Some Texas Republicans are embracing a cross-border trucking agreement between the U.S. and Mexico that labor unions worry could kill jobs and drastically reduce border security.

Two Republican boosters have circulated a memo urging business owners to contact lawmakers to encourage them to vote against the “sanctuary cities” bills pending in committee. 

A proposal by the Obama administration that would grant Mexican truckers greater access to Texas roadways would be a boon for business in the state, supporters say, since three of the top five ports for trade between the U.S. and Mexico are Laredo, El Paso and Houston. But unions contend the plan would cost American jobs. “This cheap-labor program comes at too high a risk and at too large a cost to middle-class American workers who work long, hard hours to help maintain a safe commerce system in our nation,” says a spokesman for the Texas AFL-CIO.

As the inauguration parties kick off with a big party for lawmakers sponsored by the beer lobby, we looked into just how much Texans love their brewsky.

The bomb-throwing president of Empower Texas and Texans for Fiscal Responsibility on why Joe Straus hasn't proved himself as a conservative, why the entry of outside groups like his own into the insiders' race for speaker is proper and what he'd like to see out of a Texas House with 99 GOP members in it.

Anti-Rick Perry websites run by the Back to Basics PAC are crashing all around them this morning. The group blames hackers for the server meltdowns.

It's still poisonous in Texas politics to be painted with the trial lawyer brush.

If the Larry Taylor-Steve Mostyn battle over windstorm insurance payouts wasn't a proxy war for the tort reformists and the trial lawyers before, it certainly is now.

Curbing the practice of barratry — "ambulance chasing," in the vernacular — has prompted an uneasy alliance between tort reformers and the Texas Trial Lawyers Association: They agree on reform ... just not on the form it should take.

Physician fraud investigators inside the troubled Division of Workers' Compensation say state examiners failed to uncover serious problems there — and then recommended changes that would take key decisions away from trained physicians and give them to bureaucrats.

A new political action committee is attacking Gov. Rick Perry with a television ad playing on a familiar theme: Perry's high-class living. The ad starts airing tonight in markets across Texas.

The D.C.-based Texas Democratic Trust began as an attempt to revive flagging Democratic institutions in Texas and is now a critical source of funding for them and a host of consultants. That has made its director, Matt Angle, as powerful as most political bosses in other states. Maybe too powerful, his critics say.

In the early days of the general election campaign for governor, the Perry team has been shouting it from the rooftops at the start of every press release, no matter the issue at hand: “Liberal trial lawyer Bill White …” The Democratic nominee rejects that label, which has morphed into an epithet during years of poisonous tussles over tort reform. So is he one or isn’t he? More importantly, does it matter?

In politics, friendship apparently lasts through only one political cycle. Just ask Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. Many organizations that previously supported both her and Gov. Rick Perry have put their weight behind Perry's re-election bid instead of her challenge. The Texas Farm Bureau sits as the sole trade group cheerleading for the Hutchison campaign — while Perry counts 50 organizations and associations supporting him.

Since 2005, Texas lobbyists have spent more than $500,000 on transportation and lodging for state officials, including members of the Lege.