Van Hollen added. “And my view is this is very much in flux. … People will have to make a decision one way or the other.” Several Senate Democrats — including Ruben Gallego of Arizona, Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York — have publicly said they will support Schumer for leader. Several other Democratic senators who were granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive leadership race have said either in interviews or through their offices that they intend to vote for Schumer during the closed-door election.

Read this article at Politico - Subscribers Only

Democrat Cindy Holscher wins Kansas governor’s race, defeating Trump-backed Ty Masterson

State Sen. Cindy Holscher (D) defeated Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson (R) to become the state’s next governor. Masterson had prevailed in a crowded GOP primary and was endorsed by President Donald Trump and Sen. Roger Marshall (R). Masterson and Holscher have clashed over taxes, education and data center expansion in Kansas, with Holscher calling for a complete pause on new projects. Trump won the state by more than 16 percentage points in 2024. Republicans control both chambers of Kansas’s state legislature, and the governor’s race is an elusive chance for the GOP to gain a statewide trifecta in an otherwise difficult political environment. Kansas periodically elects Democratic governors, but it became a major hub in the conservative moment last decade under Republican governor Sam Brownback. Steep tax cuts under Brownback caused a budget crisis and backlash to Republicans.

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JD Vance still likely to run for president as GOP rivals circle

Vice President JD Vance isn’t out of the 2028 presidential race — at least not yet. Detractors and even some well-wishers began writing his political obituary after Republicans’ historic drubbing in the midterm elections, surmising that the vice president — tied to a president with an all-time-low approval rating — sees the 2028 election as a lost cause. But Vance is still more likely to run for president than not, according to several close allies with knowledge of his thinking. In interviews, more than a dozen people with a view into the vice president’s orbit, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss his future, described Vance as keenly aware of the headwinds against the Trump administration — but also of the potential for those winds to shift as Democrats increase their power in Washington.

“Two years is such an eternity in politics, and people are very easily prisoners of the moment,” said one person close to Vance, describing the vice president as someone who is largely able to resist “panicky inclinations.” Vance faces major hurdles to a presidential bid. “The war needs to end,” for any Republican to have a chance of winning, said Curt Mills, the executive director of the American Conservative magazine, which has vociferously opposed President Donald Trump’s war against Iran. Trump’s appetite for ending the war has changed by the day. On Thursday, the president posted to Truth Social that he had asked Vance to stop working on a deal with Iran, and instead focus his attention on fighting fraud against public programs in “Democrat run Cities and States.” Beyond that, Vance in the coming months will have the difficult task of separating himself from allegations of wrongdoing by administration officials or advisers who will be the targets of investigations by congressional Democrats. The potential for those investigations to create havoc for Trump and those around him gained attention this week with the furor surrounding the president’s adviser, Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, who resigned as his company’s CEO after admitting to an affair with a woman who is alleged to be a Chinese spy.

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Meet the 27-year old behind the protein ad that helped flip Mississippi

You know you’ve made a good ad when it’s outperforming an endorsement video from Barack Obama. Ryan Sayles, a 27-year-old Mississippi content creator, is behind arguably the best political spot of the election cycle: Democrat Scott Colom’s viral “pick another protein” ad against GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. You’ve probably seen it by now. The ad featured Mississippi voters’ blunt reactions to Hyde-Smith’s suggestion that people struggling with rising beef prices choose from other protein options. “Pick another protein? Shiiii-, I’d rather pick another senator instead.” “Pick another protein? She done lost her damn mind. I’d rather pick another senator.” Sayles was at his nephew’s football game when he realized something extraordinary was happening.

“I was looking at the first numbers when it first dropped, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is about to be a really good video,’” he told POLITICO after Colom’s historic Senate race victory in the longtime Republican stronghold. “We had the Obama endorsement the day before, so that was our biggest video. It was like, ‘Dang, we ain’t ever gonna top that.’” “And then this ad came, and we posted it, and it outperformed anything we ever did,” Sayles said. The 30-second spot quickly became the talk of Mississippi and Washington, helping fuel Colom’s longshot campaign to unseat Hyde-Smith and become the first Black senator from the state since Reconstruction. And, it’s given Democrats across the country another blueprint for how to break through online ahead of a critical 2028 presidential race, as the party continues to rethink its strategy. With the ad — and Colom’s win — Sayles has gone from a newcomer who stumbled into campaigning almost by accident to a name to watch in Democratic digital politics, as the party looks for fresh ways to reach voters ahead of 2028. “[Sayles] should be considered the breakout-star of this cycle,” Colom wrote in a post on X about the viral ad earlier this month. “He’s going to be a giant in the media consultant game. He did GAME CHANGING work with SO little.”

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Before his ouster, Jensen Huang belittled the executive replacing him

Jensen Huang summoned his top finance executives to his office this summer. The AI economy, backstopped by Nvidia’s increasingly outrageous bets, was teetering, and Huang wanted to make sure they were getting it right. Over the course of the meeting, he proceeded to tear into the woman who is now taking over for him as Nvidia CEO. Colette Kress was “a deer in the headlights,” he said, interrupting her presentation, according to a person familiar with the comments. He had summoned Kress and his senior finance team to diagnose a ballooning problem: Nvidia was in talks to provide billions of dollars of guarantees to companies that couldn’t afford its chips. That included deals led by Huang’s son-in-law, Nico Caprez, who had been offering upstart cloud providers and data-center developers financing in the hopes of turning them into long-term customers.

Huang had launched a dealmaking spree and was now starting to question whether it had gone too far, according to people familiar with the matter. Kress was a “reporting CFO,” not someone who could help him define a strategy or make decisions, Huang said during the August meeting. Then he went on to describe the situation the company was in. Major cloud providers were running away from Nvidia, making plans to use alternative chips and lessen their reliance on the firm. Even worse, Huang said, the vast supply of chip wafers and memory Nvidia had committed to buying were coming at him like an “avalanche.” Kress now has to steer Nvidia through that avalanche—and a bigger one. She was named interim chief executive Thursday, taking over for Huang, who resigned after revelations of two extramarital affairs, including one with a suspected Chinese spy and another with an employee. Kress will need to stabilize a company facing federal and internal investigations. One of the largest companies in the world didn’t have a clear successor lined up. It has said it will look at internal and external CEO candidates. In a memo to staff Thursday, Kress praised Huang, saying she will continue “building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years.” Kress joined Nvidia more than a decade ago as chief financial officer after holding finance roles at Cisco, Microsoft and Texas Instruments.

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MAGA influencers reel after midterm rout of Trump's Republicans

For years, influencers with the "Make America Great Again" movement thrived alongside President Donald Trump. But after Democrats hammered candidates from Trump's Republican Party in last week's midterm elections, the content creators find themselves facing questions over their ideological and financial futures. "I've been running on empty for too long," said conservative commentator Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist and confidante of Trump who announced last week she was taking a break from her podcast. Samuel Woolley, a communication professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said post-midterm soul-searching would result in an inevitable "changing of the guard" among influencers espousing Trump's nationalist views. "I would expect that many influencers who worked with MAGA are going through an introspective period in the same way that many conservatives are," Woolley told AFP.

Danielle Lee Tomson, a researcher at the University of Washington, said many prominent pro-Trump influencers were losing their appeal. "A lot of these creators, like Laura Loomer or Mike Cernovich or even Jack Posobiec, they are now aging, they're older millennials," Tomson said, naming a few top influencers. "They don't have the same kind of novelty as they once did," she added. "Quite frankly, a lot of their message got boring." Ring-wing commentators like Posobiec, Tim Pool and Benny Johnson built their online audiences on a fiercely anti-establishment message. But over time, their closeness with the Trump administration lent them an institutional air, having taken part in news conferences alongside the president and flying on his jet. The midterms also put a spotlight on the waning momentum of top MAGA-aligned movements, such as youth organization Turning Point USA, whose founder Charlie Kirk was shot dead last year. Candidates backed by Turning Point were overwhelmingly defeated in last Tuesday's Democratic "blue tsunami." Some pro-Trump influencers have opted to "reclaim that they're underdogs" after the midterms rout, Tomson said, and lash out at the Republican Party rather than Trump. Specifically, they have accused the party of alienating young, white, working-class, male MAGA supporters by pushing for war with Iran. Others have cheered Stephen Miller's appointment to White House chief of staff. The combative Trump ultra-loyalist spearheaded the administration's staunch anti-immigration policies and is seen as a return to the MAGA movement's ideological roots. Commentator Johnson called Miller's ascension "a complete game-changer" and a "great move."

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Petition to make Ayanna Pressley next Speaker garners more than 75K signatures

A Change.org petition requesting Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) be named the next Speaker of the House has received more than 75,000 signatures as of Thursday night. The petition, released last Friday, was set up by the Coalition for Speaker Ayanna Pressley, “progressive activists from across the country dedicated to electing” the lawmaker to lead her party in the House. It has received 75,466 signatures as of 10:49 p.m. EST on Thursday. The coalition said in a statement that Pressley “represents a beacon of hope and integrity in a tumultuous political landscape.” It praised her record and leadership on issues like criminal justice reform and climate change, adding that electing her was “not just about politics.”

“Her ability to foster meaningful conversations and build bridges across the political aisle makes her uniquely qualified for this pivotal role,” the group said. “In a divided Congress, her role as a fair and balanced leader will be crucial in driving [bipartisan] legislation that addresses the needs of all Americans.” The group added that Pressley’s leadership style “aligns with what the majority of Americans want to see in their government,” and that she “listens to her constituents … making informed decisions that reflect the diversity and complexity of our society.” Common Dreams first reported on the petition Wednesday. Pressley has not expressed interest in launching a bid to challenge the Speakership from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who is poised to become the country’s first Black Speaker at the start of the 120th Congress in January. She did, though, call on Democrats to meet the expectations from voters after the party made sweeping victories in the 2026 midterm elections last week, calling on her colleagues to be “the FIGHTERS in the room,” according to a social media post Tuesday.

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Lead Stories

‘They would have never done it’: Musk-backed business court lands in Hinojosa’s hands

Long before Elon Musk tried to buy a U.S. Senate seat or a Texas State Park, big business shelled out money to create its own court system in Texas. Texas lawmakers approved a new business court to take complex, high-dollar legal disputes out of the hands of locally elected judges — often Democrats in the major urban centers — during the 2023 legislative session. To handle challenges to its rulings, they also created a new statewide appellate court, which they gave immediate appellate jurisdiction over cases involving state officials, as well. After last week’s blue wave, however, legal experts and business leaders are scrambling to size up a new landscape that put both courts under Democrats’ control. Power to appoint business court judges will soon be in the hands of incoming Democratic Governor Gina Hinojosa, who campaigned vowing to reclaim power from big business in Texas.

Meanwhile, inaugural justices to the new 15th Court of Appeals, who were also appointed by Abbott, appeared on the ballot for the first time this November. All three lost to Democratic challengers in a statewide sweep — upending Texas GOP leaders’ efforts to reshape the state’s judiciary. “They would have never done it if they had had a crystal ball and seen this election,” said Dallas County Commissioner Andy Sommerman, a Democratic attorney who challenged the new court’s authority. San Antonio is home to one of the five business court divisions, where judges Marialyn Barnard and Stacy Sharp just recently finished setting up shop in a building off North St. Mary’s Street several months ago. Barnard said Monday that they’ve been incredibly busy, working on cases involving Valero, NuStar Energy, the Kampmann family’s automobile groups and others handed off by divisions in other parts of the state. “Our cases have just skyrocketed,” Barnard said. “With all the companies that are coming to Texas and reincorporating … Houston and Dallas have been exploding, and so Austin, San Antonio, and Fort Worth, we have been taking some of the overflow to help out.”

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Democrat Scott Colom defeats Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi

Democratic nominee Scott Colom defeated Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith on Wednesday in Mississippi’s closely contested U.S. Senate race after a prolonged ballot counting process, giving the state its first Black U.S. senator since post-Civil War Reconstruction. Colom’s narrow victory is a seismic shift in Mississippi, which has been controlled mostly by white conservatives for generations despite having the largest share of Black residents of any U.S. state. The outcome adds to a decisive midterm rebuke of President Donald Trump, whose party suffered defeats in several Republican-controlled states, and it will bolster some Democrats’ argument that their future runs through the American South. “All I did was have the courage to imagine a night like this,” Colom told a crowd of hundreds who gathered at Tougaloo College for his victory party. “I had the courage to believe in Mississippi. I had the courage to understand that we can show the country that Mississippi matters.”

The Associated Press called the race in Colom’s favor after local officials spent several days processing absentee and provisional ballots, called affidavit ballots in Mississippi. The last time Mississippi chose a new Democratic senator was 1947; the winner was a staunch segregationist. Colom, a 43-year-old local prosecutor, capitalized on the state’s large Black population, discontent with the economy and Hyde-Smith’s missteps as she sought a second full term. “They actually deserve a senator that will listen to them, that actually cares about what they think, actually cares about what they’re going through,” Colom said in the campaign’s closing stretch. Hyde-Smith, 67, called Colom late Wednesday afternoon to concede and released a concession speech online shortly afterward. “While this is not the outcome we worked for or hoped for, I respect the decision of Mississippi voters,” Hyde-Smith said. “I want to congratulate Scott Colom and wish him well as he takes on the tremendous responsibility of representing our great state.”

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A Texas grid operator wants the power to make data centers cut usage before grid emergencies

Pablo Vegas, chief executive of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, will seek lawmakers' approval to compel data centers to scale back their electricity consumption ahead of any declared emergency, according to Bloomberg. Under current rules, the grid must reach level two of a three-level power emergency before data centers can be asked to cut demand. Vegas wants curtailment required at level one or even earlier, according to Bloomberg. "The practical realities of curtailing large amounts of customers like data centers and managing that from an operational point of view really requires us to think about pulling that up a little bit earlier into the process," Vegas said Wednesday at the BloombergNEF Summit in Houston, according to Bloomberg. "We really don't want to impact residential and everyday businesses if we get into a scarcity event in the state."

Texas enacted Senate Bill 6 in 2025, a law that obliges big electricity users, data centers especially, to cut back their consumption when given a day's warning, according to Bloomberg. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, known as ERCOT, has so far not directed any data center to scale back operations under the law. Responding to a question about whether data centers support the proposal, Vegas said that everyone in his conversations shares an interest in a functioning power grid. "The hyperscalers are on board with integrating into the system and into the community in a way that works for all of the communities and all the participants in the system," he said, according to Bloomberg. "If the legislature agrees and thinks it makes sense to modify those requirements, then we can work with them on that as well." Vegas said data centers cut their electricity consumption on their own initiative when severe weather struck last winter. He said that for the coming winter, data centers can draw on a supply of power measured in the low single-digit gigawatts, according to Bloomberg. The proposal follows a series of state actions on the industry. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in September directed the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to stop issuing permits for data center projects until ERCOT and the Texas Water Development Board complete audits of the industry's grid and water use. That directive broadened an August moratorium that froze new data center grid connections. Abbott had also ordered ERCOT to audit data centers waiting to connect to the grid.

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Democratic lawmakers apologize after absences on Hegseth vote

Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) has repeatedly said Democrats will “run Pete Hegseth out of town.” But in their first opportunity to impeach the defense secretary on Tuesday, 11 Democrats missed a key procedural vote — and Hegseth was spared, at least for now. House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Massachusetts) addressed the absences during a meeting with Democrats on Wednesday, as the lawmakers who missed the vote faced backlash. Democrats had disappointed the American people by not having all their members present to vote for the impeachment effort, she said. The effort was led by outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky). Clark’s comments were shared by a House Democrat and a House Democratic aide, speaking under condition of anonymity to freely discuss the Wednesday meeting.

Even so, if all Democrats in Washington had been present in the House chamber, the party still would not have been able to beat Republicans’ effort to sideline the impeachment, Clark reasoned. As whip, Clark is in charge of counting votes for the Democratic caucus. She is poised to become the majority leader in the next Congress. Clark’s defense came as Democrats faced accusations that the outcome might have been different had some of them not been held up while returning to the Capitol from an off-campus fundraiser. By a 211-204 vote, Republican lawmakers banded together Tuesday to block a vote on Massie’s impeachment articles, instead referring them to committee for further study. Massie was the only Republican to vote with Democrats. Eleven Democrats missed the vote, with at least two lawmakers — Reps. Laura Gillen (New York) and Melanie Stansbury (New Mexico) — blaming their absences in part on a “traffic incident” in Washington. Stansbury, who co-sponsored a previous effort to impeach Hegseth, posted a four-minute apology video. “I am so sorry,” she said, with emotion. “There is no one who is more disappointed in myself than me that I was not here the moment that gavel dropped.” But she also pointed out that Democrats would not have had the numbers, and she said that they would impeach Hegseth once they hold the majority.

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State Stories

Austin's relationship with the state has been strained for decades. Now, city leaders are optimistic

For decades, Austin's power to govern its people and city has been an easy target for the state's Republican lawmakers. The traditionally liberal City Council has faced pushback from GOP leaders as the city tried to enact its own rules. Municipal entities adopt their own policies that allow them to respond to the specific needs and values of their residents. That includes rules on how and where homes and businesses can be built; how police interact with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents; and even worker protections, like water and rest breaks for construction workers. Mayor Kirk Watson, who had his first stint as mayor in the late 1990s, remembers the fight back then over land use, when the city and the state were at odds over the development around Barton Springs.

“The city of Austin was very appropriately protective of its environment, and a lot of folks that were developing land wanted to stop some of those environmental regulations,” he said. As time has gone on, things have gotten more divisive, he said. “I think one of the things that happened is it got even more partisan,” Watson said. “Austin's referred to many times as the blueberry in the tomato soup, and that hyper-partisanship led to things where cities — and not just Austin, but Austin in particular — became the partisan targets.” Things could soon change, as new statewide leadership takes office. After the so-called blue tsunami last Tuesday that flipped most of the statewide leadership, including governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general, some local policymakers, including Watson, are optimistic about what the shift could mean for the city. “If you take out just the partisanship, there's so much good that can be done,” Watson said. “I'm very happy to hear our governor-elect talk about getting real results. I'm very happy to hear her talk about issues that make a real difference in real people's lives on a daily basis, things like affordability, taking out that rhetoric and focusing on the reality of living in this state.”

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State Rep. Paul Dyson concedes House District 14 race to Janet Dudding

Republican state Rep. Paul Dyson conceded the race for Texas House District 14 to Democrat Janet Dudding in a social media post, saying he will not return to the Texas House next year. “The final results are in, a plurality has spoken, and it is now clear that I will not be returning to the People’s House next year,” Dyson said in the post. “Unfortunately, I caught a wave I couldn’t ride,” he said. Dyson congratulated Dudding and said he wishes her the best as she prepares to serve House District 14. Dyson accompanied his concession with an AI-generated video of himself surfing a blue wave before falling, after which his Texas-themed surfboard morphs into a campaign sign that reads, “Paul Dyson for Texas concedes.”

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San Antonio takes another look at police’s ICE policy, following Austin and Houston

Three San Antonio City Council members want to restrict when local police contact federal immigration authorities, joining a push by leaders in Houston and Austin to reconsider those policies after Democrats swept statewide elections in Texas. Council members Teri Castillo (D5), Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2) and Ric Galvan (D6) submitted a memo Nov. 6 requesting a special meeting to consider an ordinance limiting San Antonio Police Department cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They want the meeting convened no later than 2 p.m. Nov. 17. Under their proposal, SAPD officers would contact ICE about someone only if that person is already going to jail on new charges or other warrants and a national law enforcement database shows an ICE administrative warrant.

An ICE administrative warrant is issued by immigration officials for civil immigration enforcement, rather than by a judge in a criminal case. It does not, by itself, mean someone faces criminal charges. The proposed ordinance says being subject to immigration enforcement — or being suspected of it — would not alone justify contacting ICE, extending a detention or taking someone into custody. Officers would also be prohibited from holding someone in the field solely for ICE to pick them up. “We’re asking that our city manager have a conversation and direct our police chief to essentially deprioritize detaining and contacting ICE for individuals that may be stopped by PD for a low-level crime that typically does not result in an arrest,” Castillo said. She said the proposal is intended to ease fears that a routine encounter — like a traffic stop — with local police could lead to immigration detention. “Many of our families do fear that they will be pulled over for something minor that could result in detainment and the contact of ICE,” Castillo said.

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‘Praying for the best outcome’: Texans who live near data centers hope for change following election

The Burnetts live next to a data center in Brazoria County that creates a constant hum they've compared to a crawfish boiler or a jet about to take off. They told Houston Public Media in June that the noise had taken a toll on their quality of life. "It’s a huge concern no matter how you dice it, whether it’s our property or health," Melissa Burnett said. "I mean, there wasn’t enough safeguards put in place prior to this coming in." In August, Gov. Greg Abbott paused permits for some new data centers until an audit could be completed. But since then, Melissa Burnett said she hasn't really seen any changes. The pause only applied to certain new data centers. Now, as new state leaders prepare to take office, she's hoping for positive change — though she does have mixed feelings about the election results. "I didn't really want to have to start over with a new governor," she said. "But at the same time, I am ... just praying for the best outcome with this change."

She's not the only one hoping for changes under new leadership. Megan Atchison lives in rural north Texas, near Wichita Falls. She's been speaking out against a proposed data center near her home. Atchison, who leans conservative, said she would have liked to see Governor Abbott call a special legislative session to pass new regulations for data centers. "But hindsight's 20/20," she added. "It's November, so what I really care more about now is what's going to happen at [the] legislative session in 2027." Atchison hopes state legislators will pass new zoning restrictions for data centers next year. "They are not quiet," she said. "They are a massive industrial building. They belong with other industrial buildings." Rice University political science professor Mark Jones said there's a good chance the Texas legislature could be open to passing restrictions for data centers. He said unlike more partisan issues — like abortion or gun control — data centers have faced backlash from across the aisle. That matters in a state legislature where Republicans will control the senate, and Democrats will have the majority in the House.

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Texas gambling expansion possible, but blue wave doesn’t guarantee it: analysis

Texas has long been coveted. By Democrats who hoped to rupture the Republican Party’s political dominance over the state of nearly 32 million. By casino and sports betting company executives who envisioned so many potential customers in a place with scant legal forms of gambling. The midterm elections last Tuesday offered both — more immediately the Democratic Party — encouragement that their dreams were realistic. While the election of Democrat James Talarico to the United States Senate was emblematic of the so-called "Blue Wave," other down-ballot outcomes could eventually prove lucrative to the gambling industry. If there’s political will, and if Texans actually care enough about it, gambling industry and Texas political observers told TheLines. And even if so, it’s going to be a while. With Vikki Goodwin ousting anti-gambling crusader Dan Patrick as lieutenant governor and gatekeeper of the Texas legislature, an obvious obstacle was removed, and a path toward legalization has potentially been charted. The election of pro-gambling-legalization Democrat Nathan Johnson as attorney general can only be taken by the industry as a positive development, too.

Still, this is no sure thing for the likes of Caesars Entertainment owner and Texan Tilman Fertitta or Las Vegas Sands majority shareholder Miriam Adelson, who, with Dallas Mavericks co-owner Mark Cuban, have envisioned resort casinos to complement the American Airlines Center where their NBA team plays. The current stance of incoming Gov. Gina Hinojosa remains undefined in real time despite one clue from her past career in the state legislature. She twice voted against gambling-expansion bills as a state representative in 2023. But ultimately, newly minted Democratic officeholders might not be willing to spend powder on an issue neither they nor their constituents care very much about right now, said Joshua M. Blank, the Director of Research for the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. “The challenge for gambling interests is that Texas voters tend to be reasonably ambivalent towards gambling,” Blank told TheLines, citing a 2025 Texas Project poll that found that 38% supported the expansion of casino gambling, but 42% opposed. “Similarly, 31% supported legalizing online gambling [and] 45% opposed that. "In both cases, the differences between Democrats and Republicans were not stark. And the patterns remain the same with slightly higher opposition and slightly less support for online betting versus a full casino gambling expansion.” California and Texas remain the largest untapped legal sports betting markets in the United States. The uncomfortable question for the industry remains whether the residents of the nation’s two most-populated states are motivated enough to open the taps. Several states bordering Texas have some form of gambling, and to the consternation of policing legal authorities, unsanctioned online gambling via prediction markets or offshore casinos remains an option. California voted down commercial- and tribal-backed sports betting initiatives in a costly and ground-scorching 2022 campaign that left the industry retrenching, and Native political power surging. Tribes already own a monopoly on casino gambling in the state through tribal compacts.

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Texas gas prices move lower after affordability played a major role in elections

The average price of a gallon of regular gasoline in Dallas was $3.25 on Wednesday, down roughly $0.22 cents compared to a week ago and more than $0.50 compared to a month ago, according to AAA. The local price dips are part of a broader trend: In Texas, the Wednesday average for a gallon of regular was $3.42, down from $3.60 a week ago and $3.82 a month ago. Nationally, the average price for regular was $3.94, down from $4.12 a week earlier and $4.36 one month earlier. Prices for mid-grade and premium have also been dropping. While Texas’ gas prices have been dropping in recent weeks, they’re still significantly higher than a year ago, when the statewide average for a gallon of regular was $2.61. In Dallas, the average price last November was $2.60, and nationally it was $3.07. Diesel prices, which have also dropped somewhat in recent weeks, have shot up even faster over the past year, rising from $3.75 to $6.13 nationally and $3.24 to $5.54 in Texas.

The falling prices amount to a slight reprieve for Texans days after residents voted to transfer power to a new slate of Democratic leaders in a midterm election that hinged largely on affordability issues. “Groceries and gas, all that,” said one Dallas voter, Nate Humes, describing his concerns. Texas Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa also campaigned heavily on the issue, including with a proposal to tap into the state’s Rainy Day Fund to give every Texan household a one-time $1,500 payment. Sen.-elect James Talarico has proposed a “cost-of-living tax cut for the middle class” and raising the federal minimum wage to $15, or more than double the current rate, which also applies in Texas. The rise in prices came largely as a result of the Iran war, which began in late February. In response to attacks from the U.S. and Israel, Iran refused to let maritime traffic pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a key global shipping route, which has led to severe global fuel shortages and sent prices soaring. Nearly nine months into the war, the U.S. and Iran continue to battle for control over the Strait, with both sides recently launching strikes in the area. “This is a man-made elevation of gas prices,” Jake Sullivan, a former national security advisor to President Joe Biden and now a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, said earlier this year, “made by the decision to start this war with Iran.” More recently, though, analysts say gasoline prices have been inching down in part because more supply did come through the Strait in the past couple months, and because gas stations have recently switched to selling winter-blend fuel, which is cheaper to produce. Analysts say the end of summer road traffic also leads to lower prices because demand is lower. In August, the Trump administration also authorized an earlier-than-usual transition to winter blend in an effort to bring down prices, moving up the usual transition date to Sept. 1 from mid-September.

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Fort Worth committee presents recommendations on how city can best regulate data centers

After spending three months developing recommendations on how Fort Worth can best regulate data centers, the Data Center & Infrastructure Commission unveiled its findings to city leaders Tuesday. The 11-member commission developed 19 recommendations across water and natural resources, land use, economic impact and electricity — all of which are detailed in a 156-page report. The committee’s findings, some of which build on existing ordinances, were presented to city council members by Michael Slattery, environmental director at Texas Christian University and director of its Institute for Environmental Studies, who was tapped by the city to lead the advisory group. In a meeting following the presentation, council members also held the city’s first public hearing on Fort Worth’s adoption of the 90-day moratorium, as required by state law.

The committee was formed after zoning commissioners in July voted down proposed regulations on zoning requirements for data centers, recommending Fort Worth staffers create stricter ordinances. That vote prompted city officials to make three votes related to data centers on Aug. 11, including the inception of the advisory group and the moratorium process. Slattery prefaced his presentation to council members by saying data center development is the most contested land-use issue in Fort Worth, adding the commission’s goal was to produce an evaluation of data center development based on fact, not advocacy. “Skepticism is healthy and it’s exactly why getting the science right in this commission absolutely mattered,” Slattery said. The report was developed by the advisory group’s 11 members. The formation of the group was approved by the city in early August and consists of representatives with backgrounds in economic development, data centers and related infrastructure, natural resource management and environmental advocacy.

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Justin Miller: Gina Hinojosa won’t be able to govern like Greg Abbott. Should she try?

(Justin Miller is the news and politics editor for the Texas Observer.) Over the course of 12 years at the helm of Texas state government, Greg Abbott became arguably the most powerful governor—de jure and de facto—in the history of Texas. His rule grew progressively unbalanced and unchecked by the GOP-run Legislature which increasingly followed his lead, through fear or favor, or the GOP-run judiciary, which was increasingly stocked with Abbott apparatchiks. Much of his power accumulated through longevity and hegemony, which also allowed for an aggressive and unprecedented use of the Texas governor’s executive powers—governing via disaster proclamations that granted him unilateral executive authority over a large swath of state policy over a long period of time. This became most pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic and continued through his border disaster proclamations, the basis on which he built his Operation Lone Star state immigration dragnet.

In total, his actions amounted to a transformation of the historically weak Texas governorship, which through intentional constitutional design is less empowered than in many other states. Those constraints are achieved through, among other mechanisms, staggered appointment terms, an independent lieutenant governor (long considered, though the sentiment is now outmoded, the actual most powerful statewide official), and a decentralized executive branch with a number of other elected statewide positions. Abbott used a variety of methods, including his simple staying power, to break out of his constitutional cage—and his Democratic successor now inherits an office whose overreach she’s harshly criticized but whose power, to the extent it remains tappable, may be politically irresistible. “Not only is this the most extensive [use of executive authority], it’s also the most unchecked. He’s used these powers in a very aggressive way,” Randall Erben, a governmental law professor at the University of Texas at Austin who closely follows state executive powers and who once served as Abbott’s legislative director, told me for an in-depth profile I did on Abbott’s executive power grabs in 2021.

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Houston, Austin lawmakers file different Texas marijuana bills. Here's how they compare.

Democratic lawmakers from Houston and Austin filed bills this week related to the legalization of marijuana in Texas. State Sen. Carol Alvarado of Houston and State Rep. John Bucy III of Austin each proposed legislation that, while similar, present different paths forward in the push to legalize marijuana. Texas State Senator Carol Alvarado of Houston has proposed Senate Bill 237, which would legalize recreational marijuana for Texans 21 and older. The bill was pre-filed on Nov. 9 for the 90th Texas Legislature on the heels of the midterm elections, which shifted control of the Texas House of Representatives to Democrats.

Alvarado’s bill would legalize and regulate the use of marijuana for adults 21 and older. It would allow for possession of up to 2.5 ounces and up to 15 grams of concentrates (THC). The bill also proposes to make it legal to grow up to 12 marijuana plants on private property that is closed to the public with locks and security devices restricting public visibility and access. Alvarado’s bill would hand over control to counties, allowing voters to decide whether marijuana-related businesses are allowed to operate. A county can order an election to approve the operation of growers, establishments, or testing facilities. State Rep. John Bucy III of Austin filed House Bill 362 on Nov. 10 which, if passed, would make it legal for adults over 21 years to possess and transport up to 2 ounces of marijuana, as reported by the Austin-American Statesman. HB 362 would also allow the transfer of that amount to another adult with the provision that that no payment is exchanged and that it is not “advertised or promoted to the public.” Similar to SB 237, adults would be able cultivate a limit of 12 plants at an enclosed private residence equipped with locks or other security devices that restrict it from the public and ensure it's "not visible without the use of aircraft or optical aids." Retail shops selling marijuana would be allowed to operate from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. but would be prohibited from allowing access to anyone under the age of 21, according to Austin-American Statesman. Hours, locations and the quantity of businesses would be regulated under local jurisdiction but it differs from Alvarado's bill in that those counties cannot ban or “unreasonably” restrict businesses from operating.

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New World screwworm cases climb to 128, with new detections in Arizona and New Mexico

Two additional New World screwworm infestations have been confirmed in horses in Arizona and New Mexico, bringing the total number of U.S. animal cases to 128 as the outbreak continues to spread across the Southwest. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported the latest cases Wednesday in Cochise County, Arizona, and Otero County, New Mexico. The total has risen from 79 on Nov. 1, an increase of 62% in just 10 days. Of the 128 confirmed animal infestations, 65 remain active and 63 are classified as inactive. The latest detections follow the confirmation of a horse infestation in Bandera County, northwest of San Antonio, along with cases involving cattle in Reagan County and a sheep in Val Verde County, Texas. A dog in El Paso County was also among the recent confirmed infestations.

Of the 128 confirmed infestations, 126 have involved domestic animals, including livestock and pets. The remaining two cases involved elk in Pecos and Jeff Davis counties, Texas. Both are now classified as inactive. USDA surveillance has also detected wild screwworm flies in six traps, including four detections in October and one in November. Those findings are tracked separately from animal infestations but provide further evidence of the parasite's presence in the Southwest. New World screwworm flies lay eggs in open wounds, where larvae hatch and burrow into living tissue. Infestations can cause severe injuries and can be fatal if left untreated. Animal health officials urge livestock and pet owners to regularly check their animals for unusual wounds, visible larvae or changes in behavior and to promptly report suspected infestations. An inactive designation does not mean the surrounding area is free of the parasite. Animal movement restrictions remain in effect in parts of 21 Texas counties: Brewster, Crockett, Culberson, Edwards, El Paso, Fisher, Hudspeth, Jeff Davis, Jim Hogg, Mitchell, Nolan, Pecos, Presidio, Reeves, Schleicher, Scurry, Starr, Sutton, Terrell, Val Verde and Zapata. Restrictions are also in place in affected areas of New Mexico and Arizona.

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SpaceX planning $24 billion data center on property disannexed by Brownsville

SpaceX has plans to build a $24 billion data center on property that it asked Brownsville to disannex at breakneck speed earlier this year, confirming suspicions that local environmental activists expressed over the summer. The city of Starbase on Monday posted a public hearing notice on a proposed tax abatement for the project during its regular Dec. 9 meeting. The notice states the property consists of an approximately 444-acre tract that Starbase annexed after it was released from Brownsville’s city limits and extraterritorial jurisdiction in August. SpaceX plans to build a gas-fired power plant alongside the “super-compute facility.” It’s not clear how the development will interact with Gov. Greg Abbott’s moratorium on data centers.

The South Texas Environmental Justice Network held a protest against the Starbase data center Tuesday outside the Cameron County Courthouse on Monroe Street. Speakers demanded county commissioners and Brownsville city commissioners speak out against the project. “It just proves everything we’ve been saying, which is that SpaceX can’t be trusted,” Bekah Hinojosa, co-founder of the organization, told The Herald. “We don’t want our low-income Brownsville community to breathe in pollution from their gas facility.” Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño Jr. was not immediately available for comment. Brownsville commissioners last week completed the months-long process of establishing a moratorium on data centers, and they have plans to extend the pause to the full 180 days permissible under Texas law. Brownsville also reactivated its Environmental and Conservation Task Force to study the potential effects of data centers on the environment, residents’ health and local economy. City commissioners will use its recommendations to inform potential data center regulations.

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Bobby Pulido’s first D.C. culture shock: Everyone in Congress runs late

Tejano music star Bobby Pulido hasn't even been sworn into Congress, but he's already suffering culture shock. At the Capitol this week for meetings, the Democrat told reporters what has surprised him so far: how hard it is to be on time. "You have to leave at a certain time, but everyone shows up late to something else and you got to get to the next place," he said on Wednesday. "I don't like that. It's just not in my DNA. I've always been on time with everything." In Washington D.C., members of Congress are always running late. Hearings and meetings run long, news breaks and they're often fielding calls from reporters or key constituents. And Pulido, who defeated Republican Monica De La Cruz in last week's midterm election, campaigned as an everyman who gives free performances at quinceañeras and talks about the value of high-horsepower pickup trucks at campaign stops.

The son of farmworker-turned-Tejano star Robert Pulido, Bobby Pulido was raised in Edinburg in the Rio Grande Valley, a place he still lives with his wife and four sons. At a press conference with other Texas Democrats Wednesday calling for immigration reform, Pulido described how when he decided to run for Congress he didn't want to campaign like a typical politician. "When I first got into this race I really wanted to get down on the ground and talk to regular folk," he said. "I didn't want to run a campaign based on commercials." However, that goal turned out to be more aspirational than pragmatic. Pulido's campaign and the Democratic Super PACs supporting him spent more than $12 million on television ads, according to research firm AdImpact.

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Foster care in North Texas has entered a new era

Four days after a new company began managing roughly 2,000 foster care cases in Dallas, it was, for better or for worse, business as usual in Judge Delia Gonzales’ downtown courtroom. In the Dallas County Child Protection and Permanency Court, Gonzales reviews and approves long-term arrangements for kids who have been removed from their parents. During the first hearing that came before her bench on Nov. 4, Gonzales asked the caseworker why, despite it being required for the case, a kinship worker was not present in court. One hadn’t been assigned due to a paperwork issue, the caseworker said. “I don’t care that you’re a new company,” Gonzales told the caseworker and the case supervisor. “You all know my rules. And so I don’t know why, for the second day in a row now, people are not showing up … You need to talk to your leadership about this.” In the next case, Gonzales made a determination of “no reasonable effort” after finding that needed therapies had not been provided to the child and adequate attempts had not been made to place the child with a family member.

A “no reasonable effort” ruling means federal funding for the case stops until the court finds the agency has done enough to establish a permanent living arrangement for a child. “How do you expect me to agree to your permanency plan when you’re not taking care of the medical needs of the child?” she asked the caseworker. “And you didn’t go make any contact with mom whatsoever.” Such courtroom scenes were quotidian under Empower, the company that was in charge of managing foster care in Dallas and eight surrounding counties until its contract was revoked in July after the deaths of two children in its care. As of Nov. 1, Nederland-based Texas Family Care Network is managing all foster cases in Dallas County, while Fort Worth-based Our Community Our Kids is responsible for cases in eight surrounding counties, including Collin and Ellis. Both nonprofits have managed foster cases elsewhere in the state for several years; TFCN in 15 East Texas counties and OCOK in 10 counties in the Fort Worth area. The two contractors were brought in after the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services found that under Empower, kids were not being checked on, court files often had missing or incomplete documents, and employees were not adequately trained to do their jobs.

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Becca Edwards: COP31: Getting ahead of the storm

(Becca Edwards is the Climate Action Fellow at Texas Impact.) The UN climate negotiations opened this week with sessions dedicated to a topic familiar to most Texans, improved monitoring of weather and climate conditions as a way of preparing for future hazards. Monitoring is increasingly necessary for understanding the impacts of climate change on various parts of the earth system, like the cryosphere and oceans. But its most important function is to support decision-makers in giving the public advance warning about imminent climate hazards. The connection between meteorological monitoring and risk communication is familiar to us in the United States. At the beginning of the current presidential administration, the president signed executive orders and took other measures to reduce the monitoring capabilities of scientific organizations like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), believing that those data only mattered for climate change research. Pushback from meteorologists across the country was fierce, pointing out that those high-quality data networks feed the computer models we need to predict everything from whether it will rain on your daughter’s soccer game to whether drought will continue to affect the agricultural productivity of an entire region.

The question of data networks came up again during the deliberations of the Special Committee on Disaster Preparedness and Flooding after the July 4, 2025, floods in the Texas Hill Country. Committee members grilled the director of the Upper Guadalupe River Authority for hours about the organization’s decision to forgo additional monitoring equipment due to funding constraints. The state then granted tens of millions of dollars to the project of improving monitoring systems and forecasting capability in the state in hopes of giving residents timely and actionable warnings for dangerous conditions in the future. Scientific researchers and meteorologists around the world are bumping up against the same problems as the Committee on Disaster Preparedness and Flooding did. Money. Who pays for better monitoring? Who maintains the infrastructure? And how do we connect that data to warnings that help people take action to protect themselves from hazards? As climate impacts worsen, it is more important to monitor the earth system than ever before. The scientific community, through institutions like universities and research centers and government agencies, maintains instruments around the world that provide more than 800 million pieces of data per day. These measurements come from remote sensing systems like satellites and radar, and from in-situ measurements, like thermometers, anemometers, and soil moisture sensors.

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National Stories

Bessent relocates from D.C.-area home to military base following Iran threats

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has relocated from his home in the Washington, D.C., area to a military base following a series of Iranian threats against his life. "The secretary will not be deterred by the Iranian regime's threats and remains committed to executing Operation Economic Outcast and maintaining the blockade, which together are collapsing Iran's economy," a Treasury Department spokesperson said. The decision comes as Bessent has led a U.S. push to cripple Iran's economy, vowing an "economic onslaught" against Tehran through a web of sanctions. The New York Times first reported Bessent's relocation. A source familiar with the situation pointed to a Wall Street Journal story as the impetus for the move.

"After The Wall Street Journal published an article featuring an online photo that allowed the location of the secretary's Georgetown home to be geo-located, security concerns began to increase which have now forced the secretary to relocate to a military base for his safety," the person told CBS News. CBS News has also reached out to the White House for comment. Last month, U.S. national intelligence chief Jay Clayton warned that Iran has "substantially increased" its efforts to target Americans in the Middle East and beyond. Clayton's warning, contained in an unclassified memo that was sent to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and obtained by CBS News, came as the State Department adjusted staffing at diplomatic posts across the Middle East.

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A diminished Justice Dept. braces for fresh fights after midterm loss

A top Justice Department official delivered a gung-ho message to Trump-appointed federal prosecutors around the country on Monday, as they reckoned with the Republican drubbing in the midterm elections: We are now a wartime department, he declared. The official, Aakash Singh, the principal associate deputy attorney general, exhorted dozens of U.S. attorneys during a teleconference call to step up their pressure on emboldened local officials in Democratic-controlled localities, like Houston, to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, according to three people briefed on the exchange. But it is hard to double down when you are running low on chips. The department, which has already seen the exodus of hundreds of career officials who were forced out or left because they disagreed with President Trump’s priorities, faces a daunting new staffing dilemma spurred by the election.

Many career officials who hung on until now, including some who broadly support the department’s current mission, are eyeing the exits to avoid two grim years of partisan combat. They are joined by a second, higher-profile group: senior department officials who have submitted resignations, some after a discreet shove, in a leadership reshuffle over the past week. Among the departures: Brett Shumate, the head of the department’s civil division; Harmeet Dhillon, the chief of the civil rights unit; and Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney in Miami who oversaw a sprawling inquiry examining the various investigations into Mr. Trump. T. Elliot Gaiser, the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and Jesus A. Osete, a Dhillon aide, have been nominated for federal judgeships. Patrick Davis, the former head of the department’s legislative affairs office, left before the election — averting the possibility that he would have to confront a torrent of congressional action. The upheaval is hardly a surprise. Democrats will soon have the power to try to constrain Mr. Trump’s authority to directly control the department for the first time since his victory two years ago. Representative Robert Garcia, the California Democrat who is the top member of the House Oversight Committee, has taunted administration officials to “lawyer up,” promising wide-ranging investigations into Mr. Trump and those in his orbit.

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Video shows soldier reprimanding Hegseth and advisers at Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

A US Army sentinel guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier reprimanded Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and a group of his senior advisers Wednesday after some in the group laughed and talked near the solemn memorial following a Veterans Day ceremony. “All visitors will maintain an atmosphere of silence and respect at all times,” the sentinel called out, stopping his patrol to face the group as they departed. Hegseth was standing and taking photos in front of the tomb with his wife, Jennifer, chief of staff Ricky Buria, deputy chief of staff Patrick Weaver and senior adviser and deputy assistant Tami Radabaugh after the ceremony held at Arlington National Cemetery for Veterans Day. Some in the group were laughing and chatting after taking photos, prompting the soldier patrolling in front of the Tomb to yell out and correct them.

When asked for comment, Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the “soldier correctly and respectfully reminded everyone to maintain decorum.” “The Secretary and the entire Department have always honored—and will always honor—the sacrifices our military men and women have made to keep America safe. While commemorating this solemn day, a soldier correctly and respectfully reminded everyone to maintain decorum,” Parnell said. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is one of the most sacred war memorials in the US, marking the final resting place of an unknown soldier who was killed in World War I. A soldier assigned to The Old Guard, or 3rd Infantry Regiment, has been guarding the tomb around the clock, rain or shine, since 1948. Foreign dignitaries, presidents, public figures and politicians frequently visit the Tomb to pay their respects to American service members. Hegseth and his team were at Arlington National Cemetery for a ceremony that was also attended by President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

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Ben Shapiro’s screenwriting debut stars a surprising number of recognizable names.

The funniest thing about the Daily Wire’s grim Islamophobic fantasy Run Hide Fight: Infidels, which premiered on the website’s streaming service earlier this fall, was that the character played by the disgraced Jonathan Majors, the sole big name in the cast, was absent throughout most of the movie, leaving a cast of unknown zoomer actors to try—and mostly fail—to keep the viewer’s attention. It was another bleak entry in the ongoing foray of the Daily Wire and producer Ben Shapiro into feature filmmaking. But the conservative media company’s new movie, Confession, now streaming on the Daily Wire’s website, does not have this problem. The list of stars who signed on for this is long, and they’re not all #MeToo’d actors thirsting for the spotlight, either. Surprisingly, Confession actually feels passably like a real movie—if not one I could recommend most people see. Here’s who agreed to be in the first feature film written by Shapiro, about a professor brought to Lubyanka Prison in Moscow in 1938 for interrogation by agents of the Stalinist state: Rob Lowe, who plays the professor, Alexei, a broken-down, shivering alcoholic with yellow teeth and a face full of spider veins; James Franco, who plays his main interrogator, Alexei’s former student Vladimir, a once promising young man turned into a vicious instrument of state violence; Jennifer Jason Leigh, Alexei’s ex-wife Anya, brought in to put pressure on Alexei to betray the priest the state seeks to imprison for distributing religious pamphlets.

Brad Dourif plays the priest, and Nick Nolte an unnamed Jewish inmate, one of three sharing a cell with Alexei, a person besieged by guilt who participated in the brutal process of dekulakization—a campaign that aimed to “liquidate” wealthy peasant farmers—in Ukraine. Even the smaller roles with less airtime in this movie have recognizable names filling them: the Oscar-nominated Kodi Smit-McPhee as Alexei’s estranged son, and Emile Hirsch as a concert pianist whose fame hasn’t kept him from incarceration. You might be wondering: Why did all these real actors say yes when the Daily Wire came knocking? Because Confession was wrapped in just a few months, filmed in a studio in Los Angeles, and, apparently, let you choose whether or not your character would speak English with a Russian accent? Because, if you’re James Franco, you have had some trouble getting mainstream Hollywood work in recent years, after a string of sexual misconduct allegations? Because, if you’re Rob Lowe, you’re kinda sorta a libertarian, on the record defending Ayn Rand, and maybe don’t have that much of a problem with the rest of what the Daily Wire does? Or is it simply because actors like and/or need to work, and don’t care what we think of their politics? Whatever the reasons may be, it’s a real tribute to the craft of the professional actor that such a darkly lit, visually boring movie could be at all watchable.

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Activists, some colleagues aim to block Schumer, Jeffries from leading Democrats

After winning commanding majorities in Congress in last week’s midterm elections, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) might have expected little opposition to their efforts to continue guiding their party on Capitol Hill. Instead, the two Democratic congressional leaders are beating back campaigns by progressive activists — and some of their colleagues — to oust them. For now, neither effort appears likely to succeed, given the inherent challenges of persuading a majority of the Democratic caucuses to change direction on short notice following major political victories. Many members have already expressed their support for Schumer and Jeffries. But liberal advocacy groups, boosted by high-profile figures like actor Mark Ruffalo, are organizing against the two men, and some congressional offices say they have received hundreds of phone calls from constituents demanding new Democratic leaders.

Their message is now reverberating through the Capitol, where on Tuesday, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), a progressive who caucuses with the Democrats, and Elissa Slotkin (D-Michigan) held a joint news conference to declare they would not support Schumer for majority leader. Both said the party should have an open debate about how best to lead the country in a new direction. “This idea that it’s progressive vs. moderate is just very 2019. It’s team fight vs. team flight,” Slotkin said. “Do you actually want to fight hard for the things that are going to help people or do you kind of want to just sit there and look like you’re doing something?” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), a progressive favorite, has signaled he is open to challenging Schumer but has not yet declared he is running. In the House, a handful of incoming lawmakers have refused to commit to voting for Jeffries as speaker, though no alternative candidates have emerged. Critics argue Schumer and Jeffries are the wrong leaders for the moment. The two have been lambasted by progressives activists as ideologically out of step with their own party: too closely aligned with corporate donors as populism is on the rise, too supportive of Israel and too weak to effectively oppose President Donald Trump in his final two years in office.

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Haley Stevens hid in Republican cloakroom when she returned to Congress after disastrous endorsement: report

As House lawmakers returned to Congress Monday, Michigan Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens was “hiding” out in a Republican cloakroom after endorsing a GOP candidate over her own party in the midterms, according to a report. Many in the Democratic Party consider Stevens persona non grata after she endorsed Republican Mike Rogers at the eleventh hour instead of Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Senate race. Stevens showed up to work but lay low as lawmakers cast votes Monday night, according to the Washington Sun. The congresswoman voted “yes” on two bills, according to the House clerk’s office, but was situated in the Republican cloakroom just off the House floor, out of sight of reporters, according to the outlet. The Democrat has maintained a low profile since the bombshell endorsement of Rogers, a move that blindsided some of her closest friends and rocked her party two days out from Election Day.

The Independent has contacted Stevens’ office for comment. Tension had been simmering between El-Sayed and Stevens over their stances on Israel, and the congresswoman complained of being shut out of El-Sayed’s campaign after he narrowly defeated her in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. Stevens was swiftly kicked out of the Michigan Democratic Party after endorsing Rogers over El-Sayed, and some members of the Democratic House caucus are giving serious thought to banishing her over the “betrayal.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries previously said the party needed to have “a discussion about appropriate steps” after the election. “Haley Stevens made a terrible decision, blindsided everyone and isolated herself from the House Democratic caucus,” he told Politico. Others were more forthcoming and called for her removal from the caucus. “Deplorable and embarrassing. Capitulating to fascism, Islamophobia, racism and the policies hurting everyday Americans makes you unfit to serve with the Democratic caucus,” said Rep. Delia Ramirez of Illinois. “Shame on Haley Stevens.”

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COP31 leaders try out new sales pitch for climate action: do it for the economy

Leaders at the COP31 summit in Turkey are trying out a new sales pitch for climate action that is tailored to the times: do ?it to bolster the economy and bring down the cost of living. The message, being repeated in the ?hallways and on the plenary stage of the annual UN conference, reflects efforts by organizers to capture the attention of governments wrestling with crises that have pushed global warming down the list of priorities. Among those is rampant inflation driven in part by disruptions to Middle East crude oil shipments since the ?onset of the Iran war. Consumer price pressures from fuel to food were a major driver in the US midterm elections ?that handed control of Congress to Democrats, and are an important vulnerability for leaders across Europe, ?Asia and elsewhere.

"Three-quarters of humanity live in countries that import fossil fuels, hostage to price shocks they did not create and ?cannot control," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told world leaders attending the summit on Wednesday. "Recent conflicts make clear that this is a ?recipe for chronic insecurity and a cost-of-living meltdown," he added, saying the clear solution is a shift to renewable energy. Simon Stiell, head of the UN's climate office, made the same point. "Today, chaos in global energy markets and climate disasters are supercharging inflation, slamming government budgets, pushing household bills up ?and living standards down," he told the conference. "The political costs of fossil fuel dependency are unforgiving. Climate action can help relieve ?the pressures." John Kerry, a former US secretary of state who has been advocating for climate action for decades, said he liked the reframing of ?the issue.

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Lead Stories

Is Dan Patrick’s new consulting gig legal? Experts say it’s unclear.

Less than a week after losing his reelection bid, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick launched a political consulting firm to help clients navigate the upcoming legislative session. “I’m going to focus on getting our conservative pro-business bills continued to be passed,” Patrick said Monday, when announcing his next steps on a conservative radio show. “And knock down some of these crazy things that are going to come out of the left in the Texas House over to the Senate.” Ethics experts say the unusual move to launch a consulting career while still in office could conflict with state law. Officeholders cannot register as lobbyists for two years after their most recent political donation, which for Patrick was in October.

While legislators are allowed to work in the private sector, a state law says their private work shouldn’t create a substantial conflict with the public interest. Patrick’s spokesman Steven Aranyi said Patrick won’t sign any clients until he leaves office Jan. 19. The firm’s new website includes a disclaimer that says Patrick won’t engage in lobbying, only “strategic consulting." But lawyers said it will be hard not to cross the line. To refrain from lobbying, he can’t have “direct communications” with the state’s legislative or executive branches to influence bills or administrative actions. Lobbyists must register with the state and disclose their clients and how much they’re being paid, while consultants do not. “His whole draw is that he knows everybody, and he’s still got power, and he has a personal cell phone of every senator that's existed in the last 15 years,” said political attorney Andrew Cates. “So, the idea that he would not be personally directly communicating with anybody is a hard pill to swallow.”

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Blue wave could swamp Texas Supreme Court if GOP justice bails: report

A Republican on the Texas Supreme Court is leaving open the possibility of stepping down early, which Bloomberg Law reports would likely flip control of the court to Democrats. Justice Debra Lehrmann told the outlet she hasn’t ruled out retiring before her term is up. Republicans currently hold a one-seat majority on the high court. Four GOP justices lost to Democratic challengers in last week’s elections, as part of a massive blue wave that saw every statewide partisan office up for election won by Democrats. A mid-term vacancy from Lehrmann's theoretical retirement would be filled by Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa, the Democrat who defeated Gov. Greg Abbott. Democratic control of the Texas Supreme Court could have monumental policy implications on everything from redistricting to voting rights to abortion rights.

Lehrmann, the longest-serving justice on the court, is one of the most moderate of the Republican wing. She was the sole dissenter in a 2024 ruling upholding a GOP-passed ban on certain types of gender-affirming care for children, calling the law "cruel" and "unconstitutional." In addition to their wins in statewide office, Texas Democrats gained control of the state House of Representatives, though they came up short of a majority in the state Senate, potentially setting off deadlock and drama in the upcoming session. Senate Republicans are already discussing removing long-standard powers of the lieutenant governor to direct the chamber, now that office will be held by Democrat Vikki Goodwin.

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Democratic senators show signs of discontent with Schumer

Democratic-aligned senators across the ideological spectrum expressed discontent with party Senate leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday as their sweeping midterm victories ignited calls for bold action. Still, it wasn’t clear whether Schumer is in danger of losing his position as party leader. Allies of Schumer, who has led Senate Democrats for nearly a decade, projected confidence he’ll remain the top Senate Democrat after they won big victories last week. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a progressive independent who caucuses with Democrats, and mainline Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin stood together Tuesday to argue Schumer hasn’t met the moment.

“I think whoever wants to run this caucus should come forward with a plan on how they’re going to govern differently, what they’re going to do in the first 100 days to put money in people’s pockets,” Slotkin said. The Michigan senator said she is a “no” on re-electing Schumer as party leader unless he provides a “concrete plan” of action. Sanders bluntly called for replacing the Democratic leader. “I like Chuck,” Sanders said, praising his work ethic. “But in my view, the time is now for change.” Many Democratic party activists have criticized Schumer for being too close to corporate donors and too cautious in confronting President Donald Trump. There is also pressure for generational change away from the 75-year-old New Yorker. Several incoming Democratic senators — including Adam Hamilton of Kansas, Troy Jackson of Maine and Annie Andrews of South Carolina — have said they wouldn’t support keeping Schumer in his leadership post. Newly elected Senator Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan said he would prefer Progressive Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland as party leader. Still, Schumer occupies an advantageous position. Democrats, who have 47 Senate seats currently, will have at least 54 in the new year — and possibly as many as 56, as races in Alaska and Mississippi have yet to be called with Democratic candidates leading. And it would be historically unusual to change leaders after a big election win.

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Texas Lt. Gov.-elect Vikki Goodwin announces transition team including 2 former GOP state senators

Texas Lt. Gov.-elect Vikki Goodwin announced her transition team to help her prepare to take office in January, after she defeated the current Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick last week. Goodwin held a press conference at the Texas State Capitol in Austin on Tuesday. Like with Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa, who announced her transition team last week, Goodwin’s transition team is bipartisan. “Over the past week, we have put together an exceptional transition team that will help me build a great staff and hit the ground running,” Goodwin said. “We're focused on ensuring the Senate will operate effectively, and my office stands ready to work with all senators to accomplish the business of the state.”

The transition team includes two former Republican state senators, Tommy Williams and Kel Seliger. Former Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Phillips, a Republican; Austin Mayor Kirk Watson, a former Democratic state senator; and former Democratic state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte are also part of the group. Seliger said he believes it is important that Goodwin has a bipartisan transition team. “Starting on January 19, 181 members of the legislature, lieutenant governor and the governor all have issues of importance to them and agenda, and if they're going to be successful in any measure, they have to cooperate, and hopefully that cooperation begins through this transition,” Seliger said. During his time as Lt. Gov., Patrick has tailored the Senate rules to give him the power to decide which bills reach the floor.

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State Stories

After a historic blue wave, what's next for the 'Texas Miracle'?

Opportunity Austin Chairman Casey Dobson, after a "blue tsunami" crashed over Texas during the Nov. 3 midterm elections, assured that Democrats? in the longtime conservative stronghold "want the Central Texas economy to grow and prosper." "I should know. I am one," said Dobson, the economic development leader who is also a seasoned trial attorney and partner at Austin-based Scott Douglass & McConnico LLP. That assurance came hours after an election that proved to be a historic one for Texas. Democrats won some statewide seats for the first time in more than three decades, and in the process took over a large block of political control at the federal and state levels.

The Austin Business Journal spoke to more than two dozen sources, most on background, in the hours after the election results to gauge what impacts they could have on economic development in Texas. The resounding answer was that while it's still too early to know for sure, the state's strong business reputation, good economic climate and approach to courting investments should mean companies continue to flock Texas and Austin regardless of who's in charge. "There shouldn't be, and I don't expect there to be, a lot of difference because we are so good at local economic development," said Carlton Schwab, who for nearly 30 years served as the president and CEO of the Texas Economic Development Council. Abbott and his team were very hands-on with economic development. But Texas has always been a state built on collaboration that starts at the local levels, Schwab emphasized, with infrastructure on that front that's been built for 40 years. "I think the opportunity for that is there and I think we are just uniquely situated to where that can happen and will continue to happen," he said. "I still think that in most states, the governor should be the No. 1 salesperson for the state, and I think that the governor-elect will be able to do that." Change breeds uncertainty, but it would largely be met with optimism in the Austin area. Gov.-elect Hinojosa, Senator-elect James Talarico and a number of other statewide and local electeds are from the area and have long-held relationships with economic development leaders. They've also supported previous initiatives. "Three Austinites just got elected to the top offices in Texas. They have supported our efforts to grow the Central Texas economy throughout their careers and I expect that to continue," Dobson said in a statement.

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Who could replace Mike Morath at leader of the Texas Education Agency?

Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa has been clear for months that she will fire Texas education Commissioner Mike Morath on her first day. Whoever replaces him could be in line for one of the new administration’s toughest jobs. The first Democrat-appointed Texas education commissioner in 35 years is likely to be someone who already has credibility with superintendents and Republican state senators alike. It’s someone who can navigate politics and byzantine school finances. And it’s someone who might be willing to take a pay cut to do it. “The job is a grind. You’ve got to be prepared for it,” said former education commissioner Robert Scott, who served under former Gov. Rick Perry.

Hinojosa has not said who she’s eyeing for the job, but at her first news conference last week she said her team was "actively interviewing people” for the position. So far, the only hint Hinojosa has given about her selection is that it must be an “educator.” That’s partly a dig at Morath, a software developer who served on the Dallas ISD Board of Trustees before being tapped by Gov. Greg Abbott in 2015. Since then, Morath has dramatically expanded the power of the commissioner and the Texas Education Agency he leads, such as imposing a new A-F school accountability rating system and creating the nation’s first line of state-created curriculum, known as Bluebonnet. The size of TEA has also grown, and the agency’s takeovers of school districts have angered local officials across the state. Undoing — or sharply limiting — Morath’s changes is likely going to be the primary mission for his replacement. Hinojosa, who got her start in politics on the Austin ISD Board of Trustees, has pledged to return school districts to local control and scrap the state testing system. Interviews with more than a dozen top school officials in Texas describe the ideal candidate as someone with experience leading large organizations, and someone who can navigate a slew of political constituencies.

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Joy Sewing: Black women helped win a historic Texas victory. Don’t forget it.

(Joy Sewing is an award-winning news columnist for the Houston Chronicle, reporting and opining on issues, including social justice, politics, education, health care and inequity.) Like so many Texans celebrating Tuesday’s historic election, Frida Adame took to social media to share her excitement. The election broke the Republican chokehold on Texas and delivered a sweeping Democratic victory for the first time in decades. But Adame had a special message for Black voters: “To the Black women and men who showed up for us: Thank you. Y’all stood on business and I love you all,” she said. “As an immigrant and as a Latina, thank you. You more than anyone else came in and showed up for us. Right now, as a DACA recipient, I feel hope.” I've interviewed Adame several times over the years about her fight for immigrant rights. She is a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, who earned her protection at age 19. Now she’s 30, using her voice to advocate loudly and unapologetically for other immigrants.

Adame’s gratitude speaks to something that deserves a closer look: the role Black voters, particularly Black women, played in this election. In the governor’s race, 90% of Black women voted for Gina Hinojosa, compared to 70% of Latina women and 42% of white women, according to a CNN voter poll. Among men, about 85% of Black men supported Hinojosa, compared with 59% of Latino men and 38% of white men. Those numbers reinforce a point I explored in February, when I wrote about how Black women continue to be overwhelmingly loyal Democrats, even when the party does not demonstrate the same loyalty in return. Take what has happened to Black women in the workplace. More than 300,000 Black women were laid off, pushed out or left their jobs in 2025 as the Trump administration thinned out the federal workforce. Yet there was hardly a whisper from elected officials about the scale of that economic setback and how it impacts the overall economy. At the start of 2025, Black women had an unemployment rate of 5.4%. By the year's end, it increased to 7.3%, the highest rate in four years.

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Texas blue wave prompts San Antonio Mayor Jones to revisit city's legislative agenda

Less than two weeks after San Antonio City Council approved its priorities for the upcoming state legislative session, Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones is calling for changes to the agenda following Democrats’ sweeping victories in the Nov. 3 election. In a memo to council members Thursday, Jones outlined six additional legislative priorities, including expanding Medicaid, repealing state laws restricting local government authority and removing barriers to voting and reproductive healthcare. The proposals represent a shift from the city’s previously approved legislative agenda, which largely focused on protecting San Antonio’s publicly-owned utilities, securing funding for major infrastructure projects and preserving local control. “Elections matter, and as we prepare for the 90th Legislative Session, we are going to ask for more,” Jones said in a video posted to social media. “We have not had this opportunity in a generation, and we have some time to make up for.”

The push comes after Democrats won control of the Texas House and statewide offices, including the governor’s office, where Democrat Gina Hinojosa defeated Republican incumbent Greg Abbott. Republicans retained control of the Texas Senate, meaning many of the proposed changes would still require bipartisan support to become law. Jones has asked her colleagues to submit proposed amendments to District 2 Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez, who chairs the city’s Intergovernmental Relations Committee, before it convenes to develop an amendment to the legislative agenda. The amendment is expected to go before City Council for approval Dec. 3. Lawmakers began prefiling bills Monday ahead of the legislative session, which begins Jan. 12. Speaking on Texas Public Radio’s The Source on Monday, Jones said the election results present an opportunity for cities to pursue policies that have faced opposition from Republican state leadership for decades. “I don’t think the message from Tuesday was, you know, ‘hey, take your time, go slow,'” Jones said. “No, I think that the message was on Tuesday was we want change and we wanted it yesterday.” At the top of her proposed additions is expanding Medicaid coverage to approximately 1 million Texans and addressing a backlog of more than 210,000 applications awaiting processing by the state.

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George W. and Laura Bush voted for Highland Park Methodist to leave the UMC

Two of Highland Park Methodist Church’s more famous members quietly weighed in on the conflict between the church and the United Methodist denomination in a New York Times piece published late last week. On October 25 and 26, 4,775 of the church’s approximately 15,000 members cast votes, with the majority voting to leave the denomination. Among those who voted to leave were former President George W. Bush and former first lady Laura Bush. “The Bushes ‘are grateful to Reverend Matt Tuggle for so faithfully guiding the congregation through these rough waters,’” Bush’s chief of staff, Freddy Ford, told the Times. Tuggle, Highland Park Methodist Church senior minister, has become the face of the effort to leave the denomination, along with former senior minister Paul Rasmussen.

The 110-year-old church on Mockingbird Lane voted 77 days after the United Methodist’s Horizon Texas Conference sued the church after it changed its bylaws and articles of incorporation in 2022 and again in 2023, removing references to the United Methodist Church, the Horizon Texas Conference, and the denomination’s governing principles known as the Book of Discipline. On October 29, Horizon Texas Conference Bishop Ruben Saenz Jr. announced that Tuggle and Rasmussen had been “reappointed…from all positions” at Highland Park United Methodist Church. He appointed Rev. Andy Lewis as senior pastor, and those who wished to remain in the denomination began meeting as Highland Park UMC at University Park UMC that weekend.

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Ibanez defeats Gates, Morgan survives 105-vote challenge in Fort Bend House races

Democrat Sandy Ibanez has defeated Republican state Rep. Gary Gates, while Republican state Rep. Matt Morgan narrowly won reelection by just 105 votes in two closely contested Texas House races that remained undecided for days after the Nov. 3 election. The latest unofficial results from Fort Bend County, updated Nov. 9, show all precincts reporting in both races. The results have not yet been formally certified. Ibanez defeated Gates by 1,608 votes in House District 28, ending the incumbent's bid for a fourth term. In House District 26, Morgan held off Democratic challenger Elizabeth “Eliz” Markowitz in a contest decided by just 0.14 percentage points. Both races became clearer as additional ballots were counted following Election Day.

Ibanez, a real estate agent, received 45,529 votes, or 50.90%, compared with 43,921 votes, or 49.10%, for Gates, a developer and property manager who was first elected to the Texas House in 2020. The 1,608-vote victory represents a significant political shift in a district Gates won comfortably two years earlier, when he received approximately 60.6% of the vote. House District 28 includes Fulshear, most of Rosenberg, much of Sugar Land and Weston Lakes. Gates had been seeking his fourth term in the Legislature. His defeat means the district will have a new representative when the Legislature convenes in January. Morgan, seeking his second term, survived an exceptionally close challenge from Markowitz. The final reported count showed Morgan with 36,818 votes, or 50.07%, compared with Markowitz's 36,713 votes, or 49.93%. Morgan thanked his supporters after the additional votes were counted. “The results are final. I am honored by the people of HD 26 to send me to Austin to represent them,” Morgan wrote on social media. “Thank you to all the voters, volunteers, and most importantly my family. I am looking forward to serving.” Markowitz acknowledged the disappointment of losing but emphasized how close her campaign came to unseating an incumbent in a district she described as a Republican stronghold. “Y’all, this is not the outcome we worked for, and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t hurt,” Markowitz wrote in a lengthy social media statement.

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Entergy Texas exec shares plan to meet industrial, residential growth in Southeast Texas

Stuart Barrett has been going to work for Entergy for nearly 30 years. And even after all that time, the scale of the work his employer performs is the spark that keeps him going. “We own the generation, we own the high-voltage lines, the low-voltage lines, the interaction with the customer,” Barrett said. “I’m a product of that — 29 years learning various disciplines within the company. Every three to five years, you can do something different but still work for Entergy, so you’re always learning.” And Barrett walks the walk — he’s currently vice president of customer service for Entergy Texas, but he also was director of resource planning and market operations and previously held roles within the broader Entergy Corp., headquartered in Louisiana.

What are some of Entergy’s near-term ambitions in Texas? "We’re seeing significant growth in Southeast Texas in residential, commercial and industrial (spaces). From a short-term perspective, what we’re having to do is build infrastructure. We have a marketing plan called STEP Ahead, and what that stands for is Southeast Texas Energy Plan. That is how much generation we need to add to be able to meet the peak loads of our customers while maintaining a focus on affordability. We’re about 8%-10% below the regional average from a cost perspective, and part of that reason is we are strategic and comprehensive in how we invest and when we invest," he said. The HBJ then asked, where and when have you noticed that growth taking off? "The past five years coming out of Covid-19, we're seeing tremendous growth, and we're seeing business investment because of the business in the state of Texas. It's a good place to raise a family. You get more for your money than other parts of the country. I don't have a specific number for you, but we're consistently seeing the growth, and therefore, requiring more infrastructure to serve it."

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Tarrant Libertarians take GOP ballot board fight to Texas Supreme Court

The Tarrant County Libertarian Party elevated its complaint about Republicans’ unfair advantage on the Early Voting Ballot Board to the Texas Supreme Court. The petition asks the court to balance the number of members across the three participating political parties, as required by state election code. Texas election code gives the ballot board the responsibility to process early voting results. Chairs of the participating political parties — which in Tarrant County are the Democrats, Republicans and Libertarians — submit a list of nominees to the county election board to approve or deny the individuals. The county election board includes the Democrat and Republican Party chairs along with elections administrator Clint Ludwig, Republican County Judge Tim O’Hare and Republican Sheriff Bill Waybourn.

When the county election board convened in July, it approved nine members from each party to the ballot board. On Oct. 29, it added 20 more members: 14 Republicans, three Democrats and three Libertarians. The board did not discuss why the additional members were necessary, but it did clarify with the body’s attorney that it could approve the unequal lists as provided by the parties. The Tarrant County Libertarian Party disagrees with that notion and asked the 2nd Court of Appeals in Fort Worth to limit the number of Republicans on the ballot board to 12, the number of approved Democrats and Libertarians. The court denied the request on Election Day without an opinion. Now, the Libertarians are escalating their case to the Supreme Court of Texas in an emergency motion. The filers have asked the court to respond by 5 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 10, and rule by noon Thursday, Nov. 12. If the court agrees with the Tarrant County Libertarian Party, the Republicans would have 11 fewer members on the ballot board and the same amount as the other two participating parties. The change would be in place for any ballot board work required, including a hand count audit, after the Commissioners Court canvasses the votes on Friday. Sean Sparkman, chair of the Tarrant County Libertarian Party, said though there is not much work left to do on the Nov. 3 election, the legal action would set a precedent for the rest of the state that there can’t be an unequal number of appointees across parties added to the ballot board in future elections. “It’s sort of fire prevention instead of firefighting,” Sparkman said. “We don’t want to have to go back after an election, and there are questions about the integrity of the election. We don’t want to have to go back and audit it. We want to make sure that we’re clear from the beginning and accountable.”

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What effect will incoming Democrats have on Y'all Street?

On Monday, the Texas Stock Exchange and Texas Capital Banchsares Inc. celebrated the latter’s new ticker symbol, TXCP, with a flashy closing bell event at Klyde Warren Park. While the Dallas-based Y’all Street pioneers have each held bell ringing ceremonies for arguably bigger milestones, none of the past events have delivered quite as much spectacle as Monday did, complete with red, white and blue daytime fireworks, catering from Mi Cocina and live music from the Josh Abbott Band. Another difference: Monday was the first bell ringing event in Blexas.

Though yet to be sworn in, Democrats will assume the reins of power in a bluer version of Texas, winning the governor’s office, the House and more in last week’s election after decades of Republican governance. Many Y’all Street allies, including its architect Gov. Greg Abbott, weren’t reelected, leaving questions of what could happen to the North Texas financial sector’s recent boom once the new administration, led by Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa, begins implementing its agenda. “We have a long history of working with both sides of the aisle on legislation and regulation. I’m excited about the new administration. I was supportive of Abbott and everything he did for the economy. He built one of the best economies in the country, actually in the world, there’s no denying that,” Texas Capital chairman, president and CEO Rob Holmes said in an interview Monday. “I fully expect the new administration to embrace the good things that the governor’s done, and then maybe consider other things that would certainly support [Hinojosa’s] agenda, but I don’t see it being detrimental to the economy whatsoever.”TXSE declined in an email last week to comment on the results of the election, as did competitor Nasdaq Texas, while NYSE Texas didn’t respond. However, TXSE founder and CEO James H. Lee appeared to address it with his on-stage remarks at the bell ringing Monday.

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Texas lawmaker renews push to expand medical examiners

A renewed effort to overhaul how Texas investigates unexpected deaths is underway, with a Dallas lawmaker filing legislation Monday that would require more counties to establish medical examiner offices instead of relying on elected justices of the peace. House Bill 864, filed by Rep. Rafael Anchia, D-Dallas, would lower the population threshold requiring counties to operate a medical examiner office from 2.5 million to 1 million residents. It would also clarify how counties can work together to create regional medical examiner districts. The proposal comes after similar legislation nearly passed last session and follows a recent legislative hearing where medical experts and justices of the peace described a death investigation system struggling to keep up with Texas’ growing population.

The proposal revives a measure that came close to becoming law during the 2025 legislative session. Senate Bill 1370, authored by Sen. Tan Parker, R-Flower Mound, sought similar changes. Anchia carried the proposal in the House and filed an identical companion bill. The legislation passed the Senate and advanced through House committees but died before receiving final approval in the lower chamber. Afterward, Anchia told KXAN the state needed to continue studying the issue, particularly the shortage of physicians qualified to conduct forensic death investigations. “I think we should have an interim charge to look at this issue to bring more medical examiners to the state,” Anchia said. House Speaker Dustin Burrows subsequently included the issue among the interim charges assigned to lawmakers ahead of the 2027 session. Most of Texas’ 254 counties rely on elected justices of the peace to investigate deaths, determine their cause and manner and decide whether autopsies are necessary. Unlike medical examiners, who are physicians with specialized forensic training, justices of the peace are not required to have medical or death investigation experience before taking office. They also handle numerous other court-related responsibilities.

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Can the blue wave turn the tide against border wall construction in Texas?

Border communities voted in overwhelming numbers for Democratic candidates in the midterm elections last Tuesday. Come January, every U.S. House member representing the U.S.-Mexico border—from San Diego to Brownsville—will be a Democrat. After a three-decade drought, Democrats swept all 18 statewide races in Texas. Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa and Sen.-elect James Talarico were among the Democratic candidates who vowed to fight the border wall in Big Bend. Now comes the challenge of delivering on their campaign promises. While Democrats chalked up major victories in the election, the Trump administration still has the funding and statutory authority to continue border wall construction through ecologically sensitive areas, including Big Bend.

For more than a decade, Donald Trump has vowed to complete border wall construction from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act turbocharged these efforts, appropriating $46.5 billion for border barriers. Advocates on the border said in interviews that Democrats must seize the tools at their disposal to push back on border wall construction. With majorities in the U.S. House and Senate, Democrats will have the authority to investigate Department of Homeland Security officials and compel them to provide contracts for border wall construction that have been confidential. In Austin, state legislators have already introduced bills for the upcoming session, when Democrats will control the state House for the first time in 24 years, to prohibit border wall construction in state parks. Incoming Texas Land Commissioner Ben Flores, a Democrat, told Inside Climate News he would not grant access to land managed by his office in the Big Bend sector for border wall construction. “There is a renewed sense of hope and optimism,” said Martin Castro, watershed science director at the Rio Grande International Study Center in Laredo. “We had been telling landowners to please hold out until the midterms to potentially turn the tide against this project.”

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Mayor's immigration order could ease workforce fears after a year of employees avoiding work

After Democrats swept the midterm statewide elections this month, Mayor John Whitmire ordered the Houston Police Department to reduce its collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The move could help local businesses after a year of workers fearing to come to work, a prominent immigration attorney told the Houston Business Journal. Whitmire issued an executive order on Nov. 6 that ordered police to contact ICE only if they arrest someone who has an administrative Immigration and Customs Enforcement warrant versus a lesser administrative warrant. “For example, if our police officers pull someone over for a minor traffic infraction and they write a citation, that person receives a citation and goes about their day. HPD will no longer contact ICE if they have an administrative warrant and they are not arrested,” Police Chief Noe Diaz said.

The Houston Business Journal asked the mayor’s office if he was considering further action or expecting pushback from the current state government or federal government. Whitmire’s office of communications provided this statement: “Mayor Whitmire stands by his executive order as the city’s approach to addressing these challenges. He believes that amending the ordinance to include additional provisions would put the City of Houston at even greater risk of violating state law. We must have confidence in the new leadership in Austin to revisit SB4 and in Congress to pursue meaningful immigration reform.” Texas Senate Bill 4, which created state penalties for illegal immigration, was passed in 2023 but because of court challenges was not fully implemented until May 2026. Earlier this year, Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to pull $114 million in public safety funding from Houston after a city ordinance initially directed officers to wait 30 minutes for ICE to arrest someone with an administrative warrant rather than the Houston Police Department making the arrest. The city removed that language in response. On Nov. 9, three members of the Houston City Council — Tiffany Thomas, Edward Pollard and Alejandra Salinas — put forth a Prop A proposal to codify Whitmire’s executive order so that it would stand no matter who is mayor.

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National Stories

House Republicans thwart Massie’s effort to impeach Hegseth

House Republicans blocked the impeachment of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for US military actions in the Middle East and Latin America, effectively killing the effort until Democrats take over Congress in January. GOP leaders forced a procedural vote to block quick consideration of the impeachment measure introduced on Monday by Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie. That procedural step, which sends the measure to the Judiciary Committee where it’s expected to languish, passed 211-204. President Donald Trump hailed the vote, saying in a social media post that Democrats and Massie had “miserably FAILED!” in their attempt to oust Hegseth. He added that the House’s action amounted to the “EXONERATION of a Great American Patriot.”

Massie accused Hegseth of waging the Iran war without congressional authorization, committing extrajudicial killings through strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, ignoring laws designed to minimize civilian casualties including with a strike on an Iranian school, and unlawfully kidnapping Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro. Massie has regularly sparred with the president and lost his Republican primary to a Trump-backed candidate earlier this year. Hegseth called a rare Pentagon news conference early Tuesday and cast the impeachment motion as a politicized attack on US troops and on lawful military operations ordered by Trump. The president has repeatedly offered support for Hegseth, signaling that the embattled defense secretary’s job was safe for now. “The reality is, we’re not indicting him for being bad at his job. In fact, he was very effective at killing school children in Iran,” Massie told reporters Monday. “He was very effective at extrajudicial killings. There’s no argument in these impeachment articles that he’s ineffective. The argument here is that he’s broken laws, and he’s violated the Constitution. And so, that’s the question put in front of my colleagues.”

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Democrats now control majority of state legislatures. Here’s the 6 they flipped

Democrats are poised to take control of a majority of state legislatures for the first time in 16 years after the party secured sweeping wins in the midterm elections. Twenty-four state legislatures will be under full Democratic control starting in January, with the party flipping 12 total individual chambers. Republicans will control both chambers in 22 states, down from 28 states prior to the election. Two states — North Carolina and Texas — will both have divided legislatures, after Democrats flipped control of the lower chambers only. Control of the Alaska and Georgia legislatures hangs in the balance pending final election results. The Peach State appears to be headed toward a split legislature, while Alaska is controlled by a bipartisan coalition.

Arizona: Both chambers in Arizona’s legislature are expected to switch from Republican to Democratic control, breaking the hold the GOP’s had on the state capitol for more than 60 years. Democrats will now have a 37-23 seat majority in the state’s lower chamber and a 20-10 advantage in the upper chamber, according to the Arizona Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (ADLCC). Michigan: Michigan’s House flipped blue and Democrats maintained their majority in the state Senate chamber on Election Day, establishing full Democratic control. With Gov.-elect Jocelyn Benson (D) at the helm, Democrats in the Wolverine State have secured a trifecta they lost when Republicans took the House majority in 2024. Minnesota: Minnesota Democrats broke a tie in the state House in the midterms and kept their control of the state Senate chamber this election cycle. The lower chamber has held its 67-67 balance since the 2024 election, with special elections giving each party brief advantages since. Republican state Rep. Lisa Demuth has served as the Minnesota House Speaker since 2025.

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Jim Jordan becomes new House GOP leader after closed-door vote, defeating Steve Scalise; Emmer defeats Pfluger as whip

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, will be President Donald Trump's top defender in Congress next year after winning a closed-door election for minority leader on Tuesday, sources told Fox News Digital. Jordan defeated Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., currently the House of Representatives' No. 2 leader, in what's believed to be a narrow race. Jordan received 106 votes to Scalise’s 73, sources in the room told Fox News Digital. Fox News Digital heard loud, sustained applause from outside in the hallway when Jordan’s win became official. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., also handily defeated Republican Study Committee Chairman August Pfluger, R-Texas, for the No. 2 leadership job of minority whip. The final vote count was 103 to 76, per sources.

Sources said House GOP Conference Chairwoman Lisa McClain, R-Mich., meanwhile, also survived a challenge and kept her job. Republicans huddled for a candidate forum on Tuesday morning where all GOP lawmakers running for leadership positions were peppered with questions by their colleagues. Sources inside the room for their Tuesday morning leadership forum said Scalise and Jordan both pitched themselves as the best person to unify the conference, but also signaled they would give a wide berth for lawmakers to "vote their districts," as one person put it. The question-and-answer session for House Republicans before electing their leader was largely cordial, Fox News Digital was told. Several people inquired about how both prospective leaders would unify the conference after their midterm losses and how they would handle leaks to journalists, Fox News Digital was told.

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Stephen Miller’s appointment energizes RFK Jr. and his MAHA allies

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his Make America Healthy Again devotees are setting sky-high expectations for the White House now that Stephen Miller is running the show there. Since President Donald Trump named Miller to replace Susie Wiles as his chief of staff, Kennedy and his supporters have celebrated Miller as a steadfast ally. “Next to me, Stephen Miller is the strongest MAHA supporter in the administration,” Kennedy wrote on social media platform X Friday. “It’s time to unleash the Kraken.” If Kennedy’s right, it would be quite the comeback. Most MAHA-backed candidates lost in last week’s election amid the movement’s mounting frustration with the GOP and as other issues like the economy took priority over MAHA’s concerns. The disappointment of Kennedy’s supporters with the White House reached a flashpoint when Trump moved to bolster the production of a pesticide they think causes cancer in February.

Their suspicions that corporations were influencing White House policy were reinforced when administration aides delayed the release of Kennedy’s plan to define ultraprocessed foods. Last week, former Kennedy adviser Calley Means confirmed their fears in an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan. Means accused Wiles of doing industry’s bidding by holding Kennedy back. A spokesperson for Wiles has rejected Means’ accusations. Miller is best known as the architect of Trump’s mass deportation campaign, but he’s also been an enthusiastic supporter of Kennedy’s agenda in White House conversations with MAHA activists. “It’s like somebody hit the UNO reverse button. …This is the restart that was needed if [MAHA] was going to have a fighting chance,” said Alex Clark, a MAHA influencer at Turning Point USA, a conservative group. At an April White House meeting during which officials sought to calm MAHA activists angry about Trump’s February order protecting the pesticide glyphosate, Miller spoke candidly about his concerns about water contamination, according to Kelly Ryerson, a MAHA influencer on pesticide issues known online as Glyphosate Girl, who attended the meeting.

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The techlash has finally arrived

The first Democratic Texan to claim a U.S. Senate seat in nearly 40 years won in part by running up astonishing numbers in Elon Musk’s “Starbase” company town. In Michigan, where Flock camera opponents won crucial races for Congress, residents also overwhelmingly voted to ban electric companies from making political donations after the companies partnered with Big Tech firms to power data centers. Mississippi’s first Black senator-elect since Reconstruction called for a pause on new data center construction in the last stretch of his campaign, joining other successful Southern Democrats in linking the imposing, controversial facilities to the rising costs of power bills. In his triumphant reelection speech, Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff called for bringing “Big Tech to heel” as his fellow Democrats gained a majority on the state’s utility regulation board (thus granting them oversight over new data center connections, as well as the ensuing electricity costs), and Gov.-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms beat a former data center executive. Two state lawmakers from California and Colorado won their bids for Congress by touting their legislative work pushing for artificial intelligence regulations.

Among the many takeaways from the Democratic Party’s historic midterms sweep Tuesday night: The techlash is real. The hundreds of millions of dollars that Musk and his fellow “broligarchs” splashed upon these races—whether on behalf of the crypto sector or the A.I. industry—largely did not shift the American political landscape further in their direction. Americans made it plain that they’re tired of unelected Big Tech executives forcing their products into their communities and everyday lives, in alignment with an autocratic president who’s helped boost their oversize fortunes (bits of which were erased during last week’s tech-stock crash). Now the people on the receiving end of this thumping sound quite worried. As with the immigration crackdowns and the Iran war, much of the opprobrium over the A.I. buildout is a reaction to the sheer pace and scale of the action. Trump-allied techies primarily embraced an “accelerationist” approach to artificial intelligence: Their companies poured millions into building data centers across the country, while the Trump administration tried to override state regulations that stood in the way. American rage over this sudden, widespread overreach transcended partisan and ideological lines; hints as to how the midterms would go were on display in local-level elections throughout the year, as pro–data center officials at all levels overwhelmingly lost their seats. Last Tuesday, voters across the country approved dozens of ballot initiatives calling for moratoria, reduced tax credits, or outright bans on data center projects. Ohio alone had 18 such measures on the ballot—and all of them passed.

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U.S. received $12 billion from Venezuela’s oil, report shows

The U.S. government received more than $12 billion in revenue from Venezuela’s natural resource exports in the first nine months of this year, according to a confidential report by the global financial services firm KPMG. The vast majority of the funds were distributed back to Venezuela soon after they were received, the report shows. It is unclear if the money stayed in the country or who the ultimate recipients were. The report, provides the most detailed portrait so far of the financial control exerted by the United States government on Venezuela since U.S. forces toppled the country’s president in January. The report was reviewed by The New York Times and its contents have not been previously reported. The Trump administration installed a pliant interim government and charged it with opening up Venezuela’s oil industry to American investment.

The report was written just days before the midterm elections and Democratic lawmakers had repeatedly vowed to bring more transparency and accountability to Washington’s policy toward Venezuela. Now that Democrats have won control of Congress in the midterm elections, several aides to Democratic lawmakers said they would continue pressing the Trump administration to describe what it was doing to prevent corruption in Venezuela after taking control of the country’s finances. The report, which KPMG compiled on behalf of the U.S. government, describes the activity of the “Venezuela Custody Account,” which was set up by the U.S. Treasury to manage the flow of Venezuelan export revenues following the ouster of former President Nicolás Maduro. The account was initially based in Qatar but was moved to Citibank in New York in late January. The report falls short of a formal audit of the Venezuelan oil finances that State Department officials promised to conduct regularly earlier this year. KPMG describes its role in the report as assisting the State Department in administering the account, helping to trace transactions and conducting other financial integrity measures. The company does not describe itself in the report as an auditor. The report provides little information about how U.S. officials and KMPG employees sought to prevent the money from falling into wrong hands or how they ensured that Venezuela’s oil and other natural resources were sold at fair prices.

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Judge weighs lawsuit over absentee ballot data in Alaska Senate race

A state judge said Tuesday that he expects to issue a swift decision in a lawsuit filed by the campaign of Alaska Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mary Peltola, which is seeking a list of absentee voters whose ballots have been rejected in one of the most closely watched races of the midterm elections. Peltola’s campaign also said it wants to know the reasons for the rejections and said its intent is to ensure that all qualified voters have their ballots counted. Attorneys for the state say the information requested would violate voter privacy. The campaign sued Friday, three days after the ranked choice election in which Peltola and two-term Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan are the main contenders. Absentee, early in-person and other ballots are still being tallied.

Alaska’s is one of two U.S. Senate races, along with Mississippi’s, that remain too early to call. In arguments before state Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews, Peltola attorney Abha Khanna said the campaign isn’t seeking to disrupt the ongoing ballot counting process and it has seen no cause for concerns. “As far as we can tell, the absentee ballot review process is going incredibly smoothly and we plan to keep it that way,” she said. But Khanna argued the information the campaign seeks is a matter of public record and is in line with what campaign observers have access to in locations where absentee review boards are meeting. The campaign wants access to that information in a more centralized way, she said. Absentee review boards meet at the state Division of Elections’ regional offices, and campaigns and parties can have observers on hand to watch the process. State law includes provisions for challenging absentee ballots if there is “good reason to suspect” that a challenged voter is ineligible to cast a ballot.

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Inside the fight to build — or block — Trump’s triumphal arch

President Donald Trump is poised to begin building a 250-foot-tall arch — the moment a federal court lifts an order pausing its construction. Trump continues to want the arch, potentially emblazoned with his slogan, “Golden Age of America,” built outside the gates of Arlington National Cemetery, administration officials say. To do so, however, he’ll have to navigate new roadblocks: an incoming Congress that has vowed to oppose his projects, federal judges wary of how Trump outraced the courts to build his White House ballroom and growing resistance from Washington’s residents and leaders. “The people of D.C. do not support this 250-foot arch,” Mayor-elect Janeese Lewis George said in a statement to The Washington Post, adding that the arch could harm local traffic, emergency evacuation routes and the “sacred” military cemetery itself.

George’s statement sharply contrasts with Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s silence on the topic for most of the last year. Trump is set to visit the cemetery on Wednesday to mark Veterans Day. His motorcade’s likely route will take him around Memorial Circle, the traffic roundabout tucked inside Washington’s boundaries where the president hopes to build his arch. Since he was first pitched on the idea last year, the president has prioritized the arch more than most of his other construction plans, placing it alongside the ballroom in his pantheon of legacy projects. Administration officials say he’s drawn to the arch by its size, dramatic sweep and comparison to the Arc de Triomphe, the 164-foot-tall Parisian monument that the president has long admired and hopes to surpass. Administration officials sometimes refer to the project not as the “Triumphal Arch,” but by a different name: the Trump arch. “It’ll be one of the great things we’ve ever done,” the president said in remarks last week.

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Lead Stories

Supreme Court says border wall construction can continue in west Texas

In September, Texas landowners filed a separate lawsuit over the federal government's border barrier plans in the Big Bend area, claiming their constitutional rights are being violated. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to continue with its plans to construct hundreds of miles of border barrier and security infrastructure in west Texas, while a court hearing over the effort moves forward. The federal government’s plans have stirred bipartisan backlash for its inclusion of Big Bend National Park, a beloved stretch of public land known for its sweeping canyons and unspoiled desert landscape. In a five-page decision issued Monday, the high court wrote that the federal judge who ruled on the order didn’t have the authority to weigh in.

“The injunction thus impedes the Government from advancing its ‘compelling interests’ in border security and integrity,” reads the unsigned decision. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter in the decision. The court wrote that federal law allows the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to waive environmental protections and conservation laws, which they called a “clear preference for expeditious border construction over the very harms respondents assert.” In an emergency application to the high court in late October, the federal government urged the justices to intervene and allow the work to begin again, saying that a gap in “border defenses” in the Big Bend region “would act as “a dangerous magnet for cartels and other bad actors.” A federal judge in El Paso issued the temporary injunction that halted the construction of 30-foot-tall steel barriers, patrol roads, surveillance systems and other border infrastructure. The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group, brought forward the lawsuit, along with an area nonprofit working to preserve a historic church near the U.S.-Mexico border and a landowner who stands to lose his border property.

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Gooden likely misused taxpayer dollars, spent extravagantly on travel, congressional watchdog says

Congressional investigators found “substantial reason to believe” Texas Republican Rep. Lance Gooden used taxpayer dollars for personal luxury travel and may have misreported his campaign spending. The nonpartisan Office of Congressional Conduct’s findings, made public Monday in a report, identified a pattern of “extravagant expenditures” by Gooden that appear to be outside his official duties. The report also highlights that Gooden sought more in reimbursements — $140,000 in 2025 alone — than any other House member. Gooden is the latest in a line of House members facing ethics allegations this year, with several forced to resign. Midterm polling showed voters citing corruption in Washington as a key reason for souring on the Republican party, although Democratic lawmakers have also faced allegations.

The OCC report was referred to the House Ethics Committee, which is the entity that can discipline members. The Ethics Committee’s investigation remains ongoing. Gooden in a statement called the report “bogus,” criticized the OCC and called for the House Administration Committee to investigate the office. “There’s a reason the Senate doesn’t have an OCC—because of insane, bogus referrals like this one,” Gooden said in a statement. “The Ethics Committee will expose this witch hunt, and I’m calling on House Administration to launch an oversight investigation into the OCC’s target selection and record of failed inquiries.” The OCC declined comment. Gooden also provided a response to OCC from his lawyers. The OCC said in its report that Gooden and several members of his team did not cooperate with the inquiry.

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Hegseth to hold rare news conference as impeachment vote looms

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth plans to hold a news conference at the Pentagon on Tuesday morning to address a looming impeachment vote over his handling of the war against Iran and other military operations. That he scheduled the event appears to be a measure of how much he feels the pressure to defend himself. Mr. Hegseth has not addressed reporters at the Pentagon since May, not even when a Navy commander was killed in a helicopter crash in the Arabian Sea on July 1 or when two U.S. soldiers were killed in an Iranian missile attack on a base in Jordan on July 17. The impeachment push is being led by Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky.

Mr. Massie introduced articles of impeachment on Monday that accuse Mr. Hegseth of violating the Constitution and federal law by ignoring the will of Congress in waging the war against Iran. Other charges accuse Mr. Hegseth of unlawfully carrying out strikes against suspected drug traffickers in boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific; capturing Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro; conducting unauthorized military operations in Yemen; and using his office to conduct political retaliation against his critics, including Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona. Mr. Hegseth has vowed to fight for his job. “If you want to take issue with what we did in Epic Fury or Rough Rider or nabbing Nicolás Maduro, you’re taking issue with the troops and what they accomplished, which is historic,” he said on Monday, using the Pentagon’s monikers for the war in Iran and U.S. strikes on Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen.

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Dan Patrick says GOP senators should strip Vikki Goodwin of power

Defeated Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who has ruled the Texas Senate for three terms in a my-way-or-the-highway style, urged Republican senators on Monday to trim the sails of the Democrat who defeated him and take control of the chamber that is now the GOP's only base of power in Austin. "If you lose the statewide offices and you still have the majority in the Senate, which we do, you shouldn't give up your your majority because the governor lost or the lieutenant governor lost," Patrick told conservative radio host Mark Davis. "Vikki Goodwin won, but she doesn't have the majority of votes on the floor. So I believe and I support the Republicans standing up for their voters."

Patrick, himself a product of conservative radio before entering politics 20 years ago, said that once he leaves office in January he'll launch a political consulting firm to promote the sort of legislation that he was able to push through the Senate during his 12 years atop the Senate. He also said that although a victory by Democrat James Talarico in the U.S Senate race had appeared more likely than not, the annihilation of the GOP statewide caught many by surprise on election night. "Everyone was shocked that day. The polling was based on bad data," Patrick said, noting that pre-election surveys undercounted Democratic strength in the suburbs and South Texas. "We still won rural Texas handily, but not by as much." During his time in office, Patrick expanded on the Senate's longstanding tradition of ceding authority to make committee and chairmanship assignments and to control the flow of legislation to the chamber floor. Each legislative session, he laid out a list of conservative priorities for the Senate to consider, and his agenda was generally followed.

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State Stories

Gina Hinojosa’s call for resumes draws 6,000 in two days

Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa’s call for resumes from those interested in working in the first Democratic gubernatorial administration in three decades had drawn more than 6,000 responses by Monday afternoon, her transition team told Hearst Newspapers. The flood of resumes comes as Hinojosa works to build out an administration ahead of the state’s first transfer of gubernatorial power in 12 years — and the first from one political party to another since Ann Richards handed the governor’s office over to George W. Bush in 1995. “This Administration will be by and for the people of Texas,” the governor-elect wrote in a Saturday morning post on X. “We are building a government that opens the doors of the halls of power to hardworking people who want to secure the American Dream.”

The thousands of resumes her team received since then is far more than the number of jobs Hinojosa will need to fill when she takes over the governor’s office. The governor’s last budget request asked for funding for 120 full time positions in the office of the governor and another 197 in the trustee programs it oversees, such as economic development offices. "Thousands of Texans are ready to fulfill Gov.-elect Hinojosa's commitment to building an administration that is ready to secure the American Dream, save public schools, and put money in Texans' pockets," said Joseph Madden, executive director of the transition team. "We are hard at work learning about all of these candidates so we can build a government that is truly by and for the people." Hinojosa has not said if she plans to do a full overhaul, or just replace the heads of offices, which range from appointments and budget and policy offices to a nuclear energy office, public safety and economic development teams. Hinojosa last week announced the first members of her transition team, led by Madden, a Houston-based consultant and longtime figure in Harris County politics. Madden has served with multiple commissioners and led Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo’s transition into office in 2019. The team also includes Tamala Barksdale, a former Austin school trustee who served alongside Hinojosa on the school board before she became a state representative; Ryan Pollock, who heads the Texas Building Trades Council, which represents dozens of unions across the state; and Ernest Bailes, a rural Republican former state representative whom Gov. Greg Abbott had worked to oust for opposing school vouchers. “Please understand, this is a transition for the whole state of Texas, and as such, we will have many opportunities for people to weigh in with their ideas, send in resumes,” Hinojosa said at a press conference last week where she introduced the team.

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John Cornyn: The case against the Big Bend border wall

One of the federal government’s primary responsibilities is to protect the American people. Under President Joe Biden’s four years of reckless open-border policies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection encountered more than 10 million illegal immigrants at the border, and nearly 2 million so-called “gotaways” evaded the Border Patrol. President Donald Trump reversed course on day one in office, resulting in record-low border crossings. We should continue building on this success, but we must also be clear-eyed on what makes sense and what doesn’t. This is especially true in parts of the Border Patrol’s Big Bend Sector of Texas, which accounted for only 1.3% of all border apprehensions in fiscal 2025.

A Border Patrol agent once told me that border security is like a three-legged stool: You need to strike the right balance between personnel, technology and infrastructure. There’s no one-size-fits-all, silver-bullet strategy. An all-of-the-above approach means implementing the right tools in the right places, and a border wall can be one piece of that puzzle. Beginning in late 2025, under authority granted to the Department of Homeland Security through the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, then Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem issued waivers of dozens of federal statutes to build a 30-foot-high steel bollard wall along 517 miles of the Rio Grande River. Since then, DHS has awarded about $7.5 billion for border wall and border-related infrastructure projects in the Big Bend Sector. Under the act, such waivers require a determination that a region is “an area of high illegal entry.” But the facts on the ground about parts of the Big Bend Sector tell a different story.

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James Talarico meets with John Cornyn in Washington

Senator-elect James Talarico sat down with U.S. Sen John Cornyn Monday to discuss areas in which the two Texas politicians could work together. The pair met in Washington following Talarico's victory last week over Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, making him the first Democratic senator from Texas since 1993. "(Cornyn) has served our state honorably, and I’m grateful for his advice and guidance," Talarico said in a statement. "Now is the time for us to come together — Democrats and Republicans — to deliver for Texas." Cornyn's office said in a statement the pair had discussed "transition planning and related matters."

Talarico, who will replace Cornyn in Washington, had campaigned on working with Republicans. The morning after his victory he appeared on Fox News to discuss comprehensive immigration reform and lowering housing and energy costs as areas of mutual interest with the Trump administration. "Give the president credit where credit is due. He has done a better job than the previous administration in securing our border," he said. Cornyn, a fourth-term senator, lost to Paxton in the Republican primary earlier this year. During the run up to the general election this month, he criticized Paxton and said his history of scandal was likely hurt Republican's chances. The night of the midterm elections, Cornyn congratulated Talarico on social media and offered his assistance. "The voters have spoken," he wrote.

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Dallas council members seek audit over $800K GOP convention bill

Some Dallas City Council members are calling for an audit after the city was left with an $800,000 bill from President Donald Trump’s GOP event in September. “This is unacceptable to us and raises serious questions concerning why the City did not in advance obtain financial security for the anticipated costs and efforts to collect the money owed,” said a memo signed by council members Paul Ridley, Adam Bazaldua, Paula Blackmon and Bill Roth. The push comes nearly two weeks after city officials told the finance committee that the police and fire department had over $800,000 in costs.

Council members said the city has not received any money for convention spending, leaving taxpayers to bear the burden. A bulk of the costs had been absorbed by the city’s budget, and several council members were concerned that no reimbursements had been finalized in the two months after the event. “When people use our city and facilities, it comes with a deposit, and integrity says, 'Pay your bill,’” Deputy Mayor Pro Tem Maxie Johnson said during an October meeting. The two-day midterm pep rally arrived in September amid the city’s budget deliberations, furloughs and spending cuts. City officials said recently they will pursue a Department of Justice grant to cover expenses outside of the arena. They gave a special event permit to manage street closures and traffic management. American Airlines Center, though a city-owned facility, books its own events.

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After nearly 3 years, AG Ken Paxton drops fight to shut down El Paso’s Annunciation House

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has dropped a suit seeking to shut down Annunciation House after demanding two years ago to examine the records of the nonprofit network of migrant shelters in El Paso, including information about the people it served. “It’s very gratifying that this has now ended. It’s over,” Ruben Garcia, founder and executive director of Annunciation House, told El Paso Matters. “What I would want next is for the state Legislature to say, ‘We have to find a way to prevent this from happening.’” The Attorney General’s Office on Monday filed a notice of nonsuit with prejudice, meaning the office will never again file a lawsuit with similar allegations against the organization in the future. Paxton’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move comes as Paxton, a Republican who unsuccessfully sought a U.S. Senate seat in the Nov. 3 midterm election, prepares to leave the AG’s Office in mid-January. Attorney General-elect Nathan Johnson, a Democrat who now serves in the Senate, has said he intends to review cases brought by Paxton. The AG’s Office first delivered a demand letter to examine Annunciation House records on Feb. 7, 2024. The next day, the organization sued Paxton challenging the demand. Within days, Paxon sought to revoke the Annunciation House’s nonprofit registration in Texas and shut down its operation, alleging harboring, human smuggling and stash-house activity. Garcia vehemently denied the claims, stating the organization serves migrants processed and released by U.S. immigration authorities. The case wound its way through the courts, with an El Paso district judge blocking the AG’s attempt, and Paxton appealing to the Texas Supreme Court. In May 2025, the Texas Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s decision and later denied Annunciation House’s request for a rehearing.

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Dallas Stars arena rejection raises bigger questions for North Texas

The rejection of a key funding measure for a proposed Dallas Stars arena in Plano has thrown the project's future into uncertainty, raising a bigger question: are North Texas voters becoming less willing to foot the bill for major developments? On Nov. 3, Plano voters rejected Proposition A, a series of taxes intended to help cover the city's $700 million support package for the proposed $3 billion arena and entertainment district at the Shops at Willow Bend. The outcome has complicated the project's financing, leaving the Stars and city officials searching for another way to move forward. The Stars have maintained their commitment to the relocation, stating plans to continue working with Plano as the city pursues a project finance zone that would require action by the Texas Legislature?. The team, whose CEO Brad Alberts previously said intends to "get married" with the city, is currently on a tight timeline to find its next home with its lease at Dallas' American Airlines Center set to expire in 2031.

Steven Haynes, a finance professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, said a special taxing district could help fund the project by using tax revenue generated in the surrounding area. But that money could take years to build up, potentially forcing the Stars to seek more private investment, contribute more of the club's own money or reconsider the scale of the development. "The problem is that's kind of a pay-as-you-go and when we're looking at a development project of this size, in the billions of dollars, it's not something that you really want to do because it's not quick," Haynes said. Haynes said the approach could still shift some costs to Plano residents who shop and dine within the district. While visitors from outside Plano would also contribute, local residents who frequent the area would ultimately foot the bill, meaning "in some ways it is a pass-on to the residents of Plano." The voters' disapproval also reflects growing concerns about the financial risks of publicly supported projects, Haynes said, particularly as housing, insurance and other living expenses continue to strain household budgets.

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Austin photojournalist Robert Godwin dies of cancer at 72

Photographer Robert Godwin, who documented the evolution of Austin’s social scene and philanthropy for decades, died Wednesday of small-cell lung cancer at home after extended treatment at UT MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He was 72. “He was a happy soul right to the end,” posted Austin native Forrest Preece, who, among many other projects, writes the column, “Westside Stories,” for West Austin News. “Five days ago, he posted a photo on Facebook of the trick or treat candy he'd left out for kids in his neighborhood, with some comments parsed in his usual jovial manner.

Because of his long, watchful exposure to the worlds of nonprofits and philanthropy during a time when both forces matured in Austin, Godwin was called upon to advise groups such as the St. David’s Foundation on fundraising tactics. He witnessed firsthand the growth of the philanthropic sector from old-fashioned charitable efforts that survived on meager donations to Austin’s current thousands of nonprofits, some with annual budgets in the tens of millions of dollars and secure endowments doing effective work at home and around the world. “It was as vanilla as you can imagine,” Godwin told the American-Statesman in 2015 about socializing during the 1970s. “There was a degree of exclusion by demographics if nothing else. And a $5,000 fundraiser was big back then. Nowadays that’s postage for invitations.” His professional advice was always delivered gently, kindly and humorously, except when it came to food. Something of a home gourmet, Godwin could be quite frank about what edibles were offered to event guests, whether at backyard barbecues or glittering galas, and how important it was to make a hospitable impression.

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Musk admits Tesla doesn’t have enough talent to build more than one car at a time after exodus

Elon Musk now says Tesla can’t build the Cybertruck and the Cybercab at the same time because there are only so many “smart, dedicated people” to go around. Half the executives he showed off in 2023 as proof of Tesla’s “bench strength” have since left the company. It’s the most honest explanation yet for how Tesla went from five consumer vehicle programs at the start of 2026 to a single platform, Model 3 and Model Y, by the middle of 2027. On Friday, Musk said Tesla would wind down Cybertruck production at Giga Texas around the middle of next year “to make room for increased Cybercab production.” As we pointed out at the time, Giga Texas isn’t short on space. The Cybertruck line runs at a fraction of its installed capacity because the truck sells a fraction of what Tesla planned.

A day later, replying to a user on X, Musk gave a different reason: “The biggest thing most people fail to understand is that there are a very limited number of smart, dedicated people! They can only do so many things.” He added that if Tesla has to “maintain a complex production line, supply chain and allocate engineering for Cybertruck, we can’t use those people” for scaling Cybercab. By Monday morning, the explanation had shifted again, to the “opportunity cost of the complexity of Cybertruck.” But the Saturday version is the one that matters. Musk is telling us the bottleneck at Tesla isn’t factory space or money. It’s people. The Cybertruck is the second casualty this year. In January, Musk announced the end of the Model S and Model X on Tesla’s Q4 earnings call and summed up the reason in one word: “Autonomy.” The Fremont line is being converted to build Optimus robots, and by April, only inventory was left. The flagships had been on life support for years. Their last real update was the 2021 interior refresh. The June 2025 “refresh” brought a new paint color, a front bumper camera, a bit more range, and a $5,000 price increase. That’s not how you treat a vehicle program you care about. Tesla painted a very different picture just two years ago. At its 2024 shareholder meeting, it showed this slide of its lineup: the Model 3, Model Y, Model S, Model X, Cybertruck, and Semi, plus three vehicles under covers that Musk said were “going to be pretty special.”

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After Huffines’ defeat, Austin ISD halts cooperation with state investigation

The Austin school district has halted its cooperation with a state investigation into its spending, challenging the comptroller’s authority to question district employees and demanding answers about why investigators are seeking information about library books, sex education and student identification. The move comes just days after Texas voters ousted Republican Comptroller Don Huffines, whose office launched the investigation after Gov. Greg Abbott requested audits of up to four school districts. State investigators did not arrive for a scheduled visit Monday after Austin ISD notified the comptroller’s office Friday that it would suspend its participation, a district spokesperson confirmed.

The confrontation threatens to derail Austin ISD’s participation in one of four school district investigations Huffines’ office launched in October. The reviews were intended to determine whether taxpayer money was being directed toward students, classrooms and teachers rather than administrative expansion, with findings due Dec. 31, ahead of the next legislative session. In a four-page letter sent Friday, Austin ISD General Counsel Kenneth Walker questioned whether the comptroller had the authority to conduct extensive employee interviews, whether the investigation could be completed fairly on such a short timeline and why investigators were requesting records that appeared unrelated to school spending. “Consequently, we respectfully discontinue our participation and will not be available next week, November 9-13 for any site visits or interviews,” Walker wrote. The election has also cast uncertainty over the investigation’s future. In her first news conference after defeating Huffines, Austin-area Sen. Sarah Eckhardt said last week she would limit the reviews to school finances rather than examining library books and hiring policies, according to KERA, the Dallas-area NPR affiliate.

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New Camp Mystic lawsuit alleges owners knew of flood warning gaps years before disaster

A new lawsuit filed by the parents of an 8-year-old girl killed in the Camp Mystic flood alleges camp leadership had years of knowledge about critical gaps in the area’s flood warning system, including the removal of an upstream river sensor that could have provided approximately 30 minutes of additional warning before floodwaters reached the property. The 106-page petition, filed Monday by Clarke and Katherine Baker on behalf of their daughter, Mary Grace, also details allegations that camp administrators prioritized moving equipment and protecting adult employees over evacuating hundreds of sleeping girls as floodwaters rose, despite receiving warnings of life-threatening conditions hours before the disaster.

The lawsuit provides additional details about the Eastland family’s involvement with regional flood warning infrastructure, the camp’s emergency procedures and the responsibilities of individual employees. It also alleges the camp had dozens of adults on its property who were not assigned specific roles in an emergency evacuation. Mary Grace was among the 25 campers who died when catastrophic flooding swept through the camp along the Guadalupe River on July 4, 2025. The Bakers are pursuing claims against camp entities and individual members of the Eastland family, as well as several employees. Attorneys representing each of the defendants named in the lawsuit are not yet listed. KXAN will reach out once that information is available. One of the most significant allegations involves Dick Eastland, Camp Mystic’s longtime executive director, and his involvement with the Upper Guadalupe River Authority. According to the lawsuit, Eastland served as treasurer of UGRA’s board and acknowledged in a 2018 email to family members that a critical river sensor located upstream from Camp Mystic had been removed years earlier. The sensor, which monitored the South Fork of the Guadalupe River, could have provided approximately 30 minutes of advance warning before floodwater reached downstream locations, the lawsuit alleges.

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Harris County DA’s chief of staff leaving office after scrutiny over dismissed DWI case

The chief of staff for Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare is leaving the office weeks after KHOU 11 Investigates exposed her involvement in the quick dismissal of a DWI case involving a prominent Houston attorney and former prosecutor. In an email to staff Friday, Teare announced that Lauren Byrne “will be leaving the office.” He praised her work, writing that she had “given it her heart, pursuing justice at every turn and advocating for changes that make our criminal justice system fairer for everyone.” Teare has not said whether he asked Byrne to resign or whether she decided to leave on her own. The district attorney’s communications director said the office could not confirm details about personnel actions.

Byrne’s departure follows questions about her role in approving a pretrial intervention agreement for attorney William “Wes” Rucker, whose DWI and unlawful carrying of a weapon charges were dismissed less than 72 hours after his Oct. 9 arrest. Chief Justin Wood of the arresting agency, Hedwig Village police, previously said the speedy dismissal “didn’t pass the smell test.” “I think it shows favoritism and poor decision-making on the part of the district attorney’s office,” Wood said in an Oct. 27 interview. KHOU 11 Investigates has now confirmed that the Tier 1 DWI pretrial intervention program had been paused since December 2025 when Byrne negotiated Rucker’s agreement. A notice to prosecutors said the Tier 1 program was “currently closed” and that no applications would be considered. The district attorney’s office said that pause was intended to give participants time to complete the program so the office could review their progress, make adjustments and consider a more permanent structure under a second phase of the program during the fourth quarter of 2026.

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SpaceX plans $24 billion gas power plant, data center project in Texas

SpaceX is planning a roughly $24 billion gas-fired power plant and super-compute facility in Starbase, Texas, according to a public hearing notice. The rockets-to-AI company's request ?comes as opposition to data centers grows, with voters rejecting them ?in 40 of 41 local ballot measures and Democrats, some of whom had campaigned on pausing new projects, taking control of the US Congress and the Texas governor's office ?in the midterm elections.

The filing shows SpaceX, which bought Elon Musk's ?AI lab xAI earlier this year, has applied for a property ?tax abatement for the project. The Starbase City Commission will consider the ?abatement, plus a related economic development agreement, at a public meeting on December ?9. The notice describes $24 billion as the estimated capital investment for the project's initial phases. It said the work may be done in multiple phases and could include future expansions. SpaceX ?would construct, own and operate the facilities. The project would be among ?the largest private investments in the Rio Grande Valley. Building its own power plant could let ?SpaceX ?skip a years-long wait to plug a project into Texas' main power grid. The notice did not say how large the abatement would be or how long it would last. It also gave no details on the plant's generating ?capacity or the scale ?of the computing ?operation. SpaceX affiliate Lone Star Mineral Development has filed plans for an 8-mile natural gas pipeline to Starbase, called Starpipe, ?that is scheduled for service by January 2027. It ?will feed ?a planned plant to turn the gas into liquid methane for Starship rockets, according to filings Reuters reviewed in June. The company last month reported a 161% jump ?in ?revenue and a ninefold increase in AI revenue ?for its third quarter. The company has been renting out computing capacity to Google, Anthropic and others. Bloomberg News first ?reported on the development.

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National Stories

GOP’s hold on Florida could chart the future of data centers

Many voters nationwide flat-out rejected data centers — and candidates who were linked to them — during last week’s midterm elections. But in Florida, the industry got its wish. GOP Rep. Byron Donalds, a pro-business Trump ally whose campaign was flush with millions from the data center and tech industries, narrowly won the election for Florida governor over Democrat David Jolly, a staunch data center opponent. Donalds’ win was one of the GOP’s few major victories of the night, as Democrats took control of Congress and ousted Republicans in red-leaning states. The data center industry also took an electoral beating, after data center-critical Democrats flipped governor’s races in states that have been industry hot spots. In Texas, Georgia and New Mexico, where tech giants like Google and Microsoft have planned massive data centers, Democratic governors-elect have pledged moratoriums on new projects. In hubs like Ohio and Nevada, the governors-in-waiting support tightening guardrails on the industry. The results reflect a burgeoning anti-data center sentiment nationwide: Voters have spurned the industry and the AI companies driving its booming growth.

“[AI companies] are going to have to cure cancer to convince people this is a good thing,” said Brendan Steinhauser, CEO of the Alliance for Secure AI, an AI safety group. After last week’s wipeout, Florida is the most populous Republican-led state — and one still without a hyperscale data center, despite the industry’s efforts. Yet while Donalds has supported certain restrictions on data centers, he hasn’t gone as far as governors-elect in other states and has not been as hard line an opponent as outgoing Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). His victory could change the data center industry’s views about the Sunshine State’s viability, just as other states are pumping the brakes on development. In the lead-up to the election, state Democrats sought to paint Donalds as a Big Tech ally. Campaign ads, social media memes and a statewide blitz of press conferences labeled him “Data Center Donalds.” Jolly, who made data center opposition a key pillar of his campaign, promised to institute a moratorium and said he’d be willing to outright ban hyperscale facilities. Donalds’ critics blasted his donor base, which included data center developers and AI companies. It wasn’t enough — Donalds eked past Jolly by less than 2 percentage points.

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California voters reject Prop. 40 billionaire tax

Billionaires spent $378 million to defeat Prop. 40, exposing a rift among California Democrats on taxing the rich. California will not become the first state to levy a wealth tax on its richest residents — at least not this election. Voters rejected Proposition 40, a proposal to tax billionaires based on their net worth and financial holdings, by 52.8% to 47.2%, according to The Associated Press Monday. The measure had trailed behind for days before The Associated Press confirmed results. Leaders for Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, the union pushing the measure, seemed to concede the race minutes before the polls closed but vowed to try again in 2028 if California’s Legislature “fails to deliver a real solution” to fund healthcare hammered by recent federal law. “That’s not a hypothetical. That’s our plan,” said Dave Regan, president of SEIU-UHW.

Election Day was projected to be an all-around defeat for the union, known for aggressively pursuing ballot measures. Voters defeated union-backed Proposition 44, an effort to control how clinics spend money. Proposition 42, a billionaire tax countermeasure prohibiting future wealth taxes, was leading Monday evening by 51.6% to 48.4%. That measure could get in the way of SEIU-UHW’s future plans to try taxing wealth again. The billionaire tax would have generated $100 billion for healthcare and education through a one-time, 5% tax on billionaires, according to SEIU-UHW. Opponents of the measure celebrated its defeat. “Proposition 40 was a reckless experiment conducted on our state’s economy with little regard for the harms it would cause,” according to a statement from Evan Westrop, a campaign strategist for No on Prop. 40. The opposition campaign, which was backed by wealthy tech investors and healthcare organizations, argued the measure had already driven billionaires from the state and permanently harmed income tax revenue. On Monday they said the state still faces “enormous pressure” to find other ways to fund healthcare hit by federal cuts.

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‘No business having a gun’: Some ICE recruits had a record of red flags

One officer in Detroit fired multiple shots at a fleeing teenage suspect, fatally striking him in the back in an incident that led to a $2.5 million settlement with his family. An Arkansas officer was castigated by his supervisor for showing “unreasonable anger” while on the job, and fired after his boss expressed concern about what he might do “when he faces a civilian who he feels has disrespected him.” Some officers went viral for embarrassing incidents, including a New York City detective who stole nearly $3,000 worth of high-end champagne at a music festival and a Mississippi officer who said under oath that he couldn’t remember core rights bestowed by the U.S. Constitution. All of them share one thing in common: They were later hired as federal immigration officers to carry out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. The Trump administration has onboarded thousands of new officers in an accelerated recruitment effort that has bypassed traditional background checks in favor of quickly putting people onto the streets to arrest undocumented immigrants.

In recent months, at least two of those hires were involved in shootings, including one that resulted in the death of a 25-year-old Colombian father. Some have been fired after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement discovered red flags in their backgrounds that initially went undetected. The names of the officers hired to scour residential streets, courthouses and airports have been shielded by the Department of Homeland Security, which cites privacy policies designed to protect them from harassment, even in incidents where they are involved in fatal use of force. But that cloak of anonymity was pierced in late October when activists hacked a DHS employee database and released information about thousands of workers, including about 1,500 ICE officers and agents hired since Trump took office in 2025. The Washington Post performed background checks on about 300 of the new hires using standard public record searches to uncover information. While most of the officers were chosen at random, others were selected for review after being flagged by artificial intelligence. The Post has verified the authenticity of the database with current and former DHS officials. The review offers the most comprehensive look yet at whom DHS hired when it urged people to apply to “defend the homeland” and offered a signing bonus of up to $50,000 for top recruits.

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Fed Governor Waller sees December hike likely, opens door to possible half-point increase

Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller said Tuesday the central bank needs to follow through on expectations for additional interest rate hikes or risk its credibility, even suggesting that a larger-than-usual half-percentage-point increase could be warranted in December. Speaking in London, the policymaker said he “is leaning toward” a rate increase in December even if the October inflation data comes in softer than expected — and would support “more robust action” if readings come in higher than forecast. “In that case, I believe a 50 basis point hike in the policy rate should be considered at the December meeting,” he said. “Hiking only 25 basis points would put our credibility at risk, a risk I am not eager to take.”

Waller said Fed communications prior to and at the October meeting led markets already to price in additional rate hikes. Following through, Waller added, is what’s important, even if the hikes come intermittently. “When this communication is clear and credible, what really matters is that those hikes are eventually carried out — it is not necessary, for example, to raise rates at consecutive meetings,” he said. “If, however, the hikes are not carried out, markets will reduce expectations of rate hikes and rates will immediately fall, which would loosen monetary policy in an undesirable way.” Waller added that higher rates “will be needed, sooner rather than later.” “So, while the precise timing of the hikes doesn’t matter, ensuring that the promised hikes are implemented in a reasonable period of time does,” he said.

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Exxon takes first step toward investing in Venezuela

ExxonMobil is moving forward in Venezuela. The U.S. oil giant signed a preliminary deal Monday to explore investments in Venezuela’s oil patch, negotiating a potential return to the country nearly two decades after its exit. In a 38-word statement that was sparse on details, the company said it signed a memorandum of understanding to evaluate drilling opportunities with the Venezuelan government and its state-run oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela. It didn’t specify which oil fields the agreement covers but said it wants to see further progress on regulatory reform and other conditions necessary for a profitable investment. “This memorandum is a meaningful first step,” an Exxon spokesman said. “But any future investment would require stable policies, clear regulations, strong investment protections and competitive returns.”

The Wall Street Journal reported in September that Exxon was closing in on a preliminary agreement to invest in a number of developed and undeveloped fields. At the time, the company was evaluating a deal that could encompass fields with more than 50 billion barrels of oil buried underground, according to a person familiar with the talks. Venezuela says it has some 300 billion barrels of proven reserves, which would be the largest in the world. Exxon sent teams to Caracas earlier this year to negotiate a possible deal after President Trump pushed American oil companies to plow $100 billion into the country to revitalize its energy sector. It had left Venezuela in 2007 after Hugo Chávez seized control of its oil assets there. As a result, the company has approached Venezuela with more caution than some of its smaller rivals. At a White House meeting in January, shortly after the U.S. ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Exxon CEO Darren Woods said Venezuela was “uninvestable” without significant changes to its commercial frameworks, legal system and hydrocarbon laws.

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Israeli opposition eyes deal with ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties to oust Netanyahu

As he seeks to crack the complicated math of building a new Israeli government coalition that will oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, ex-military chief Gadi Eisenkot is eyeing a potentially controversial alliance with ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties. A deal with the ultra-Orthodox would bring a sea change to Israeli politics. And the push for it shows the bloc led by Eisenkot, a centrist security hawk known as a pragmatic battlefield tactician, seeking every option to avoid a potentially even more controversial partnership with Arab parties. For more than a decade, the ultra-Orthodox — many of whom reject secular jobs, military service and even the Zionist concept of a Jewish state — have backed the right wing led by Netanyahu in exchange for state financing of their seminaries and exemptions from the draft.

Now, Eisenkot and his allies are exploring whether they could flip the support of the ultra-Orthodox, also called Haredi, by reaching a deal on military conscription. It is a politically risky move after the ex-general spent months on the campaign trail vowing to enlist Haredi men. Religious exemption from military service is one of the most divisive and emotional issues in Israeli society, especially after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, with the Israel Defense Forces and many families with service members saying they are stretched to a breaking point. As he accepted the mandate from Israeli President Isaac Herzog to form a new government on Sunday, Eisenkot reiterated that he would welcome the support and partnership of every parliamentary faction that accepts his four conditions, which include mandatory service for all. But he also hinted that compromises might be necessary. “We must form a national emergency government,” Eisenkot said in a speech at the president’s residence. “This will require creative and ?unconventional political steps.”

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Lead Stories

Takeaways from Trump's 60 Minutes interview

Days after Republicans faced a series of bruising midterm election losses, President Trump stood by his handling of the economy and the Iran war — but he acknowledged some "bad messaging" on economic issues and said his immigration crackdown was "too tough" at times. In a sitdown with 60 Minutes correspondent Ross Douthat, the president also suggested some top administration officials could be on their way out. One hour later, he announced White House chief of staff Susie Wiles would depart her role and be replaced by Stephen Miller. Here are the biggest takeaways from the interview: Republicans lost more than 40 House seats and at least seven Senate seats on Tuesday, with some races still uncalled, including in places that Mr. Trump won by double-digit margins two years ago. About 63% of midterm voters disapproved of Mr. Trump's job performance, and 44% said one reason for their vote was to express opposition to him, according to CBS News exit polling. Asked for his analysis of the midterm losses, Mr. Trump told 60 Minutes that voters "didn't like the war" with Iran or the soaring gas prices that it triggered. Some of the candidates were picked by the president. He endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in the Lone Star State's bitter GOP Senate primary, and he endorsed Sen. Darline Graham, who was appointed to fill her late brother's South Carolina Senate seat — encouraging her to run for a full term.

Mr. Trump argued that "Cornyn would have lost also." The president defended his stewardship of the economy in his 60 Minutes sitdown, which came hours after a stronger-than-expected jobs report. He said "the numbers are phenomenal." "We're doing numbers that have never been done before. 401(k)s are at their all-time high by a lot. Under other presidents, they were a disaster. 401(k)s have made people rich," the president said. Pressed on the fact that not all Americans have large retirement accounts, Mr. Trump responded: "But a lot of people do." But exit polling shows three-fourths of midterm voters viewed the condition of the economy as either poor or not so good — and 70% of that group voted for Democratic House candidates. Voters were especially concerned about prices of gasoline, food, utilities and healthcare, and two-thirds of voters believed that Mr. Trump's tariff policies hurt the country's economy. The morning after the election, Vice President JD Vance argued on social media "the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone" — the broadly unpopular Iran war." Mr. Trump said Vance told him about his plan to write that post, and he responded: "You write what you want." The president said "I don't disagree" with the vice president's diagnosis for why the Republicans lost the midterms, "other than one thing." "The one thing he left out is — that I would say, and maybe he wouldn't say it, I don't know. I've never asked him really. But, if you had … to do again, would you do it? And that's Iran. Would you go and attack Iran?" he said.

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Congress returns for crowded lame-duck session as Hegseth impeachment, government funding deadline loom

Following the historic midterm election sweeping Democrats into majority control of the House and Senate, Congress returns Monday for a five-week lame-duck session, with a long to-list to tackle before the end of the year and dozens of lawmakers ending their tenure in the House, and at least 17 senators heading home as well. The lame-duck session kicks off Monday with a two-week legislative period wrapped with freshman orientation for members-elect who will be seated in the 120th Congress on Jan. 3. There are still several races that are too close to call, but as it stands Friday, at least 109 incoming House freshmen will be seated -- the largest pre-convening freshmen class in the lower chamber in almost 100 years -- since the 73rd Congress convened in 1933.

On the floor, House Speaker Mike Johnson is already hearing it from his own conference after GOP leadership plans to advance just one piece of legislation under a rule next week -- continuing the frustrations voiced by some of his members earlier this fall when the speaker dismissed lawmakers for a six-week campaign blitz rather than put Republican legislative wins on the floor. Johnson's designs for the lame-duck session could be quickly derailed as Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, who lost a GOP primary months ago, is expected to reintroduce a privileged resolution to impeach Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Massie has a resolution with eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth, who is staring down consternation at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue in the wake of Tuesday's Democratic victories. President Donald Trump said Thursday he intends to keep Hegseth in his job amid assessments from several Republicans -- including Vice President JD Vance -- that the Iran war led to the party's midterm losses. In a video posted Thursday, Hegseth proclaimed that he will not back down -- doubling down on the Iran war and his cultural agenda at the Pentagon while drawing a parallel to Trump. Massie could move as early as Monday, teeing up a showdown midweek on Hegseth impeachment.

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The new political era: Less party loyalty, big election swings

President Trump’s Republicans just found out the hard way what other political parties are seeing across western democracies: Voters are fed up, they have lost trust in political parties and they don’t have much patience when they feel politicians aren’t listening. The massive shift in the midterm elections is a sign of a new political era taking hold from Paris, Texas, to Paris, France. Voters are becoming less attached to the parties their parents voted for and are more likely to try out new parties or new political pitches, on the left and right. And while they are willing to give insurgent parties or populist figures like Trump a shot, they will also lose patience quickly if they don’t deliver. The upshot means greater volatility in elections, and bigger swings from one party to another that leave a sense of political whiplash.

If the Republicans were to lose the next presidential election, it would be the first time since the late 1800s that four consecutive presidential elections have ousted the incumbent party after just one term. In Europe, the disaffection has overturned politics, causing many traditional parties in places such as France and Italy to fade, and new parties, especially populist nationalist ones, to rise up in both countries as well as Germany and the U.K. France’s far-right National Rally is the clear favorite in French elections next year and, later this month, a nationalist party, Vox, is likely to gain a share of power for the first time in Spain since its return to democracy. Far-right parties are also set to do well in Italy and Poland next year. “Voters are clearly less attached to a party and far more willing to switch,” said Tony Travers, a political scientist at the London School of Economics, who compares it to a retail shopping experience, and attributes part of the change to a fast-paced digital world where people expect fast results and simple explanations for complex problems.

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Nvidia opens investigation into Jensen Huang’s relationship with Chinese spy

Nvidia said on Sunday that it was opening an investigation into Jensen Huang, its chief executive and co-founder, after he acknowledged to the company’s board that he had been intimate with a business executive who U.S. intelligence determined was a Chinese spy. Mr. Huang’s relationship with the woman, who goes by Alice Huang, became a U.S. government concern after surveillance revealed that she was feeding information directly to Beijing. The revelation raised troubling possibilities because Mr. Huang is one of the most powerful figures in the A.I. revolution as well as an influential ally of President Trump. In a message to the company, Mr. Huang apologized. “I was unfaithful to my wife,” he said. “My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.” Nvidia’s board said that it had “no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised,” but that “the board’s inquiry will examine all available information.” It said Mr. Huang “fully supports the review and has committed to cooperating with it.”

The independent board members will choose an outside counsel to investigate. John Rizzo, a company spokesman, said Mr. Huang wouldn’t be part of the selection process. Mr. Huang, 63, will continue to lead the company during the investigation, the board said. As a co-founder, he has set up a unique structure at Nvidia where he dictates all aspects of its business while overseeing some 60 people who directly report to him. “Today’s news will not slow Nvidia,” Mr. Rizzo said. “Jensen is committed to continuing to lead Nvidia as C.E.O. without interruption.” In a brief comment to reporters on Sunday evening as he was about to leave Florida, Mr. Trump defended Mr. Huang. The president said he would “certainly take him” on his upcoming trip to China. “I haven’t heard he’s done anything wrong,” Mr. Trump said. “He dealt with somebody, but you know, so does everybody else.” Mr. Trump said he had not spoken to Mr. Huang about the situation. “I just know he’s a fine person, but you never know what’s going on,” Mr. Trump said. He added that he had no regrets about his own lack of action when he was told about a year ago that the U.S. intelligence community was electronically surveilling Ms. Huang.

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State Stories

Delek CEO downplays White House refinery expansion announcement

Delek US Holdings Inc. won’t add crude oil processing capacity at its Tyler, Texas, refinery despite US Vice President JD Vance’s October announcement that the facility would be expanded using Defense Production Act funds. “We are still talking to the administration, but to make it very, very clear, Tyler is going to stay at 75,000 barrels a day,” Chief Executive Officer Avigal Soreq said on a Friday earnings call, referring to the refinery’s current processing capacity. “There is no material capex that we need to disclose.” The company is discussing “shifting between different kinds of products and that’s it,” Soreq said. “There is not much more to it.”

The CEO’s tone differed notably from Vance’s Oct. 13 campaign stop in Tyler, where he announced Trump administration plans to work with Delek to expand the refinery using the 1950 Defense Production Act. The disconnect complicates Trump administration efforts to boost US refinery capacity amid high fuel prices, exacerbated by conflicts in the Middle East and between Russia and Ukraine. White House efforts to show progress on lowering energy prices ultimately proved unsuccessful in swaying voters in Tuesday’s midterm elections, in which Democrats swept to decisive victories across the country. Soreq said during Friday’s call that Delek is “very thankful” to the Trump administration, noting the company’s appreciation for a commitment to helping rural refineries. The Tyler facility is far smaller than some of the large-scale facilities owned by the country’s oil and refining giants. The White House and Delek didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

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Abbott’s defeat is personal for DA José Garza, who may have more room to act

At an Election Day watch party in a crowded East Austin bar, Travis County District Attorney José Garza watched as early results showed Gina Hinojosa pulling ahead of Gov. Greg Abbott. Through his black-rimmed glasses, he squinted at the TV and smiled. For Garza, Abbott’s defeat is personal: It could mean less state intervention in his office. The three-term Republican governor, whose loss to Hinojosa on Tuesday sent shock waves across the nation, had proposed creating a chief state prosecutor who could monitor cases and take them over from local prosecutors. “For the last six years, statewide Republicans have attempted to make me a central theme of their politics,” Garza told the American-Statesman. “I think what we saw on Tuesday is overwhelming evidence that that failed.”

After years of being in the GOP’s crosshairs for the way he has at times prosecuted cases involving violence — with Republicans often asserting that Garza delivered lenient or questionable sentences — the two-term district attorney may face less resistance from the Capitol as he continues pursuing the progressive agenda voters elected him to carry out: police accountability and criminal justice reform, including less incarceration for people accused of lower-level crimes. Some challenges of his work have cost county taxpayers thousands of dollars to defend. Twice, he overcame attempts to remove him from office under the state’s 2023 “rogue prosecutor” law, which the Texas Legislature passed to remove district attorneys who refuse to prosecute certain crimes, such as abortion-related offenses or low-level marijuana possession. Both complaints, filed by Travis County residents, were dismissed: The first was dismissed because the complainant had an active drug-possession charge; the second was dismissed by a Republican judge, who found no evidence that Garza had broken the law. In one high-profile case, Abbott pardoned a defendant convicted of murder by a Travis County jury. Garza has characterized many of these challenges as political theatrics, which he is eager to leave behind. But not all of his criticism has come from Republicans. Comptroller-elect Sarah Eckhardt and Democratic judges have expressed concerns about missed deadlines for grand jury indictments, an issue that was the focus of ongoing reporting by the Statesman last year. Garza said, “I’m confident that we have addressed it.” County records show that prosecutors are no longer missing deadlines. Soon, Democrats in power and outside groups will be responsible for oversight. Both pledge to provide it, but for different reasons.

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Tom Giovanetti: This election was terrible — and wonderful — for conservatives like me

(Tom Giovanetti is the president of the Institute for Policy Innovation.) It was a terrible, wonderful election for conservatives like me. It was a terrible election for my preferred policy outcomes. The Democratic Party is generally hostile to individual liberty, economic growth, wealth creation, innovation, to families and to the cause of life. Antisemites who refused to denounce the murderous Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel were popularly elected to Congress, including to the formerly august Senate. There are more in Congress than ever who won’t give straight answers to simple questions like “what is a woman?” and “is it okay to surgically sterilize pre-adolescents?” And if we need to replace a sitting Supreme Court justice, it won’t be easy to put another nominee committed to the original meaning and text of the Constitution on the bench. The crew in charge of Congress for the next two years will want to raise taxes, obliterate the senate filibuster, pack the Supreme Court, and maybe even add Democratic-leaning U.S. territories to our list of states. For certain they will prevent the passage of any legislation contributing to freedom, innovation and growth.

For the next two years, folks like me will be fighting to oppose new regulation on AI, data centers, energy abundance, financial privacy, individual liberty — the list goes on and on. About these things, I am concerned but not worried. It’s harder to make major changes in our system than people think, even when one party holds healthy majorities. There will be a lot of forces pushing back. But if some do happen, that’s the price you pay for political malpractice. Which is what Republicans have been guilty of for the past two years. That’s why it was a wonderful election for our constitutional system, if not for my preferred policy outcomes. In our political system, there are no mandates. The people give you an opportunity to govern the country reasonably and prudently — to steward political power well. If you fail, the people get to throw you out. If you don’t like that, blame the politicians who squandered their duty, not the people who judged them for it. Throwing out people who are abject failures at their jobs is the healthy response of a self-governing people. In 2024, in full knowledge of his many incompetencies, vices and transgressions, voters nonetheless elected Trump and Republicans to return the country to its pre-Covid robust economy. Somewhere in there they assumed that congressional Republicans would deter Trump from his worst impulses, as often happened during Trump’s first term. Instead, congressional Republicans became his catamites — enabling, defending and praising his many abuses. Worst still, the speaker of the House exchanged his role as steward of the constitutional duties of the House for chief catamite, and undertook to protect Trump from any and all attempts at congressional oversight. As one of the worst House speakers in American history, Rep. Mike Johnson rightly finds himself speaker no more.

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Texas women face barriers despite the narrowing wage gap, report finds

A typical Texas woman working full-time made 81 cents for every dollar her male counterpart earned, up from 79 cents in 2014, according to a new statewide index report. While the foundation estimates women could make up the majority of the state’s workforce by 2040, the report, authored by Texas Women’s Foundation, reveals that their economic opportunities aren't keeping pace with their growing population. In October, the foundation worked with data scientists at Every Texan to release the report examining women’s economic security, stability and success in Texas. Every Texan is a nonprofit, nonpartisan institute that uses research and data analysis to advocate for policies that support economic opportunity and access to health care.

In the report, a Texas Women’s Economic Opportunity Index compared conditions for women in more than 200 Texas counties, finding disparities in pay, leadership opportunities, overall well-being and childcare. “Texas women and their families need to not just survive, but to thrive,” foundation president and CEO Karen Hughes White said. “We believe that investing in women and their families will create a strong and vibrant Texas for everyone.” The foundation hopes lawmakers and community leaders will use the index to guide future state investments. Since 1985, the nonprofit foundation has invested millions in grants to eliminate the barriers to women’s economic security, stability and success through advocacy and research. Coda Rayo-Garza, senior director of research and data at Every Texan, said the wage gap may be smaller, but it doesn’t mean change is happening overnight. “In 10 years, the gap has only moved 3 cents,” Rayo-Garza said. “It's not going to take years to close that gap; it's going to take generations to close that gap at that rate.”

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What a Blue Texas could mean for Dallas

Every statewide seat up for grabs on Election Day will be filled by a Democrat come January, and the Texas House will have a Democratic majority for the first time in 24 years. That, of course, means a few things just might change once everyone is sworn in. Bills that would’ve died in committee might make it to the House floor, even if they face an uphill battle in the Republican-controlled Senate, where the “Blue Wave” didn’t quite take over. Lawsuits filed by the attorney general’s office could be dropped, and the incoming attorney general has already said he won’t continue suing out-of-state doctors who mail abortion pills to Texas. Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa will also have fellow Democrats in two key leadership positions: Vikki Goodwin, who will preside over the Republican-majority Senate as lieutenant governor, and, likely, Houston Democrat Senfronia Thompson as Speaker of the House. Thompson said Friday that she has enough votes for the job, although the House won’t formally elect its speaker until January. Here are a few things that could change in light of Tuesday’s election results.

The crosswalks might get gay again: After its appeals were denied, the City of Dallas began removing crosswalks that TxDOT and the U.S. Department of Transportation said were “nonstandard.” Included were the city’s Black Lives Matter crosswalks and the rainbow crosswalks in the Oak Lawn neighborhood. Given that some “nonstandard” street markings remain, many said the move by Gov. Greg Abbott and U.S. Transportation Secretary/former MTV Real World roommate/Airport Sartorial Choice Critic/Human Jock Jams CD/champion lumberjack/speed climber/CNN guy Sean Duffy was more about erasure. With a new slate of leaders, might we also see the return of the crosswalks (which also included Black Lives Matter and other themes related to neighborhood or cultural identity) on Dallas streets? Stay tuned. Court strategy: Democrats won 21 appellate court races on Tuesday. That includes the Texas Supreme Court, where the currently all-GOP bench will become five Republicans and four Democrats, including Maggie Ellis, who will become the first LGBTQ+ person to serve as Chief Justice. Judges are expected to apply the law impartially, but their interpretations of that law can differ, sometimes along ideological lines. Attorneys often factor potential appellate success into their strategy, even before a case goes to trial. Take, for instance, the suit between the Highland Park Methodist Church and the United Methodist Church’s Horizon Texas Conference. In its lawsuit and public statements, Highland Park Methodist Church has repeatedly cited previous Texas Supreme Court rulings as being among the reasons for the moves leading up to the suit. “Would you reconsider your strategy if you were a lawyer for Highland Park?” I asked one attorney, who is not representing the church but is familiar with these types of cases. He responded with a meme of Dwight Schrute saying, “Yes! Agreed! Yes! Absolutely!” More Democratic justices on the Texas Supreme Court don’t necessarily mean the court will be friendlier to the denomination than the church. But it’s hard to imagine lawyers on either side aren’t already considering what the new composition could mean.

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League City covers more than 50 Flock cameras after election results

League City crews spent the day Thursday covering over 50 Flock Safety cameras with nylon trash bags to block them from taking photos or videos after voters rejected the city's use of them in Tuesday's election. Officials are now required to remove Flock cameras, which are automated license plate readers, within 72 hours of the official canvassing of the election results, which is on Nov. 17, per a resolution city council members approved in October. However, League City Mayor Nick Long asked city staff to cover the cameras immediately. Long said the city plans to physically take down the cameras once officials sort through contractual issues with Flock Safety, the company that provides Flock cameras.

"We’re moving ahead right now, showing that we are committed to following the will of the voters and removing the cameras starting today," Long said Thursday. Long said that while it's important to listen to the will of the voters, he has safety concerns now that the city's lost the cameras. According to Long, they have helped solve over 300 cases and led to over 120 convictions in the past three years. "I think it’s safe to say that we are less safe without the cameras, but that is what the voters have weighed and they’ve made their decision," Long said. Long said the city spent about $120,000 a year on the cameras out of a $400 million budget. "It’s not a lot of money. One police officer costs more than $120,000 a year. ... Simply reallocating that to one more officer will not produce the same results," Long said. City officials decided to leave the fate of Flock cameras up to citizens after hearing concerns from League City residents about the use of Flock cameras. Fifty-six percent of voters rejected the cameras, while 46% of voters opted to keep the cameras in place.

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Central Texas’ only pediatric program ends

Pausing a Taylor Swift concert film, Shannon McLennan sets up a drip stand into the living room. The mom/nurse prepares an IV bag for her daughter, Oliana Gardner, better known as “Oli,” who lays on the couch. The Leander home’s transformed into a makeshift clinic as McLennan helps with Oli’s hospice care. But prior to entering the treatment, the daughter’s faced a life of medical challenges. Born at 35 weeks, Oli had bilateral microphthalmia — a condition where eyes aren’t developed at birth. Then at 4-years-old, doctors diagnosed her with nonverbal autism. “I am her voice. I’ve always been her voice,” McLennan told KXAN. The latest medical fight arrived following complications brought on from toxic megacolon in 2023.

“We found out her stomach didn’t work at all,” described McLennan of the condition. “It was basically paralyzed.” Since March, Oli’s been in hospice by way of the Dell Children’s Medical Center home hospice program. “I wanted her to stay home,” reasoned McLennan, who said Oli faced enough trauma from hospital visits to put her on high blood pressure medication. “She lived a completely normal life [before toxic megacolon], and then she went from that to being extremely sick, being poked and prodded.” But a call from a Dell doctor three weeks ago informed McLennan their home hospice care would end November 6. “I was shocked,” recalled the mom. “It was the only pediatric program I had ever heard of [in central Texas].”

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At the dawn of a new Texas frontier, advocates consider possibilities for abortion rights

When Gina Hinojosa’s victory in the Texas governor’s race was announced at her election night party Tuesday, 21-year-old Ava Marchant dissolved into tears of mascara-smeared happiness, trading embraces with various members of her family. For Marchant, the win provided hope that laws restricting reproductive rights in Texas could change. “I’m feeling just overcome with joy and relief,” she said. “When Abbott’s been governor, you know, I’ve just felt pressure as a woman in Texas, and I felt scared.” Texas has one of the tightest bans on abortion in the country, restricting the practice except in narrow medical circumstances when the mother’s life or a major bodily function is at risk. Over the past five years, the state’s conservative legislature has passed laws that pioneered new methods to crack down on abortion, while Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton doggedly pursued their enforcement.

Now, Texas will have its first Democratic governor in more than three decades. The Texas House of Representatives has a blue majority, and Democrats were elected to the influential roles of lieutenant governor and attorney general. For voters like Marchant, it feels like a new frontier. Anti-abortion advocates feel it, too. “I’ve been working on pro-life legislation for the last 22 years, and this is the biggest shift I’ve seen in that amount of time,” said John Seago, president of Texas Right to Life. “We expect that dynamics across the board will be significantly more difficult for the pro-life movement in Texas.” Still, the Texas Senate remains red, with Republicans holding 19 of 31 seats. That means legislators interested in expanding abortion rights in the state will have to seek common ground across the aisle, and that champions of the anti-abortion movement in the Senate still have a strong position to block sweeping changes to Texas’ laws. For Texas abortion rights advocates who are accustomed to navigating a highly unfavorable political environment, the changes to the makeup of the state government feel dramatic and surreal. “I’m pretty sure we’re being punked,” joked Kaitlyn Kash following Tuesday’s election.

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With Democrats in charge of Texas, what’s next for UT Austin?

Under Texas Republicans’ leadership, UT Austin has been undergoing a sea change. In just the last two years, the school installed new top leadership, slashed numerous majors, launched an overhaul of its core curriculum, and intervened in the governance of KUT Public Media – Austin’s NPR station that the university has housed for decades. What could happen now that Democrats, who have harshly criticized many of those changes, are about to take charge? The state controls Texas’ public universities in two crucial ways. The governor appoints everyone on their oversight boards, including nine voting members of the Board of Regents for the University of Texas System, which includes UT Austin and a dozen other public institutions. And, the Texas Legislature controls their budgets and the policies they operate under. Both levers of control could transform following the midterm elections, though not immediately.

UT Austin did not respond to a request for comment. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has packed the UT System Board of Regents, who serve six-year staggered terms, with conservative donors and allies. Gina Hinojosa, who defeated Abbott to become the state’s first Democratic governor in more than three decades, will now be in charge of filling those seats. But six of the nine regents are not up for reappointment until 2029 or later, unless they choose to leave sooner. Hinojosa does not have the power to fire them outright. The Texas Senate, which still has a Republican majority, must also confirm Hinojosa’s picks — if she makes them while the Legislature is in session. UT’s former top spokesman Gary Susswein said that could limit Hinojosa’s ability to make sweeping changes right away. Susswein, who now runs a strategic communications firm in Austin, pointed out that former Texas Gov. Rick Perry repeatedly clashed with the regents he had chosen. He wanted them to fire then UT President Bill Powers, and for years, they resisted.

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Without property taxes, school districts on military bases find ways to survive

Back in 2011, three San Antonio school districts were left without 50% of their funding until two months before the school year ended. They made due by pulling from their fund balance, a rainy-day fund they have grown accustomed to using given their unique funding situations. Randolph Field Independent School District, Fort Sam Houston ISD and Lackland ISD are confined entirely to their respective military bases; only seven districts like this exist in the country. Unlike other public school districts, they receive no money from property taxes. In 1950, President Harry S. Truman established the Impact Aid Program to fund local school districts that lose property tax revenue because they include tax exempt areas, like Indian reservations, national parks or military bases.

But the last time the Impact Aid Program was fully funded was 1969. Despite being the nation’s oldest K-12 federal education program, it is one of the only major K-12 federal education program that is not funded at the start of each fiscal year. Impact Aid funding contributes to roughly half of these district’s budgets, creating somewhat of a precarious situation as they hope the funds come through each year. “If we didn’t have those funds, we’d have to shut our door,” said Gary Bates, superintendent of Fort Sam Houston ISD. Each year, the superintendents of the three districts find themselves in the same position: begging lawmakers to continue to fund the program they desperately rely on. “There have been presidents and Congresses that have tried to either eliminate Impact Aid altogether or just severely reduce it,” said Burnie Roper, superintendent of Lackland ISD. “That’s one of the reasons why we go to D.C. at least twice a year to advocate for Impact Aid, because without that funding piece, we won’t be able to survive.” Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump have all attempted to cut the program in one way or another. It currently has a $1.6 billion price tag. Under Trump administration changes to the Department of Education, it was recently relocated to the Department of Labor.

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Dorazio is the lone GOP survivor in San Antonio’s Texas House delegation

Republican state Rep. Mark Dorazio (R-San Antonio) has long been part of the conservative wing that pushed out then-Texas House Speaker Joe Straus (R-San Antonio), wanted only Republicans to chair committees in the Texas House and spent years working to cut Democratic colleagues out of the legislative process. When he returns to the state capitol in January, however, he’ll be on his own in a Texas House dominated by Democrats. Democrats have a majority in the chamber for the first time in many years, Dorazio is the lone Republican left standing in a Bexar County’s 10-member delegation. Suburban Republicans had a tough night on Tuesday, when a blue wave swept out many GOP state lawmakers who didn’t expect to face tough races.

Even in Dorazio’s Texas House District 122, Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Gina Hinojosa carried the district with 52.7%, according to San Antonio political data analyst Bert Santibañez, and a majority of voters even came back to support Democrat Ron Nirenberg in the Bexar County Judge race. When the AP finally called Dorazio’s race this week, he was holding off little-known Democratic challenger Shelly Nickels by about 1,800 votes. San Antonio’s other two Republican state lawmakers, state Reps. Marc LaHood (R-San Antonio) and John Lujan (R-San Antonio), were already long gone. Lujan waged an unsuccessful bid for Congress instead of seeking reelection this year, and the Republican running in his swingy Southside Texas House District 118 was defeated handily by Democrat Kristian Carranza. LaHood conceded on election night to Democratic challenger Zack Dunn — the first Democrat to win his Northside Texas House District 121 since 1981. His 54-46% victory marked a 13-point swing from LaHood’s win there just two years ago.

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The unlikely college football powerhouse fueled by Texas gas money

From the moment James Hurley arrived as president of Tarleton State University in 2019, he made it his mission to spread the word about what he considered the best-kept secret in America. He has driven tens of thousands of miles across Texas, meeting with hundreds of high school administrators and eating more burritos in his car than he would care to remember. There were stops in places without cell service and towns with one stoplight. But nowhere was too small to visit if he could put Tarleton State on the radar of college applicants. Hurley knew that more students could also mean more cash from a $46 billion state endowment flush with Texas oil money that backs certain public universities. And if there was one surefire way to boost the school’s profile—beyond endless drives around the state—it was college sports and the Tarleton State Texans.

“Athletics will never be the most important endeavor we embark upon,” Hurley says, “but it is the most visible.” As enrollment surges, Tarleton State has committed $1.5 billion to campus infrastructure projects, many of them backed by the Permanent University Fund that generates money from Texas oil fields and distributes money to some public schools. And it’s no coincidence that an athletic program that traditionally prided itself on its national-title winning rodeo team is making waves across college sports. This season, the undefeated Tarleton State football team reached No. 1 in the Football Championship Subdivision for the first time in school history, and it’s planning the leap to the sport’s highest level. Meanwhile, the basketball teams that recently made the move from Division II to Division I are beginning their seasons in a new $130 million arena that would be the envy of many of the richest programs in the country. On the baseball diamond, a program that was also Division II a few years ago has already made the NCAA tournament for the first time and won a game.

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Cullen Davis, millionaire oilman acquitted in Fort Worth mansion killings, dies

Cullen Davis, who was one of the richest men in America when, in the summer of 1976, he was accused of wearing a black wig as he used a revolver to fire upon four people at a mansion on a remote hilltop in southwest Fort Worth, killing two of them, has died. He was 93. Davis, who was acquitted at his four-month capital murder trial and professed his innocence ever since, died Friday at his home in Colleyville, a stepson, Trey Davis, said on Sunday. The cause was not clear. Slain in one of Fort Worth’s most infamous crimes was Andrea Wilborn, the 12-year-old daughter of Davis’ estranged wife Priscilla. Also killed was Stan Farr, a former TCU basketball player who was Priscilla Davis’ live-in boyfriend.

Priscilla Davis was shot once in the chest and survived, and Gus “Bubba” Gavrel Jr., a chance visitor to the mansion off South Hulen Street, was left paralyzed by a bullet in his spine. Priscilla Davis insisted from the outset that the gunman was her estranged husband, Cullen Davis, a multimillionaire oil heir. A judge had ordered him that morning to increase Priscilla Davis’ support payments to $5,000 per month and to pay her attorney’s fees. Cullen Davis had earlier been barred by a court order from going onto the property. A man dressed in black broke into the home. Andrea was shot once in the chest and was dragged or chased into the basement, where she bled to death in the utility room. Priscilla Davis, who was locked in a bitter divorce dispute with her husband, arrived home later with Farr. They confronted the killer in the house. Shot in the chest, as she lay wounded, Priscilla saw Farr get gunned down. She fled the house when the killer stepped outside to confront another couple.

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Grand Prairie ISD responds to theater play cancellation lawsuit, says ‘uncertainty’ guided decision

Grand Prairie ISD has responded to a lawsuit filed by a female student who’s casting as a male character in a play led to it being cancelled. The district said an “uncertain legal landscape” and “enforcement environment” played into their decision. 17-year-old Ana Mota was cast last month to play Seymour, the lead male role, in “Little Shop of Horrors” at South Grand Prairie High School, but then district officials told her it might violate state law if she played the character. Mota was told she would have to share the lead female role with another student. When Mota refused, the play was cancelled and replaced with Disney’s “Frozen.” Mota sued in federal court last week, arguing the district violated Title IX — a federal statute that protects students from being discriminated against for their sex. She requested the court reinstate “Little Shop of Horrors” and her lead role.

Mota’s initial lawsuit stated that SB 12 “contains no text that can reasonably be read to require an actor’s biological sex to match the sex of a fictional scripted character.” The lawsuit also argues that even if SB 12 barred Mota from the role, federal antidiscrimination law supersedes state law. The district’s response, which states AI was used to assist in some portions, said it was complying with Texas Senate Bill 571 – which requires school officials to report ‘educator misconduct’ and lays out penalties if they don’t – and a section of SB 12 that bars schools from providing “instruction, guidance, activities, or programming regarding sexual orientation or gender identity to students.” “While Plaintiff’s role as Seymour was to remain a male character, not a transgender character, and the intent was to portray Plaintiff as a male,” the response states. “The concern was that the audience or other third parties may not view Plaintiff as a male, and that supporting a production featuring two females engaged in a romantic relationship might place the educators involved in the production of the musical in peril of committing ‘educator misconduct’ and cause the District to run afoul of state law.” The district said there’s no guidance from regulators or legal precedent on if SB 12 would bar a girl from playing a male character with a female romantic interest, creating legal uncertainty.

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National Stories

Trump says he was kidding about hiring Dana White as press secretary

President Trump said Sunday that he was joking about Ultimate Fighting Championship Chief Executive Dana White becoming his next White House press secretary. “You would have thought that people would have said he’s having a good time,” Trump told reporters. “I will tell you I was only kidding.” Trump posted online Saturday that he had asked White to be his White House press secretary, but didn’t indicate whether White had accepted. In the social-media post, Trump said that he requested White bring “assistants,” including mixed martial artists Islam Makhachev, Khabib Nurmagomedov, Justin Gaethje and others, to “defend us against the Lunatic Left.” Trump said Sunday that the list of fighters he mentioned was an indication that he was joking.

“I was kidding but I think Dana likes the idea and he is a very capable guy,” Trump said. “That was an example of something where I was kidding and then people said ‘you know that’s actually a pretty good idea.’” White said that he would be meeting with Trump in Washington on Monday. Trump confirmed that he and White would meet in person, but said that White was coming “for other reasons.” Trump has approached White before about the job, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

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Democrats amp up Trump investigation threats, Blanche counters he may probe lawmakers

Top Democrats are ramping up oversight of the Trump administration and businesses it has partnered with, while Attorney General Todd Blanche warned he could counterinvestigate lawmakers conducting probes. Democrats romped to majorities in both the House and the Senate during Tuesday’s midterm elections, putting them in position to seize control of committee gavels and subpoena power in January. The electoral rout leaves Democrats with at least 54 Senate seats and 254 seats in the House of Representatives as votes continue to be counted in several states. Democrats vowed to investigate both President Donald Trump’s White House and businesses that have worked with the administration. CNBC reported on Thursday that Democrats are expected to take an aggressive approach to probing businesses, especially those companies with ties to the Trump family. The technology, cryptocurrency and prediction market industries, among others, could immediately be in the crosshairs.

“If you’ve been making your profits by cheating American families and scamming your investors, you better get ready for some investigations — serious ones,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the incoming chair of the Senate Banking Committee, on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “The American people are just damn sick of this.” Blanche, Trump’s former personal attorney, whom the Senate narrowly confirmed as the nation’s top cop earlier this year, took umbrage at the Democrats’ plans for investigations and said he may launch his own investigations against members of Congress. “There could be,” Blanche said Sunday when pressed on CNN’s “State of the Union” about whether the administration will counterinvestigate Democrats. “When the threats become so vile and so dangerous that you are telling people in college that they better be careful if they want to work in the Trump administration because somebody will come after them, at some point you have to draw the line.” Blanche was referring to comments made by Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., who said during a University of Chicago event that she wants “young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I go work for the Trump administration?’...I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want. And so let me avoid participating in that.’ I want that deterrence message sent.”

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Schools are closing more quickly in US. Research shows it's not enough

Minutes before first bell, Penny Núñez-Brandão scanned the crowd outside Glen Cove Elementary School, looking for familiar faces. “I don’t see any,” the fifth grader told her mom one morning in August. “None of my friends are coming.” The start of a new school year can be nerve-wracking under any circumstances. But for Penny and thousands of students across the U.S., this academic year brought the added difficulty of adjusting to an entirely new school after their previous ones shuttered. As U.S. birth rates continue a multidecade slide and state and federal education funding dries up, an increasing number of cash-strapped school districts around the country have resorted to closing campuses to save money. A total of 1,156 schools closed during the last academic year — the highest number since the pandemic, according to an analysis of federal data by Big Local News at Stanford University. At the same time, new research shows student enrollment has fallen much faster than schools are closing, suggesting more painful financial choices lie ahead.

The Vallejo City Unified School District, a working-class district near San Francisco, serves half as many students as it did two decades earlier. District leaders have closed five campuses since 2025 — a quarter of its schools. They’ve also placed up to a third of all staff positions on the chopping block to help plug a staggering $36 million deficit. Still, research shows closing schools rarely yields the financial relief districts hope for. Busing students to their reassigned schools, severance for pink-slipped staff and security for empty facilities often eat up any savings. School closures can also set students back academically and make it harder to attract teachers, who may worry the jobs aren’t stable. Closing schools can also trigger a downward spiral, as frustrated families flee to charter or private schools or other districts. In Vallejo, some parents said they chose to homeschool this fall or were planning to sell their homes and move to neighboring districts. “Families are literally packing up their kids and moving away,” said Penny’s mother, Kimberly Núñez-Brandão, who already moved her older son to a competing charter school. She recently attended Glen Cove’s curriculum night for families and shared her shock at learning Penny’s new teacher had 32 students in his first class. “They already overwhelmed teachers with 30-plus students,” she said. “Who’s winning here?”

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'Nerve-wracking' wait in Mississippi for US Senate vote result

Mississippi residents faced a "nerve-wracking" wait to see whether the southern state elects its first Black senator in more than a century as vote-counting dragged on Sunday after this past week's US midterms. Voters who spoke to AFP in the state capital Jackson on Saturday anticipated that history could be in the making in the whisker-close race between Democrat Scott Colom, an African-American man, and Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith, a white woman. With 97 percent of the vote counted by Sunday afternoon, Colom was 2,574 votes ahead of Hyde-Smith -- a gap of just 0.3 percentage points. Mississippi has not elected a Democratic senator since 1982, and Colom would be its first Black senator in nearly 150 years -- since the Reconstruction era following the American Civil War that ended slavery.

Gregory Glass, a 47-year-old restaurant owner, himself an African-American, said a victory for Colom would be "historic" but admitted to having "bittersweet" feelings about that. "It should have happened sooner than that, especially in Mississippi, in a state that has so many African-Americans in it," said Glass. According to the US Census Bureau, more than one-third of the state's population, long viewed as a bastion of Republican politics, is Black. A victory for Colom would also put another staunchly Republican state -- including Texas, South Carolina and Kansas -- in the Democrats' column for Senate in Tuesday's election. The midterms were a resounding win for Democrats, who seized control of both houses of Congress as voters nationwide delivered a stinging rebuke to Republican President Donald Trump. But the count is not over yet. The unusually long wait reflects Mississippi's election procedures, which allow officials several days to process mail-in and provisional ballots -- potentially enough to decide the contest. Jermal Clark, election commissioner for Hinds County, which includes the city of Jackson, said that they were still going through so-called "affidavit" provisional ballots.

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Biden says cancer fight means he will scale back book promotion tour

Former president Joe Biden said on Sunday that his battle with an aggressive form of prostate cancer will prevent him from doing as many promotional appearances as he had hoped for his upcoming presidential memoir. “Some days are better than others. It hasn’t stopped me. But sometimes it slows me down,” Biden, 83, said in a statement about the Nov. 17 release of “Promise Me, America.” “What that means is, unfortunately, I won’t be able to do as many conversations about my book as I’d hoped. However, I’m hopeful the words on the page speak for themselves.” The book chronicles Biden’s four years in the White House, the challenges his administration confronted and the decisions that shaped his presidency.

Biden’s publisher, Little Brown, initially announced that he would do a publicity tour accompanying the release of the memoir, something that is common for books written by former presidents. A spokesperson for Biden declined to provide additional details. Biden announced in May 2025 that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. He subsequently underwent radiation and hormone therapy. In August, his son Hunter Biden said the cancer had spread further and was causing significant pain. The illness has sharply curtailed Biden’s post-presidential life, leaving him increasingly reliant on a small circle of family members and longtime aides even as he has sought to shape his political legacy. Questions about Biden’s age, stamina and mental acuity dogged his presidency and ultimately derailed his reelection bid. Those concerns crystallized during his June 27, 2024, debate against Donald Trump, when a weak-voiced Biden repeatedly lost his train of thought, struggled to finish answers and failed to mount a forceful case against his opponent.

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Mysterious request scrambles major Supreme Court gun case

The Supreme Court received an unusual request late last week in one of its biggest cases this term, a challenge to state and local bans on AR-15s and other semiautomatic weapons. In a one-paragraph filing, the lead plaintiff, Cutberto Viramontes, asked to be dismissed from the case. The 36-year-old Illinois resident had sued officials in Cook County in 2021, arguing that a local ban on semiautomatic rifles violated his Second Amendment rights, a dispute that spiraled into the Supreme Court case the justices have agreed to hear next month. Mr. Viramontes’s court filing offered no explanation for his decision. It is also unlikely to derail the challenge, in which the justices will weigh the constitutionality of such gun bans. That’s because the court agreed to consider two similar cases, Mr. Viramontes’s challenge to Cook County’s restrictions and a parallel case from Connecticut.

But the last-minute shake-up, less than a month before the Dec. 2 argument, injects questions and chaos into what is shaping up to be a landmark Second Amendment case. In recent years, the court’s conservative majority have announced a series of rulings expanding gun rights, and people on both sides of the debate have long been anticipating the showdown over assault weapons bans. “It’s unprecedented for a gun-rights plaintiff to abruptly pull their name from a major Supreme Court case with zero explanation,” said Janet Carter, managing director of Second Amendment Litigation at Everytown Law, the legal arm of Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates tighter guns laws. She added that “in a case with stakes this high,” she thought that “the public deserves to know why the lead plaintiff is suddenly walking away.” Reached by phone, Mr. Viramontes declined to say why he wanted to drop out of the case. “I would not like to make a comment,” he said. Mr. Viramontes is represented by Cooper & Kirk, a law firm that has litigated other Second Amendment challenges. The firm declined to comment.

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Rubio sees little hope of diplomatic breakthrough to Mideast deadlock amid 'outrageous' Iranian demands

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has accused Iran of “outrageous and ridiculous” demands as efforts to reach a lasting resolution in the Middle East war appeared stalled. Speaking with reporters in Florida on Sunday evening before traveling to Paris for the G7 foreign ministers’ meeting, Rubio indicated the two sides remain far apart on negotiations, after Tehran proposed shortening the timetable for restarting talks from seven days to two. Rubio said President Donald Trump would prefer to solve “this and every problem diplomatically,” but added that “sometimes that’s not possible, unfortunately.” Energy prices moved lower on Monday morning after President Trump said Sunday that further strikes were “highly unlikely” if negotiations progressed toward a strong agreement. Brent crude, the international price benchmark, was down 0.75% at $97.58 per barrel by 5:25 a.m. ET. Meanwhile, U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures for December delivery were trading 0.42% lower at $90.45.

Trump said in a CNN interview prior to Rubio’s comments that a resumption of hostilities in the more than eight-month-long conflict was unlikely, provided that talks to constrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions and reopen the Strait of Hormuz can progress. “I wouldn’t say we’re on the verge of a breakthrough,” Rubio said. “Right now, it hasn’t been very productive because the Iranian demands are simply not just unacceptable but, in some cases, outrageous and ridiculous and really not realistic.” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said Monday that Tehran wants U.S. sanctions lifted and the war ended on all fronts before negotiations begin.

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Lead Stories

With Susie Wiles’s departure, big business loses a sympathetic ear

Lobbyists and surrogates for some of the world’s largest companies had a go-to strategy when they saw no other path to head off a damaging policy from President Trump: call Susie Wiles. Throughout her tenure, Trump’s departing chief of staff became a sounding board for corporations and advocacy groups trying to influence the administration, according to people familiar with the matter. Her departure, announced Friday, will leave many businesses searching for a new interlocutor within the White House. Leading Wall Street executives have often turned to Wiles and her staff. JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Jamie Dimon and his team have been in regular contact with her, as well as her former deputy, James Blair, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser has also had some interactions with both Wiles and incoming chief of staff Stephen Miller, according to people familiar with the matter.

It was Wiles, along with Vice President JD Vance, who helped broker a truce between Trump and Elon Musk after their public falling out. Musk recently poured roughly $500 million into Republican midterm efforts. Wiles was known to encourage companies to invest domestically. After a foreign auto manufacturer announced a new plant was being built in the U.S. earlier this year, Wiles texted “thank you” to officials at the company, according to a person who received the text message. But while Wiles was viewed as a sympathetic ear by corporate titans, their entreaties to her sometimes failed. Shortly after Trump imposed sweeping tariffs last year, a healthcare-trade group contacted Wiles and advocated for the administration to pare back the trade levies, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. The tariffs continued despite the lobbying effort, the person said. White House spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez said both Wiles and Miller have “tremendous” relationships. “This administration will continue building powerful partnerships, advancing the president’s America First agenda, and delivering historic wins for the American people,” Alvarez said. Wiles didn’t return requests for comment.

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Houston police to stop alerting ICE during traffic stops

The stunning wave of Republican defeats is already having an effect in Texas. Mayor John Whitmire of Houston said he was directing city police officers on Friday to limit their cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement during traffic stops, bucking a policy imposed on Texas’s largest city by Gov. Greg Abbott. Under an executive order from the mayor, Houston police officers will no longer alert ICE agents when they encounter an unauthorized migrant during routine traffic stops or in connection with other low level infractions. Instead, officers will only alert ICE in cases where a person has been arrested and is being brought to, or has already arrived at, a county jail. “If they’re charged with a new crime, we’ll let ICE know as we get them to the jailhouse,” Mr. Whitmire said in an interview with The New York Times. “We just are not going to deal with the nonviolent contacts.”

The change in how Houston officers interact with immigration agents was a direct result of Tuesday’s election, Mr. Whitmire said. Mr. Abbott lost his bid for re-election to what would have been a record fourth term as governor. Sign up to get J. David Goodman's articles emailed to you. J. David Goodman is a Houston-based reporter covering the people and politics of Texas. “The governor was requiring us to contact ICE,” Mr. Whitmire said. “It created a lot of anxiety” among Houston residents. He added that the shift was “certainly consistent with the new leadership in Austin,” referring to the slate of Democrats elected to every major statewide position in Texas on Tuesday. “We won’t have new leadership until January,” Mr. Whitmire said. “But I’m willing to make a responsible decision that in the next two months we’re going to go to a more effective policy.” A spokesman for Mr. Abbott’s office declined to comment. The change comes as prosecutors in Harris County are pursuing a criminal case against an ICE agent who struck a Mexican construction worker in October with a vehicle in Houston, injuring him. A grand jury indicted the agent, Mario Alberto Morales, late last month. The county’s prosecutors were also investigating the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo who was killed during an encounter in July with ICE agents in Houston.

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Justice Department intervenes in Planned Parenthood lawsuit in Texas

The Trump administration is intervening in a high-profile Texas lawsuit against Planned Parenthood, taking ownership of a case that could fall by the wayside under the state’s newly elected Democrat attorney general. The Justice Department outlined its intention Friday night in a court filing in the five-year-old lawsuit, which had been championed by outgoing Republican attorney general of Texas Ken Paxton. The suit accused Planned Parenthood clinic operators in the state and the national umbrella organization, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, of committing Medicaid fraud. The move, just days after an election loss in deep red Texas, was a signal that the Trump administration could seek to supplant the Democrats’ power in former Republican strongholds, where officials had used litigation to further their agenda on social and policy issues. Under President Biden, the Justice Department in 2021 declined to step into the Planned Parenthood case.

The Texas suit accused Planned Parenthood of fraud for collecting Medicaid reimbursements while Texas had sought to remove it as a Medicaid provider. Planned Parenthood has denied the claims, noting that courts did not bar it from collecting payments during the litigation. The state is seeking to recover $1.8 billion, which includes Medicaid reimbursements, interest and penalties. Planned Parenthood, which recently reported annual revenue of $2.1 billion, said that such a payout could result in its closure. A lawyer for Planned Parenthood said that the Justice Department’s intervention showed that President Trump was “undeterred by the election results.” “This is an effort by the Trump administration to shut us down,” said Susan Baker Manning, general counsel for Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “It is going to weaponize the Department of Justice against us.” Representatives of the Texas Attorney General’s office and the Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.

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Trump signals combative next two years with elevation of Stephen Miller

After a brutal election that gutted Republican power in Washington, President Trump has chosen one of his most loyal and divisive advisers as the new White House chief of staff, signaling a combative posture for the final two years of the Trump era. Stephen Miller, a fierce political operative who has been at Trump’s side for more than a decade, has been a vocal advocate of the no-holds-barred style of governing that delighted the president’s most die-hard MAGA supporters—and was repudiated by much of the rest of the country on Election Day. He succeeds Susie Wiles, who was seen as a moderating force on a sometimes impulsive president. Miller, 41 years old, was the architect of the aggressive immigration enforcement policies that turned off many voters, according to polls, contributing to Republicans’ historic losses on Tuesday. His elevation signals that the president has no intention of backing away from the immigration agenda on which he built his political brand.

Miller is expected to push a maximalist approach to executive power now that Democrats control Congress. In the days after the election, Trump sent early signals that he would work with Democrats, but Miller has long advocated for a confrontational response to the wave of investigations that the newly ascendant opposing party is expected to launch. Though Miller has at times pushed for a muscular foreign policy, particularly in South America, he has suggested they wind down the deeply unpopular war in Iran, according to people familiar with the discussions, and called for refocusing on policies like immigration that made Trump popular with his base. Miller, when contacted Friday, directed questions to the White House. “He’s going to do a great job,” Trump told reporters after arriving at an event in Florida. An early test for Miller, according to associates of the president, is whether he can satisfy Trump’s desire to punish his perceived political enemies. One of Trump’s biggest frustrations with Wiles, according to administration officials, is that she and the Justice Department weren’t doing enough to go after people seen as leaking classified material, to jail reporters who publish such material and to prosecute his opponents. Though Miller was influential during Trump’s first term, his purview has greatly expanded in the second one. He has overseen policy rollouts concerning the president’s trade war and targeting of elite universities, along with spearheading the Pentagon’s unprecedented campaign of striking alleged drug-carrying boats in the Caribbean, killing many on board.

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Sotomayor sees U.S. in ‘rough patch’ for rule of law

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said Saturday that the U.S. is experiencing a “rough patch” for rule of law and civic discourse, but one that can be overcome through a greater commitment to civility, equality and educating young people about America’s enduring values. “I think we're in a rough patch right now. There's so many challenges to it on so many different levels. This is a really critical point in our history,” Sotomayor said. “Is it going to end tomorrow? No.” “It's going to take some hard work. I don't know how long it's going to take to put us back on an even keel,” the Obama appointee said during an appearance at a conference in Virginia exploring the history and future of American democracy. “I'm hoping it's … in my lifetime. But even if it's not in my lifetime, I genuinely believe it will happen.” During an hourlong appearance at George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate, Sotomayor did not comment directly on the outcome of this week’s midterms.

However, she did mention the “outpouring of voters” Tuesday as a positive sign of civic engagement. Voter turnout was about 49%, a figure exceeded in modern midterm elections only in 2018. Sotomayor lamented the fact that in recent years the electoral choices have seemed so stark to many people that they are scared by the possible outcome. “Every election now seems really important to people because they are, and that sense of fear, I know, is not comfortable for many people,” the justice said. ”I think we'll come out of this.” Sotomayor also pointed to a decline in civility as contributing to a fraying of America’s civic engagement. “That someone disagrees with you doesn't make them a bad person, and that's something we've forgotten,” the justice said. “Our politics today have devolved into personal name-calling, which is something that wasn't quite what I was used to when I was growing up … It was always a debate about ideas, rarely about people's personal motivations or about people's personality or personal peccadilloes."

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State Stories

Secretary of State's office to audit voter registration system

The Texas Secretary of State’s office is auditing its voter registration system after a massive backlog of applications sent counties scrambling ahead of the midterm election. “While there is still work to do to wrap up our 2026 election cycle, it is important that we continue to think ahead about the needs of our Texas election community,” Director of Elections Christina Adkins wrote in an email to election officials Friday. “And to create a plan of action on how to address the ongoing concerns with the TEAM system.” The TEAM system has been around since the early 2000s, but was overhauled in July 2025 by the state and a Louisiana-based vendor called Civix. Since then, county officials have complained of major glitches they said slowed their work ahead of the midterm.

Adkins said the state’s TEAM system, which stands for Texas Election Administration Management, will undergo an audit beginning in mid-December. The results will be available during the upcoming legislative session. In the office’s request for the third-party audit, it wrote that it had identified “critical areas of concern.” “These continued areas of concern pose a direct risk to election officials’ ability to meet its legal obligations for statewide election administration in an efficient manner,” the request from the secretary of state’s office said. Election officials across the state reported smooth and successful elections, but said they had to work overtime throughout the season to rectify issues with system errors — including the backlogs of voter registrations reported in September. During early voting, turnout numbers lagged on the state’s own website because counties had to manually enter mail voter data into the TEAM system, one by one.

Read this article at San Antonio Express-News - Subscribers Only

State-appointed managers in Texas takeover school districts brace for imminent removal

Appointed school board managers in some of Texas’ districts under a state takeover said Friday that they are preparing to be out of a job as soon as January. Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa campaigned to stop state takeovers in public schools and to replace Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath with an educator on her first day in office, which would be Jan. 19. The new commissioner could immediately change the governance of the eight districts that were taken over by the state because campuses persistently failed academic standards. During a state takeover, a commissioner appoints managers who assume the authority of locally elected trustees. Hinojosa’s appointee could replace any or all appointed board managers at any time with new appointees, education experts said. Although Hinojosa hasn’t said if or when a new commissioner would replace appointed leaders, presidents of Houston and Fort Worth ISD’s board of managers said they’re making plans now.

That includes speaking with elected trustees about what transition of power would look like to ensure they best serve students, they said. Ric Campo, the Houston ISD board of managers president, said some of the state-appointed managers plan to meet with the elected trustees Monday to lay out a “robust” plan. Campo said he’s making the assumption that the trustees must be ready by January. “I’ve always said — in public and to the elected trustees — that we’re working ourselves out of a job, and we’re happy to do it,” Campo told the Tribune. “What we really want to make sure happens is that we have a great, smooth transition, and that the elected trustees, when they do come back, are prepared and have the information they need to do the best job they can.” Trustees in districts under such state intervention remain in office but do not have the power to vote on anything, including to pass a budget or change board policy. The state takeover of HISD began in 2023, and Morath already planned to announce the timeline for the district to return to elected control by June.

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Audio: 911 calls reveal confusion, chaos after Florida jet crash

When a Learjet 60 plummeted to the ground near a residential area in Florida on Nov. 1, people nearby frantically called 9-1-1, though they weren’t quite sure what they’d seen. On Saturday, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office released recordings of several calls alerting authorities that the Learjet 60 bound from Austin to the Bahamas had crashed into the ground near Cresthaven. “An airplane or a rocket – something fell from the sky,” one caller said. “We felt our house shake and then we heard an explosion when we ran outside.” Another caller thought a bomb had gone off, reporting that the impact caused a crater that still appeared to be on fire. “I would say take everybody out of it,” the caller said, seeming to suggest that officials evacuate the area. Meanwhile, a 9-1-1 caller who said she was a retired police officer reported a motorist near where the plane crashed into the ground, noting she was unsure of his involvement.

Soon, first responders swarmed the scene, finding a crater where the plane crashed, killing all nine people on board. Debris was flung onto roofs and homes of nearby buildings. The crash killed Austin entrepreneur Adam Robinson, 45, his wife Helen Sharp their children, Emma, 4, and Charlie, 2, and Anita Maria Cetina, the children’s nanny. Also killed were their friends, Charmi Fehr and Rachael Reed, the pilot, 55-year-old Jeff Gregory, and copilot Nathalia Filgueiras, 20. While the National Transportation Safety Board has not determined the cause of the crash, investigators found pieces of the plane’s tail some 3.8 miles away from the crash site, indicating the parts broke off before impact.

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Ted Cruz says Democrats are ‘drunk on their own power’ after midterm wins

Senator Ted Cruz said Democrats are "drunk on their own power" after their midterm victories, predicting the party will overreach despite what he described as a "generationally damaging" defeat for Republicans. Speaking on his Verdict podcast Friday, the Texas Republican argued Democratic leaders will interpret their gains as a mandate for a broader progressive agenda, even though he believes voters were primarily expressing frustration over economic concerns. "These guys are drunk on their own power," Cruz said. "They are high on their own supply."

Cruz claims Democratic leaders are already misreading the election results. "The radicals are running the Democrat Party," he said. "They believe they have a mandate." The comments came as Cruz assessed the scale of Republican losses nationwide, which handed Democrats control of both chambers of Congress and expanded the party's Senate majority. "We're already at 54 Democrats. We could be at 56," Cruz said. "That is generationally damaging." Cruz argued Senate defeats are particularly difficult to overcome because senators serve six-year terms, potentially locking in Democratic gains for years. "It will take six years to have the chance to turn them around," he said. "Retaking the majority in the Senate is very, very difficult." Texas political analyst Scott Braddock, editor of Quorum Report, offered a different interpretation on his show, arguing Democrats won because James Talarico, Gina Hinojosa and other candidates remained focused on voters' economic concerns. "Republicans kept trying to bait them into having arguments about culture wars," Braddock said on his podcast. Instead, he said, Democrats stayed "laser focused" on affordability and the economy. "It's the economy, stupid, and guess what? It still is."

Read this article at Newsweek - Subscribers Only

Democratic-majority Tarrant County Commissioners Court could redefine relationship with Republican sheriff

Newly elected Tarrant County Judge Alisa Simmons and Sheriff Bill Waybourn haven’t seen eye to eye when it comes to how the Sheriff’s Office runs the Tarrant County Jail. The two had a heated discussion during September’s commissioner court meeting over a jail death earlier this year. Waybourn told Simmons she was releasing incorrect information about what happened surrounding that jail death. “You keep saying these things and you keep putting rhetoric out there that was not true,” Waybourn said. Simmons answered, “When you get to the truth, you have to share the truth.” It’s among one of several clashes the two had during Simmons’ tenure as commissioner. Waybourn has been the focus of criticism from Simmons and other Democratic leaders over accountability from jail deaths. In the past, Simmons has requested a full review of jail operations by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Now, as several seats in Tarrant County flipped blue, including Simmons’ victory as county judge in the midterm election, the sheriff’s office could be facing more calls for transparency and accountability from the new commissioners court Democratic majority. In a statement Wednesday, Waybourn congratulated Simmons and other newly elected officials. “Public safety is not a political issue; it is a fundamental duty that requires cooperation, transparency, and professional collaboration across all levels of county government,” Waybourn said. “As we prepare for this upcoming administrative transition, my office is fully committed to working constructively and professionally with the incoming elected officials in our county.” KERA News reached out to Simmons and will update this story with any response. In the past Simmons has been vocal in her concerns over jail deaths, the lack of details provided about those deaths and the legal troubles brought upon the county. She’s also called on Waybourn to resign, calling him “unqualified to serve.” “Families deserve more than that,” Simmons said. “And people in custody, many of whom have not been convicted of any crime, deserve more than that. This jail is not the execution chamber.”

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Tarrant County went blue in a historic election. Is the shift here to stay?

Tarrant County voters chose a Republican over a Democrat in only five of the 58 contested races at the federal, state and county levels. Is the shift to blue here to stay? Democrats without a doubt had a stellar election on Tuesday, Nov. 3, SMU political science professor Cal Jillson said. The results were overwhelmingly blue, and far better for Democrats than anyone could have imagined, Jillson said. But it doesn’t mean Tarrant County, or Texas, is officially blue. “This is just an opportunity for the Democrats to govern, and they will be evaluated just as Republicans have,” Jillson said. “Republicans were found wanting and replaced. If Democrats are found wanting, they could be replaced too.” In the 2018 midterm election during President Donald Trump’s first term, Tarrant County went for Democrat Beto O’Rourke over Republican incumbent Ted Cruz by less than 1 percentage point, about 4,000 votes in the U.S. Senate race.

Though O’Rourke did not win, he was one of nine Democrats to win in Tarrant County of the 47 contested federal, state and county races. His success in Tarrant County was remarkable for Democrats of the reliably red county, but Republicans continued to take the majority of the wins until this year. The GOP losses on Tuesday were so widespread and historic that the election will be studied for years to come, Texas Politics Project research director Joshua Blank said. No one imagined Democrats sweeping the statewide ticket, he said, but Blank is still wary to call Texas blue. “Texas is not blue, Texas is competitive,” Blank said. He isn’t willing to call Tarrant County blue either. Tarrant saw the same pattern as many parts of the state, where fast-growing areas near urban centers swung heavily to the left. Though the turnout was historic, there are still more Republican voters out there who didn’t cast a ballot, Blank said.

Read this article at Fort Worth Star-Telegram - Subscribers Only

Bobby Pulido, the new scion of South Texas Democrats

Tejano star Bobby Pulido crushed the incumbent Republican Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz by 24 points last night in a fierce blue backlash against gerrymandering, immigration crackdowns, and the high cost of living in South Texas’ Congressional District 15. With 30 years of touring and two Latin Grammys under his belt, Pulido was a formidable opponent for the lesser-known congresswoman from the start. His nostalgic 1990s hits became the soundtrack to a moderate, good-vibes campaign pushing back against the extremism of President Donald Trump, who previously won the predominantly Hispanic district by a stunning 18 points in 2024. The red ripple and gerrymandered maps that ushered in De La Cruz as the first Republican to represent the 15th district proved to be a short-lived and failed experiment, one of countless casualties in last night’s blue tsunami. The congresswoman’s last-ditch efforts to distance herself from the immigration raids that have disrupted life across South Texas proved futile as Pulido’s star status propelled him higher and higher in the polls.

He performed at countless quinceañeras, the Texas Democratic Party convention, and at rallies alongside Gina Hinojosa and James Talarico. On October 17, the 53-year-old musician gave his final performance, La Ultima Desvelada, at a sold-out arena in Edinburg. But now that the music’s over, constituents will see what kind of congressman Pulido will be. Asked about how he connects with voters on important issues, Pulido told the Texas Observer in a July interview, “Issues are more important to journalists than they are to people. I think the people don’t look at it as ‘How do you stand on this issue?’ It’s ‘Can I trust that you care about me?’” He’s spent more time performing “Desvelado” for local audiences and taking pictures with fans than diving into his vaguely populist, centrist platform. “For over 30 years, you played my music at your weddings, your quinceañeras, and your carne asadas, and the past year you welcomed me into those same celebrations on the campaign trail,” Pulido said in a statement to the Texas Tribune. “Tonight, you trusted me with something even bigger than a song. You trusted me with your future, and I will work hard everyday to honor it.” The beloved figure will be joining the ranks of a not-so-beloved coalition that helped fund his campaign: the Blue Dog Democrats. The conservative Democratic group established in the 1990s is notorious for siding with Republicans in Congress on critical issues like abortion, gun control, and border security. Their numbers have been dwindling over the past decade, but Pulido’s victory alongside that of Johnny Garcia in Texas Congressional District 35, fortifies the group’s hold on South Texas—alongside Henry Cuellar of Laredo and Vicente Gonzalez in Brownsville, who both also handily fended off the GOP’s attempts to take them out last night.

Read this article at Texas Observer - Subscribers Only

A conservative billionaire, film studio and years long Texas fraud

Mindy Raymond thought she had found the job of her dreams. The veteran film and TV producer was given the chance to be president of a burgeoning movie studio in her home state of Texas. It was 2017 and the company was called New Republic Studios, which had just taken over the former Spiderwood Studios lot outside Bastrop. The nascent production house was led by John Robison, a charismatic, smooth talker with influential connections throughout the Republican party and a big vision. “Huge. It was massive,” Raymond recalled. “We had architects and designers … We wanted to be the biggest studio in Texas.” But it may have been little more than a dream. Over more than two years in business, employees at times went months without being paid, Raymond said.

County records show the property was ceded back to its prior owner in early 2020. Former employees said the property was lost because of nonpayment, and Raymond was out $100,000 in wages and investments in other Robison companies. New Republic Studios stands as just one episode in a pattern of Robison companies that took money from investors in Texas with visionary promises that went undelivered. Robison, 63, was convicted of four federal counts including wire fraud and money laundering in July and sentenced in late October to 41 months in federal prison, three years of supervised release and ordered to make $1 million in restitution for what a federal judge called a “brazen” scheme to defraud conservative billionaire Joe Lonsdale on the promise of building a campus for the University of Austin. The New Republic episode is just one of several since Robison landed in Texas that call into question whether his conviction for the $1 million swindle of Lonsdale was the first time the silver-tongued pitchman was accused of fraud — or was just the first time he got caught. Neither Robison nor his attorneys commented for this story. In 2013, Robison relocated to Texas from California, often telling people the move was at the behest of then-Gov. Rick Perry. He said Perry — who championed expanded incentives for film and TV projects — asked him to come home to build out the state’s media industry.

Read this article at Austin American-Statesman - Subscribers Only

This MAGA Republican was abandoned by his party. He feels vindicated.

As Texas Republicans were left stunned by their losses in Tuesday’s midterms, one of them, who had been warning party leaders of possible Democratic victory for months, felt vindicated. Sid Miller, Texas’ outgoing Agriculture Commissioner, wasn’t on Tuesday’s ballot. But for months he had urged Republican leaders’ to crack down harder on the data center boom — particularly zeroing in on Gov. Greg Abbott and, ultimately, not voting for him. A Stephenville rancher, Miller said a GOP loss — especially among rural voters — became clear to him a year and a half ago. “I saw how upset they were over vouchers, how upset they were over THC, and then the data centers came along, and it was just, ‘oh my God, this is, maybe, the final nail in the coffin,’” Miller said in an interview.

Clayton Tucker, a Lampasas rancher, defeated Republican nominee Nate Sheets in the race to succeed Miller and became the first Democrat to claim the office in 40 years. He campaigned on promises to stop data centers, address New World Screwworm and make food affordable for Texans. Miller, who had been requesting either a special session or a one-year moratorium on data centers so the Legislature could act, often campaigned with Tucker. In an election where every county swung towards Democrats, rural ones that had traditionally been safe for Republicans were no exception. Analysts said a Republican win in the top-of-the-ticket U.S. Senate race would require strong turnout from the state’s most reliably red regions, like the Panhandle, East Texas, and parts of West Texas, but turnout fell in almost every county in those regions of the state. Sheets, the founder and former CEO of a raw honey company, defeated Miller in the March Republican primary with backing from Gov. Greg Abbott and others in the GOP establishment. Abbott criticized Miller’s “character flaws,” and said he "has never felt an obligation to tell the truth."

Read this article at San Antonio Express-News - Subscribers Only

Dozens party outside Elon Musk's Austin home after midterm election

Outside of a West Lake Hills compound affiliated with billionaire Elon Musk, about 60 people gathered on Saturday to celebrate that the unprecedented amount of money Musk spent ahead of the midterm election went mostly to candidates who lost, including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. They arrived at noon, spilling out of the two blue Fly-Rides party buses they had boarded downtown, plus a dozen cars, and held a dance party in the street. Festivities included music, birthday party hats, inflatable costumes and refreshments.

Austin Police received a call reporting alcohol use at the event but said they didn't see any evidence of that when they responded. It was not immediately clear if anyone was home. Residents did not address the partygoers. Eli Cortez, 28, was one of the bus captains for VOCAL-TX, which organized the “People Over Billionaires Election After Party” with Popular Democracy and People’s Action. Cortez was gleeful as he sipped Martinelli’s cider from a plastic champagne coupe near the home’s tall wrought-iron fence. “When’s the last time that we were able to celebrate an election?” said Cortez, wearing a red party hat, while people chanted along to Queen’s “We Will Rock You” playing from a speaker on wheels. “We’re here celebrating Texans showing up en masse against MAGA’s agenda, up against billionaires’ interest in elections and celebrating real democracy.”

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Beto O'Rourke urges Texas Democrats to deliver after historic sweep

Beto O’Rourke has a clear message for Texas Democrats following their historic victories Tuesday: deliver. O’Rourke, whose narrow loss to GOP Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018 foreshadowed that flipping the state from red to blue was possible, believes Democrats should pass three policies that could appeal to Texans across party lines in the 2027 legislative session: Expand Medicaid, raise the state minimum wage and increase public school teacher salaries. “Those are three things that would be felt by everybody, Republican or Democrat, rural or urban,” O’Rourke said Friday in a phone interview. The statewide sweep Tuesday gives Democrats control of the state’s levers of power — minus the Texas Senate — for the first time since the 1990s.

However, O’Rourke knows that just as quickly as voters elected Gina Hinojosa as governor, Vikki Goodwin as lieutenant governor and dozens of Democrats to the House — giving the party control of the House for the first time since the 2001 legislative session — Texans can be just as quick to vote them out if they are unhappy with the state’s direction. “If Democrats can't deliver on this chance that Texans have given them, then they'll withdraw the offer,” O’Rourke said. “And what we need to do is build on the success by delivering for everybody quickly in a way that can be felt.” Democrats will control the House in the 2027 legislative session, but Republicans will maintain a majority in the Senate, where Goodwin will oversee the 31 senators. Over in the House, Rep. Senfronia Thompson of Houston is on a clear path to be the first Democratic speaker since the 2001 legislative session. She said Friday she had the support of the majority of House lawmakers. A Thompson speakership gives Democrats control of the legislative agenda in the House, and Hinojosa, as governor, will also lay out her legislative priorities for lawmakers. Goodwin's influence on the Senate agenda will depend partly on the rules Senators adopt. The split in the legislature means Democrats will have to find ways to compromise with Republicans, O’Rourke said. He acknowledged it won’t be easy. The path to compromise might require Democrats to arm-twist Senate Republicans and add public pressure from their constituents to show that the bills will benefit their communities. Voters will ultimately judge Democrats on what they accomplish, not that they tried. “I don't know that anyone is interested in grading you on effort,” O’Rourke said. “They're really holding out for the results.”

Read this article at Dallas Morning News - Subscribers Only

No. 10 Texas pulls away from No. 19 Missouri for crucial 34-20 road win

No. 10 Texas overcame early mistakes and a second-half deficit to secure a crucial 34-20 victory over No. 19 Missouri on Saturday at Faurot Field, keeping its College Football Playoff hopes alive. The Longhorns (7-2, 4-2 SEC) scored 14 unanswered points in the fourth quarter to pull away from the Tigers (6-3, 3-3 SEC), led by quarterback Arch Manning, who completed 28 of 38 passes for 297 yards and three touchdowns. Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian praised his team’s resilience following the victory, particularly its ability to overcome turnovers and defensive penalties.

“I’m very proud of the way they hung together, the way they responded to adversity,” Sarkisian said. “I think we had two fumbles today. We gave up a total of three points.” Texas entered Saturday’s matchup ranked No. 7 in the initial College Football Playoff rankings, knowing a third loss could significantly damage its postseason aspirations. After trailing for much of the afternoon, the Longhorns took their first lead with 5:03 remaining in the fourth quarter when Manning connected with Raleek Brown for a 23-yard touchdown pass, putting Texas ahead 27-20. Missouri had an opportunity to respond on its ensuing possession, but defensive back Graceson Littleton came up with a critical interception with 1:41 remaining to give Texas possession. Brown delivered the finishing blow moments later with an 8-yard touchdown run to seal the victory. The Longhorns had to overcome a difficult start after Missouri quarterback Austin Simmons connected with Brett Norfleet for a 2-yard touchdown on fourth-and-goal to open the scoring.

Read this article at KXAN - Subscribers Only

National Stories

MAGA voters reveal who they want to see lead GOP in 2028

With Democrats taking control of Congress in the midterm elections, MAGA voters are already sizing up potential successors to President Donald Trump in 2028 — with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly emerging as favorites among those interviewed by Fox News Digital. "I like [Rubio]," one American told Fox News Digital "I like that he's no-nonsense, similar to Trump." "Well, I like JD Vance obviously," another said. "I like Marco Rubio. There's some other ones too that are maybe not so much mainstream that are coming up that I like too."

"JD is great too, but Rubio has a little more experience," one said. "He's articulate, he’s well spoken. He's got good ideas. I just really like him." Fox News Digital spoke with Americans attending a Trump rally in Bangor, Maine, as one of Trump’s final stops before Tuesday’s midterms that ended in a stunning blue wave. Fueled by anger over high costs and the war with Iran, Americans voted to oust Trump and his agenda, boosting Democrats to large majorities in the House and Senate. With Democrats looking to rebuke Trump and his allies, Republicans that Fox News Digital spoke with are looking for a presidential candidate to fill in Trump’s "footsteps." "I'm really open to see who can fill Trump's footsteps, not just the next person in line," one told Fox News Digital. "I wish Trump could run again," another said. Another brought up the prospect of another presidential run by Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., who has tried to distance himself from the results of Tuesday’s midterms. In a news conference Wednesday, he praised Florida for keeping the state under GOP control — suggesting his governance was a reason Florida Republicans held on. "I would like to see either JD And Marco, or JD And Governor DeSantis," one said at the Trump rally. "That's what I would feel comfortable with. " Beyond Vance, Rubio and DeSantis, other prominent Republicans whose names have surfaced in early 2028 discussions include Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas and Josh Hawley, R-Mo.

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Wall Street races for megadeals as countdown begins on Trump era

President Donald Trump’s return to the White House changed the political calculus around mergers and acquisitions, reviving companies’ desire for dream deals that had become difficult to pull off. Now, corporate America is on the clock. The rout by the Democrats in the midterms is creating a sudden sense of urgency in boardrooms, with executives wondering if they might have one last chance to pull off a transformational transaction while M&A-friendly regulators remain in place under Trump. Conversations with top advisers suggest the result is already prompting companies to ask whether they should move fast to bring big strategic moves forward. There’s a realization that a resurgent Democratic Party could work to frustrate the kind of blockbuster dealmaking that’s built up steam during Trump 2.0. and powered record revenue on Wall Street. Kevin Foley, co-head of investment banking at JPMorgan Chase & Co., one of the world’s top advisory firms, said companies should be ready to transact through another complicated operating environment.

“The biggest risk may be assuming that, sooner or later, things go back to normal,” New York-based Foley said. “Standing still is always an option, but when industries are changing this fast, it’s the wrong one.” Fernando Rivas, a senior Wells Fargo & Co. banker, put it more starkly at an industry conference in Boston on Thursday when he said a “now or never” mentality will return to drive M&A in the near term. Trump’s two terms have accounted for an outsized share of the biggest deals. More than half of all announced transactions worth at least $50 billion and involving a US company over the past two decades have come while he was president, according to analysis of Bloomberg-compiled data. This year alone has seen landmark combinations in mission-critical sectors like power and technology, such as this month’s record-breaking $100 billion-plus takeover of laser maker Lumentum Holdings Inc. by Marvell Technology Inc. Elsewhere, the Department of Justice cleared Paramount Skydance Corp.’s $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. without antitrust remedies. There’s a particular urgency to get going with these more complex transactions. Megadeals can take months to negotiate and even longer to clear regulatory reviews around the world. Companies that wait until a 2028 presidential campaign is in full swing to move ahead with such deals risk seeing them become political footballs at the stump.

Read this article at Bloomberg - Subscribers Only

Anthropic IPO meets AI backlash after midterms show stinging rebuke of data centers

Americans were unequivocal at the ballot box this week as they expressed disdain for tech billionaires and mistrust of artificial intelligence. With that backdrop, Anthropic is about to try to go public. The AI company is gearing up for a potentially historic IPO, likely targeting mid-November for its Nasdaq debut. CNBC reported on Friday that Anthropic investors see the company aiming for a valuation of $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion, down from a target of $2 trillion that had been floated in recent months. From Wall Street to Main Street, it’s becoming a tougher environment for Anthropic. The Nasdaq on Thursday suffered its steepest drop in 19 months, and it’s down to start November after October marked its worst month since March 2025. Chipmakers and neoclouds, the companies most closely tied to the AI buildout, are getting hit the hardest.

Voters rebuked AI in Tuesday’s midterm elections, while sending Democrats to sweeping congressional victories across the country. Candidates who advocated for more stringent AI regulation won handily in states like Michigan, Ohio, Texas and Georgia, which will all now have Democratic governors, and local communities opposed data center-related ballot measures in 40 out of 41 cases. More than half of voters said AI data centers were a “crucial” or “major factor” in who they supported for Congress, according to an exit poll from NBC News. “People don’t want a data center going near them if it’s just going to house AI that’s going to help a big tech company profit,” Maura Austin, a behavioral scientist at the University of Virginia, told CNBC. “What Anthropic is doing when they’re going public with such a high valuation is they’re really leaning into that big tech, billionaire kind of caricature. I expect that’s not going to go well with the public.”

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UFC CEO Dana White declines Trump’s offer to become press secretary, source says

President Donald Trump said Saturday that he offered the White House press secretary job to Dana White, but a source familiar with the matter says the Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO declined the unorthodox idea. “I am pleased to announce that the Great Dana White, a violent Fighter and Warrior, has been offered the job of Press Secretary of the United States,” Trump posted Saturday on Truth Social. He said he requested White bring “assistants,” listing six UFC fighters and posting their photos. “We need these people to defend us against the Lunatic Left. Dana will be a Press Secretary like none other. Dana, please take the job!” he added.

While one aide said Trump was joking about the offer, the president’s post came as he’s continued to search for a new press secretary following Karoline Leavitt’s departure and Katie Zacharia’s five-day stint in the role. Trump has struggled to find someone to fill a crucial position that he is personally invested in — a matter that has only become more important after Democrats won control of Congress and pledged to investigate his administration. On Saturday, White House communications director Steven Cheung reposted the president’s message, adding, “Hell yeah! Do it, @DanaWhite!” CNN has reached out to the White House and UFC for comment. White deflected on a question about the offer at a news conference Saturday, saying only that he plans to fly to Washington, DC, to meet with Trump on Monday. Trump fired Zacharia after one rocky briefing, making her stint as press secretary the shortest in history. Leavitt, who served as press secretary for a year and a half, left her role in August, saying she wanted to spend more time with her young family. She joined Fox News as a contributor this month.

Read this article at CNN - Subscribers Only

A reckoning may await data centers following a beating in the midterms

After a campaign season filled with outrage against data centers, the midterm elections ushered in a wave of Democrats pledging to clamp down on the energy-hungry behemoths. A tougher regulatory environment for artificial intelligence giants and data center developers is expected to follow, even if President Donald Trump — perhaps the industry’s biggest champion — stalls any federal crackdown. Data center regulation itself was not on most midterm ballots, and it wasn’t among the top issues for most voters. But hardline stances against the server warehouses were woven into the platforms of many candidates, including the Democrats who upended longtime Republican control of the governorships in Texas, Ohio, Georgia, Nevada and Iowa, many of which are data center hotspots.

Skepticism of data centers, and their impact on electricity prices, often blended with the fight for affordability — a key campaign talking point for Democrats. In Texas, Clayton Tucker, the first Democrat elected state agriculture commissioner since 1986, said his pledge to fight data center development was critical to his victory. Everywhere he went, he said, ranchers worried that data centers posed an existential threat to their dwindling water supplies. “You know, there’s an old saying around here that ‘whiskey’s for drinking and water’s for fighting,’” Tucker told The Associated Press. “And that’s exactly what happened.” According to data from AdImpact, campaigns large and small spent more than $380 million on television ads mentioning data centers. Democrats outspent Republicans on the topic by more than three to one. Sweeping wins by Democrats could have far-reaching implications for data centers. Besides taking control of Congress, Democrats flipped at least five governors’ offices and took full control of state governments in five more states: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Michigan. Data Center Watch, a project of AI security consultancy 10a Labs, said it tracked winning candidates for Congress and governorships and found the vast majority had expressed support for stronger regulation or even a moratorium.

Read this article at Associated Press - Subscribers Only

The only town in the U.S. that said yes to data centers

Harwood, North Dakota, may be the only place in the United States that voted in favor of data centers last week. The town, population 845, faced the prospect of a $3 billion, 1.8-million square foot facility on its outskirts. Resident Michael Swartz hadn’t liked the idea. He said he felt city officials had rolled over for a mega-developer who wanted to cash in on the artificial intelligence boom. “It’s changing … our small town, and I don’t know if it’s for the good,” he said. So Swartz, a software engineer, organized to get a measure on the ballot demanding independent reviews and public hearings for big new industrial projects, as well as proposed modifications and expansions of existing ones. It was one of at least 40 ballot measures in 10 states this election cycle that could have restricted data center development.

On Tuesday, in dozens of cities and towns across the country, voters overwhelmingly endorsed those restrictions. They also elected candidates who campaigned against Big Tech. Nationally, too, the mood was decidedly anti-data-center. In TV network exit polls, 76 percent of voters said they would oppose the construction of a new data center in their community, and 57 percent (including nearly two-thirds of Democrats) said AI would do more to hurt than to help society. But confronted with same debate that played out in dozens of other communities, a majority of voters in Harwood were convinced of the merits of data center development. They gave a resounding “no” to increased oversight by a margin of about three to one. Harwood residents tend to describe their town as a bedroom community. There’s not much there besides a couple bars and a grain elevator, they say. Many residents commute to work in Fargo, North Dakota’s most populous city, and the surrounding metro area. From the beginning of the data center project, Harwood faced the prospect of losing it to their next-door neighbors. Although Texas-based Applied Digital had already contracted 900 acres when the project was announced, Harwood and Fargo disputed who had claim to annex the land. “It was always going to get built right around the same area that it was now,” said Blake Hankey, the mayor of Harwood. “If the data center is going to get put in this similar location, we might as well get the tax benefits and the tax revenue from it.”

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Trump orders DOJ to look into Democrats for 'threatening' people

President Donald Trump ordered the US Justice Department on Saturday to look into Democrats for "threatening a lot of people" with impeachment and other ?forms of punishment, saying in a social media post that their actions amount to a "criminal ?act," without providing evidence. Democratic candidates routed Trump's Republicans in midterm elections on Tuesday, giving them control of Congress starting ?in January. Party leaders have promised to reassert Congress' oversight of the executive branch once they are in power by holding hearings and conducting investigations into Trump administration actions. In his post, Trump accused Democrats of sending "threatening letters to many people, all innocent."

Members of Congress have released copies of letters seeking documents ?on matters such as tech company ?donations for the large ballroom Trump is building at the White House. Trump's post also referred to Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who suggested in remarks ?last month at the University of Chicago that Congress should investigate people who have enabled Trump's policies. "I want young people coming out of school to say, 'Should I go work for the Trump administration?' … I want ?them ?to be like, 'Lord, that might be buying myself a ?ton of problems that I don't want. ?And so I might avoid participating in that,'" Slotkin said. "I want that deterrence message sent." Her comments, within weeks of the midterm elections, were criticized by some Republicans. Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah wrote on social media that Slotkin was threatening young people who wanted to go into politics. Slotkin responded that Lee had lied about her comments and wrote, "Spare us the manufactured outrage."

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Lead Stories

Hinojosa taps anti-school voucher Republican, education and labor allies for Texas transition team

Texas Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa announced her first transition team appointments Thursday, tapping allies in public education and organized labor — along with a former Republican lawmaker who fought against outgoing Gov. Greg Abbott’s school voucher plan. “I am not going to be the governor for just Democrats,” Hinojosa said. “I am going to be the Governor for all the people of Texas.” Former state Rep. Ernest Bailes, a conservative Republican from rural East Texas, was among the GOP lawmakers who joined Democrats to block Abbott’s school voucher push in 2023. Abbott then successfully retaliated by backing primary challengers against those Republicans in the 2024, including the candidate who defeated Bailes.

Hinojosa, who served alongside Bailes in the Texas House, called him a champion for public schools and one of her closest Republican allies on education. “We will put partisanship aside. We will work together for what is best for the kids of the state of Texas,” Bailes said Thursday. Hinojosa’s focus on public education is also reflected in her selection of Tamala Barksdale, a former Austin ISD trustee who served alongside her on the school board. During her campaign, which Barksdale worked on, Hinojosa promised to increase funding for public schools and replace Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath with an educator. Ryan Pollock, a union electrician and executive director of theTexas State Building and Construction Trades Council, brings organized labor’s perspective to the transition team. Hinojosa said his appointment reflects her commitment to creating good jobs and putting money in Texans’ pockets. Pollock said achieving that goal means investing in workers.

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Nasdaq 100 eyes $1.8 trillion loss as Democratic win sparks AI delay fears

The Nasdaq 100 index was set to lose a whopping $1.8 trillion in stock value on Thursday as investors feared that the sweeping midterm victory of Democrats could stall the pace of ?AI infrastructure expansion. The rout marked a dramatic slide from a relatively mild initial reaction in the previous session, when ?the index, stacked with elite tech companies, rose on hopes that an end to election-related uncertainty could improve overall sentiment. "Wall Street badly needs a happy ?AI story right now," said Matthew Tuttle, founder and CEO of Tuttle Capital Management. "We now probably have two years of nothing. Divided government, angry politics, and very little getting passed." Shares of semiconductor and neocloud companies, which were behind much of the market's gains in the recent past, witnessed sharp declines for a second straight day on worries that data center buildouts worth billions of dollars could face ?delays.

The Philadelphia SE Semiconductor index fell 8.4% ?to its lowest level in more than six months, led by losses in heavyweights Nvidia and Broadcom. Hyperscalers, which defied the selloff on Wednesday on hopes that slower data-center construction could rein in Big ?Tech's AI spending, also dropped. Amazon.com fell 2.5% and Alphabet 1.4%. The losses suggested investors are beginning to price in the possibility that political gridlock and greater scrutiny of data-center development could slow one of Wall Street's most important growth engines. Around 30% of expected US data center ?capacity ?additions in 2028 could be at risk from potential construction pauses, ?UBS analysts estimated, highlighting the threat to an industry ?whose growth depends on a rapid build out of new facilities. The political jitters are hitting an AI trade that was already on shaky footing in recent weeks, on worries surrounding the enormous sums being poured into the technology. CoreWeave, which has become a barometer of investor anxiety over heavy AI spending, slumped 12%. Five-year credit default spreads widened to a record high, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. Nebius, another neocloud company, also dropped 15.2%. The sharp declines put the Nasdaq Composite on ?course to confirm a correction, or a 10% drop from its recent ?peak. The Nasdaq 100 was last down 4.5%. "The market's moving from the promise ?of AI to the price of AI," said Ted ?Parkhill, founder and CEO of Incline Investment Management. "There's no question that AI is going to be ?transformative for the world in the long run. But ?that doesn't mean every AI-related ?stock is currently priced appropriately. There's going to be a lot of turmoil."

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Trump tells voters ‘you only have yourselves to blame’ in Truth Social rant after stock market crash

As Democrats continue to add to their “blue tsunami” of midterms wins, President Donald Trump has pointed the finger of blame at the opposition and at the American public for Thursday’s stock market plunge. The Nasdaq Composite dipped 5.52 percent while the S&P 500 dropped 4.36 percent and the Dow Jones went down 1,833.06 points in response to this week’s resounding election results. “The Stock Market suffered one of the Worst Days in History based on the results of the Election. Such a sad thing to watch!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Remember, it wasn’t Republicans, it was Dumocrats.” In a follow-up post, he told the electorate: “You only have yourselves to blame!”

With votes still being counted in the Alaska and Mississippi Senate races and elsewhere, Democrats currently hold a 54 to 44 majority in the Senate and are projected to win 253 seats in the House to the GOP’s 157. The results come amid a civil war brewing within the Trump administration, with insiders scrambling to assign blame, the president reportedly sounding out advisors on the potential firing of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly on “resignation watch.”

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Inside the investigative blitz coming for Trump’s corporate allies

Democrats are preparing to unleash a wave of investigations that will probe the most sensitive and controversial actions of America’s largest corporations over the past two years, sparking a reckoning among Silicon Valley and Wall Street executives who courted the Trump administration — and who are now bracing for an onslaught. Days after winning majorities in the House and Senate, Democrats are setting sharp priorities. They are zeroing in on Apple, Meta and the companies led by Elon Musk as early targets for congressional investigations, according to two people familiar with the plans. The House is laying the groundwork to investigate President Donald Trump’s use of Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok, to plan the military operation and capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, according to those people. Lawmakers are also eyeing Apple over its hosting of tracking apps used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Meta over its demands that local governments sign nondisclosure agreements related to data center development.

This report is based on interviews with five congressional staffers, lobbyists, venture capitalists and lawyers familiar with the preparations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private matters, along with recordings of meetings reviewed by The Washington Post. Those possibilities have prompted a flurry of activity in Washington, where corporate lawyers are hosting emergency online meetings, gatherings in co-working spaces and intimate bar conversations to dispense advice to founders and C-suite executives on how to prepare for the highly public investigations about to rain down on firms with ties to the Trump administration. Multiple firms have crafted pitches for why they should serve as Musk’s personal counsel, aware that the world’s richest man is likely to receive a barrage of subpoenas and that any casework stemming from those investigations will be both lucrative and the highest-profile investigative work available in the coming year, according to two of the people. It remains unclear in Washington’s corporate legal circles, however, whether Musk’s current team can manage these efforts, according to the two people. “This is a new era,” a lawyer at a prominent Washington law firm warned corporate executives in a private online meeting on Thursday. “If your company is caught up in this oversight, it’s likely to be much more highly publicized.”

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State Stories

How Texas Democrats could change enforcement of the abortion ban

The momentum behind Texas’ anti-abortion movement stalled this week. The major Democratic gains in Texas are likely not enough to repeal the state’s strict abortion laws, but new state leaders could take a dramatically different approach to abortion-related issues than their Republican predecessors. That includes eschewing legal action against out-of-state healthcare providers who mail abortion pills to Texans, redistributing money now earmarked for anti-abortion causes and improving research on maternal deaths. “I do not intend to use Texas law as a tool of persecution, intimidation and harassment,” Democratic Attorney General-elect Nathan Johnson told the Houston Chronicle. “I will uphold the law. I will enforce the law. But there's a difference between upholding and enforcing the law on the one hand, and using it to score political points by persecuting people on the other hand.”

Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa, who unseated three-term Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, previously acknowledged to the Chronicle editorial board that “it's going to take more than the election of a governor to undo that and get us to a place where we have the protections of Roe v. Wade.” “That is ultimately what I support, but I'm not going to pretend like I can make that happen once I'm elected,” she said. “What I do think there is bipartisan support to do is to save women's lives.” Texas has some of the strictest abortion laws in the country, threatening anyone who provides an abortion with first-degree felony charges, civilian lawsuits and the loss of medical licenses. There are no exceptions for rape or incest, and the few exceptions that do exist -- for ectopic pregnancies (in which the fetus is unable to survive) or complications that put the mother’s life in danger -- have been met with confusion among doctors who have hesitated to perform the procedure in life-threatening situations. Multiple Texas women have faced health consequences or died because doctors delayed care for pregnancy complications -- delays that patients and other medical experts attribute to the ban, according to lawsuits and news reports. But the composition of the Texas House and top leadership posts changed overnight, with Democrats taking control of the Texas House for the first time in 24 years.

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Texas wanted to power America’s AI boom. Its new governor could change everything

Less than a year ago, Texas Governor Greg Abbott stood beside Sundar Pichai, the Google CEO, to celebrate the company’s $40 billion investment in the state’s cloud and AI infrastructure. Three new data center campuses would help make Texas, Abbott declared, the “epicenter of AI development.” On Tuesday, Abbott, a Republican, lost his reelection bid to Gina Hinojosa, a Democrat who campaigned on halting new data center development until state lawmakers pass stronger protections for residents. At a press conference over the summer, Hinojosa accused corporations of taking advantage of Texans and operating with little oversight, blaming Abbott for creating the “Wild West of data centers.” Her stunning victory makes her the first Democrat elected governor of Texas since Ann Richards in 1990. And given that Texas is home to the country’s second-largest data center market, behind Virginia, the political upheaval could have profound implications for the artificial intelligence boom.

Texas’s $2.9 trillion economy is the nation’s second largest; if it were a country, it would rank eighth worldwide. It boasts abundant energy resources, a ton of relatively inexpensive land, and a historically light regulatory touch—all of which have enticed AI companies (and companies in seemingly every other sector, for that matter). Researchers at Rice University’s Baker Institute estimate that annual data center investment in Texas rose from $3.4 billion in 2022 to a projected $66.2 billion in 2026. And much more is in the pipeline. Texas accounts for roughly 26% of planned American data center capacity—nearly three times the amount planned in Virginia—according to an analysis by the investment bank Jefferies, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. Jefferies estimated that Hinojosa’s proposed moratorium could put 13.3 gigawatts of announced Texas data center projects at risk, potentially delaying construction or forcing developers to abandon their plans.

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Gov.-elect Hinojosa promised to stop state takeovers, fire TEA leader. Can she?

Texas’ newly elected governor, who will take office in January, pledged to fire Texas Commissioner of Education Mike Morath and to stop existing state takeovers of school districts such as Fort Worth ISD. Political science experts say fulfilling these promises is less straightforward than it appears. Democrat Gina Hinojosa won over Texas voters this week, defeating Republican incumbent Greg Abbott with about 53% of the vote. As a former school board member in Austin who ran on a platform prioritizing public education, Hinojosa promised to turn the tides on state appointees taking over control of school districts with low-performing schools while also kicking out Morath, who oversees state takeovers of schools. In Tarrant County, Fort Worth ISD and Lake Worth ISD have been under state control since March and April, respectively.

In a Thursday statement from the Texas Education Agency, state officials said Morath told superintendents that he is committed “to ensuring a smooth and successful transition for the incoming education commissioner” in a previously scheduled meeting on Wednesday. Morath met with education leaders at the Region 12 Education Service Center in Waco after visiting Troy Elementary in Troy ISD. “As planned, he was present for the entire presentation and provided introductory and closing remarks (at the superintendent meeting). As part of his remarks, he also expressed his appreciation for the educational leaders in the room and a commitment to ensuring a smooth and successful transition for the incoming education commissioner,” TEA officials said. Morath’s current term as education commissioner ends on Jan. 10, and Hinojosa’s inauguration is Jan. 19. Hinojosa’s campaign did not respond to questions about the logistics of firing of Morath or ending state takeovers as of Thursday afternoon. Fort Worth and Lake Worth ISDs both shared statements saying they would continue to focus on serving students with state-appointed leadership. “While political circumstances may change, our focus remains unchanged. We will continue to provide the highest quality education to every student in Fort Worth and keep building on the gains this community has earned,” Fort Worth ISD officials said.

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Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production in Texas after years of poor sales in few markets

Tesla will wind down Cybertruck production at its Texas gigafactory around mid-2027, CEO Elon Musk said on Friday, after years of persistently weak sales for a futuristic model once touted as a rival to legacy pickup trucks that ultimately only sold in just a handful of markets because of its heavy, angular design. Musk said in an X post the production wind-down would enable the automaker to accommodate increased output of its newly launched Cybercab model, which the billionaire has made central to Tesla's robotaxi ambitions.

While it was not immediately clear whether Cybertruck production would be moved to another facility or phased out entirely, the automaker's Austin plant is the only known Tesla facility equipped to manufacture the model's specialized components. In response to a user on X, Musk called the Cybertruck the "best vehicle Tesla has ever made" and the wind-down the "end of an era". Tesla did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment sent outside regular business hours. The US EV maker only began delivering the Cybertruck to customers in late 2023. According to Kelley Blue Book, the company only sold 20,237 Cybertrucks in the US last year, down 48% from 38,965 in 2024. Before the pickup truck launched, Musk had predicted annual sales of 250,000 units. "It doesn't make sense to keep it going when it's not meeting its targets," said former Aston Martin CEO Andy Palmer. "Every rational auto guy would say the same." "It will no doubt only be a rounding error on Tesla's balance sheet, but the statistics speak for themselves."

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Democrats poised to narrowly flip Texas State Board of Education

Democrats delivered a major shakeup to the Texas State Board of Education Tuesday night, breaking up the Republican supermajority. Democrats appear in position to double their seats on the board from four to eight, according to unofficial election results from the Texas Secretary of State. According to the Secretary of State's results, Democrat Dana Van De Walker beat Republican incumbent Audrey Young for the District 8 seat by a little more than 500 votes. Young could request a recount over the incredibly close results. Thursday morning, Van De Walker posted to social media celebrating her victory but said she was still tracking the results.

“I’m still processing it,” Van De Walker said. “Things are not official official until votes are certified. So we are kind of waiting with baited breath.” Young did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding whether she would request a recount. Board members set curriculum and choose instructional materials for more than five million public school students across Texas. The board also develops education policies, oversees the State Board of Educator Certification — which sets standards for teacher certification — and holds the power to veto charter school applications as their popularity grows. Tuesday's election radically changed the Democratic voting power on the board. For several cycles, Democrats have had little recourse to counter ultra-conservative proposals pushed by their GOP board members. The flipped board comes alongside major changes in political leadership across the state. As part of her campaign, Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa promised to remove Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath with an educator.

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Dan Patrick steered the Alamo makeover. What happens next?

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick never forgets the Alamo. He’s captivated with the 1836 siege and battle and its mythology, his enthusiasm fed by the television shows and movies starring Fess Parker or John Wayne as defender Davy Crockett that he watched growing up in Baltimore, Maryland. Patrick says he has been “breathing it and living it” for decades. He heralds the site as a symbol of liberty and sacrifice and one of Texas’ most precious historic treasures. His Capitol office is a kind of shrine whose sacred objects include an Alamo diorama, a cannonball from the battle, a poster from Wayne’s Alamo movie and the signatures of Crockett, James Bowie, William Barret Travis and other defenders. Patrick has used his position, one of the most powerful in state politics, to shape a major public-private makeover of the Alamo grounds — and how the history of the site is told.

He lost his re-election campaign to Democratic state Rep. Vikki Goodwin of Austin on Tuesday. His defeat raises questions about the Alamo’s future as the redevelopment of the 4.2-acre site and surrounding properties in the heart of downtown San Antonio inches closer to completion. “There is no elected official who has had more passion for the Alamo and the Alamo project than Dan Patrick,” said Douglass McDonald, a former CEO of the Alamo Trust Inc., a nonprofit that oversees day-to-day operations at the site. Patrick drove Texas lawmakers to allocate more than $500 million for the $700 million project as well as millions more for ongoing preservation and maintenance. And he has pushed for a historical interpretation of the site that focuses primarily on the 1836 battle, rather than a multifaceted telling of the Alamo’s complex 308-year history, including accounts of Indigenous people who lived in the area and how slavery shaped the conflict. In April, he announced that producer and writer Taylor Sheridan, creator of the TV series “Yellowstone,” would make a film recreating the story of the Battle of the Alamo for a 4D theater at the future Alamo Visitor Center and Museum. Patrick said he personally reached out to Sheridan to ask if he would take on the project.

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The gay romance novelist who saw Blexas coming

Did you see blue Texas coming? Maybe you had considered that state legislator–cum–seminary student James Talarico could eke out a win against the scandal-ridden Ken Paxton for a U.S. Senate seat, but there was no way the Democrats could also take the governor’s mansion. The mood heading into Tuesday night was one of hope heavily tinted by fear, even if many of us had an inkling that, as Slate writer Jim Newell wrote in September, this time in the Lone Star State might actually be different. But one person who did see the potential for Blexas on the horizon was Casey McQuiston, the bestselling author of queer romance novels. Their 2019 debut Red, White & Royal Blue (later turned into a Prime Video movie starring Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine) features an enemies-to-lovers dalliance between Alex Claremont-Diaz, the son of a female American president, and Prince Henry, the third in line for the British monarchy. Spoilers ahead: These two crazy kids find a way to be together—while Alex also hatches an elaborate political strategy to, against all odds, flip Texas blue for his mom’s reelection, a plot point that was viewed with some amount of lighthearted disbelief at the time.

Well, turns out McQuiston was right. When real-life Texas’ returns came in on Tuesday night, my feed became flooded with memes about this unexpectedly prescient 7-year-old novel, its 2023 film adaptation, and the all-important role this story might play in America during so-called “Woke 2.0” (or even 3.0, depending on who you’re asking). I called up McQuiston the day after the historic blue tsunami to get their read on this monumental night, and to ask if any of their other characters—who will appear again in the sequel to Red, White & Royal Blue, an epistolary novella called The Private Correspondence, out in December—have some political predictions they’d like to share. Slate: "How have your past 20 or so hours been, Casey?" Casey McQuiston: "It’s so funny. I’ve been burned so many times by watching returns that I was not letting myself really lock in too much. I was literally sitting right there at my sewing machine, working on Christmas presents, and I had Steve Kornacki on YouTube going. And then around the time they started calling Harris County in Texas—which I know is Houston, ’cause I’m a Houston bitch—I was like, OK, let’s put this aside for a minute. And so I swapped to my TV and started actually really watching. I pretty immediately started getting a lot of texts from friends and a lot of people being like, 'Oh my God, I’m thinking of you right now.'" Slate: "Do you feel vindicated?" McQuiston: "You know, I do! But at the same time, I wasn’t really surprised until [Texas Gov. Greg] Abbott conceded. Honestly, even with how much I’ve been burned, I was really confident Talarico was going to win. And so I was just like, OK, let’s have a cute little night and let’s see what happens. But when Abbott conceded, I literally screamed 'WHAT!' out loud."

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Houston Chronicle Editorial: Here are the worst candidates Texans elected in the 2026 blue wave

It wasn’t all sunshine, rainbows and blue skies in Texas on election night. While many of the editorial board’s preferred candidates prevailed at the top of the ticket, the blue wave that James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa surfed to victory also swept a lot of flotsam and jetsam onto Texas’ political shores. It’s clear that most voters in both parties didn’t heed our plea to split their tickets, particularly in lower-profile races on Harris County’s lengthy ballot. If Texans can’t occasionally vote for a candidate on the other team, both parties must place a far greater emphasis on vetting candidates in primaries. Many Texans are thankful that vile candidates like Bo French lost, but he never should’ve made it to the general election in the first place. Our democracy, statewide and nationally, will be far healthier when voters aren’t simply picking the lesser of two evils, or blindly choosing any candidate with a D or R next to their name. Fans of good governance should encourage the new Democratic majority in the Texas House to consider reforms to how we select our judges and county officials. Former Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Phillips, a Republican who endorsed Talarico for Senate, would be the right person to help lead that effort if Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa is looking for someone to chair a committee.

Until then, Texans can rest assured we’ll be keeping an eye on the unqualified candidates who prevailed and that we won’t hesitate to hold them accountable if they fall short of expectations in public office the next time they’re on the ballot. U.S. Representative-elect, District 2: Steve Toth. The fact that Toth just barely squeaked it out over Democrat Shaun Finnie in a heavily red congressional district speaks to his weakness as a candidate and poor reputation as a state lawmaker. Toth, the owner of a pool maintenance services company, has been in the state House since 2012 with very few bills to show for it despite being in the legislative majority that entire time. Worse, he actively takes positions and votes against his constituents’ interests, such as his opposition to common sense flood mitigation bills. Justice-elect, 15th Court of Appeals, Place 3: Marc M. Meyer.q At first glance, Meyer doesn’t belong on a list with the rest of this motley crew. He’s a licensed nurse and former EMS supervisor for the Houston Fire Department who specializes in defending nurses accused of malpractice. But Meyer will now be thrust onto the 15th Court of Appeals after ousting Republican April Farris, an experienced appellate judge and lawyer with a stellar reputation. That’s a rather huge leap for a lawyer with limited appellate experience beyond medical malpractice cases.

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Lina Hidalgo sued by former employee for discrimination, retaliation

A former employee of Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo is suing the county, alleging she was fired for filing a discrimination complaint. The lawsuit highlights a common issue for employees of elected officials: human resources and other departments have little sway over elected leaders. In most cases, the power to address workers’ complaints lies mainly in voters’ hands, as elected officials are broadly immune from disciplinary or other corrective action under Texas law – and numerous county offices are elected positions. The plaintiff, Tera Roberson, claimed Hidalgo’s staff openly discussed that the judge “preferred white men” for certain roles within her communications department, and viewed this as the reason she was passed over for a promotion.

Roberson filed a complaint with Harris County Human Resources and Risk Management on Nov. 11, 2024, according to the suit. Eleven days later, after requesting an update on her complaint, she was fired, the suit alleged. Roberson, a Black woman and mother of two, had been promoted to a leadership role in Hidalgo’s office just one month prior to her termination, according to the suit. “One would like to believe that when you follow the process and make a complaint, that it will be looked at properly,” Roberson said in an interview. “Instead, the exact opposite happened to me. Once I was informed they were looking into it, I was fired almost immediately.” Roberson is suing for race and sex discrimination, as well as retaliation. A spokesperson for Hidalgo rejected Roberson’s allegations in a statement. “These allegations are false. Judge Hidalgo’s administration has appointed qualified and accomplished women, including women of color, to key leadership positions within her office and various county appointments,” the statement said. “Her administration has a strong record of elevating women to positions of authority at the highest levels of county government.”

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A quick message to Eric Johnson

You could switch back.

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Corpus Christi approves water charges for industrial giants as landslide election rocks Texas

Amid a spate of historic political upsets across Texas, voters in the industrial port city of Corpus Christi on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved a citizen-led petition to impose steep fees for water use on the region's refineries and chemical plants during future droughts. The measure passed by a two-to-one margin despite heavy spending by industry groups in opposition—a dramatic rebuke of industrial interests in a port city that leads the nation in crude oil exports. "The people have woken up," said Sylvia Campos, a member of the Corpus Christi City Council and the Democratic Socialists of America who supported the measure. "We overcame all that money." The city's referendum was part of an earth-shattering election across Texas, a fortress of conservative politics and the seat of the nation's energy sector, which saw Democratic challengers wipe incumbent Republicans out of every statewide office on the ballot.

The new governor-elect of Texas, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, has described her politics as "economic populism." "In the past we evaluated politics as right versus left, I just don't think those labels apply at this moment," Hinojosa told the New York Times in October. "Things are so stacked against working people in this country." In Corpus Christi, a Gulf Coast city of 300,000, partisan lines didn't mark the political divisions that emerged over the referendum on industrial water fees, according to Paul Gottemoller, a professor of political science at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi. "It's kind of a country club, business, chamber of commerce thing versus a populism thing," Gottemoller said. "You do have populist and business sentiments on both sides of the political aisle." The measure, proposed as an amendment to the city's charter, would levy millions of dollars in surcharges on the region's largest water users—industrial titans like ExxonMobil, Valero and OxyChem—the next time its main reservoirs drop below 30 percent full.

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Jon Rosenthal joins Texas’ oil regulator with plans to double budget

As a "drill, baby, drill Democrat,” newly elected Texas Railroad Commissioner Jon Rosenthal said he isn’t coming for anyone’s oil rig. In fact, the sitting state representative and oilfield engineer from Houston said during a recent interview that he wants to encourage more energy production of all kinds as he prepares to serve as one of three powerful regulators of the state’s prolific oil and gas industry. But, he said, “we have to operate responsibly.” It’s the operative word for a regulatory agency that walks a fine line between protecting Texans from pollution and boosting the industry that fuels paychecks, state budgets and campaign coffers. The commission issues drilling permits and regulates oilfield activities such as oil and gas extraction, flaring and waste disposal.

Rosenthal will be the first Democrat to serve on the commission since 1994. He aims to double the agency’s annual budget to roughly $500 million a year to hire more inspectors, specialists and scientists and pay more-competitive wages that retain talent. The commission’s need for more funding and more people to monitor oilfield activities is “without question,” he said. “I hope that's an area where I can find common ground with the other two commissioners,” Rosenthal said. Rosenthal joins the commission at a pivotal moment. The industry is running out of safe places to put its wastewater, forcing the regulatory agency on its heels as it grapples with an issue threatening the Texas economy and drinking water across the state. The commission’s budget is already growing rapidly as it contends with areas where oil and gas operators are stuffing so much toxic wastewater underground for disposal that the earth is spitting it back up, contaminating water and soil it touches along the way to the surface.

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Dan Patrick steered the Alamo makeover. What happens next?

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick never forgets the Alamo. He’s captivated with the 1836 siege and battle and its mythology, his enthusiasm fed by the television shows and movies starring Fess Parker or John Wayne as defender Davy Crockett that he watched growing up in Baltimore, Maryland. Patrick says he has been “breathing it and living it” for decades. He heralds the site as a symbol of liberty and sacrifice and one of Texas’ most precious historic treasures. His Capitol office is a kind of shrine whose sacred objects include an Alamo diorama, a cannonball from the battle, a poster from Wayne’s Alamo movie and the signatures of Crockett, James Bowie, William Barret Travis and other defenders. Patrick has used his position, one of the most powerful in state politics, to shape a major public-private makeover of the Alamo grounds — and how the history of the site is told.

He lost his re-election campaign to Democratic state Rep. Vikki Goodwin of Austin on Tuesday. His defeat raises questions about the Alamo’s future as the redevelopment of the 4.2-acre site and surrounding properties in the heart of downtown San Antonio inches closer to completion. “There is no elected official who has had more passion for the Alamo and the Alamo project than Dan Patrick,” said Douglass McDonald, a former CEO of the Alamo Trust Inc., a nonprofit that oversees day-to-day operations at the site. Patrick drove Texas lawmakers to allocate more than $500 million for the $700 million project as well as millions more for ongoing preservation and maintenance. And he has pushed for a historical interpretation of the site that focuses primarily on the 1836 battle, rather than a multifaceted telling of the Alamo’s complex 308-year history, including accounts of Indigenous people who lived in the area and how slavery shaped the conflict. In April, he announced that producer and writer Taylor Sheridan, creator of the TV series “Yellowstone,” would make a film recreating the story of the Battle of the Alamo for a 4D theater at the future Alamo Visitor Center and Museum. Patrick said he personally reached out to Sheridan to ask if he would take on the project.

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New DART CEO expected to testify in January in prior agency inquiry

New Dallas Area Rapid Transit CEO Nathaniel “Nat” Ford is expected to testify in January to Jacksonville leaders as Florida state and local officials investigate his prior agency’s financial crisis. Ford led the Jacksonville Transportation Authority for 13 years before starting at DART last month. He left JTA in a cloud of financial concerns — a nearly $40 million budget shortfall, service cuts and dozens of eliminated jobs. Jacksonville leaders have subpoenaed Ford to testify on what went wrong at the agency. The Florida attorney general — Republican James Uthmeier, who won reelection Tuesday — is also investigating, with subpoenas naming Ford and seeking records involving contracts, payments and other agency business.

Jacksonville City Council member and JTA liaison Rory Diamond said he expects the testimony to come early next year. It’s not clear if it will take place in person or if Ford will appear virtually. “I’ve been going back and forth with Mr. Ford about his appearance before the finance committee and expect that to happen in January,” Diamond said at a Nov. 1 meeting. “The exact date in January, we’re still going back and forth on.” Ford said he’s in contact with Diamond’s office and is working on scheduling. Article continues below this ad “I have great respect for the Jacksonville City Council and for the work we accomplished at JTA,” Ford said in a statement. “My focus remains fully on DART and the riders and communities we serve across North Texas.”

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Texas’ chief justice-elect urges all-or-none wedding policy for judges

Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice-elect Maggie Ellis wants to amend a rule allowing judges to refuse to perform weddings on religious grounds, setting up an early test of her ability to reshape the court. Ellis, a Democrat, told The Dallas Morning News she wants to ensure judges who officiate weddings will perform ceremonies for all couples — without religious exceptions. “One thing I’d like to do is work with the other justices to amend these orders to say either you perform all marriages, or none,” she said.

The court adopted the rule in October 2025, adding a two-line comment to the Texas Code of Judicial Conduct: “It is not a violation of these canons for a judge to publicly refrain from performing a wedding ceremony based upon a sincerely held religious belief.” “It’s really the wrong direction for our Supreme Court,” Ellis said of the order. “It's back-door discrimination.” The amendment came after a Waco justice of the peace sued the State Commission on Judicial Conduct for reprimanding her for refusing to perform same-sex marriages. The American Civil Liberties Union and LGBTQ advocates decried the rule as discriminatory. The rule helped persuade Ellis, who previously served on the Texas Third Court of Appeals, to run for the state’s highest civil court. Now, after being elected Texas’ first female chief justice, she said she wants to reverse it. Ellis defeated Republican Chief Justice Jimmie Blacklock in Tuesday’s election. Fellow Democrats Chari Kelly, Kristen Hawkins and Gisela Triana also ousted Republican incumbents on the bench. The victories give Democrats four seats on the nine-member court, leaving the GOP with a 5-4 majority. Ellis will need support from Republican justices to change the wedding ceremony rule.

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Bee Moorhead: Texas Impact heads back to the UN’s Climate Change Conference

(Bee Moorhead is the executive director of Texas Impact, the state's oldest and largest interfaith advocacy network.) The international community will gather November 9-20 in Antalya, Türkiye, for the 31st United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties, also known as COP31. As in years past, Texas Impact will be participating in the COP as the only state-level, faith-based credentialed NGO observers and sharing video with the Chronicle from the conference. Texas Impact joins a cohort of experienced faith advocates from around the world in traveling to the meeting. As leaders of denominations, social action groups, and mission organizations, we hope to remind the parties in the official negotiating rooms that the need for climate action is not an isolated technical or scientific matter, but a humanitarian and ethical imperative of the highest order.

U.S. faith participation in COP this year is urgently important. That’s partly precisely because our national leaders are staying away – effectively sidelining Americans in a critical global conversation that has existential implications for all people. It’s also important because the emerging agendas and work plans for this year’s COP reveal serious conflicts between interest groups, nagging doubts about the efficacy of multilateral negotiations in the current global political environment, and – most significant for faith communities – growing tensions between the goals of economic leaders and demands for equity and justice from marginalized groups like women, youth, and those living in areas already disproportionately impacted by climate change. The issues in play on the global stage – from interest group conflicts to political conditions to justice and equity – also are in play right here in Texas. Local fights over data centers are one potent example. And Texans, like all Americans, certainly are experiencing climate impacts on our weather. The United States is uniquely positioned with respect to climate change, both as a primary emitter of the greenhouse gases causing human-induced climate change and as a wealthy nation with the capacity to drive mitigation and adaptation worldwide. And we were on track to be climate leaders: The U.S. set ambitious emission reduction targets under the Paris Agreement, and operationalized those targets through the Inflation Reduction Act. Unfortunately, the current administration has undone decades of American leadership to address climate change. The U.S. has withdrawn not only from the Paris Agreement but from the entire United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – although subnational leaders continue to participate robustly.

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County Stories

Susan Hays elected Presidio County Commissioner

Tuesday’s election resulted in a new Presidio County commissioner — Susan Hays — who beat write-in candidate Ida Dominguez for the Precinct 4 seat 459-264. The seat was held by Commissioner Frank “Buddy” Knight, who was appointed by the county judge after David Beebe inadvertently resigned from the seat when he announced his run for county judge too soon last year to meet constitutional requirements. (All results are unofficial until the government entities canvas the votes.) At his appointment, Knight said he had no intention of running in the election.

Hays, an attorney and former state agriculture commissioner candidate in 2022, was unopposed in the March Democratic primary, and she appeared to be cruising unopposed with no Republican candidate for Tuesday’s election. But Ida Dominguez, wife of Sheriff Danny Dominguez, announced as a write-in candidate. Presidio County faces a lot of challenges, and I look forward to working with the entire Commissioners Court to improve the whole county, not just Marfa. In the only other contested Presidio County race, Democrat Bianca Bailon came out on top of Republican opponent Amabilia Galindo 677-305. Other county Democratic officials reelected with no Republicans opponents included: County Judge Joe Portillo, County/District Clerk Carolina Cataño, Treasurer Florcita Zubia and Precinct 1 Justice of the Peace Dina Jo Marquez. Also elected with no Republican opposition were Precinct 2 Commissioner-elect Jesus “Junie” Herrera, and Precinct 3 Commissioner Obed Esonterias, who was appointed in March after Franky Ortiz resigned.

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City Stories

In the shadow of failed school bonds, city launches 2027 bond process with new tri-chairs

City council discussed an updated list of proposed 2027-2032 bond projects on Thursday. They’ll be under the guidance of three newly appointed bond chairpersons. The proposed $442 million bond is about half the size of the 2022 bond, the result of a tough economy. It comes with a smaller list of public infrastructure and improvement projects — but no tax increase. Three bond-related propositions, tweaked slightly since the last council briefing on Oct. 29, will be put to voters in May. The next step in the process, the public review, gets underway Nov. 16 In the months to follow, the bond chairpersons are tasked with shaping the list of projects to present to the council on Jan. 21 then seeing that the bond is something the community will support.

Put forth by Councilwomen Sukh Kaur (D1) and Phyllis Viagran (D3), the tri-chairpersons approved by the council are Kevin Dinnin, FirstDay Foundation president and CEO; OCI Group co-founder Anita Fernandez; and Sandi Wolff, Hallmark University vice president of Community Engagement and Advancement. “I think we’ve arrived at three great people who are going to make sure that the bond gets all the attention it deserves from the community,” said Marc Whyte, (D10). They are “going to lead the effort in a way that is going to be really nice to see, and it’ll be something that the community can rally around.” They could have their work cut out for them. While a Pre-K 4 SA reauthorization passed Tuesday, bond propositions and accompanying tax increases from four local school districts on the midterm ballot failed. The fifth district, Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City ISD, saw its proposition pass narrowly in with voters in Guadalupe and Bexar counties.

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Fort Worth is poised to lose its premier PGA Tour event at Colonial Country Club

Proving again that tradition has nothing on a giant pile of money, Fort Worth’s future with the PGA Tour, if there is one, will be a tournament of seniors who appreciate the history of the game, and its celebrated courses. This current iteration of the PGA Tour and its players may sell tradition, but that ambition is easily defeated by a bag of cash. As a result, Fort Worth’s Colonial Country Club will likely lose its spot hosting a premier PGA Tour event when the new schedule begins in 2028. Colonial Country Club hosts the longest-running non-major PGA Tour event, a tournament that began in 1946 and has been a staple on the schedule for 80 years. Unless something dramatically changes, the event at Colonial in 2027 will be its last as a premier PGA Tour tournament.

A source confirmed the Golf Week Magazine report that the PGA Tour’s new format will likely not have Colonial and its Charles Schwab Challenge as part of its Championship Series. Sources did say that nothing has been officially decided, and that there are “many moving parts” to this future schedule. On Thursday afternoon, Colonial Country Club issued a statement via email to its members from its Board of Governors. “With the current Charles Schwab Challenge contract terminating in 2027, Charles Schwab, with Colonial Country Club’s full support and alignment, sought a place in the newly established PGA Tour Championship Series beginning in 2028. Despite Colonial’s best efforts, an agreement with the PGA TOUR has yet to be reached at this time,” the statement says. “While an agreement has not been reached at this time, Colonial Country Club remains actively engaged in discussions with a variety of organizations involved in sponsoring and staging championship golf as we explore opportunities to bring championship competition to Colonial in 2028 and beyond. We are actively exploring a range of options and alternatives and will share updates as our discussions progress and information becomes available.” Technically it’s not official, so there is still a chance that the CS Challenge could ace a shot from 180 yards into a stiff breeze, but this looks all but done. Because money.

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National Stories

The blue tsunami was the revenge of the Black South

Voters in the 2026 midterm elections issued a stunning rebuke of the Republican Party on Tuesday, delivering Democrats control of both the House and the Senate, in addition to a majority of state legislative chambers, governorships, attorney general offices, and more. A Democratic victory of this magnitude—which turned even staunchly red states like Texas blue—hasn’t been seen in generations. And a new memo circulated among top Democratic National Committee officials on Wednesday acknowledges that voters of color were “the driving force” of this massive win. The feat is all the more astounding because the voters of color who powered Democrats’ success were set up to fail. In July 2025, Donald Trump’s Justice Department started pressuring Texas officials to break up electoral districts where Black and Latino residents made up a majority of eligible voters. In August, Trump declared that Republicans were “entitled” to five more congressional seats and called on the state to redraw district maps to hand the GOP a structural advantage.

Texas, led by Gov. Greg Abbott (who just lost his reelection campaign) and Attorney General Ken Paxton (who just lost his campaign for Senate), did as it was told. And at Trump’s urging, several more Republican-led states soon redrew their district maps, aiming to maximize partisan gains at the expense of meaningful representation for voters. Experts predicted a precipitous drop-off of people of color in elected office, and warned that 20 of the Congressional Black Caucus’ 62 members could lose their seats. Then, in April 2026, the Supreme Court poured fuel on the fire by eviscerating the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais. Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the Republican majority that district maps violate the VRA only if there is an “objective likelihood” of “intentional racial discrimination.” He stressed that maps drawn to achieve partisan goals easily pass that test, “even if it so happens that the most loyal Democrats happen to be Black Democrats.” And he emphasized that restoring the political power of people of color targeted with gerrymanders is unlawful, because that too is “intentional race-based conduct.” In other words, Alito gave Republicans the go-ahead to deny Black people an equal opportunity to participate in the political process.

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Trump signs proclamation to prevent changes to Oval Office, other White House rooms

President Donald Trump signed a proclamation Thursday designating the Oval Office, the Outer Oval Office and the Cabinet Room as a national monument and federal landmark, a move intended to preserve the spaces and prevent future administrations from altering them. "It won't be able to be taken down, destroyed, touched or anything else," Trump told reporters from the Oval Office. "It’s actually called a national monument. It’s a federal landmark. When completed … it'll make it impossible for anybody ever to destroy this incredible space. " Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House.

The announcement came two days after the midterm elections in which Democrats won enough seats to gain control of Congress. The proclamation is part of a broader series of post-election public appearances highlighting White House construction initiatives. On Monday, Trump detailed planned updates during remarks in front of the Reflecting Pool. On Wednesday, he held a press briefing at the construction site of a new White House ballroom. Since returning to office in 2025, Trump has prioritized several high-profile architectural and cultural projects, including a proposed 250-foot triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery and proposals to rename and restructure the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

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Nithya Raman wins L.A. mayor race as Karen Bass concedes

The latest voter results released Thursday morning by the L.A. County Register-Recorder/County Clerk show Raman, a two-term City Councilmember, with a continuing commanding and growing lead over incumbent Bass. As of right now, with 72% of the expected vote counted, Raman has 429,450 to Bass’ 394,796. In terms of percentage, that’s a decisive 52.1%-47.9%. On Wednesday night, Raman had 51.67% to Bass’ 48.33% of the vote, with over 66% of ballots tabulated. Raman took to social media to thank the voters of “this beautiful joyful city” for her win. In the less than two-minute video, Raman praised Bass for her service over the decades. The newly minted Mayor-elected also promised those who voted against her or didn’t vote at all to use her time in City Hall to “earn your trust.”

In a statement, Bass said: “Four years ago, you elected me as the first Black woman mayor in the history of Los Angeles. You gave me the honor of serving the city that raised me, and every single day since, I have carried that responsibility with me While this is not the outcome we hoped for, the people of Los Angeles have spoken. I have called Councilmember Nithya Raman to congratulate her on her victory, and I have committed to ensuring a smooth and seamless transition. Moving this city forward is what Los Angeles needs from all of us.” Raman’s vote has been steadily growing since Tuesday’s general election, while Bass, who has been pilloried over her initial response to the 2025 wildfires, projected L.A. Olympics costs and quality-of-life issues, has been going down. While more vote drops are scheduled for later today and Friday, the trajectory made it mathematically impossible for Bass to catch up to her former ally and challenger. Today’s statement by the pragmatic 73-year-old veteran pol shows Bass is considering her legacy in the Democratic Party with the way the wind is blowing in the city and nation. Pledging to make the revitalization of film and TV production in the home of Hollywooda top priority in her administration, Raman’s win is a shock to the L.A. political establishment, who lined up solidly behind Bass. To that, Raman will surely move quickly to heal divisions that emerged in the party during the campaign. At the same time, as midterm election results across the nation this week made clear, voters want change in what looks to be a generation shift. On that note, the 45-year-old Raman will not be the youngest mayor L.A. has ever had. That distinction goes to Alpheus Hodges, a physician who was 28 when he took over City Hall’s top job in 1851 while also serving as L.A.’s coroner. Hodges led the then city of less that 1,700 for less than a year.

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The 'World's Best Airline' is updating its business and first-class experience

Singapore Airlines is rolling out new onboard seating, dining and entertainment options as part of an over S$2 billion ($1.6 billion) investment to keep up with rivals from around the world. The cornerstone of this investment: new premium cabin seats for its long-haul flights, which will progressively debut on the Airbus A350 long-haul and ultra-long-range planes in mid-2027. First-class seats will come with 32-inch 4K high-definition screens, Bang and Olufsen noise-cancelling headphones and options for passengers to book double bed and face-to-face dining configurations. New First Class seats will feature a configuration where travelling companions can choose to dine face to face if their seats are beside each other.

Seating in business class will come outfitted with 22-inch 4K screens, wireless charging and Bluetooth audio connectivity. These retrofits to the A350 aircraft also come as SIA grapples with a long-running delay to the delivery of new Boeing 777-9 planes, which were slated to come in 2021 and now faces an uncertain date as to when it will take delivery of the aircraft. These products will also debut with the 777-9 aircraft when they come into service with SIA. Minor refreshes will be added to other classes, such as an extra inch of reclining space in premium economy cabins, and new upholstery in economy class. Both will also come with new 4K seatback entertainment monitors, but the new features for economy and premium economy seats will only be on the incoming 777-9 aircraft.

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Goodbye from Salon: It has been an extraordinary privilege.

Today, after 31 years, we are saddened to announce that Salon is ceasing publication. It’s difficult to find the right words for the end of something that has meant so much to so many people. Salon was never just a website. It was an idea about what journalism could be, born at a moment when the internet was still a largely unexplored frontier. When Salon launched in November 1995, the web was a very different place. A small group of journalists set out to create something original: a publication with a strong voice, a curiosity about the world and a belief that the internet could bring journalism and readers together in new ways. They helped pioneer a form of journalism that would come to define an entirely new era of publishing.

Over three decades, Salon has brought together politics, culture, criticism and ideas in a way that was distinctly our own. Our journalism examined power and politics, questioned assumptions, surfaced stories that deserved attention and made room for perspectives that were too often overlooked. Our writers and editors helped shape conversations about the forces changing our lives. The work was never simply about keeping up with the news. It was about making sense of it. The history of Salon is also the history of the people who made it. We are profoundly grateful to the journalists, editors, photographers, producers, designers, business teams and countless other colleagues who brought this publication to life across its many chapters. To the founders who imagined it, the staff members who built it, the contributors who gave it their voices and the alumni who carried its spirit into the world: Thank you. Salon’s legacy belongs to all of you. We also want to thank our readers. You came to Salon for the journalism, the dialogue, the essays, the criticism, the unexpected discoveries and the sense that there was a place on the internet where ideas mattered. You read, shared, challenged, subscribed, wrote to us and kept coming back. Your engagement made Salon a publication and a community, and it gave our work meaning. We are so grateful for the time you spent with us.

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Should cities take control of their electric utilities?

The concept of public power may be an unfamiliar one for many Ann Arbor residents who have only ever paid for electricity from a for-profit company. But Ann Arbor would not be the first to create its own electric utility if voters say yes to Proposal E on Tuesday, Nov. 3, and the city follows through on it. About 40 Michigan communities have had public power since the late 1800s or early 1900s — cities like Chelsea, Lansing, Bay City, Traverse City and dozens of others. Nationwide, about 2,000 community-owned, not-for-profit power utilities serve tens of millions of customers across the United States — everywhere from Austin to Nashville, Los Angeles, Seattle and beyond, including the entire state of Nebraska. Proponents want Ann Arbor to create a public utility that would replace DTE Energy, the investor-owned utility that has served Ann Arbor for more than a century. Opponents of the ballot effort, which include DTE and city officials, argue it would be too costly, citing estimates the city may have to borrow anywhere from a few hundred million dollars to $1 billion to buy out DTE and the likelihood of a costly legal battle to break away from DTE.

Dozens of communities across the U.S. have attempted municipalization of their electric grids in recent decades and most never panned out, notes the DTE-backed Ann Arbor Responsible Energy Coalition, which is campaigning against Prop E. City Council Member Erica Briggs, one of several Ann Arbor officials against the proposal, cites Boulder, Colorado, as an example of a failed effort. Boulder set out in 2010 to cut ties with Xcel Energy and spent nearly $30 million on a decade-long legal fight before giving up. “I accept the basic concept that evidence demonstrates municipal power, if you have it, is generally more affordable and more reliable,” Briggs said. “The question is just us trying to do it 100 years after the infrastructure has been built.” Jonathan Koehn, Boulder’s chief sustainability and resilience officer, told the Ann Arbor Energy Commission in 2021 he didn’t consider his city’s municipalization attempt a cautionary tale. It was worth it and he would do it all over again, he said. “We did make mistakes and you can learn from those mistakes,” he said. Boulder’s intention wasn’t to own and operate poles and wires — it was to achieve community goals, Koehn, said, and he’s still a believer in public power.

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The fight is growing over ballot counting in Mississippi’s tight Senate race

National party operatives, lawyers, grassroots activists and content creators are descending on Mississippi to observe the vetting of thousands of provisional ballots in the coming days and to gear up for possible legal challenges over the final results. Mississippi, a state not used to the national spotlight for close elections, now sits at the forefront of a fight that will determine the size of the Democrats’ majority in the US Senate next year. Democrat Scott Colom has a razor-thin lead over Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, in a state that hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in nearly 40 years and no Black person to the Senate since Reconstruction.

Both Colom and Hyde-Smith have assembled extensive teams ready to observe and potentially challenge ballot-counting procedures ahead of Mississippi’s December 3 deadline for certifying the results. “We were prepared for this for months,” Colom told reporters Wednesday. “We have an army of lawyers. We have local lawyers. We have everybody involved to make sure the process is followed according to the law.” At a press conference Thursday, the state GOP touted the 50-plus volunteer attorneys and observers it had sent across the state, and Mississippi Republican Party Chair Michael Hurst said many more are prepared to jump in to help. “Our attorneys and observers will continue to be in different parts of Mississippi – watching as election commissioners review and process these outstanding ballots, ensuring that our elections are followed and that only ballots which have been legally cast are counted,” he said.

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Copyright November 14, 2026, Harvey Kronberg, www.quorumreport.com, All rights are reserved