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In this Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2018, photo, campaign T-shirts are stacked on a table at a Republican congressional candidate forum, in New Braunfels, Texas. Texas holds the nation's first 2018 primary elections Tuesday, March 6, 2018, and the campaign is providing a vivid exhibition of the Trump effect in GOP politics.
State Rep. Matt Schaefer speaks during his campaign kick-off and fundraiser in Tyler, Texas, on Monday, Nov. 13, 2017. Representatives of Grassroots America, Texas Right to Life, Texas Eagle Forum, Empower Texans, Texas Home School Coalition, Gun Owners of America, and Texans for Vaccine Choice were in attendance.
It's part of a broader push by the network - backed by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch - to redouble its criminal justice reform efforts while embracing common ground with President Donald Trump and his administration, which have delivered mixed results at best for the unlikely alliances that have formed around changing the system. "We're going to meet people where they are," Mark Holden, a senior network official, told reporters here repeatedly - a kind of mantra for the network's eagerness to make progress on a host of policy issues in the Trump era.
It can sometimes be tempting to go with a fresh new face in a primary and turn out the longstanding incumbent. But smart voters know when to resist that temptation.
Drawing clever political districts is one way politicians in Texas and elsewhere avoid accountability - by protecting themselves from voters who disagree with them. They do this by stuffing weirdly shaped geographic districts with voters who agree with them.
The question of what voter data Texas can release to such commissions and what safeguards they must ensure stems from a lawsuit filed in July by the Texas NAACP and the Texas League of Women Voters seeking to block the state from handing over its voter rolls to the federal commission. Texas election law includes provisions that prohibit the information from being used for commercial purposes.
As far as court battles go, 2017 was a busy year on the voting rights front in Texas - and 2018 will likely be no different. After years of litigation, Texas and its legal foes - minority and civil rights groups and voters of color - begin the year waiting on the courts to rule on the fate of the state's embattled political maps and voter identification requirements.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation, which has more than 75 employees in Texas, will open a new office D.C. in January. Its leaders plan to increase its D.C. staff from five to as many as 15 employees in 2018, to seek rollbacks and changes to environmental and health care issues, and work on criminal justice reform.
Texas has been awarded billions in federal aid to help recover from Hurricane Harvey and the devastating flooding that followed, but it's unclear how the state is spending its share of the money. Disaster recovery experts say the lack of transparency in Texas could hinder coordination, encourage fraud and squander an opportunity not only to rebuild after one of the country's costliest natural disasters, but also to mitigate the risks of the next monster storm.
Four veteran Texas Republicans are quitting Congress, meaning their state will be trading House seniority for newcomers who may be even more conservative. Reps.
Mayoral candidate Joyce Craig said Mayor Ted Gatsas should have made sure officials disclosed the 2015 rape of a West High School student, while Gatsas called comments on the issue the "lowest... Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee Kevin Brady and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan unveil legislation to overhaul the tax code on Capitol Hill ... (more)
In this July 18, 2017, file photo, Texas Speaker of the House Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, calls the House of Representatives to order in Austin, Texas. Straus, a powerful moderate voice that kept the country's largest conservative state from moving even father to the right, abruptly announced Wednesday, Oct. 25, 2017, that he won't seek re-election.
In her dissent in the 1983 case Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote, "The Roe framework ... is clearly on a collision course with itself."
Texas has a long and complex history with the issue of abortion and reproductive rights. Click through to see more about how it has played out over the last four decades.
Insurance coverage for more than 390,000 Texas children and pregnant women is in jeopardy after Congress failed to renew authorization for a federal program. Congressional authorization for the Children's Health Insurance Program, which provides low-cost health insurance for children from low- and middle-income families, expires Sept.
With immigrants and their advocates chanting and beating drums outside, a federal appeals court heard arguments Friday on whether it should allow a Texas law aimed at combatting "sanctuary cities" to immediately take effect. Under the law, Texas police chiefs could face removal from office and criminal charges for not complying with federal immigration officials' requests to detain people jailed on non-immigration offenses.
TEXAS TRIBUNE FESTIVAL Three days. Sixty sessions. Two hundred fifty speakers. All focusing on education, climate change, President Trump, media's role in 2017, and more.
Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday tapped a veteran Democrat to lead the state's recovery effort after Harvey, which is shaping up to be among the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history. John Sharp is chancellor of Texas A&M University and doesn't plan to leave that job while heading the new Governor's Commission to Rebuild Texas.
AUSTIN Of the more than 1,000 bills passed by the Texas Legislature during its session this year, more than 600 of them go into effect Sept. 1. Once of the more controversial laws set to go into effect has been shelved for the moment.