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‘A Hearing Can Save a Life’: Ban on Gay Conversion Therapy Gets a Courtesy...
Fighting back tears, Representative Celia Israel told the Texas House Public Health Committee on Wednesday that she nearly committed suicide at age 17 because she didn’t think she could live openly as...
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More STAAR? The Texas Senate Proposes Even Higher-Stakes Testing for Students.
Update, 5/7/19 11:41 a.m.: The Texas Senate passed the House-sponsored school finance bill following several hours of debate on Monday by a vote of 26-2. The version passed by the upper chamber still...
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Here’s What Texas DAs Think of the New Hemp Law that Effectively...
Hemp is now legal in Texas, thanks to House Bill 1325, which sailed through the Legislature earlier this year. Supporters hailed hemp’s potential economic benefits as a drought-resistant cash crop from...
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Did House Speaker Dennis Bonnen Really Try to Bribe Michael Quinn Sullivan?...
Politics these days can feel annoyingly scripted, the events of each news cycle preordained by some lower power. So when something genuinely shocking or unusual does happen, it hits twice as hard. That...
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The Speaker and the Creeper: Everything You Need to Know About the Craziest...
Have you ever seen slow-motion footage of an atomic bomb test? There’s a bright flash of light and an explosion that starts small, and you could be forgiven for thinking, Is that it? Then the mushroom...
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The Scandal Swirling Around House Speaker Dennis Bonnen Is Bad. But Is It...
As far as speaker scandals go, L’affaire de Dennis Bonnen is missing some of the luster of past episodes. The controversy lacks the lurid appeal of that time in the nineties when Speaker Gib Lewis took...
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The Bonnen Tape Is Tawdry, Shocking, and Kinda Funny
In July, when right-wing ringleader Michael Quinn Sullivan accused House Speaker Dennis Bonnen of essentially trying to bribe him to secure his help in ousting members of the GOP, it was a profound...
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Bonn Voyage, Dennis!
The traditional course of a political scandal, the shape of Watergate and most others that come to mind, is a slow unraveling. At the outset there’s a loose thread or a hint of truth, and as time goes...
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Cocaine Is a Hell of a Drug, But Then So Is Partisanship
On Thursday, a warrant was issued for the arrest of state representative Poncho Nevárez, a Democrat from Eagle Pass, a week after the lawmaker suddenly announced he wouldn’t be running for reelection....
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Weird Candidates and Fifteen-Way Races: The Texas Primary Ballot Is Madness
The march of the holidays continues: Halloween, Thanksgiving, filing day. On Monday, the deadline passed in most races to add names to the March primary ballot, meaning that the brackets for next...
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How Much Does the Democrats’ Big Flop in Tuesday’s Special Election Matter?
Special elections play the same role in political discourse that the unexpected passing of a comet played in the ancient world—an opportunity for soothsayers of varying quality to impart their own...
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The Documentary ‘Boys State’ Delivers a Dose of Political Hope to Our...
You can’t go to the Sundance Film Festival without seeing a political celebrity: Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG) in 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Knock Down the House) in 2019, and Hillary Clinton...
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The Balance of Power in Texas Politics Runs Along I-35
It’s not news that Texas suburbs are booming. Frisco, McKinney, Conroe, Pearland, New Braunfels, League City, Round Rock, and Denton were among the 25 fastest-growing cities in America since 2010 (as...
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Can the ‘Texas Miracle’ Survive?
On an average day in 2019, the Texas Workforce Commission received about 13,000 calls from Texans applying for unemployment benefits. Toward the end of the year the state unemployment rate hovered...
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Why Texas Still Celebrates Confederate Heroes Day
One of Texas’s most enduring memorials to the Confederacy isn’t a statue cast in bronze or a plaque dedicated to the Lost Cause. It’s a state holiday the Texas Legislature created in 1973, more than...
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What ‘Boys State’ Says About the Future of Texas Politics
President George Washington’s famous warning about the dangers of partisan politics, delivered in his 1796 farewell address, appears on a title card at the outset of the new documentary Boys State. Yet...
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Until 1968, a Married Texas Woman Couldn’t Own Property or Start a Business...
Around this time of year, Louise Raggio’s three sons miss the smell of cookies wafting from the compact kitchen in their childhood home. On the minuscule counter space, she’d prepare dozens of...
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The GOP’s Voter Restriction Bill Would Be a Do-over of the Attempted Voter...
For more than seven hours last Wednesday, until shortly before 2 a.m., Texas senators debated legislation that would make it significantly more difficult for Texans to vote, especially minorities and...
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Why Eight Texas Republicans Broke From Their Party Over Mask Mandates
Texas lawmakers began this year’s legislative session with some agitation over new rules that required that they wear face masks to limit the spread of COVID-19. In January, Republican representative...
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2021: The Best and Worst Legislators
Since 1973, our biennial list of the best and worst legislators has tried to make the chicanery (and occasional valor) of the Texas Legislature a little more visible through brief portraits of the...
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The Texas Lege’s Culture War on Austin Has Come to a Cuddly Ceasefire
In recent years, the Texas Legislature has passed laws restricting what regulations cities can pass—especially if they originate in Austin. The Lege has overturned local regulations around ride-hailing...
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Roar of the Crowd: August 2021
Collectors’ Additions I was very disappointed in the Texas Monthly excerpt of the book Forget the Alamo [“The Next Battle of the Alamo!,” June 2021]. The Alamo has long been revered as a monument to...
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The 2020 Census Shows Texas Metros Are Booming. The Guv and the Lege Keep...
The 2020 Census counts released last week are filled with good news for Texas. For each day since 2010, 1,095 people were added to the state’s population, for a total of nearly four million new Texans...
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Who Killed Criminal Justice Reform in Texas?
In recent years, Rick Perry struggled mightily to live up to the expectations so many once placed on him. As Donald Trump’s Secretary of Energy, he made virtually no mark on the public consciousness....
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Melancholy Rebel
All of us have done things we regret, and one of the things I regret deeply is my treatment of Frances Tarlton “Sissy” Farenthold at a dinner buffet I gave in honor of a writer friend. Everyone was...
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