The Legislature gave voters what they said they wanted last year: big budget cuts in lieu of tax increases. Now it's election time again, and the question is: Are they pleased with the budget cuts they got?

There's still that pesky problem after the maps are drawn: When will Texans vote?

In two weeks, the federal judges in San Antonio will be drawing a new set of maps. Between now and then, the lawyers on both sides have a lot of writing and arguing to do.

This week, the redistricting judges in Washington did the judges in San Antonio a favor, telling them the D.C. panel won't be ruling on its part of the case for a month. The Texans can start drawing maps.

This week's political news starts with a couple of dropouts and a dispute over where one a statewide elected official lives — and where she's supposed to live.

In this weeks' survey of government and business insiders, we asked about the primaries and how delays and splits might affect the results of this year's elections.

Houston Democrat Jason Gibson has dropped out of the race for U.S. Senate and endorsed Paul Sadler of Henderson.

The four best-known Republicans running for U.S. Senate mostly agreed with one another at a Texas Association of Business forum this afternoon in Austin: They're all running against President Obama.

Railroad Commissioner Elizabeth Ames Jones is making a run for a state Senate seat. But her opponent in the GOP primary, state Sen. Jeff Wentworth, is challenging her on residency. That dispute is among this week's top political news items.

Every Texas Democrat who has run for statewide office in the last 18 years has been defeated. Every Democrat on the ballot this year hopes to bust that slump. But Republicans in Texas have suffered a longer drought than what Democrats are currently facing.

Tan and Dehn talk to some of Gov. Rick Perry's allies about his return to Texas, Aaronson maps (interactively!) the insured and the uninsured among us, E. Smith's TribLive interview with state Rep. David Simpson on Perry's race and TSA pat-downs, M. Smith on a Texas school so broke it's shutting down sports, Whitney on a split in the legal community over divorce forms, KUT's Philpott on abuse in state hospitals, Ramshaw reports on the governor's decision not to repay taxpayers for protection during his presidential campaign and Aguilar on the state's attempts to put its voter ID law in force: The best of our best content from January 23-27, 2012.

Federal redistricting judges in San Antonio told lawyers Friday they won't be able to hold primary elections in April if they don't make substantial progress on maps by early next week. But some want the court to slow down, even if it delays the elections again.

Up and down the Texas ballot, candidates are waiting to see whether the redrawn political maps give them any chance of winning. Careers, plans and schemes are in the balance.

Nobody said running for a U.S. Senate seat in Texas was cheap. A (partial) release of Ted Cruz's finances, and other political news from around the state.

Three federal judges in San Antonio are going back, literally, to the drawing board for new political maps for Texas, and to decide when to have primary elections. The same things, in other words, they were trying to work out in November.