Depending on who you asked, U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s decision this week to run for Senate meant one of two things.

In the eyes of some pundits and politicos, the Dallas Democrat’s nomination would spell doom for her party’s chances of winning a statewide race for the first time in over three decades. To others, she is a fighter and gifted communicator whose expand-the-electorate strategy is worth trying in a state where Democrats of all stripes and styles have failed.

In interviews with over a dozen Texas Democratic operatives, perspectives on Crockett’s strengths and liabilities — and how they would play in a general election — were varied. Crockett has said she can defeat whoever emerges from the GOP Senate primary by speaking to infrequent voters and motivating them to turn out for her. Some said her authentic communication style and well-established reputation for going toe-to-toe with Republicans can help do exactly that.

But others say she would need to attract voters who cast their ballots for President Donald Trump, in a state the president carried last November by nearly 14 percentage points — a gap that some argue cannot be bridged by high Democratic turnout alone, and that Crockett is too polarizing to achieve.

Crockett, a second-term congresswoman who inspires both fierce fandom and deep disdain, has staked her political career on her statewide viability. On Monday, the last day for candidates to file for the 2026 ballot, she officially joined the U.S. Senate primary setting up a marquee battle March 3 against state Rep. James Talarico, an Austin Democrat and progressive aspiring Presbyterian minister who, like Crockett, has assembled an impressive social media following and fundraising apparatus of his own.

At stake is not just the U.S. Senate race, but competitive seats further down the ballot for the U.S. House and the state Legislature. Though Texas Democrats are still smarting from another round of blowout defeats last year, 2026 marks the first midterm with Trump in the White House since 2018, when Beto O’Rourke’s narrow Senate loss generated a wave of down-ballot wins for Democrats.

Fiery, quick-witted and adept at generating viral moments, Crockett is well-known to the Democratic base in Texas and around the country. As Democrats have struggled with unscripted forums, finding their digital voice and authentic presentation, Crockett, a frequent presence on cable television and in long-form interviews, is regarded among the base as an invigorating and clear communicator, never robotic or boring. Operatives agree she will be a strong fundraiser and a formidable primary candidate. And her backers argue her status as a household name — including in the White House — is a strength.

“Jasmine Crockett is the most talked about member of the United States Congress, House or Senate,” Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis, a bastion of Houston politics, said at Crockett’s launch event. “And why are they talking about her? Because she talks back. She will expand our base. She’s a great communicator. She has shown that she can raise money.”

But critics say that while Crockett may drive disengaged Democrats to the polls, she will also inspire independents and Republicans to come out against her — a phenomenon she can ill afford in a red state. They worry that 2026 — a Trump midterm year, with a hotly contested Republican primary that will leave the eventual GOP nominee bruised and battered — is too promising an opportunity to run a candidate known for clapping back against members of the dominant party in the state.

Nancy Zdunkewicz, an Austin-based Democratic pollster unaffiliated with either campaign, said Crockett is well-known to Republican voters, many of whom have negative views of her. A successful candidate will motivate the base, persuade swing voters and demoralize Republicans, Zdunkewicz said. On the last point, she worries Crockett would have the opposite effect.

“My concern with her is that, in a year where we’re already anticipating that there’s going to be greater Democratic turnout and enthusiasm in response to this administration, as we saw in 2018 … are we giving [Republicans] an incentive to turn out, where they otherwise would’ve stayed home?” Zdunkewicz said.

Monique Alcala, a former executive director of the Texas Democratic Party, also voiced concerns about Crockett’s electability and whether she can turn out or flip enough infrequent voters needed to win statewide. Alcala said she worries that Crockett’s brand of politics — and her limited record of legislative accomplishments — may not activate those populations.

“I don't think that they're looking for somebody that is going to be a firebrand,” Alcala said. “I think that they're looking for somebody that's going to get things done. And I think that Crockett has not made that a priority of hers in Congress.”

Crockett has said she is running because she believes the opposite — that she can turn out infrequent voters and expand the electorate. She has said her internal polling reflects that belief — and insisted for weeks that she would only run statewide if the data showed a path to victory — but she has not shared any of those numbers publicly. Her campaign wants a high-turnout election, believing it would benefit her.

Asked in a Monday night CNN interview how she planned to attract Trump voters, Crockett said she planned to focus her message on affordability, and added, “I don't know that we'll necessarily convert all of Trump’s supporters. That's not our goal."

Already, Republicans — who have made no secret that they would prefer to face her over Talarico — are tying her to down-ballot Democrats running in some of the most competitive seats in the country. Sen. John Cornyn, the Texas Republican who would face Crockett in November if he survives his primary, told Semafor her bid is a “gift.” One Republican operative told The Texas Tribune that the mood yesterday in the GOP was on par with “Christmas morning.”

Crockett’s previous comments about key voting blocs in Texas will likely take center stage in Republican advertising, such as when she described some Latino voters’ anti-immigrant attitudes as a “slave mentality” in an interview with Vanity Fair a year ago. And she once criticized the right as a “violent group” that “attract[s] violent actors”.

But Crockett has remained unfazed by the doubters.

“We’re used to [people] telling us what I can’t do,” Crockett said at her campaign kickoff event Monday. “But they have no idea what Crockett’s crew will do. And so I just want to be clear for all the haters in the back, listen up real loud: We’re gonna get this thing done.”

Turnout vs. persuasion

The graveyard of failed Texas Democrats from the last 30 years is littered with statewide candidates of all stripes — moderates, progressives, big fundraisers, national figures, military and law enforcement veterans, profane celebrities, lawyers, business owners and those of all race and ethnicity.

None have won.

Numerous operatives said a successful statewide Texas race requires both turning out as many Democratic voters as possible — including infrequent voters — and persuading swing voters. Some think Crockett can do both; others concede she may juice turnout but that she may struggle with independents and Trump voters.

Katherine Fischer, director of the Democratic-aligned Texas Majority PAC, said she agrees that Crockett will be able to turn out voters who have rarely or never cast a ballot. But, she added, doing so is a heavy lift and can only succeed if the candidate also wins over swing voters.

“I believe that she will really motivate Democrats to turn out and vote,” Fischer said. “Will she have persuasive capabilities? We'll have to see.”

Rebecca Marques, who has worked in Texas Democratic politics for years, including on O’Rourke’s 2022 gubernatorial bid, said she believes in Crockett’s campaign because the Dallas Democrat is stylistically attractive to infrequent Democratic voters and swing voters, many of whom are younger, Latino or Asian. Crockett, she said, comes off as a fighter who speaks to people’s frustrations, like O’Rourke and, paradoxically, Trump.

“I actually think her arguments and the way she speaks is closer [to those voters],” Marques said. “She has an easier time bridging how she campaigns and speaks to that unlikely voter base and the swing voters we think we could peel off in a general — Latinos, Asians, maybe poor young white folks — that are not ideologically in one camp or another, and are most focused on their economic ability.”

Marques also said she does not think Crockett would uniquely whip up Republican turnout if she wins the nomination. She believes the right is already fired up because of their dramatic Republican primary and the possibility that Attorney General Ken Paxton — a GOP firebrand who is popular among the base and hopes to unseat Cornyn in March — may be the nominee.

Some strategists dismissed Crockett’s chances outright, noting that she never needed crossover appeal with Republicans to win her solidly Democratic districts in the Texas House and Congress. Talarico, by contrast, flipped a state House seat in 2018 before switching to a safer blue seat in Austin for the 2022 cycle after his district was made redder through redistricting.

“This is not a base mobilization election — Trump carried Texas by 14 points — it’s about who can create a big enough coalition to win,” Eric Koch, a Democratic strategist who has done campaign work in Texas, said via text. “Talarico can do that, Crockett can’t.”

Matt Angle, a longtime Texas Democratic operative and founder of the Lone Star Project, said Crockett’s biggest asset is her ability to communicate effectively with voters, while her biggest challenge will be coming across as a Texas Democrat rather than a national Democrat, given her massive profile.

“She unquestionably has communication skills and excites our base in a way that’s absolutely necessary,” Angle said. “The challenge for her is to build beyond that. Can she reach out to some people who have dismissed Democrats, either because they just don’t think they’re going to win, or because they don’t think they talk to them about the right issues?”

Down-ballot races

The Democrat who came closest to winning a statewide race in Texas this century was O’Rourke, who lost by less than 3 percentage points in 2018, reviving dormant Democratic dreams of a blue Texas.

Though O’Rourke lost, one of his lasting legacies is the array of down-ballot races Democrats won that cycle, in part by relying on the high turnout he generated through motivating infrequent voters. Riding the blue wave, Democrats flipped two U.S. House seats, two Texas Senate seats and 12 state House seats.

Whoever emerges as next year’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate will carry the same responsibility of helping down-ballot Democrats in tough races — or, at the very least, not harming their prospects.

Republicans see Crockett as a useful liability to be pinned on Democrats whose seats they are targeting in 2026, including the two South Texas congressional districts represented by U.S. Reps. Henry Cuellar of Laredo and Vicente Gonzalez of McAllen. Democrats, meanwhile, are targeting U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz, R-Edinburg, who also represents the region, making the southern part of the state a critical battleground for control of the House.

The National Republican Campaign Committee — the House GOP’s campaign arm — has already sought to tie Gonzalez to Crockett, as has one of his prospective GOP opponents, Eric Flores. Gonzalez is running for reelection to a district that Trump would have carried by 10 points, after Republicans in the state Legislature redrew the boundaries over the summer to be more favorable for the GOP.

“Radical Jasmine Crockett is electoral kryptonite and now vulnerable Texas Democrats are stuck sharing a ticket with her,” NRCC spokesperson Reilly Richardson said. “Whether they cave and endorse her before the primary or wait until she’s officially coronated as Democrats’ next statewide loser, her toxic brand will hurt Texas Democrats down the ballot next year.”

The NRCC’s internal polling, shared with The Texas Tribune, found that Crockett’s image was underwater in a summer survey of 50 battleground districts across the country, though the group did not disclose her exact margin. Her name identification was 75%.

Marques said Crockett was a frequently requested surrogate for South Texas stops on O’Rourke’s 2022 campaign. Rather than being a drag, she believes Crockett can help juice turnout, allowing vulnerable Democrats to take advantage of that while maintaining distinct political brands.

Cameron County Democratic Chair Jared Hockema runs the local party in a Rio Grande Valley county that voted for Trump last year, shifting 10 percentage points to the right and voting for a Republican presidential nominee for only the third time since 1980. Hockema said he does not worry about negative down-ballot impact from either Senate nominee; if anything, he said the primary will excite people.

“I never subscribed to the idea that you’ve got to be careful what you talk about,” Hockema said. “That's why we're in the place we are. We need to be courageous to talk about the issues that matter to people. And both of those folks do that.”

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

Just last year, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott joined a bipartisan chorus of governors in denouncing a Biden administration plan they said would strip states of powers guaranteed to them under federal law.

The plan would have transferred Air National Guard units from six states to the U.S. Space Force, the newly created military branch, stoking concerns about federal overreach and the erosion of governors’ control over their own guard forces. Texas wasn’t among the affected states, but Abbott made his opposition unmistakable in an open letter to the president.

He called the plan an “intolerable threat that would set a “dangerous precedent.”

“I strongly oppose any attempt to sideline governors when it comes to their respective National Guards,” he wrote.

A year later, Abbott helped Donald Trump do just that. He said that he “fully authorized” the president’s plan to send Texas National Guard members to Illinois and Oregon to protect federal law enforcement personnel who are executing immigration laws. Those states’ governors vigorously objected, saying such action was an unnecessary escalation that interfered with state sovereignty.

Abbott defended the deployment on Fox News. The president, he said, has the authority to mobilize guard members to preserve public safety.

“President Trump and I have a good, longstanding working relationship, and there is a substantive reason behind that,” Abbott said. He added that he and the president were “operating very closely aligned on ensuring that our country is going to be safe.”

Abbott, the leader of the largest state led by Republicans, has emerged as one of Trump’s most important allies as the president tests the limits of executive power. While governors often align with their parties’ presidents, Abbott’s support for Trump’s expansion of federal powers is a striking departure from his own historical and ardent defenses of state sovereignty.

That, constitutional experts say, sets a risky example that may be difficult to reverse.

“What he’s doing is short-term gain for his political positions, and Texas’ political positions, but not for Texas as a state moving forward,” said Georgetown University Law Center professor Victoria Nourse. “You might like this president, but you’re not necessarily going to like what happens to Texas with the next one.”

There are myriad examples of Abbott bending his views on state sovereignty to accede to the wishes of the new administration, including directing state agencies to assist the administration’s immigration enforcement — an action that constitutional law experts said essentially deputized the Texas government into federal service — as well as providing data on voters and redrawing legislative boundaries to net more GOP-friendly seats in the U.S. House.

Abbott’s arguments then and actions now are an example of what Jessica Bulman-Pozen, a constitutional law professor at Columbia University, calls partisan federalism, a term describing how state leaders’ fervor for defending their sovereignty increasingly depends on whether their party is in power in Washington. She said Abbott’s support of the guard deployments is particularly alarming because it diminishes the traditional power of governors to manage law enforcement in their states.

Abbott did not respond to interview requests or written questions from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. But Robert Henneke, general counsel for the conservative think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation, and James Peinado, chair of the Republican Liberty Caucus of Texas, which advocates for limited government, said they saw no contradiction between Abbott’s historic defense of states’ authority and his support of Trump’s actions. Trump is following the law, Henneke said, and “the states don’t have the power to block the lawful exercise of authority of the federal government.”

Abbott’s actions, however, have drawn rebuke from fellow governors, including at least one from his own party.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, told The New York Times that he was surprised Abbott sent Texas guard members to Illinois. “We believe in the federalist system — that’s states’ rights. Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration,” said Stitt, who did not respond to interview requests.

Ron Beal, a retired law professor at Baylor University, said Abbott’s actions not only violate the historic spirit of cooperation among states, but provide Trump cover to unlawfully interfere in state matters.

“Trump’s reason for sending troops is clearly a total fabrication of reality and I believe a constitutional violation,” Beal said. “It is simply outrageous that Abbott would participate and cooperate with such activity.”

Shifting View of Federal Power

Abbott’s devotion to state sovereignty has long been central to his political identity.

In January 2016, entering his second year as governor, he published a 92-page essay defending states’ rights and decrying what he called the Obama administration’s executive overreach. In a speech that month to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, he accused President Barack Obama of bypassing Congress by enacting climate change and immigration policy through unilateral executive orders. Abbott also lambasted the Supreme Court for upholding the Affordable Care Act, arguing the justices invented a legal basis for it.

“State leaders were supposed to have the power and opportunity to check any attempt by federal officials to overstep their bounds,” Abbott wrote. “Indeed, the entire structure of the Constitution was premised on the idea that the states would be stronger than the national government.”

Abbott proposed the “Texas Plan,” a set of nine constitutional amendments that he said would restore the balance of authority between the federal government and states. Among them was one that would make clear that the president, Congress and judges have no powers beyond those expressly mentioned in the Constitution.

The essay offered a well-reasoned critique of growing federal power, said Sanford Levinson, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas, who has assigned it as required reading for his students.

Levinson said Abbott’s recent actions mark a complete reversal.

“He condemned presidents for overreach, particularly in executive orders, and said we had to do something to rein that in. There’s much to be said for that, but that is certainly not his view in 2025,” Levinson said. “Most of what Trump does is through executive order.”

Trump has sought to use executive orders to force changes to elections and voting. He has also pressured state leaders to make changes on his behalf, and Abbott has obliged.

Over the summer, Abbott became the first governor to comply with Trump’s demand that Republican-led states break from the traditional 10-year cycle of redrawing congressional districts to create more GOP-friendly seats for the 2026 midterm election.

Initially sympathetic to incumbent Republican House members’ worries that the strategy could weaken solid GOP seats by spreading the party’s voters across too many districts, Abbott ultimately called a special session of the Texas Legislature to draft new congressional boundaries.

Texas lawmakers in 2003 similarly conducted a rare mid-decade redistricting, but that was not directed by then-President George W. Bush, said Karl Rove, one of Bush’s senior advisers. “The White House and RNC didn’t provoke or lead the effort,” Rove said in a text message.

A governor allowing a president to influence when a state redistricts cedes the historical power of states to run their own elections, said Mimi Marziani, who teaches election law at the University of Texas.

She said Trump’s request for more GOP-friendly seats “has everything to do with national party interests and nothing to do with state interests.” And she warned that if governors give in, they will be vulnerable to future presidential meddling.

Earlier this month, Trump endorsed Abbott for reelection, citing redistricting as one of the governor’s key accomplishments. A week later, a panel of three federal judges blocked the state’s newly drawn congressional map from taking effect, finding that it discriminated against voters based on race. On Tuesday, Abbott said Texas would “swiftly appeal” to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Abbott’s cooperation has extended to sharing voter registration data with Washington.

Texas joined more than a dozen states in turning over voter roll information to the Justice Department, despite long-standing resistance to federal oversight of state elections.

The Constitution allows states to run elections, subject to oversight by Congress. But Trump sought greater control over the process, issuing an executive order in March that prioritized enforcing the federal laws that bar noncitizens from voting.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that noncitizens are voting en masse to sway U.S. elections in favor of Democrats, while research has shown this not to be true.

A recent voter roll audit by the Texas secretary of state, using a federal citizenship database, flagged 2,724 voters — or 0.015% — as potential noncitizens. Preliminary investigations by county voter registrars, however, found that some of those voters are citizens.

Acting on Trump’s order, the Justice Department requested from states their entire voter rolls, including dates of birth, addresses, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers, according to a letter sent to Texas and obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune under public records laws.

Records show that Texas provided voter roll information to the Justice Department in October.

Texas secretary of state spokesperson Alicia Pierce told ProPublica and the Tribune that the secretary of state provided only the publicly available version of its voter roll, which redacts information such as driver’s license and Social Security numbers.

The Justice Department is suing eight states, six of which had provided or offered publicly available versions of their voter rolls because they did not include all the information the federal government sought. One such state is Pennsylvania.

“This request, and reported efforts to collect broad data on millions of Americans, represent a concerning attempt to expand the federal government’s role in our country’s electoral process,” Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, a Republican, wrote to the Justice Department in August.

Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre declined to comment on why the federal government had not included Texas among the states it was suing for failing to share all the information the government sought.

But the same month that Texas quietly handed over the limited voter roll, Secretary of State Jane Nelson, an Abbott appointee, announced her office had finished running the full roll, along with Social Security numbers, through a federal database to check voters’ citizenship status.

The Department of Homeland Security stores voter data uploaded by state officials, DHS records obtained by ProPublica found.

Nelson’s office did not answer questions about whether doing so essentially provided the federal government with even more data on Texas voters than it had initially sought.

In Limbo

Abbott embraced Trump’s deployment of Texas National Guard troops under a novel interpretation of a federal law that authorizes the mobilization of troops to quell a rebellion or threat of rebellion, or if “regular forces” are unable to enforce federal law. No modern president has invoked the law to assist in carrying out immigration policy.

Despite Abbott’s support, the 400 Texas National Guard troops mobilized by Trump are still not on the streets of Illinois or Oregon.

Federal judges temporarily halted the deployments after Oregon and Illinois sued the Trump administration, arguing that its actions violate the 10th Amendment, which gives the states all powers not explicitly granted to the federal government by the Constitution.

The states’ arguments echo those Abbott made in his 2016 essay, in which he warned that Washington too often ignored that amendment to impose its will on states. He proposed making it easier for states to sue the federal government over alleged abuses of power.

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is handling the Illinois case, had a similar take. In an Oct. 16 ruling, the court said the Texas troop mobilization was “an incursion on Illinois’s sovereignty” and likely a violation of the 10th Amendment.

The litigation kept Texas Guard members who were deployed to the Chicago area more than a month ago in limbo, unable to carry out what Trump wanted them to but unable to leave. A U.S. Defense Department spokesperson said the 200 guard members who were training at a base in Illinois returned to Texas last week. The rest, bound for Oregon, remain at Fort Bliss in El Paso.

The U.S. Supreme Court has placed the Illinois case on its emergency docket and is considering the parties’ written arguments. The court’s pending ruling would likely apply to the Oregon case as well.

Despite the uncertainty regarding the deployment’s legality, Trump suggested in an October speech to U.S. military members that he was prepared to send troops, including active-duty units, into more cities.

Abbott’s cooperation thus far will make it harder for other states to resist Trump in future deployments, said James Gardner, a constitutional law professor at the University at Buffalo. The framers of the Constitution intended for states to stand with one another to ensure officials in Washington never accumulated too much power, Gardner said.

He said that while Abbott, who is seeking a record fourth term next year, would likely rediscover his passion for states’ rights if a Democrat were elected president, the governor may struggle to regain power he helped take away from the states.

“By altering the Constitution’s contemplated balance of power, it makes it easier for the central government to crush dissenting states,” Gardner said.

Former Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan on Thursday said his decision to drop his bid for another term leading the lower chamber last year was rooted in his disapproval of President Donald Trump’s agenda.

Phelan, a Beaumont Republican who served two terms as speaker, narrowly survived a primary challenge last year from an opponent endorsed by Trump. He later declined to seek reelection as speaker amid opposition from within his own party.

In August, Phelan announced he wasn’t going to run for reelection to his southeast Texas House district. Trump earlier this week posted on Truth Social: “Fortunately for the Great State of Texas, their Former Speaker, who is no longer Speaker, Dade Phelan, is quitting Politics.”

Phelan at a Texas Tribune Festival event Thursday said it wasn’t anything new to have the president come after him.

“That’s fine,” Phelan said. “It’s not a secret I am not a MAGA Republican. I never have been a MAGA Republican. I’m not a Donald Trump guy. Again, it’s the reason I decided not to be speaker again. I could not carry his agenda through the Texas House.”

Phelan said that it felt “phenomenal” not to be running for office again. But he said he was concerned for the Republican Party as it headed into the midterms, where the party that controls the White House generally doesn’t do well. He noted that prices weren’t going down — “regardless of what Mr. Trump says” — and health care costs were set to rise next year with the looming expiration of Affordable Care Act tax credits, spelling political trouble for his party.

“We’ve got to get a handle on this or we’re going to have a very messy, very messy November of next year,” he said.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

THE WOODLANDS — Thousands gathered Friday night to kick off a conference of young Republicans in which Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist killed last week, was memorialized as a “martyr” whose death is galvanizing youths across the nation.

Speaker after speaker, from state lawmakers to influential MAGA cultural tastemakers, shared stories at the Texas Youth Summit about how Kirk — who began rallying young conservatives as a teenager — made them and others feel like their Christian-guided views mattered and their perspectives were shared by many.

They called him a “hero,” “miracle,” and “martyr for Christ." Amid the mourning, they said that the fight Kirk had embarked on was far from over but one that could be won by the young people in attendance.

And it appeared, according to some of the speakers, that more people were learning Kirk’s name and his vision for a faith-led American future every day since his death.

The speeches caused roars of applause from the mostly young audience, some wearing white t-shirts that said “We are Charlie,” which glowed in front of bright red and blue stage lights.

“Be like Charlie,” Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, the final speaker of the night, told the crowd, which had thinned by the time he took the stage past 10 p.m. but was still several hundred strong. The state’s junior senator recounted how he texted Kirk upon hearing about the shooting, asking if he was OK.

“I’m praying for you right now,” Cruz said he texted, adding: “Obviously, I never got an answer.”

Kirk was killed Sept. 10 while speaking at a Utah university, the first stop of his group’s “The American Comeback” tour. He often debated students who disagreed with him on his tours while firing up young conservatives.

“There's a lot of value in a bunch of young conservatives coming together and (feeling) like they're not alone. Charlie created that environment — single handedly,” U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Houston said in a video that was played. “No one else did that kind of thing.”

The memorial was just the latest instance of Texans gathering to share their sorrow over Kirk’s death. Vigils at college campuses, town squares and churches have drawn thousands, with speakers and attendees saying Kirk changed how they viewed politics, debating and their own beliefs. Others vehemently opposed what Kirk stood for but attended the homages to condemn his killing as an unacceptable act of political violence.

“We weren’t alive for JFK or MLK, and this is the first big assassination,” said Harley Reed, one of more than 1,000 who gathered last week at Texas A&M for one such candlelight vigil. “This is the first big movement, if you will, that we’ve seen interrupted in a way.”

Also grieving publicly are the state’s leaders, including some Republicans who are set to speak at the conference on Saturday. Some have also urged a close examination of reactions to Kirk’s death from educators and students; Gov. Greg Abbott, for one, has called for the expulsion of students who publicly celebrated Kirk’s death, prompting blowback from critics who say such calls run afoul of the First Amendment’s free speech protections.

Such scrutiny has done little to slow the momentum that’s erupted among conservative youth who just became old enough to vote or will reach the threshold in time for next year’s midterms.

Turning Point USA, the group Kirk launched as an 18-year-old to organize other young conservatives, said it received an explosion of more than 50,000 requests to establish new chapters at colleges and high schools in the days after its founder’s death.

In Texas, where the GOP has dominated state government for longer than current college-age students have been alive, organizers of this weekend’s youth summit said they anticipated record-breaking attendance after getting an influx of interest leading up to the event.

“Charlie Kirk cannot be replaced,” Christian Collins, the summit’s founder and leader, said Friday night. “But what I will say is, what will happen in this community, and in this country, is thousands of Charlie Kirks will rise up.”

The event was another example of how Kirk’s death has invigorated a growing movement of young conservatives nationwide, and added fuel to efforts from Texas’ GOP leaders to turn the red state an even deeper shade of red.

State GOP leaders and lawmakers have pointed to that outburst of interest and solidarity as evidence of a Christian awakening among the state’s youth that they say will only grow stronger and usher in a new culture in America.

While the state’s leading young Republican organizations were once lukewarm on Trump, the voter bloc they represent proved crucial to Trump’s victory last year throughout the country.

The president has reportedly said that was thanks, in large part, to Kirk’s work.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/20/texas-youth-summit-republican-charlie-kirk-memorial/.

In 2019, the Keller Independent School District in North Texas looked a lot like its counterpart just 30 miles to the east in the Dallas suburb of Richardson. Each served about 35,000 children and had experienced sharp increases in the racial diversity of students in recent decades. Each was run by a school board that was almost entirely white.

In the five years since, the districts have followed strikingly divergent paths as culture war battles over how to teach race and gender exploded across the state.

In Keller, candidates backed by groups seeking to limit the teaching of race and gender took control of the school board and immediately passed sweeping policies that gave outsized power to any individual who wanted to prevent the purchase of books they believed to be unsuitable for children.

Though more than half of Keller’s students are from racially diverse backgrounds, the district in 2023 nixed a plan to buy copies of a biography of Black poet Amanda Gorman after a teacher at a religious private school who had no children in the district complained about this passage: “Amanda realized that all the books she had read before were written by white men. Discovering a book written by people who look like her helped Amanda find her own voice.” The passage, the woman wrote, “makes it sound like it’s okay to judge a book by the authors skin color rather than the content of the book.”

Board members at the Richardson school district went in the opposite direction, even as they contended with similar pressure from groups aiming to rid the district of any materials that they claimed pushed critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that discusses systemic racism. The school board did not ban library books but instead allowed parents to limit their own children’s access to them, keeping them available for other students.

One major difference contributed to the districts’ divergence: the makeup of their school boards.

The way communities elect school board members plays a key, if often overlooked, role in whether racially diverse districts like Keller and Richardson experience takeovers by ideologically driven conservatives seeking to exert greater influence over what children learn in public schools, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found. Since the pandemic, such groups have successfully leveraged the state’s long-standing and predominantly at-large method of electing candidates to flip school boards in their direction.

Most of Texas’ 1,000 school districts use an at-large method, where voters can cast ballots for all candidates. Supporters say that allows for broader representation for students, but voting rights advocates argue that such systems dilute the power of voters of color. If board members are elected districtwide, there tends to be less diversity, according to research, which also shows that if they are elected by smaller geographic zones, candidates of color often have more success.

“What you’re seeing happening in Texas is how at-large districts make it easy for somebody to come in, usually from the outside, and hijack the process and essentially buy a board,” said Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit public policy institute that champions small-donor campaign financing. “Because of this conflux of factors — at-large elections and large amounts of outside money — it just sort of defeats the idea of representative democracy.”

ProPublica and the Tribune examined 14 rapidly diversifying suburban school districts where children from diverse backgrounds now make up more than half of the student population. In the six districts that used at-large voting systems, well-funded and culture-war-driven movements successfully helped elect school board members who have moved aggressively to ban or remove educational materials that teach children about diversity, even in districts where a majority of children are not white. Nearly 70% of board members in such districts live in areas that are whiter than their district’s population.

Eight nearby school systems with similar demographics employ single-member voting systems to elect school board candidates. Under the single-member system, voters within certain boundaries elect a board member who specifically represents their area. Candidates in those districts received less campaign support from ideologically driven political action committees, and none of the districts experienced school board takeovers fueled by culture war issues.

About 150 Texas school districts have transitioned to a single-member system since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which is intended to prevent voter discrimination and has brought greater racial representation to local governments. Richardson joined that list in 2019 after a former Black board member sued the district.

Such legal challenges, however, could soon become more difficult. In one of his first acts in office, President Donald Trump froze civil rights litigation against school districts accused of discriminating against minority groups, and many legal experts believe that under his administration, federal prosecutors will refuse to bring challenges against at-large systems. DOJ officials did not respond to questions from the news organizations.

Trump, a staunch critic of diversity and inclusion programs, has threatened to cut federal funding to schools that he says are pushing “inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the shoulders of our children.”

Districts whose boards oppose sweeping efforts to restrict curriculum and books related to race and racism face even more headwinds in Texas. In January, Gov. Greg Abbott vowed to ban diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in public schools, a move that would expand the state’s existing ban on college campuses. And Texas lawmakers continue to target the books students can access. One bill, authored by North Texas state Sen. Angela Paxton, the wife of Attorney General Ken Paxton, would require every district in the state to follow a version of Keller’s library book purchase policy.

The president of the Keller board, Charles Randklev, did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and the district did not answer written questions. District officials have previously said that the board represents all students, not just those in a specific neighborhood or area.

But Laney Hawes, the parent of four students in the district and an outspoken critic of the school board, said the policy on library purchases spawned a backdoor channel to banning materials about race. That, she said, has deprived her children of reading books about Americans like Gorman that provide points of view they might not find otherwise.

“They have created a system that allows anyone in the community to complain about any book for any reason, and now that book is not on library shelves,” said Hawes, who is white. She added that the book does not contain any sexually explicit material and was strictly targeted because it dealt with race.

“They just hate the racial undertones.”

“Up Against a Machine”

School districts across Texas have drawn considerable attention for removing books from their shelves, but board members in Keller went further when they passed a policy in August 2022 that, in practice, allowed community members to block proposed purchases.

Students spoke out against the district’s removal policies during a board meeting months later, pleading for access to books about race. One biracial student, who has since graduated, told the board that books about characters from different racial backgrounds helped her feel more accepted.

“All kids deserve to see themselves in literature,” the student said. “Racial minorities being written into a story does not instantly equate the book to being propaganda. Having books that mirror the experience of race is not pushing an agenda. It's simply documenting the hardships that consistently happen to most students of color that they’re able to relate to. Concealing ideas just because they tell an uncomfortable truth is not protecting your children.”

The students’ pleas didn’t sway the board, and by July 2023, challenges to such books began pouring in.

One person opposed the purchase of “Jim Crow: Segregation and the Legacy of Slavery.” The person, who did not provide their name, pointed to a photo of a young girl participating in a Black Lives Matter protest with the caption: “Just as in the past, people continue fighting for change.” They also took issue with this quote: “You can’t ‘get over’ something that is still happening. Which is why black Americans can’t ‘get over’ slavery or Jim Crow.”

The photo and the quotes, the book challenger said, were “potentially CRT,” showed the Black Lives Matter Movement in “a positive light” and claimed “oppression is still happening.”

Another person challenged the planned purchase of “Our Skin: A First Conversation About Race,” saying that the book started “beautifully,” but that “unfortunately tenets of CRT, social justice, and anti-white activism are portrayed.” The person, who used a pseudonym, did not offer specifics.

Administrators removed those books, the Gorman biography and 26 others from the purchase list after receiving the complaints, according to district officials. Librarians can reinstate books on future lists, but 75% of those flagged for further review never made it to the shelves, an online search of district libraries shows. That includes the three books about race.

Hawes, who heads two PTA groups at her children’s schools, said book challenges and complaints have come from allies of school board members. In 2022, Patriot Mobile Action, a North Texas Christian nationalist PAC funded by a cellphone company, spent more than $115,000 supporting three ideologically driven conservatives running for control of the school board.

Leigh Wambsganss, Patriot Mobile’s spokesperson and executive director of the PAC, declined to comment but said in a 2022 podcast that the PAC chose candidates based on their Christian conservative views and sought out those who “absolutely would stand against critical race theory.” Patriot Mobile supported eight candidates in three other North Texas districts that used at-large voting during the same election cycle. All of them won their races.

“We weren’t prepared for what was coming,” Hawes said. “We were literally up against a machine.”

Another PAC, KISD Family Alliance, spent $50,000 to help elect the same Keller school board candidates. Its donors included conservative activist Monty Bennett, who previously told the Tribune that he believes schools have been taken over by ideologues “pushing their outlandish agendas.” Neither Bennett nor the PAC’s treasurer responded to requests for comment.

The slate of Keller candidates, whose combined campaign war chests dwarfed that of their opponents’ by a more than 4 to 1 margin, focused their agendas squarely on culture war issues related to library books and curriculum.

“While I have many priorities I want to focus on, if concerns over child safety, and sexualization and politicization of children make me a one-issue candidate, so be it. I will be a one-issue candidate all day long,” Joni Shaw Smith wrote on her campaign website. Smith, who is now a board member, declined to comment.

Her election contributed to what would become a sweep of the seven seats on the board. Five of those seats are held by board members who live in the city of Keller, where three-quarters of residents are white and the median household income of more than $160,000 is among the highest in the state.

Most of the Keller district’s 42 schools, however, are located in the more diverse neighborhoods of Fort Worth.

A Different Approach

Thirty miles away, the makeup of Richardson’s school board changed dramatically after the district settled a lawsuit filed in 2018 by David Tyson Jr. He argued that the continued use of at-large voting to select candidates was a “relic of the district’s segregated past.”

Tyson became the district’s first Black board member when he was elected in 2004. After he retired in 2010, he watched with growing consternation as no candidates from diverse backgrounds followed in his footsteps, even though students of color accounted for nearly 70% of the district’s population.

Frustrated, Tyson sued Richardson, challenging its system for electing candidates under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He and Richardson officials settled the lawsuit in 2019, and the district converted primarily to a system in which candidates needed to live within specific boundaries and receive a majority of votes from residents who also lived within those boundaries to be elected.

As ideologically driven candidates swept Keller school board elections, similar efforts played out differently in Richardson. In 2022, two candidates supported by groups seeking to limit instruction and library books that deal with race and gender ran against two candidates of color with differing views. A local PAC that accused the district of teaching “CRT nonsense” in a mailer hired the same Republican campaign consulting firm that was working in support of the Keller candidates.

Despite being outspent 2-to-1, the candidates of color won their elections. Their wins gave Richardson four board members of diverse backgrounds, a remarkable evolution from an all-white board just three years earlier. And, as nearby districts began mass removals of library books dealing with race and gender, the Richardson school board embraced an “opt-out” process to give concerned parents control over their children’s reading “without impacting the choices of other families who may have different values, wishes or expectations.” Opponents say opt-out systems do not go far enough in protecting students from materials they deem objectionable.

“Single-member districts benefited us in making sure our school board maintains the diversity, and diversity of thought, we have, and not just fall into those culture wars,” said Vanessa Pacheco, one of the board members who won.

Pacheco said not being consumed by such fights allowed the board to focus on “real stuff” like dual-language classes for elementary students, expanding pre-K opportunities and scheduling school events for parents in the evenings and on weekends to account for working families.

So striking was the district’s atmosphere following the 2022 election that a Dallas Morning News commentary dubbed Richardson a “no-drama district” in a sea of school boards consumed by fights over race and gender.

Tyson, whose lawsuit set the stage for the Richardson school board’s dramatic transformation, said that the shift in voting methods has accomplished what he had hoped for.

“The goal was to get representation,” he said. “We’re a majority-minority school district, and so we need to have a majority-minority representation on the school board.”

“Now or Never”

Hawes watched as voters down the road in Richardson rejected candidates seeking to limit what the district’s diverse student body could read and learn. She watched as the board itself grew increasingly diverse. And she watched with a touch of envy as the district embraced the idea that parents and community members who opposed certain books should not make decisions for every child in the district.

With Richardson as their north star, Hawes and a growing number of concerned parents began discussing ways to force the Keller school district to adopt what they believed was a more representative voting system. It wasn’t just a question of race for Hawes. It was also about geographic diversity. Board members who live in the city of Keller hold a majority, even though less than a third of students in the district attend schools there.

So last year, Hawes and other concerned parents met with law firms and the NAACP and began planning a petition drive that would require the board to hold an election to do away with at-large voting. Members planned to meet in January to finalize a strategy.

Then, in mid-January, the Keller school board shocked many in the community by proposing to split the district in two, separating the whiter, more affluent city of Keller to the east from the neighborhoods of northern Fort Worth, which are home to the majority of the district’s students, including many who are low income. Like many districts in the state, Keller faces a massive budget shortfall.

Randklev, the board president, defended the split as financially beneficial for both districts in a Facebook post last month. He also wrote that “neighboring school districts have been forced into single-member districts, and that’s a no-win situation regardless of where you live.” He did not explain his position but said the proposed split “could provide programming opportunities that best reflect local community goals and values and foster greater parent and community involvement.”

But many parents, including Dixie Davis, who previously ran unsuccessfully for the board, said the proposed change would leave the vast majority of the district’s low-income student population, and most of its students of color, with uncertain access to facilities like an advanced learning center and the district’s swimming complex.

On Friday, board members abandoned plans to divide the school district in two, citing the cost of restructuring the district’s debt. But their push to split the district has further energized efforts by some parents to do away with at-large voting. Brewer Storefront, the same law firm that fought to change the voting system in Richardson, has filed a similar legal challenge in federal court against Keller and concerned parents have launched a petition drive to force the district to vote on its at-large system. The district has not yet filed a response to the lawsuit and did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“With the momentum and uproar around this proposed district split, it's now or never to get this done,” Davis said. “It'll be a huge uphill battle, but this is our best shot.”

WASHINGTON — Sen. John Cornyn is facing what could be the toughest primary challenge of his career as the state party takes a decidedly rightward turn and his popularity among Republican voters dips from 2020 highs.

It’s a remarkable turn for the four-term senator who — before last year losing his bid for party leader — had never lost an election in his life, served in the highest echelons of the Senate Republican Conference, had an early hand in the Republican takeover of Texas and secured a host of legislative wins directly impacting the state.

Attorney General Ken Paxton has repeatedly hinted that he’s interested in challenging Cornyn in the Republican primary, saying on Fox News he could be making moves soon.

“As far as my plans, right now, I don't know. I'm just going to serve as attorney general,” Paxton said. “I'm looking potentially at the U.S. Senate. We'll look at that over the next couple of months.”

Cornyn’s office confirmed last week that he was still in the race.

But polling suggests that if Cornyn and Paxton were to have a primary today, Paxton would win. Among Republican-identifying voters, Cornyn has an approval rating of 48% — one of the lowest of state-wide office holders, according to a polling aggregate by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Paxton, meanwhile, has an approval rating of 60% among Republican-identifying voters. Texas’ other senator, Ted Cruz, has an approval rating of 78% among Republicans.

If Cornyn were to retire, several members of the U.S. House could also launch a bid. U.S. Reps. Beth Van Duyne of Irving, Wesley Hunt of Houston and Ronny Jackson of Amarillo have all been discussed in Republican circles, though none have publicly vocalized their intentions as Paxton has.

Jackson was Trump’s physician in the White House, and Trump’s endorsement in his first race for Congress in 2020 helped Jackson beat controversy in the primary over allegations of workplace abuse during his time in the White House. Jackson is an impressive fundraiser for a House member in a deeply red seat, raising more than $6 million in the last election cycle. He invested in Spanish-language ads in 2022 to raise his name recognition among voters outside his district. Jackson’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Van Duyne was the first mayor to endorse Trump when she was mayor of Irving, and was the 2024 Texas GOP victory chair, campaigning for Cruz and Trump.

Her campaign didn’t say if she was considering entering the primary. “Beth is focused on delivering President Trump’s America First agenda: secure borders, confronting Mexican cartels, tax relief and lower costs for working families, American energy dominance, and an economy with rising wages,” her campaign said in a statement.

Hunt led much of the Trump campaign’s outreach to Black men in the last election cycle and interviewed to be his Defense secretary late last year. Trump endorsed Hunt in his Congressional races in 2020 and 2022, and Hunt has proven himself a prodigious fundraiser, raising more than $7 million in his first U.S. House race. Hunt was recognized with a primetime speaking slot at the Republican National Convention this year. Hunt’s campaign declined to comment for this story.

But Cornyn is not making any signs of stopping. He has taken on more committee assignments this year — several that will be central to some of the biggest policy priorities of the Trump presidency. He finished 2024 with $4.1 million in cash on hand, according to a source briefed on his fundraising operation, and has been meeting with some of his biggest supporters throughout Texas since the beginning of the year.

When asked if he would still run for reelection shortly after losing the leadership race, Cornyn said, “absolutely.”

Early support set a smooth 2020 path

Cornyn has faced primary challenges from the right before and mobilized his formidable operation to quash them.

He ran against a crowded primary in 2014 with seven Republicans hoping to unseat him, including then-U.S. Rep. Steve Stockman. The Friendswood Republican at the time cited Cornyn’s distaste for Sen. Ted Cruz’s filibuster against government funding legislation that would fund the Affordable Care Act. Cornyn, who was Senate minority whip at the time, said the tactic was not effective, though he shared Cruz's antipathy for the health care law.

Cornyn obliterated the opposition. He won his primary with 62% of the vote. Stockman secured just over 17%. Cornyn raised over $11 million in that race. Stockman raised just over $115,000.

In 2020, Cornyn faced a potential challenge from U.S. Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Sherman, who was then a state senator. Fallon said at the time that Cornyn “has had 18 years. Some of the things you agree with until you check under the hood” as he launched an exploratory committee into a Senate run.

But Cornyn was armed not only with his bountiful funds but also endorsements from across the Republican ideological spectrum. Cruz endorsed Cornyn in December 2018 — two years early and less than a month after securing his own victory against Democratic U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke. Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Trump also endorsed Cornyn ahead of the 2020 primary.

Fallon eventually decided against running in the primary and ran for the U.S. House that year. Cornyn won reelection handily. Fallon did not respond to a request for comment.

This time, Cornyn has not yet secured the endorsements that helped stave off a primary challenge in 2020. Cruz, whom Cornyn helped with over $500,000 in his own competitive reelection campaign last year, has not endorsed in the Senate primary.

When asked if he had spoken to Cornyn about endorsing him, Cruz said “it’s early to worry about politics in a race two years away. John Cornyn and I have worked together very closely for the last 13 years, and we will continue to work together very closely.”

“We’ll have plenty of time to have those conversations,” Cruz continued when asked why he was not endorsing early like in 2018. He had the same answer when asked about a potential Paxton run.

Cruz and Paxton operate in overlapping orbits, with senior staff for Cruz previously serving in Paxton’s operation. Cruz also defended Paxton through his impeachment and enjoys considerably higher popularity among the conservative base than Cornyn.

Cruz notably voted for one of Cornyn’s opponents, the right-wing Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, in the first round of voting in the majority leader race. He would not say if he voted for Cornyn or Sen. John Thune of South Dakota in the second round. Thune won the majority leader race with 29 out of 53 votes.

Abbott’s and Patrick’s campaigns did not respond when asked if they would endorse Cornyn.

Trump’s pick

The endorsement that could count the most is Trump’s. His endorsement has catapulted multiple Republicans through crowded primaries in Texas.

The president has so far made no indication whom he would support. With the primary more than a year away, there’s plenty of time to audition for the presidential blessing.

Few have done more for Trump’s cause — and done so more brazenly — than Paxton. He led a lawsuit challenging the results of the 2020 election and repeatedly sued the Biden administration to stop its legislative agenda. Trump gave the attorney general a special shout out during his inauguration this year. Trump even floated his name for U.S. attorney general last year.

Cornyn, meanwhile, has appeared averse toward Trump in the past. He told reporters in May 2023 that Trump’s “time has passed him by,” suggesting that Trump didn’t have enough appeal in a general election to win. He also expressed concern in a June interview with CBS Texas about Trump’s federal indictment on keeping classified documents in his private residence, saying Trump had “created a circumstance for himself, which is, I think, very serious.”

Cornyn eventually endorsed Trump after he won the New Hampshire primary.

Since Trump won back the presidency, Cornyn has not given Trump any reason to criticize him. He has steadfastly supported all of Trump’s nominees, even his most controversial ones. He voted to advance Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, to serve as Trump’s director of national intelligence, despite misgivings even among Republicans about her past comments supporting Russian President Vladimir Putin and ousted Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Cornyn has also joined Abbott in calling for the federal government to reimburse Texas for Operation Lone Star and is a founding member of the DOGE Caucus, aligning himself with the cost-cutting mission spearheaded by Elon Musk.

Despite his electoral doubts, Cornyn’s support for the president within the chamber has been consistent through the years. He was Senate majority whip during the first years of Trump’s presidency, herding his conference to support the president’s agenda on tax cuts and judicial nominations — including the controversial appointment of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Cornyn voted more than 92% of the time with Trump’s agenda during his first presidency, and he voted for every Trump appointee in both the Executive and Judiciary at the time.

That hasn’t spared him from Trump’s criticisms, particularly over his work on the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a gun safety bill passed following the Robb Elementary shooting in Uvalde. The bill was the first gun safety bill signed into law in decades and invested heavily in community safety measures and limited the ability of high-risk individuals to access firearms.

Trump called Cornyn a Republican in name only for his support of the bill, posting on social media at the time: “The deal on ‘Gun Control’ currently being structured and pushed in the Senate by the Radical Left Democrats, with the help of Mitch McConnell, RINO Senator John Cornyn of Texas, and others, will go down in history as the first step in the movement to TAKE YOUR GUNS AWAY. Republicans, be careful what you wish for!!!”

The Cornyn-Paxton feud

Cornyn and Paxton have had a storied distaste for each other. Before his time in the Senate, Cornyn served as the first Republican Texas attorney general in more than a century. He transformed the position from a sleepy government office to a major force in conservative politics.

Cornyn said he was “disturbed” by Paxton’s various legal troubles and that it was an “embarrassment” that they had not been resolved before Paxton’s 2022 primary.

Paxton has accused Cornyn of being a Republican in name only, urging someone to primary him. He rallied the MAGA base to denounce Cornyn’s bid for majority leader, writing on social media: “Republicans deserve better in their next leader and Texans deserve another conservative senator.”

The differences go beyond personality. Paxton said in early 2024 that it was “unbelievable” that Cornyn would vote for $95 billion in military aid for U.S. allies. Foreign military aid emerged as a major fault line between traditional defense Republicans and the far right last year. Cornyn shot back that Paxton’s “criminal defense lawyers are calling to suggest you spend less time pushing Russian propaganda and more time defending long-standing felony charges.”

When Cornyn was eyeing a run for Senate majority leader, Paxton was vocally against the bid, writing on social media that Cornyn was “anti-Trump, anti-gun, and will be focused on his highly competitive primary campaign in 2026.”

Cornyn replied: “Hard to run from prison, Ken.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/02/11/cornyn-paxton-possible-senate-primary/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Federal prosecutors dropped their charges against a Dallas surgeon accused of leaking the records of underage patients’ gender transition-related care in what some conservative activists are calling a win for anti-transgender activism.

The request for dismissal, submitted by Jennifer Lowery, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, did not specify why the four counts of wrongful disclosure of individually identifiable health information against Dr. Eithan Haim were dropped.

Haim, a self-described whistleblower, was charged after he provided conservative activist Christopher Rufo with the records of children receiving gender transition-related care at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, the largest pediatric hospital in the United States.

Rufo published the material in a May 2023 article, however the records have since been removed from the piece. While transgender care for minors was legal in 2022 when the records were sourced, the hospital publicly had said it would end providing the care after Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the parents of children undergoing transition-related care be investigated for child abuse. The Texas Supreme Court later ruled Abbott had no grounds to order the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate the families.

Haim never contested that he leaked the records, however he did maintain throughout the legal proceedings that no laws were broken because personally identifiable patient information was not disclosed.

The case quickly became a lightning rod for anti-transgender activists and politicians who describe Haim as a whistleblower for exposing an alleged “secret transgender program.” Transgender care in Texas, especially for minors, has long been under fire by Republicans in the state. Only weeks after Rufo published the records provided by Haim, Texas passed an outright ban on transition-related care for minors.

Transition-related care can include anything from mental health counseling and social affirmation of gender through pronoun changes or medical interventions like puberty blockers or surgery, however instances of physical treatment among youth are rare.

The dismissal follows an X post from Haim’s wife Andrea accusing Lowery of “weaponizing the DOJ” against her husband. The alleged weaponization of the justice system also has been a highlight of President Donald Trump’s campaign, who signed an executive order Monday claiming the Biden Administration had a systematic campaign of weaponized prosecution.

Texas House Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian, was one of dozens of people congratulating Haim for the dropped charges, and said he spoke with Haim on the phone to congratulate him directly for the update.

“We still must get to the bottom of the potential crimes he exposed, for which he should've been praised... not prosecuted,” Harrison said in an X post Friday.

The case was set to begin a jury trial on Feb. 10, according to the court’s website.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/24/transgender-care-data-leak-texas-childrens-hospital/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

When President Donald Trump appeared in a New York courtroom last spring to face a slew of criminal charges, he was joined by a rotating cadre of lawyers, campaign aides, his family — and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The medical director of the Texas Medical Board has retired, less than two weeks after conservative lawmakers publicized his employment with a Planned Parenthood laboratory.

Dr. Robert Bredt has worked as medical director for the state medical licensing agency since 2012, earning $185,000 a year. While the members of the licensing board are appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, the medical director role is hired by agency leadership.

According to his resumé, Bredt also worked at Planned Parenthood South Texas Laboratory since 2011, as well as Genics Laboratory in Las Vegas and San Antonio since 2022. Bredt, 62, is also a professor, consultant and laboratory inspector.

Bredt submitted his retirement paperwork on Tuesday, which was also his last day of work, a medical board spokesperson said in an email. Bredt declined to comment.

This kerfuffle began not with a debate about reproductive health care, but rather, another highly politicized fight about COVID treatments. The Texas Medical Board has been locked in an ongoing legal battle with Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, a Houston ear, nose and throat doctor, about her anti-vaccine stances and use of ivermectin to treat COVID. In 2023, the board filed an official complaint against Bowden, alleging she violated the standard of care, failed to maintain patient-doctor confidentiality and acted unprofessionally by treating a COVID patient without examining them

After she refused to settle, Bowden ended up before an administrative law judge through the State Office of Administrative Hearings. As part of that case, the Texas Medical Board filed a motion asking to introduce Bredt as an expert witness, to testify about the board’s usual practices and procedures. The motion included Bredt’s resumé, which showed his employment at a Planned Parenthood lab.

State Rep. Brian Harrison, a conservative Republican from Midlothian and frequent critic of the medical board, said he made the decision to go public with this information “within minutes” after he learned about it.

“There's some real irony here in that in their zeal to prosecute a doctor, they had to make public that the medical director … is literally also a Planned Parenthood employee,” Harrison told The Texas Tribune on Wednesday.

He posted Bredt’s resumé on X and sent Abbott a letter demanding Bredt’s termination. He said he would file legislation to defund the medical board, and his office would call the agency every day until Bredt was fired.

“This fox must be removed from the guardianship of the henhouse,” he wrote to Abbott.

Harrison also said Abbott should direct all state agencies to ensure none of their employees work for Planned Parenthood. While there is no law or regulation prohibiting a state employee from also working at Planned Parenthood, the reproductive health care organization has long been enemy number one of Texas conservatives. The state sacrificed millions of federal dollars to keep Planned Parenthood providers out of the Medicaid program, leading dozens of family planning clinics to close in the process, and is currently trying to bankrupt Planned Parenthood with a $1.8 billion lawsuit.

Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas no longer provide abortions, but that has done little to reduce conservatives’ vitriol towards the health care provider. In a letter sent to members of the Texas Medical Board just before the end of the year, calling for Bredt’s termination, state Rep. Briscoe Cain, a Republican from Deer Park, called Planned Parenthood “a criminal enterprise that profits off of killing babies.”

In a statement, Planned Parenthood South Texas CEO Laura Terrill accused politicians of wasting “valuable time and resources playing doctor in an act of political theatre.”

“Dr. Bredt’s work at Planned Parenthood South Texas (PPST) reflects his unwavering commitment to providing the highest standards of medical care,” she wrote in a statement. “Planned Parenthoods in Texas follow the law, full stop. We have, and always will, comply with state and federal regulations while focusing on what truly matters: delivering essential health care services to the tens of thousands of Texans who depend on us every day.”

Harrison said Wednesday that he is pleased Bredt no longer works for the state, but is outraged that he was hired in the first place. He wants an investigation into the medical board, and the executive branch’s hiring practices, and said he may still push a bill to defund the board itself.

This is not the first time Harrison has led a charge to force a state entity to bow to his vision of conservative values. Last year, he claimed credit for Texas A&M getting rid of its LGBTQ studies minor, although the university said he played no role, and forced the Texas Workforce Commission to remove a line on its website saying it would investigate claims of discrimination based on gender identity.

Disclosure: Planned Parenthood has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/08/texas-medical-board-robert-bredt-retire-planned-parenthood/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

In Texas, undocumented people have built apartment complexes and skyscrapers that changed skylines. They have picked fruits and vegetable in fields, cooked in restaurant kitchens, cleaned hospitals and started small businesses. They have become stitched into communities from El Paso to Beaumont.

Now some of their employers worry that many of them could get deported when President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House.

A number of Texas business leaders interviewed by the Tribune describe a sort of wait-and-see apprehension about Trump’s pledged mass deportations. The impact any deportations could have on Texas’ economy will largely depend on the specifics of what Trump does, business leaders say. But those specifics are not yet clear.

“I don’t think any of us know exactly what’s coming as far as policy — we’ve heard all of the rhetoric,” said Andrea Coker of the North Texas Commission, a nonprofit that promotes the Dallas region.

The owner of a Rio Grande Valley agriculture import-export business who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of legal repercussions said four of his seven employees are undocumented. A majority of similar businesses would take a hit should the government deport undocumented people en masse, the business owner estimated.

Without undocumented workers, he said, “We wouldn't survive and we'll have to close."

A farm worker moves containers to be filled with grapefruit near Mission on Dec. 16, 2024. Credit: Michael Gonzalez for The Texas Tribune

He said he hired undocumented workers because he struggled to find U.S. citizens and legal residents willing to do the grueling work.

"The people who are here legally don't want to work here. They'd rather collect unemployment," he said. "We've hired people who were documented, but they don't last."

In speaking about mass deportations, Trump and his incoming aides have said they will prioritize deporting people with a criminal history, while also noting that anyone who has entered the country illegally has committed a crime. Any large-scale deportation plans are sure to face legal and logistical challenges.

But Texas’ state leaders are eager to help Trump, and the state is a target-rich environment. The Pew Research Center estimates that unauthorized immigrants make up approximately 8% of the state’s workforce, including a large presence in the hospitality, restaurants, energy and construction industries.

The state comptroller’s office did a study in 2006 to find out how the state economy would look without the estimated 1.4 million undocumented immigrants living in Texas in 2005. The study said their absence would cost the state about $17.7 billion in gross state product — a measure of the value of goods and services produced in Texas. The state has not updated the study since; analysis replicated by universities and think tanks have reached similar conclusions that undocumented Texans contribute more to the economy than they cost the state.

“We know that immigrants are punching above their weight,” said Jaime Puente, director of economic opportunity at the left-leaning nonprofit Every Texan. “We are looking at a significant loss of productivity.”

Among major Texas industries, construction has the highest proportion of undocumented workers, according to the Pew Research Center. Mass deportations could disrupt the state’s homebuilding industry in the midst of a housing shortage, which could lead to fewer new homes built and even higher home prices and rents, according to housing experts.

A recent paper from researchers at the University of Utah and the University of Wisconsin-Madison explored the aftermath of the deportation of more than 300,000 undocumented immigrants nationwide from 2008 to 2013. In the places where deportations happened, the study found, homebuilding contracted because the local construction workforce shrank and home prices rose. The researchers discovered that other construction workers lost work too because homebuilders cut back on new developments.

A construction worker along Highway 1604 in San Antonio on Dec. 19, 2024. Credit: Scott Stephen Ball for The Texas Tribune

“We really find ourselves in the situation where anything that kind of disrupts the process of [adding] housing supply would be detrimental to the housing affordability crisis,” said Riordan Frost, a senior research analyst at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Stan Marek’s Czech grandfather arrived in Houston in 1938 and began hanging sheetrock. Nearly 100 years later, Marek’s family owns a large Houston-based construction firm with roughly 1,000 employees.

“I have watched the stages of immigration,” said Marek, 77. “Eighty-five years later and our immigrants are here, and like they’ve always been, to do the work that no one else wants to do or can do.”

Marek sees a long overdue opportunity to fix a lingering mess — the country’s immigration laws. He said deportations “will be terribly expensive and terribly nonproductive” but granting widespread amnesty to undocumented people would not work either.

Marek believes giving a path to citizenship to people who arrived in the country as children and received deportation protection through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, could help the state reduce its workforce shortage. He also believes in the creation of a similar program for adults to gain legal status — which he calls “Adult DACA” — so that they can work legally.

“It’s not just construction. Who’s picking all the fruit and all the vegetables? Who’s milking all those cows? Every job you look at all over the United States, there are immigrants,” Marek said. “We gotta have the business community step up. That’s the key because the business community, more than anybody, is responsible for the labor.”

In the oil-rich Permian Basin, mass deportations could reduce populations in cities and in turn result in closed businesses and the disappearance of sales tax dollars, said Virginia Bellew, executive director of the Permian Basin Regional Planning Commission.

“I think you've seen communities just waiting [to see what Trump does], don't want to take any steps to predict, discuss, or make decisions,” Bellew said.

In Austin, a 43-year-old man who arrived from Mexico 25 years ago said his first job involved sweeping up debris at a construction site for less than $8 an hour. Today he is a foreman for a general contractor, supervising projects and coordinating crews. He asked his name not be published for fear of jeopardizing his pending residency application.

He said he is not letting himself be consumed by the fear of Trump's promises of mass deportations. He has deep roots in Texas now. He and his wife have raised their three kids in Austin in a house they built themselves.

His kids are U.S. citizens and his wife has legal status through DACA. He’s in the process of applying for legal residency through his eldest daughter, a student at St. Edward’s University in Austin.

“I try to be a great citizen,” he said in Spanish. “[Trump] can not deport everyone because there are so many of us who are indispensable to this country.”

Disclosure: Every Texan and the North Texas Commission have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/08/texas-immigration-mass-deportations-economy/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit accusing a New York doctor of prescribing abortion drugs to a Texas resident in violation of state law.

This lawsuit is the first attempt to test what happens when state abortion laws are at odds with each other. New York has a shield law that protects providers from out-of-state investigations and prosecutions, which has served as implicit permission for a network of doctors to mail abortion pills into states that have banned the procedure.

Texas has vowed to pursue these cases regardless of those laws, and legal experts are divided on where the courts may land on this issue, which involves extraterritoriality, interstate commerce and other thorny legal questions last meaningfully addressed before the Civil War.

In this case, Paxton accuses Dr. Margaret Carpenter of mailing pills from New York to a 20-year-old woman in Collin County. The woman allegedly took the medication when she was nine weeks pregnant. When she began experiencing severe bleeding, the lawsuit says, she asked the man who impregnated her to take her to the hospital. He had not been aware she was pregnant or seeking an abortion, according to the filing.

The lawsuit does not say whether the woman successfully terminated her pregnancy or experienced any long-term medical complications. Mifepristone and misoprostol, the medications Carpenter is accused of sending, are more than 95% effective if taken before 10 weeks of pregnancy.

Paxton is asking a Collin County court to block Carpenter from violating Texas law, and order her to pay $100,000 for every violation of the state’s near-total abortion ban. Texas’ near-total abortion ban comes with up to life in prison, fines of at least $100,000 and the loss of a provider’s Texas medical license.

Carpenter is not licensed to practice in Texas, according to the complaint. She is the founder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, a national group that helps doctors in states with shield laws provide telemedicine consultations and abortion pills to patients in states that have banned abortions.

The group was founded after the overturn of Roe v. Wade by Carpenter, Dr. Linda Prine, and Julie Kay, a former ACLU lawyer who successfully argued the case that overturned Ireland’s abortion ban. They support doctors who want to become “shield providers” by advising them on licensure, data security, pharmacy contacts and legality.

Carpenter also works with AidAccess, an international medication abortion provider, and helped found Hey Jane, a telehealth abortion provider. Neither Carpenter nor Kay immediately responded to a request for comment.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/12/13/texas-paxton-abortion-pill-mail-lawsuit/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar is claiming some credit for Texas’ controversial buoys to prevent migrants from crossing the Rio Grande, saying he pitched the idea to Border Patrol years ago.

The conservative Democrat said in a recent interview with Newsweek that he made the pitch to Border Patrol to prevent migrants from claiming asylum by setting foot on U.S. territory.

“I said, if you put a wall in Texas in the river, you're about a quarter mile away. So when somebody crosses and touches the riverbanks, they can claim asylum,” Cuellar told the news magazine.

In a brief interview with The Texas Tribune, Cuellar added that the idea didn’t go anywhere at the time because the International Boundary and Water Commission didn’t give the necessary permits. But he was enthusiastic about an alternative to a land-based border wall in his district.

Gov. Greg Abbott deployed buoys and razor wire on the border last year to deter migrants from crossing the Rio Grande. Dozens of people have died trying to cross the river in recent years. Then-Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador criticized the tactics last year after a body was reported on one of the buoys.

Texas Democrats in Congress, including Cuellar, sent a letter to President Joe Biden urging his administration to investigate Abbott’s actions under Operation Lone Star, including the use of razor wire and buoys on the Rio Grande. The letter asserts the buoys and razor wire are “potentially illegal and may violate multiple bilateral treaties” designating water rights between the United States and Mexico. Every Democrat in Texas’ congressional delegation at the time signed onto the letter.

Cuellar, who has represented the 28th Congressional District since 2005, expressed similar concerns during a press conference in 2023 about Operation Lone Star, where he said the buoys could change the border if there is flooding and that Border Patrol agents have expressed concerns that the razor wire can impede them.

“We need to have border security, but at the same time, we have to respect the rights and the dignity of the migrants who are trying to come into the U.S.,” Cuellar said at the news conference. “One of the things that we’ve asked the state and that I’ve asked the federal government is, are we coordinating with the state, and it looks like the state is going solo on this.”

Speaking with The Texas Tribune, Cuellar said he was not opposed to the use of buoys, but he signed onto the 2023 letter in opposition to the state’s unilateral use of the barriers without working with the federal government. He said he was optimistic the state will work with the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump on hardening the border.

Cuellar also said he didn’t want to take credit away from Abbott for deploying the buoys.

“I’m not taking anything from Governor Abbott,” Cuellar said. “I congratulate him.”

Cuellar is among the most conservative Democrats in Congress and has occasionally crossed over to support Republican efforts on border security. He helped launch a Democratic task force on border security earlier this year.

He has recently shown openness to working with Trump’s administration, saying he saw opportunities for “common ground” with Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar. Homan served as director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term. The pair plans to meet sometime next week. Cuellar said he could see an agreement with the Trump administration on working with Mexico to keep migrants from reaching the U.S. border.

Cuellar remains politically battered, reeling from a federal indictment charging him with bribery, money laundering and working on behalf of the Azerbaijani government and a Mexican bank. He has denied the allegations and won reelection in November by 5.6 percentage points. He won reelection in 2022 by more than 10 points.

Republicans declined to heavily fund a challenge against Cuellar this year despite the indictment, which came out after the first round of the district’s Republican primary. But South Texas remains a major target for the party, and national Republicans have telegraphed they are keeping their sights on the district in the future.

Cuellar’s trial is set to begin next spring in Houston, in which more details of his alleged criminal activity are expected to be aired out. He is charged with accepting nearly $600,000 in bribes to advance the interests of Azerbaijan’s oil and gas sector and the business interests of Banco Azteca. He is accused of setting up money-laundering schemes to conceal the bribes with the help of his wife, Imelda. Cuellar said his behavior was in line with other members of Congress.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/12/04/henry-cuellar-texas-rio-grande-border-buoys-immigration/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Eight years ago, when conservative state lawmakers tried to restrict what bathrooms trans people could use, moderate Republicans quietly killed the bill in a special session.

Less than a decade later, that seems like a distant memory. The far-right now has the Legislature firmly in its grip and, emboldened by the recent election, they’re gearing up to make growing trans animus the social issue of the session.

[After Texas banned puberty blockers and hormones for trans kids, adults lost care, too]

Nationwide, Republicans have successfully pushed these laws as a way to protect children, by prohibiting them from medically transitioning before they turn 18 and stopping trans students from playing on sports teams that don’t align with their biological sex.

Texas has so far marched in lockstep with its conservative cousins in passing laws aimed at children. But some lawmakers want to further restrict the lives of trans adults as well, filing bills about bathroom use, gender identity markers on official documents and funding for gender reassignment surgery.

“The American people and especially Texans that I represent, they’ve had enough of it,” Rep. Brian Harrison, an arch-conservative from Midlothian, told The Texas Tribune. “They’re forcing you to celebrate something that’s at odds with objective reality, and in many instances, forcing tax dollars to fund it.”

The limit on how far Texas will go on this issue lies in the hands of conservative lawmakers, as the state is unlikely to face federal pushback as they did during the Biden administration. Incoming President Donald Trump has vowed to get Congress to pass a bill declaring there are only two genders, and to keep “transgender insanity the hell out of our schools.”

“I don’t see any reason the state would moderate its position at this point,” said Andrew Proctor, a political science professor at the University of Chicago who studies LGBTQ political issues. “If anything, the things they want to pursue will be easier now.”

A message is born

In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, and conservatives began casting around for a new social issue to back. They landed on the small but growing trans population, and the incremental discrimination protections they’d gained during the Obama administration.

The next year, in 2017, there were a few dozen anti-trans bills filed in state houses across the country. Many, like Texas' bathroom bill, failed. At that time, 57% of Republicans said society had gone “too far” in accepting trans people.

Then, they honed in on children. Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, a right-wing political advocacy group, helped shape the messaging around this issue. He said conservatives are willing to be “polite” to people who identify as trans — to a point.

“Once you go into my daughter's athletics or in her locker room or showers, once you start giving kids gender transitions that mutilate them and sterilize them, then we're in a whole different world,” he told The Texas Tribune after the election.

All major medical associations acknowledge that gender dysphoria, the distress someone can feel when their physical presentation doesn’t match the gender they identify as, is a real medical condition best treated with gender-affirming care. That can range from social transition, in which someone goes by different pronouns or dresses differently, to medical treatments, including puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgeries. Minors rarely undergo surgery to transition, and all decisions are made in consultation with their parents and medical professionals.

Nonetheless, the conservative messaging resonated. Last year, almost 80% of Republicans said society had gone too far in accepting trans people, and this year, even with Texas laying dormant, there were 669 anti-trans bills filed in state legislatures across the country.

But despite this sharp increase in anti-trans sentiment, it’s not entirely clear what Americans want their government to do about it. More than half of Republicans do not want to ban gender-affirming care for minors, and almost as many want to protect trans people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces.

Texas’ ban on gender-affirming care for minors was widely condemned by medical associations, doctors, advocates and trans people, who called the laws “dangerous,” “cruel and grotesque,” and “devastating.” Every Republican, and a handful of Democrats, voted for the ban.

Now, trans people, advocates and health care providers are bracing for what comes next.

“It's almost necessary, based on their framework and the way they frame these cases, that they would argue that access to care for adults would be a violation in the same way as for children,” said Elana Redfield, the federal policy director at the Williams Institute, a research center on gender identity law and public policy at the University of California Los Angeles. “Texas has already made it pretty clear they intend to do that.”

The next frontier

In 2024, an off year for the Texas Legislature, other Republican states charged ahead, setting the agenda for what lawmakers might do when they reconvene in January. No state has fully banned adults from accessing gender-affirming care, but some, such as Florida, have significantly restricted the provision of these treatments, discouraging doctors and patients alike.

Texas lawmakers are already filing bills to tee up these issues. Sen. Bob Hall, a Republican from Edgewood, and Rep. Ellen Troxclair, an Austin Republican, have filed bills requiring government records to reflect that there are only two genders, tightly defining male and female based on reproductive organs. Other bills would prevent trans people from amending their birth certificates to reflect their gender identity.

These laws have the effect of “erasing transgender people altogether,” Redfield said. Some of this is already under way: Earlier this year, the Texas Department of Public Safety, under scrutiny from Attorney General Ken Paxton, began refusing to change the sex listed on someone’s driver’s license, even with a court order. The agency also began compiling names of people seeking the change.

Lawmakers are also hoping to resurrect the bathroom issue, as well as requiring trans people to be placed in jails or prisons based on the sex they were assigned at birth.

Harrison, the Midlothian Republican, has filed a bill that would forbid state funding to be used for transition-related care.

This idea gained traction during the presidential election, when Trump accused Vice President Kamala Harris of supporting taxpayer-funded gender reassignment surgery. In a small number of cases, federal inmates have won court battles that required the federal government to pay for their transition-related medical care.

Harrison said his focus is purely about how tax dollars are spent, and it’s the media who portrays these as social issues.

“We are making the lives harder for Texans of all stripes when we make them poorer, and we certainly shouldn’t make them poorer in the pursuit of leftist ideology,” he said.

Federal shifts

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a lawsuit challenging Tennessee’s gender-affirming care ban for minors, a case that could determine how far states like Texas can go with these restrictions. The U.S. Department of Justice sued in 2023, saying the law unconstitutionally discriminates on the basis of gender.

The suit was one of several attempts by the Biden administration to insulate trans people from the impacts of conservative state laws.

“The Biden administration has been the most explicitly protective administration for transgender people,” Redfield said. “We can anticipate the incoming president will claw back as much of that as possible.”

In his first term, Trump ejected trans people from the military and reversed many Obama-era discrimination protections. In his recent presidential campaign, he ran heavily on this record, culminating in an ad that said “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

Project 2025, the policy blueprint created by the conservative Heritage Foundation that many hope Trump will pull from, calls for removing “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from all federal rules, regulations and legislation, and restricting gender-affirming care across age groups.

Trans people and advocates are preparing for what Congress and the White House might do, as well as where state legislatures might go without federal oversight to rein them in. Many groups are recommending trans people proactively change their government documents to align with their gender identity, where that’s still allowed; stock up on transition-related medications; and prepare to move states or leave the country, if needed.

Whatever Trump does on this issue, Texas is expected to go even further.

“Texas better do at least as good a job as Washington, D.C. is going to do on that front,” Harrison said. “And that’s what I’m committed to ensuring happens.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/12/04/texas-transgender-restrictions-legislative-session/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

JOHNSON COUNTY — Tony Coleman recognizes the signs all too well. A cow drools strings of saliva. Then it starts to limp, each step slower. Then it grows stiff.

Then it’s quick. There’s nothing to be done. The cow dies.

Since early 2023, the Grandview rancher has watched more than 35 of his 150 Black Angus cattle perish. July was especially brutal. In the span of a week, Coleman lost a 3-week-old calf; a cow; and Little Red, a strong bull full of spirit, leaving Coleman with nothing but unanswered questions.

“This is destroying our lives,” Coleman said. “You never know what you're going to get every day when you get down here.”

Next door, James Farmer has lost two calves, and found two of his wife’s beloved horses toppled to the ground like dominos, their bodies swarmed by buzzards.

“It's hard for me to tell her, because I know she's gonna break down,” he said. “Why are our animals dying? Just back to back? It never ends.”

Months before, the men said they noticed a gag-inducing sewage smell drifting from smoking piles of fertilizer on their neighbor’s property. Heavy rains then washed some of the fertilizer onto their land. Soon after, they said they found fish floating dead in the stock ponds their livestock drink from.

The Colemans have lost more than 35 animals. One went blind before dying, they said, a white film coating the pupil. A pair of calves died less than a week after birth. They found dead fish floating in their stock ponds. When an animal dies it's a race against time. Coleman and his neighbor James Farmer scramble to beat the buzzards and coyotes to the carcass, then drive it to a lab in College Station. Credit: Courtesy of Tony and Karen Coleman

They contacted the county with their concerns, triggering a nine-month investigation. That’s when their cattle and horses began to die.

An environmental crime investigator in Johnson County collected samples of the dead animals’ tissue and organs, the water they drank from, the soil and the fertilizer that was applied next door.

After the county received test results, the two families finally got their answer: The animals had been killed by something in the fertilizer.

The fertilizer had been made with biosolids, part of an effort to find a climate-friendly method to recycle municipal sewage. But the fertilizer also contained synthetic and highly hazardous chemicals known as PFAS, which are found in hundreds of household products and have had devastating effects on farms and ranches that inadvertently spread them on their land.

An untold number of farms and ranches across Texas and the rest of the nation may have also used fertilizer made from sewage tainted with these “forever chemicals” — which don’t break down in the environment — without knowing it.

PFAS, or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are man-made chemicals used since the 1940s that have a singular ability to repel oil and water and resist heat. They are used in products like nonstick cookware, pizza boxes, waterproof mascara, toilet paper, soaps and rain jackets.

There are more than 12,000 types of PFAS, but researchers have only studied the health effects of roughly 150. They can contaminate food and water and build up in the body over time. Exposure to certain PFAS has been linked to cancer, low birth rates and birth defects, damage to the liver and immune system, and other serious health problems. One study found the chemicals in the blood of nearly 97% of all Americans.

Due to their widespread use in consumer products, forever chemicals have been discharged into waterways by chemical manufacturers, trucked to landfills with household trash or flushed into city sewers via toilets, sinks, showers and washing machines.

Then they end up in local wastewater treatment plants where the solids are separated from sewage. Fertilizer companies who are often paid to haul these biosolids away process them into fertilizer that’s sold to farmers and ranchers as a cheaper alternative to chemical fertilizers.

A number of Texas wastewater plants have contracts with fertilizer companies to take their biosolids, including Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas and Arlington. Nationally, more than half of sewage sludge was treated and spread on land, according to one study; 19 billion pounds of it was spread on American farms between 2016 and 2021, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group found in 2022.

Wastewater treatment and biosolids experts call this an environmental win-win because those solids don’t go to landfills or incinerators — processes that create greenhouse gasses, which contribute to climate change.

But nobody knows how much of that fertilizer is contaminated with PFAS, which can be absorbed by crops, consumed by livestock, and then enter the food supply. There are no requirements to test biosolids for PFAS, or to warn farmers and ranchers that they could be using contaminated fertilizer made with biosolids on their land.

“Some people are saying, [PFAS contamination] are isolated incidents. No, they're not. I guarantee that this is a problem in every single state that uses biosolids,” said Kyla Bennett, a former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency employee who is now a science policy director for the nonprofit group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

“The reason we're not hearing about it all over the country, in all 50 states, is because nobody's looking for this problem,” Bennett added.

According to EPA data analyzed by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group in 2022, an estimated 5% of all crop fields in the U.S. — up to 20 million acres — could have used fertilizer made with biosolids. In Texas, more than 157,000 dry metric tons of biosolids-based fertilizer were applied to agricultural lands in 2018.

While the EPA recently set limits for a handful of the chemicals in drinking water, those rules do not cover biosolids.

“The evidence is out there” that PFAS are a health hazard, Bennett said. “We shouldn’t have to wait [for the EPA to act].”

Without federal regulations, some states have taken action, requiring wastewater treatment plants to test their biosolids for PFAS or setting their own limits for PFAS in biosolids. Texas is not among them. State environmental regulators said in a statement they’re not required to by law.

Karen said her dad’s farm land doesn't feel the same anymore — the PFAS has cast a shadow on it. If they sold any cattle, she said, it would feel like a betrayal of her father's memory. She’s relying on her faith as a moral compass to guide her — even if it means hard choices. “We believe in Jesus. And at the end of my time, when I have to stand in front of Jesus and I get to see my dad again, I have to answer for the decisions that we're making right now,” Karen Coleman said." src="https://thumbnails.texastribune.org/935W7LMmANadeSFImmtI1n08od8=/1200x804/smart/filters:quality(75)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/a97d6e6fd014bd6ee2e0cab002d0038f/Colemans%20and%20Ranch%20AS%20TT%2001.jpg">

Tony Coleman took over the farm in 2018 after his wife’s father died from liver cancer. Karen Coleman said the farm doesn't feel the same anymore — the PFAS contamination has cast a shadow over it. If they sold cattle now, she said, it would feel like a betrayal of her father's memory. “We believe in Jesus. And at the end of my time, when I have to stand in front of Jesus and I get to see my dad again, I have to answer for the decisions that we're making right now,” she said. Credit: Azul Sordo for The Texas Tribune

Coleman and other Johnson County farmers who know their land is contaminated are now faced with an existential dilemma: Do they sell their cattle and their crops, knowing they’re likely laced with PFAS, or face financial ruin?

Coleman and Farmer have both decided not to sell any cattle. That means the men now run zombie farms. They pay to feed animals and harvest hay that they won’t sell — a single 900-pound steer could sell for $4,800, Coleman said.

“Everything we plant here is just sucking this [PFAS] stuff up,” Coleman said. “The cows drink the water and eat the grass. For them there is no escaping.”

Anxiety in Johnson County

The Johnson County Courthouse in downtown Cleburne on July 29, 2024. Credit: Azul Sordo for The Texas Tribune

In February, Johnson County residents packed the courthouse and listened intently as Dana Ames, an environmental crime investigator for the county, and other local officials explained the findings from the nine-month investigation into the noxious smells and dead livestock.

Ames, who spent $35,000 of the county’s money on the investigation and sent samples to a lab in Pennsylvania, told residents that the liver of the Coleman’s stillborn calf contained 610,000 parts per trillion of perfluorooctane sulfonic acid, or PFOS, one of the many types of forever chemicals.

The tissue from a calf belonging to Farmer that died a week after being born tested at 320 ppt of PFOS.

Currently, there are no federal food safety standards for PFAS. In Maine, which in 2016 became the first state to detect PFAS contamination at a farm, state officials issued limits for beef containing PFOS at 3.4 parts per billion and milk containing PFOS at 210 parts per trillion — meaning that beef or milk exceeding these levels should be considered unsafe for consumption. Maine, which has discovered 78 contaminated farms and shut five of them down, has been the only state to set its own PFAS limits for food.

Samples of the pond water where the ranching families’ livestock drink from ranged from 84 ppt to 1,333 ppt of PFAS.

The county also tested the fertilizer their neighbor spread on his farm and found 27 types of PFAS chemicals, including four out of the five the EPA has set limits for in drinking water.

Johnson County Commissioner Larry Woolley at his desk in Cleburne. Credit: Azul Sordo for The Texas Tribune

“These people were led to believe this was safe and a cheap fertilizer,” County Commissioner Larry Woolley said at the meeting. “And this isn’t just isolated to this one incident or multiple counties. This is going on all over.”

“The amount of beef and milk that’s gone into the food chain, who knows what their PFAS levels are? The level of victimization is widespread,” he added.

The Colemans, Farmer and four other local farmers have sued Synagro, the Maryland-based company that produced the biosolids-based fertilizer applied on their neighbor’s fields, and Renda Environmental, a Texas-based fertilizer company that sold to the neighbor before Synagro. The lawsuit claims the companies knew about the contaminants in the fertilizer and failed to provide adequate warnings to its customers.

Synagro denies the allegations. Kip Cleverley, a spokesperson with the company, said the company did its own testing on the land where the fertilizer was applied and preliminary results found PFAS levels in the single digits parts per trillion in the surface water. The company did not provide its test results to the Tribune, saying its analysis was still in progress.

“The data strongly suggests that the farm where biosolids were used could not be a source for the PFAS allegedly found on the plaintiffs’ farms,” Cleverley said.

Renda Environmental told the Tribune the company does not comment on pending litigation.

In a separate lawsuit filed against the EPA in June by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility on behalf of the farmers, the group claimed the agency failed to implement restrictions on PFAS in biosolids despite knowing the health risks posed by the chemicals. Johnson County later joined the suit.

“My heart breaks [for the farmers],” said Bennett, the group's science policy director. “It could be years until the EPA sets biosolids regulations. Somebody needs to hold their feet to the fire … farmers are losing their livelihoods.”

The biosolids used to create the fertilizer that allegedly contaminated the Colemans’ and Farmers’ farms came from Fort Worth’s Village Creek Water Reclamation Facility, which treats sewage from 1 million people, many industries and 23 communities in North Texas. It generates between 27,000 to 31,000 tons of biosolids per year.

Top right: Mary Gugliuzza, spokesperson for Fort Worth Water said the wastewater treatment plant is “passive receivers” of forever chemicals, meaning they don’t produce them at the treatment plant, but come into the wastewater treatment plant from residential homes, commercial businesses, institutions, and in some cases industrial users.

Bottom left: People flush all sorts of things containing PFAS down the toilet, including wipes, menstrual products, rocks, toys, sticks and plastic. During the first step of the wastewater treatment process, raw sewage passes through screens, which helps remove the trash. It then pushes it through a chute, goes into the conveyor belt and falls into the dumpsters. All trash is taken to a landfill.

Bottom right: Air is pumped into pools filled with wastewater known as aeration basins. The water looks like it’s boiling from oxygen being fed into it. One expert linked it to a fish tank with a bubbler at the bottom pushing oxygen. The oxygen promotes microbial growth that helps break down pollutants, nitrogen, and phosphorus, which creates an earthy smell." src="https://thumbnails.texastribune.org/G4Ul6Oav7w7Yn7DO4lwryGKGNU4=/1200x804/smart/filters:quality(75)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/45d4d67099e72516645d2258d8f373ff/Village%20Creek%20ENS%20TT%2001.jpg">

Top left: In one of the last steps in the wastewater treatment process, the wastewater is injected with chlorine to kill any remaining bacteria. Fort Worth Water sends the recycled water to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport for industrial use.

Top right: Mary Gugliuzza, spokesperson for Fort Worth Water, said forever chemicals enter the wastewater treatment plant from homes, businesses and industrial customers.

Bottom left: The first step of the wastewater treatment process involves sending raw sewage through screens to remove trash.

Bottom right: Air is pumped into wastewater pools known as aeration basins, where oxygen promotes microbial growth that helps break down pollutants. Credit: Erika Nina Suarez for the Texas Tribune

Mary Gugliuzza, spokesperson for Fort Worth Water, said the fertilizer pellets produced by Synagro meet EPA and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality requirements.

Gugliuzza added the city had tested some of its biosolids for PFAS even though it’s not required. Those results showed PFAS in the biosolids, but Gugliuzza said that’s the case at wastewater facilities across the country.

Synagro has contracts with more than 1,000 municipal wastewater plants, industrial, and agricultural customers in North America — including Fort Worth — to turn biosolids, which one employee described as resembling chocolate milk, into fertilizer that it markets as nutrient rich and environmentally friendly.

In 2022 Synagro processed 6.5 million tons of biosolids nationwide.

“The [EPA] has not suggested that any changes in biosolids management is required because of the presence of trace amounts of PFAS,” Cleverly, the company spokesperson, said.

In September, the EPA responded to the lawsuit saying it has complete discretion over which pollutants to regulate under federal law — so it can't be sued.

But the agency is now studying the presence of PFAS in wastewater and sewage sludge nationally and conducting a risk assessment on the use of biosolids and sewage sludge containing the two most widely used and studied forever chemicals — PFOA and PFOS — focusing on health risks through exposure to soil, water, crops, meat and dairy. It expects to publish the results by the end of this year, which will determine whether new federal rules are necessary.

Who should be responsible for removing forever chemicals?

In the wastewater treatment process at the San Antonio Water System’s Steven M. Clouse Water Recycling Center, final clarifiers are used to separate the treated water from the remaining solids. Credit: Chris Stokes for The Texas Tribune

In Texas, most biosolids end up in a landfill. But the rest is diverted for agricultural use in Texas.

At San Antonio’s wastewater treatment plant, water is removed from sewage sludge by using a machine that squeezes it between two tensioned belts or by spreading it in drying beds so the sun evaporates the moisture. Once it’s dried to a crumb-like texture, the biosolids are piled into black mountains then transported to other facilities where two Texas compost companies turn it into fertilizer.

Pitched as a cost-effective way to improve soil fertility, biosolids have been applied to land in the U.S. since the 1970s. Scientists say they contain nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium that helps plants grow.

The EPA only requires wastewater treatment plants to test biosolids for heavy metals and pathogens that can be harmful to health.

Sand drying uses rectangular sand beds where sewage sludge is spread and left to dry using sunlight. Heat from the sun evaporates the moisture from the sludge. Once dried, it looks like a crumbly material." src="https://thumbnails.texastribune.org/lhgyh7J28SMdqRw6Tyj7KX-o6x8=/1200x804/smart/filters:quality(75)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/9278cd062732954927704ee5a24a3f6d/Wastewater%20Process%20CS%20TT%2001.jpg">

The two most common ways to dry sewage sludge are by passing it through a belt presser — which presses the sludge between two belts to squeeze out the water — or in drying beds. Sludge spread over sand beds dries into a crumbly material after the sun's heat evaporates the moisture. Credit: Chris Stokes for The Texas Tribune

If the EPA issues new restrictions on PFAS in biosolids, utilities fear they are likely to bear the responsibility for removing the chemicals from wastewater.

“If we are required to treat a particular chemical that is not covered in the way you already treat, you have to design a whole new system,” said Ed Guzman, the senior vice president and chief legal and ethics officer at the San Antonio Water System. “You have to put it in place and that all takes time. It takes money.”

The cost of removal is significant: A 2023 report by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency found that it would cost between $2.7 million and $18 million per pound to remove and destroy PFAS from municipal wastewater, depending on facility size, and between $1 million and $2.7 million per pound of PFAS removed from biosolids.

Adam Krantz, the CEO of the National Association of Clean Water Agencies, a group representing municipal wastewater treatment agencies, said the cost of remediation could be passed down to water utility customers, but argues that "polluters should pay."“It really is the corporate polluter that needs to foot the bill for this as the wrongdoer,” he said.

Others, like Janine Burke-Wells, executive director for the North East Biosolids & Residuals Association, which represents wastewater treatment facilities and biosolids producers, said that the responsibility to curb PFAS should fall on everyone.

“Unless we really eliminate all the sources of PFAS there's always going to be a background level because [PFAS] is in everything,” Burke-Wells said.

One county doing what it can

County Commissioner Larry Woolley drives past PFAS-affected land in Grandview on July 29, 2024. Credit: Azul Sordo for The Texas Tribune

In Johnson County, Woolley drives his silver pickup down rural roads, pointing out hay bales and miles of milo grain, corn and wheat — crops the county commissioner says have been blessed by heavy rainfall earlier this year.

Woolley, a former agriculture teacher who moved to Grandivew in 1982, says he’s spent sleepless nights worrying about PFAS’ impacts on ranching families in this county of 180,000 residents.

“I lay awake at night thinking of the magnitude of this whole deal. It’s just crazy,” Woolley said. “This is just the tip of the iceberg. I think there's gonna be so much public outcry on this … it's gonna be hard for our state officials to ignore that.”

Following the county’s investigation, Woolley led the charge to pass a local resolution urging farmers to stop using biosolids on their land.

The resolution called for Fort Worth to stop sending its biosolids to fertilizer companies until the TCEQ tests them for the presence of PFAS and asked the EPA to set limits on PFAS in biosolids. The resolution also called on state lawmakers to regulate the application of biosolids-based fertilizer on farmland or give power to counties to do so.

“That’s the hard part,” Woolley said. “We don’t have authority to ban biosolids.”

In July, neighboring Ellis County passed a similar resolution calling for regulation and legislation to restrict the application of biosolids on farms and ranches until further testing is done. Since then, Kaufman, Henderson, Somervell and Wise counties have done the same.

Woolley has traveled around the state to sound the alarm about PFAS at conferences for county officials. He said he and his staff are preparing to go to Austin to meet with state lawmakers during the next legislative session. He hopes they will introduce new bills that will address PFAS contamination in biosolids, including giving counties money to test for the contaminants, and require TCEQ to test biosolids statewide for forever chemicals.

So far, there have been no bills filed by state lawmakers regarding PFAS contamination in biosolids ahead of the legislative session that begins in January.

In 2021, Michigan began requiring all municipal wastewater treatment plants to test their biosolids for PFAS before spreading them on agricultural land. The state also began prohibiting the application of biosolids containing more than 150 parts per billion of PFOS on agricultural land. Since then, the state has lowered that threshold to 100 ppb and added another type of PFAS to the list, PFOA.

What experts refer to as the "Michigan model" has now been embraced by other states including California, Wisconsin and Washington. Connecticut and Maine have banned the use of biosolids on agricultural fields.

Ellen Mallory, a professor of sustainable agriculture at The University of Maine, said state response has been crucial given the lack of standards at the federal level.

“The important part here is it's really hard to have any response to PFAS contamination if we don't have any standards. So a state like Texas that has no standards, what do you do? How do you help farmers determine if their food is safe or not?” she said.

Meanwhile, Tony Coleman and his wife are still watching their livestock die. They pack dead cattle in a big cooler, load them onto a trailer and drive 140 miles to a laboratory at College Station where vet technicians perform a necropsy and remove tissue to be tested for PFAS.

The couple both work two jobs and are looking for a third. They're worried they have lost the ability to make a living off their own land.

“We can't consciously sell you a side of beef and then you eat it and you get sick. What kind of people does that make us?” Coleman said.

Disclosure: San Antonio Water System has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Tony Coleman pets "Tank," a bull they raised and bottle-fed as a calf on their property in Grandview on Aug. 5, 2024. Credit: Azul Sordo for The Texas Tribune

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/12/02/texas-farmers-pfas-forever-chemicals-biosolids-fertilizer/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Last year, state Rep. David Cook of Mansfield was quietly but steadily climbing the ranks of Texas politics.

The sophomore lawmaker had been named vice chair of the committee overseeing the state’s criminal laws. He carried and passed a GOP priority bill aimed at reining in “rogue” progressive district attorneys. And he had a coveted seat on the powerful Calendars Committee, which acts as the House gatekeeper because it controls which bills reach the floor for a vote and which never see the light of day.

Cook’s promising start was a clear indication House Speaker Dade Phelan considered him an ally.

Then, in September, Cook made an audacious gambit by announcing he would join an increasingly crowded field challenging Phelan for the speaker’s gavel. By the end of that month, Cook emerged as the consensus pick of the anti-Phelan House Republicans to replace the sitting speaker.

In announcing his run for speaker, Cook said that political infighting, breakdowns in communication and a lack of transparency from Phelan had hindered the Republican majority’s work. He promised to engage regularly with lawmakers if elected.

“My philosophy is rooted in returning power to the members and fostering an environment where we can work together effectively,” he said.

Cook, whose voting record placed him near the ideological middle of the House Republicans, is an unlikely choice to be standard-bearer for a coalition looking to oust Phelan on the grounds that he is too moderate. The group is dominated by social conservatives from the chamber’s rightmost flank, many of whom opposed Attorney General Ken Paxton’s impeachment last year or won their seats by defeating members like Cook who had supported it.

They want to further disempower the House’s Democratic minority by putting Republicans in charge of every legislative committee. They also want to speed the passage of conservative legislation and ensure that major GOP bills reach the floor before any Democratic measures.

On paper, other GOP candidates who’d announced challenges to Phelan appeared more representative of the insurgent crowd, including Rep. Shelby Slawson of Stephenville, one of the House’s most conservative members, and Rep. John Smithee of Amarillo, who won plaudits from the far right for vigorously opposing Paxton’s impeachment.

“If you’re a reformer, I’m not sure how they settled on him,” said Rep. Carl Tepper, R-Lubbock, a Phelan supporter.

Now, Cook and Phelan are waging a behind-the-scenes battle for control of the Texas House, each projecting confidence that they have a path to victory despite shaky public support.

In early December, the House GOP Caucus is scheduled to meet to settle on their endorsed nominee for speaker. Under the group’s rules — which are occasionally disregarded by members — whoever gets 60% or more of the votes at the meeting will be the caucus’ endorsed candidate and should receive support from all Republican members when the vote goes to the full House.

Phelan, a Beaumont Republican who has served as speaker for two terms and a House member since 2015, insists he has enough votes to lead the chamber for a third time in January — but he has not produced a list of supporters. Cook is touting 47 Republicans who would back him, short of the threshold required to gain the endorsement of the House GOP Caucus and far short of the 76 lawmakers from either party he would need to win the real speaker’s election on the House floor in January.

His allies remain hopeful that enough Republicans will buckle under the pressure of drawing a career-threatening primary challenge from Phelan’s deep-pocketed political foes if they lend their support to the incumbent speaker. But that threat has not produced any new pledges for Cook since he announced his initial list of supporters, signaling that Phelan could keep the gavel with backing from the chamber’s 62 Democrats and a minority of the Republican caucus.

Cook and Phelan both declined comment for this story.

The caucus meeting is a pivotal moment for Cook’s bid. The 53-year-old lawmaker will either emerge as the clear frontrunner to lead the chamber or potentially be relegated to the doghouse next session for challenging the sitting speaker.

“A coalition builder”

Cook’s roots in the Texas Capitol go back more than 30 years to 1993 when he got his start as a legislative aide for conservative Democrat Rep. Jerry Johnson of Nacogdoches while attending Stephen F. Austin State University.

But his biggest mentor and influence in the Legislature was the late Republican Sen. Chris Harris of Arlington, whom he worked for as an aide in the mid-1990s. The two became law partners at Harris’ family and business law firm, where Cook now works as managing partner.

As a lawyer in Tarrant County, Cook was able to rub elbows with movers and shakers in Texas’ largest Republican county who could help him launch a political career.

In 2008, he won his first election for mayor of Mansfield, a suburb south of Arlington with about 50,000 residents. During his 12 years at the helm, the city’s population grew by more than 40%, part of the explosive growth seen throughout the North Texas suburbs.

Larry Broseh, a longtime Mansfield city council member, said Cook helped usher the city out of its “sleepy, bedroom community era” into a booming suburb marked by mixed-use developments and a growing web of master-planned communities.

He began to show some of the hallmarks of how he would govern as a state legislator, focusing on a conservative approach to the city’s finances and promoting economic growth, over culture wars.

“He was definitely a coalition builder,” Broseh said, describing how the seven-person council typically decided matters with 7-0 or 6-1 votes. “I’ve worked with four mayors throughout my tenure, and by far I think he was the most collaborative person.”

Broseh said he was “surprised as much as the next person” when he heard that Cook was challenging Phelan, in part because Cook had left City Hall for the Capitol so recently. But Broseh contended that Cook’s ability to build alliances and find common ground — underscored by his work as a family law mediator — would serve him well in the race.

In late 2019, Cook launched a primary challenge against longtime Arlington Rep. Bill Zedler, a staunch social conservative and member of the Texas House Freedom Caucus. Zedler bowed out of the race, citing health concerns, and Cook went on to win the seat in 2020.

In his first session the following year, he filed 10 bills, several of which dealt with family law. He passed his first law, making it easier to modify child support and other family legal orders — his only bill to reach the governor’s desk that year.

Cook was more productive during his second term in 2023, when Phelan named him vice chair of the Criminal Jurisprudence Committee and placed him on the Calendars Committee.

That year he filed 69 bills and passed 14 of them, including the Republican priority that allowed courts to remove district attorneys for misconduct if they did not pursue certain types of crimes. The bill, which was signed into law and took effect last September, targets progressive prosecutors in large urban counties who have declined to pursue low-level marijuana possession cases and vowed not to prosecute abortion-related crimes.

Last year, Cook also took two of the most consequential votes of his short legislative career. Near the end of the spring regular session, he was one of 60 House Republicans who voted to impeach Paxton for allegedly accepting bribes and abusing the power of his office, charges on which he was later acquitted by the Senate. Cook was the only member to note in the House record after the vote that he supported some — but not all — of the articles of impeachment.

Later that year, Cook sided with Gov. Greg Abbott’s bid to enact a private school voucher program, voting against an amendment that stripped vouchers from a broader education bill.

Those two votes paved the way for an ugly primary season. To vote for impeachment meant Paxton’s far-right allies were coming for your seat. To vote against vouchers meant that Abbott and a lineup of pro-voucher groups might spend millions to oust you. Despite his impeachment vote, Cook managed to avoid a primary challenge, which kept his name out of the headlines during a period of intraparty mudslinging.

Why Cook?

Capitol observers and legislative colleagues said Cook tends to push his bills through quietly, steering clear of the bomb-throwing tactics intended to attract attention and rile controversy.

Bill Miller, a veteran Austin-based lobbyist, described Cook as “a watcher and absorber” with a tendency to keep his cards close to his vest. He said Cook’s style is reminiscent of former House Speaker Joe Straus, who also emerged from the background after just two terms to challenge an incumbent speaker.

“He’s one of the members, I put him in the category of people, they’re smart, they pay attention, and they keep their own counsel,” he said.

Cook sometimes sided with Phelan’s team to beat back ideas pushed by the right wing of the GOP.

Last year, he voted with Republicans and Democrats to redo a vote on a bill that would give tax breaks to businesses that bring jobs to Texas, after some of his far-right colleagues snuck in an amendment targeting transgender health care and abortion access. He later supported the bill’s passage when the amendment was removed.

Cook also supported legislation to legalize sports gambling, which many social conservatives, including some of those now in his camp, oppose.

Luke Macias, a consultant to some of the state’s most socially conservative legislators, said focusing the race on Cook’s record is a mistake.

“The coalition that’s formed has formed around how the House operates,” he said. “It’s not formed around a personality on either side but on structurally changing the Texas House in a way that’s better for every single member.”

On top of removing Democrats from leadership positions, the anti-Phelan coalition also wants the speaker to ensure Republican priorities receive floor votes early in the session, among other demands laid out in their manifesto called the “Contract with Texas,” to which Cook has committed.

Rep. Tony Tinderholt, R-Arlington, said Cook’s decision to sign onto that pledge, which was drafted by lawmakers pushing for a new speaker, was a major factor in deciding to support him. Tinderholt, one of the chamber’s most hard-right conservatives who is often at odds with House leadership, said he doesn’t always agree with Cook on policy but likes that he treats other House members with respect.

“This quality in David is what makes him a good consensus candidate to unite Republicans,” Tinderholt said in an email. “His governing philosophy is in the middle of our caucus and his track record of treating members with dignity and respect is impeccable.”

Rep. Ellen Troxclair, a Lakeway Republican who is one of Cook’s core supporters, said he won her over in part by showing her and other freshman members respect despite their lack of seniority.

“In an atmosphere that tended to tell freshmen to keep their heads down and mouths shut, David had the opposite approach, where he really wanted to help the new class be successful,” Troxclair said. “I know that was appreciated not just by me but by my other classmates who had similar experiences.”

Cook’s public support has stalled since the late September meeting after which he put out a list of 48 supporters. That number has dropped to 47 after one of his pledges, Republican Steve Kinard of Collin County, lost his challenge to Rep. Mihaela Plesa, a Democrat.

To win the GOP caucus endorsement, he needs 53 votes when the group meets on Dec. 7.

Most of the 41 other House Republicans have yet to voice their support for either GOP speaker candidate. Cook has tried to win over some of those unpledged caucus members, so far to no avail.

With neither candidate touting enough votes for the caucus’ stamp of approval, the possibility of a third GOP contender has gained traction. Some lawmakers are actively calling uncommitted Republicans and those on Cook’s pledge list to see if they would entertain breaking away for a new to-be-determined candidate, according to three sources who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the race candidly. The idea, they said, is to lay the groundwork for someone who could draw support from the pro- and anti-Phelan camps if Cook and Phelan deadlock at the caucus meeting.

Miller, the Austin lobbyist, said the fluid state of the race means that, for now, many members see little upside in voicing public support for either candidate and risking political exile if they pick the losing horse.

“They want to bet right, or more importantly, they don’t want to bet wrong,” Miller said.

Phelan loyalty

The outcome will shape much of the direction of Texas politics next year, with the speaker wielding enormous control over the fate of major bills and billions in taxpayer dollars. Phelan’s reelection would likely ensure a rancorous session between the two legislative chambers, with the Senate controlled by Phelan’s political rival, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who tried to end the speaker’s political career by backing a primary challenger earlier this year. If Phelan is deposed, Patrick and the rest of the GOP’s most conservative faction could have a willing ally in driving a hardline agenda through the Legislature.

Tepper said he has decided to vote for Phelan because he views him as the stronger conservative, particularly on tax policy. He said he likes Cook personally but questioned some of his bills, including proposed changes to background checks for public sector employees. Based on his conversations with the Mansfield lawmaker, Tepper said Cook seemed “very friendly to the cities,” perhaps from his time as mayor. Tepper hopes to continue curbing the power of municipalities, a long-running priority of many Texas GOP lawmakers.

On Sunday, Rep. Jared Patterson, R-Frisco, a Phelan ally, told CBS News Texas that he is “fully supportive” of Phelan serving a third term as speaker. Others say they want to “maintain” the House’s current trajectory, as Reps. Drew Darby of San Angelo and Cole Hefner of Mount Pleasant, told The Texan. They point to conservative wins on abortion, property taxes and more under Phelan’s leadership.

Phelan has also tried to shore up support by adding firepower to his staff, hiring longtime lobbyist Mike Toomey as his chief of staff and bringing on former Gov. Rick Perry as a senior adviser. Perry told KXAN earlier this month that Phelan has “got the votes” to hold onto the gavel.

But with a majority of Republicans behind Cook, Phelan’s current path to 76 votes relies on support from the Democratic minority. And the speaker’s opponents say that the entrance of two Democrats into the speaker’s race — Ana-Maria Ramos of Richardson and John Bryant of Dallas — suggests that Phelan may not have as firm a lock on the Democratic caucus as his camp believes.

Tinderholt, meanwhile, said he believes Cook already has enough backing to reach the 60% threshold for the GOP caucus’ endorsement.

“I believe those votes are already secured,” Tinderholt said, “and the only path that Dade Phelan has to the speakership is to reject the caucus vote and rely on the Democrat caucus to support him on the floor.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/11/27/david-cook-dade-phelan-texas-house-speaker/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

WASHINGTON — After outperforming Kamala Harris in South Texas on Election Day despite being vastly outspent by Republicans, U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-McAllen, has a message to his fellow Democrats in Congress. Actually, he has a few of them.

No. 1: Don’t tell him how to handle his business, he’s going to represent his district the way he knows is best. And No. 2: Clean up your own act.

In a recent interview with The Texas Tribune, the four-term Democratic congressman, with a penchant for going rogue, took a shiv to the Democratic playbook. He said the party’s fixation on abortion this cycle was “lazy” and out of touch with his majority-Catholic district. He urged the party to, in some cases, soften its defenses of transgender rights, even if that means voting against the Democratic base. He said Democrats had insufficiently attacked Republicans on economic issues. And he said the Democrats were plagued with “incompetence” in gauging the driving issues for voters in districts like his.

“Their messaging is off. I also believe their polling is off. Democratic polling has been consistently off beyond the margin of error for the last two or three cycles,” Gonzalez said in his Capitol Hill office. It’s “incompetence, at the end of the day. I think they need to get rid of people.”

Gonzalez won his competitive South Texas district — which runs from the Mexican border in Brownsville to Corpus Christi along the Gulf Coast — by less than 3 percentage points this year, fending off Republicans’ biggest offensive effort in the state. He outperformed Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to President Donald Trump in every county in his district.

Gonzalez is one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress, at times voting with Republicans on issues related to energy and the border. He caused House Democratic leadership headaches as he pushed back on President Joe Biden’s climate and infrastructure agenda before eventually supporting the legislation, citing concerns it would negatively impact his district’s energy interests.

Gonzalez said his ability to see the social conservatism of his district and knowing when to break from the national party helped preserve his place in Congress.

“I told the entire caucus, don’t ever try to whip me again because I know my district better than anybody in this room,” Gonzalez said. “Having me 97% of the time is better than having my opponent 100% of the time. We need to give that leeway, especially to frontline members. Nobody knows our districts better than us.”

Republicans poured millions of dollars into supporting their candidate, former U.S. Rep. Mayra Flores, this cycle, viewing Gonzalez’s proclivity for off-color comments — including comparing Latino Trump supporters to “Jews for Hitler” in March — as a major vulnerability.

The race was among the most expensive U.S. House races in Texas this year. Flores, who previously represented the district for a few months in 2022 after winning a special election, spent over $5.7 million in the race as of mid-October.

Vicente Gonzalez's supporters watch the televised debate live between him and Republican challenger Mayra Flores in Rancho Viejo on Oct. 17, 2024. Credit: Michael Gonzalez for The Texas Tribune

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the House Majority PAC, the party’s two biggest outside spending groups for House races, spent over $1 million with ads supporting Gonzalez.

But Gonzalez has serious issue with the way both groups operated in his district. Neither group responded to requests for comment.

Gonzalez said it was an error to focus so heavily on abortion in a region that is overwhelmingly Catholic. He said the strategy showed congressional Democrats “don’t know the region and they get lazy about it,” leaning on the issue because it was salient in the 2022 midterms. Abortion was a central issue in TV ads aired in his district to help him by national Democrats, which Gonzalez said was out of touch with voters more concerned about the rising cost of living.

The ad “was hitting my opponent on abortion in an 80% Catholic community. Somebody needs to get fired for that,” Gonzalez said. “Whoever was the decision maker to do that in South Texas should be gone, because they clearly don't know the district.”

A photograph of Gonzalez, his wife Lorena Saenz, President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden is displayed with other memorabilia in his office at the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. Credit: Shuran Huang for The Texas Tribune

Gonzalez saw some room for abortion to be an effective element to a winning strategy, but he said the messaging should be targeted on digital platforms to young women rather than blasted on television ads. Gonzalez still went after Flores on abortion when the two shared a debate stage in October.

Gonzalez said Democrats focused too much on TV ads generally in Texas and should have spent more time door knocking and talking to voters.

Gonzalez also lamented that Democrats don’t have a winning strategy to counter anti-trans attacks that Republicans used through the latter part of the cycle. The National Republican Congressional Committee and Sen. Ted Cruz’s reelection campaign both poured money into ads attacking Democrats as wanting to use taxpayer money to fund gender transitions for children and to allow boys to play in girls sports. Democrats and LGBTQ+ rights activists denounced the ads as spreading dangerous misinformation about trans youth.

Gonzalez was among the few Democrats to tackle the ads head on, issuing his own counter ad rebuffing the Republicans’ claims, saying he never supported tax-funded sex changes. He said more Democrats should feel comfortable following his lead, even if it leads to pushback from the progressive base.

“I think we need to protect every community in America,” Gonzalez said. “But there are issues that I don't agree with, like boys and girls bathrooms, or boys competing in girls sports, and I think we should be outspoken about it. I don't think Democrats should have to hide from a message like that.”

Gonzalez has supported pro-trans legislation in the past, voting in 2021 for the Equality Act, which would protect trans people from discrimination.

Republicans are poised to continue their attacks on transgender rights, emboldened by voter response to their ads nationwide. And Democrats are already being confronted with the issue as the first transgender member of Congress, Rep.-elect Sarah McBride of Delaware, is set to be sworn in in January. Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina introduced a bill that would ban McBride from using the women’s bathrooms or locker rooms in the Capitol complex.

When asked if he would vote for Mace’s bill, Gonzalez said: “That's a very, very tough conversation that needs to be had by Democrats. And I think at the end of the day, we got to vote our district and vote what we really believe. And I don't believe that boys should be in girls' bathrooms.” He did not specify how he would vote on the bill.

McBride has agreed not to use women’s restrooms and stressed she does not want her gender to become a distraction. All members of Congress have private bathrooms. She did not respond to a request for comment on Gonzalez’s remarks.

Gonzalez said Democrats should have invested in attack ads targeting Republican candidates who want to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Title I funding for schools in low-income communities, as Republicans have cast Democrats as supporting measures to defund the police. South Texas Republicans deny they want to cut funding for the programs.

Gonzalez also suggested he was not impressed with Democrat Michelle Vallejo, who challenged U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz in the 15th Congressional District. She lost both in 2022 and 2024, by double digits despite support from the DCCC and investment from the House Majority PAC. She ran in 2022 on a progressive platform, focusing on reproductive rights and expanding access to health care. She moderated her tune this cycle, but was unable to close or even shrink the gap.

Gonzalez said the district needs a moderate Democrat to win. “It's a tough district, especially for somebody who initially campaigned as a progressive. It's kind of hard to turn the clock back,” Gonzalez said.

Still, Vallejo made positive strides. She outperformed Harris in her district by seven percentage points. Vallejo declined to comment.

Gonzalez formerly represented the 15th Congressional District for six years before switching to the 34th district in 2022 following redistricting. Then-DCCC Chair Sean Patrick Maloney preferred Gonzalez, a well-funded incumbent, stay in the more competitive 15th District to give Democrats a better shot at holding onto all of their South Texas seats, Gonzalez said. But Gonzalez defended the move, saying his home was drawn into the new 34th district and he had to prioritize his own race.

Gonzalez is optimistic that Democrats can continue holding on to South Texas despite the heavy investment from Republicans, saying Republicans have a “low quality of candidate,” including Flores and De La Cruz.

De La Cruz, who outperformed Trump in her district, shot back at Gonzalez’s comments in a statement. “It’s funny he’d say that, considering I chased him out of this district and he’s underperformed in the last three elections,” De La Cruz said. “He can focus on pettiness — I’ll keep picking up his slack and delivering results for South Texas.”

Gonzalez called Flores’ victory in a 2022 special election a “fluke,” saying she got elected solely because Republicans poured millions of dollars into a special election that national Democrats did not pay much attention to.

“We welcome Vicente Gonzalez’s self-delusion as the ground shifts underneath him. Donald Trump romped across South Texas, ” said Delanie Bomar, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, House Republicans’ campaign arm. “It’s only a matter of time before those same voters toss Gonzalez from office, too.”

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/11/26/texas-vicente-gonzalez-congress-democrats-abortion-transgender/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.