Texas House Speaker Joe Straus brushed aside complaints that he controls the House and said he is confident that most of the members of the House will support him for a record-breaking sixth term in that post in January 2019.

The tempestuous president has been trumped by a tempest: Texas politics and government is all about Hurricane Harvey now, and Donald Trump might not be the most important outsider in the state's 2018 elections after all.

House Speaker Joe Straus wants business to stay the course through 2018’s elections and into the 2019 session, buttressing business-friendly Republicans against a conservative tide. It's a lot to ask.

Hurricane Harvey presents the state of Texas with a set of problems that are bigger than politics, a turn of fortune that could be a political boon to Gov. Greg Abbott.

The nation's highest court says Texas should use the political maps it already has in place while litigation over those maps continues. But the courts have been known to change the maps in the middle of election years.

Travis County prosecutors are setting aside felony charges against state Rep. Dawnna Dukes, D-Austin, at least temporarily, the Austin American-Statesman reported Thursday.

The races at the top of the 2018 Republican primary ballot don't look very competitive. That might be good news for the party's most conservative down-ballot candidates. 

Texas lawmakers have now been popped by federal judges seven or eight times in recent years for intentionally discriminating against minority voters in with voter ID and redistricting legislation. Think they’ve got a problem?

Families in politics are nothing new — they're all over history and, for that matter, the current Texas Legislature. But the upcoming Senate primary in Collin County offers a fresh twist on the theme.

The differences between the state's top legislative leaders will inform the coming Republican primaries, because Dan Patrick and Joe Straus reflect different wings of the Texas GOP. 

The cities and counties won the latest round of the state's war on local government. But it's a temporary win, at best.

Republican state lawmakers could decide who'll be speaker of the Texas House in January 2019 themselves — and then stick together when it goes to a vote in the full House of Representatives. That would be a significant change.

The Texas Legislature's special session ended with a bang, but it wasn't the sound of the property tax bill the governor was hoping for. Will he call state lawmakers back for more?

In Austin — the poster child for property tax recapture in Texas right now — the school district is telling taxpayers they’ll be sending $2.6 billion to the state over the next five years. That's inspiring some crazy ideas.

A new report says the deferrals and other fiscal tricks lawmakers used this year — and are considering in the current special session — are digging a hole legislators will have to fill when they return to write a new budget in January 2019.