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Diane Owens
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Democrats haven’t won a statewide election in Texas in nearly two decades. So why is Jeremy Bird smiling?
President Obama’s former national field director is launching a new effort, dubbed “Battleground Texas“, to ramp up the fight for the state’s electoral votes by capitalizing on its changing demographics. According to estimates from the Texas State Data Center, Hispanics will make up some 19 million of the state’s 37 million residents by 2030, outnumbering whites by some 20 points.
“It’s not just demographics. For us to be successful….it’s also going to take better messaging and strong candidates, Bird told Chuck Todd on The Daily Rundown. “It’s a holistic approach,” he said.
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Diane Owens
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House Republicans are ready to take on immigration reform. Slowly. Very slowly.
The House Judiciary Committee meets Tuesday on immigration reform, and Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) wants everyone to be clear it isn’t to talk about the Senate proposal. Rather, it is the first of several hearings for members to hear about current immigration policy and then find out where they stand.
“Most members of Congress don’t know a lot about immigration law,” Goodlatte said.
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Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has been on the losing side of every vote the Senate has taken in his young career — the only senator who can claim that distinction, boosting his anti-establishment credentials and earning him rave reviews from grass-roots...
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As a group of Senate stars tries to sell a new immigration proposal, their House counterparts are secretly toiling under the radar to craft their own plan in the next few weeks.
Politico
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Diane Owens
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Texas voters don't like Barack Obama. 47% of voters approve of him to 51% who disapprove. 39% of them, including 67% of Republicans, would like to see him impeached from office.
Public Policy Polling
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Diane Owens
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Texas needs more than tax cuts to thrive and will require investments in education, infrastructure and water to keep growing, House Speaker Joe Straus told the Texas Association of Broadcasters on Monday.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Introducing a new wrinkle into the already fraught fiscal cliff showdown, a consortium of billionaires today warned that if their taxes are raised they will no longer have enough money to buy politicians. The group, led by casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, commissioned a new study showing that the cost of an average politician has soared exponentially over the past decade. While the American family has seen increases in the cost of food, health care and education, Mr. Adelson says, “those costs don’t compare with the cost of buying a politician, which has gone through the roof.” The casino billionaire points to his group’s study, which puts the cost of purchasing an average House member at two million dollars and an average senator at several times that. “And let’s say you buy a senator like Jim DeMint and he decides to quit,” Mr. Adelson says. “Good luck trying to get your money back.” The Vegas magnate complains that the media has ignored billionaires’ essential role in giving jobs to politicians who would otherwise have difficulty finding “honest work of any kind.” “Billionaires are providing employment for a group of seriously incompetent and marginal people,” Mr. Adelson says. “You raise taxes on us, and who’s going to create those jobs? I really don’t think people have thought this through.” Adding insult to injury for America’s billionaires, he says, “the simple dream of someday owning a President is slipping out of reach.” “People think a billion dollars buys you a President, but they’re wrong,” he says. “It barely gets you a lemon like Mitt Romney.”
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Progress Texas is hosting a special screening of the documentary Koch Brothers Exposed at the Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar. They have already sold out more than half the theater – be sure to reserve your seats now before they sell out!
Read more & purchase tickets
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Diane Owens
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A prediction: If the Supreme Court strikes down part of the Voting Rights Act this term, we’ll read about Obama’s re-election—and especially the role played by black and Hispanic voters—in a majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts. After noting that the president’s giant share of support among minority voters pushed him over the top in key states, Roberts could point out that some Republicans started shifting ground on immigration the very next day.
The first lesson that just about everyone has drawn from the election: With the white vote shrinking, both parties have to court minority voters. If Republicans don’t figure out how to appeal broadly to Hispanics, in particular, they’ll eventually say goodbye even to their stronghold of Texas. There’s a second possible lesson from the 2012 results, however, which would be controversial indeed in the hands of Roberts and the conservative wing of the court: Given their electoral muscle, perhaps minority voters no longer need the protection of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. [Read more]
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Diane Owens
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A day before a Friday deadline, Gov. Rick Perry announced Texas would not set up a key component of the Affordable Care Act, a health-insurance exchange that would allow individuals and small businesses to find coverage online at the most favorable price.
The governor reiterated his opposition in a letter released Thursday to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
"As long as the federal government has the ability to force unknown mandates and costs upon our citizens, while retaining the sole power in approving what an exchange looks like, the notion of a state exchange is merely an illusion," Perry said in the letter. "It would not be fiscally responsible to put hard-working Texans on the financial hook for an unknown amount of money to operate a system under rules that have not even been written."
Proponents of the exchange contend it will allow the state to significantly reduce the size of its uninsured population, the largest in the United States.
In the wake of last week's election results, a few Republican governors have had second thoughts about their opposition to the program.
They include Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who has been, along with Perry, one of the most vociferous opponents of the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as ObamaCare.
"The election is over and President Obama won," Scott told the Associated Press this week. "I'm responsible for the families of Florida. … If I can get to yes, I want to get to yes."
Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Gov. Dave Heineman of Nebraska, both Republicans, also declined to participate.
North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue, a Democrat, said her state would pursue a partnership model with the federal government.
Every state is supposed to have an exchange by Jan. 1, 2014, when the Affordable Care Act will require most Americans to have insurance.
For Texas and other states that refuse to set up exchanges, the federal government will do it for them.
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WASHINGTON - Texas Republicans anticipate compromise as they return to Capitol Hill Tuesday for postelection negotiations to avert a threatened one-two punch that would drain more than $1 trillion from the economy in automatic federal spending cuts and expiration of popular tax breaks.
Voters' unmistakable demand to end gridlock, the political leeway resulting from President Obama's reelection and dire economic forecasts by the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office are fast overtaking the no-compromise climate that gripped the nation's capital for months heading into the election.
"It may not come before the Christmas holidays, but the urgency and seriousness of the (fiscal) cliff make me cautiously optimistic a sound solution can be enacted in time," said Rep. Kevin Brady, R-The Woodlands, vice chairman of the Joint House-Senate Economic Committee and a senior member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.
The upcoming negotiations present "both an immense challenge and an historic opportunity to come together and do the right thing for the country," says Sen. John Cornyn, a second-term senator seeking to become second-in-command in the Senate GOP leadership. "I'm optimistic the urgency of the moment will bring members of both parties together to avert what would be an economic disaster."
'Start the governing' The president's election to a final term "certainly frees him to really stop the campaigning and start the governing," says retiring Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Dallas, leaving the Senate after 19 years. "It has been pretty clear from all of the election rhetoric that the president and Congress have not had much communication."
Adds Rep. Gene Green, D-Houston: "I'm very hopeful that both parties can come to a common sense agreement … After several years of gridlock, it would be great to see more willingness from both parties to come to a bipartisan agreement quickly on the fiscal cliff." Inaction on all fronts would be felt almost immediately by ordinary Americans, with the average household potentially facing $3,500 more a year in taxes, according to estimates by the Tax Policy Center.
That prospect is stoking overnight talk of compromise in the wake of the of the election season.
House Speaker John Boehner has signaled flexibility by saying Republicans would be willing to consider ways to harvest higher tax revenues as part of an unspecified compromise that takes place "under the right conditions."
In the GOP-led House, voters rejected some prominent House candidates who proselytized no compromise on efforts to cut the federal debt. Tea Party-backed first-term Rep. Francisco "Quico" Canseco, R-San Antonio, for example, became the only House incumbent to lose in Texas' 36 congressional districts. [Read more]
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Amid the heap of GOP losses on Tuesday, one unsung Republican emerged as a winner: Texas Rep. Pete Sessions, a onetime Eagle Scout and former telephone company district manager who for the second cycle in a row led the party’s campaign to keep the House under Republican control.
Presiding over the National Republican Congressional Committee the past four years, Sessions has amassed a record that speaks for itself: In 2010, Republicans won 63 seats and the House majority. And though Tuesday’s results aren’t final, the party is on track to lose seven seats, rebuffing Democrats who until recently were talking up their chances of taking back the House.
Sessions engineered a series of behind-the-scenes moves over the course of the cycle that paid big dividends on Tuesday, according to accounts of his actions that were kept under wraps during the campaign but shared with POLITICO afterward. He devised a blueprint to nearly wipe out the remaining Blue Dog Democrats, who for years had impeded Republican gains in the South. He persuaded wavering Republican lawmakers not to retire. And Sessions helped devise a strategy to neutralize the Medicare issue, which Democrats believed they’d use to beat the GOP back into the minority.
To say Sessions is solely responsible for his party’s success in winning and then defending the majority would be a stretch. House Republicans over the past two elections have benefited from a favorable political environment and a once-in-a-decade redistricting process that buffered many of their members. Read more
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Texas public schools would get back a chunk of the $5.4 billion in state funding they lost two years ago under a budget proposal adopted by the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday.
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Curran joined representatives of the Texas Medical Association at a news conference Tuesday at the Capitol to call on the Legislature to restore funding for such patients that was cut in January 2012.
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A state judge ruled Monday that Texas’ school finance system is not delivering enough money for schools to do their job and is distributing funds in an unfair and unconstitutional manner, a long-anticipated ruling that could kick off a sweeping makeover of how the state pays for public education.
Dietz, noting the argument that education problems can’t be solved “by throwing money at them,” said the problem is the state hasn’t kept up. After adjusting for inflation, he noted, Texas is providing only slightly more for education than in 2004, and that doesn’t take into account enrollment increases of 630,000 students during the period."
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And freshman Sen. Ted Cruz, the tea party firebrand who engaged Hagel in tough questioning, later wouldn’t rule out trying to place a hold on his nomination, which would require 60 votes to overcome on the Senate floor.
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How’s this for a day’s work in the Senate: Introduce a bill to repeal the health-care reform law, vote against Sen.
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A bipartisan breakthrough on immigration policy triggered a fierce debate Monday and set the groundwork for months of wrangling by tying a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants to a promise to secure the nation’s borders.
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The Affordable Care Act is the federal law that Texas Republicans love to hate, but one top lawmaker says expanding health care for the working poor could happen if federal authorities are willing to strike a deal.
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Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) went on a rant against his party leaders for "not leading" when it comes to cutting government spending, and warned that if they don't prevail in extending the Bush tax cuts for everyone, including the wealthy, then rich people will leave the country.During a Tuesday interview on The Lars Larson Show, a conservative talk radio segment, Gohmert -- a Tea Party favorite -- complained that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) hasn't done enough to bring about the major changes the party has been seeking for years, namely tax reform and entitlement reform. The issue now on the front burner is whether Republicans will give in to Democratic demands to let the Bush tax cuts expire on the wealthy as a way to generate new government revenue. Republicans prefer cutting spending instead, but Gohmert signaled he expects Boehner to cave on the matter.
"We've got the guys with the good ideas. Unfortunately, we're not leading with them. We're playing defense and going, 'Well, we might agree to more revenue,'" the Texas Republican said. "I hate the metaphor kicking the can down the road, but good grief, it looks like we can't stop ourselves. That's why I nominated a different speaker."
Gohmert made news earlier this month when, during Republican leadership elections, he unexpectedly stood up and nominated Newt Gingrich as House speaker. Nobody else seconded the idea, though.
From the Occupy movement to top GOP strategists, forces from both sides of the aisle are uniting to combat the corrupting influence of money in politics.
The result? The American Anti-Corruption Act. To read the act, sign your name, and learn more at www.Represent.Us
For details about the Act, visit: www.anticorruptionact.org
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Yes, there are Texans who don’t want to secede from the U.S., and they’re shaking their heads at their fellow statesmen.
Despite a petition to the White House calling for the Lone Star state’s peaceful secession (as of Wednesday afternoon, it garnered nearly 100,000 signatures — well more than the 25,000 required for a response), many in Texas still view it as nothing more than disgruntled voters expressing their frustration that President Barack Obama won reelection.
“It is a tantrum being thrown because I think people are sick of the intense polarization in the past 10 years. There doesn’t seem to be any middle ground any more. There doesn’t seem to be any way to compromise,” Mac McDowell, a San Antonio tea party member, told POLITICO. “Without anybody answering the ‘Why?’ People start asking, ‘Aren’t you listening?’”
He said he doesn’t support calls for secession — which have emerged in dozens of other states since the Nov. 6 election — because there remain political pathways to bring about change.
“This is the lesson from history: the Civil War,” McDowell said. “The reality is 10 percent of the U.S. population disappeared in that war. Do we really want to go that route again. It’s crazy. But fortunately it isn’t serious, it’s a tantrum. Thank God.”
McDowell added: “We’d have to experience something akin to a Gestapo with people rounding people up for me even to consider it. Nobody’s doing that.”
“This is a strange phenomenon,” Randolph “Mike” Campbell, chief historian of the Texas State Historical Association told POLITICO. “Most of us sort of shake our heads. I really do think that this is due to the frustration of losing the presidential election. This is fringe stuff and when fringe groups are just that unless there’s something that happens that makes them seem relevant.”
He added: “I think that Obama’s election was such a shock to so many conservative Texans that all of a sudden extremists who talk about leaving the United States seem relevant. Ideally this will go away.” [Read more]
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By Mike Ward American-Statesman Staff Texting while driving would be banned statewide, full-day pre-kindergarten would be restored and children targeted by identity thieves would get protections under the dozens of bills filed Monday for the legislative session that begins in January. Monday was the first day bills could be filed, and legislators took the opportunity to frontload their most pressing issues. In the Senate, 100 bills were filed. In the House, the bill tally was 131. [Read more]
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Diane Owens
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By ROBERT T. GARRETT
President Barack Obama’s federal health care law may be safe from repeal, but it’s drawing nothing close to a salute in Texas.
Just as before last week’s election, state leaders castigate President Barack Obama’s signature legislative achievement, even after he won re-election and Democrats strengthened their grip on the U.S. Senate. And on the biggest immediate issues — expanding Medicaid and creating an “exchange” for people to seek insurance coverage — state leaders aren’t budging. “Nothing changes from our perspective,” Gov. Rick Perry said Thursday.
The Republican governor called Medicaid a budget-buster that’s “untenable,” repeating his opposition to expanding the program to cover more low-income Texans, though the federal government would pay most of the costs.
Also last week, a Perry spokeswoman said Texas won’t volunteer to set up the health insurance exchange, a sort of Travelocity for health insurance shoppers. Under the federal law, if a state doesn’t roll out an exchange, the federal government will.
The state has no plans to respond by Friday’s deadline for states to notify federal officials that they want to run their exchange, said Perry press secretary Catherine Frazier. “Texas will not be a subcontractor to Obamacare,” she said, noting that federal officials still would “dictate how it’s operated” and enforce “rules that haven’t even been determined yet.”
Other views In lesser state offices, though, and in some consulting firms that focus on health policy, officials said last week that they will continue to explore ideas for reducing Texas’ staggering problem of people who lack coverage.
These experts said they are seeking policy options that can be cast as fiscally responsible while expanding productivity. They also said they hope some options could tap into at least some of the $100 billion of federal Medicaid matching money that Texas would leave on the table between 2014 and 2023 if it refuses to participate in the federal law — assuming it’s fully funded as passed. [Read more]
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