Want a straw poll in the Speaker’s race? Not so fast.
Morgan Smith
Morgan Smith was a reporter at the Tribune from 2009 to 2018, covering politics, public education and inequality.
In 2013, she received a National Education Writers Association award for “Death of a District,” a series on school closures. After earning a bachelor’s degree in English from Wellesley College, she moved to Austin in 2008 to enter law school at the University of Texas.
A San Antonio native, her work has also appeared in Slate, where she spent a year as an editorial intern in Washington D.C.
Posted inState Government
License to Torture?
The State Board of Psychologists will decide whether an architect of Bush-era “enhanced interrogation techniques” developed for use in so-called black prison sites violated the profession’s rules of practice.
Posted in
Public Education
TribBlog: HISD Leaving Girls Sports Behind?
The largest school district in Texas isn’t providing enough opportunities for high school girls to play sports, according to a Title IX complaint filed by the National Women’s Law Center today.
Posted in
Criminal Justice
TribBlog: High Court: Property Rights Trump Open Beaches
In a pivotal decision, the Texas Supreme Court has ruled that the Open Beaches Act may not allow the state to ask landowners to remove private property if a hurricane or other natural disaster moves it within the public section of a beach.
Posted in
Congress
What Chet Does Next
His resounding defeat was only one of Election Day’s many hits to the solar plexus of the state Democratic Party. But the loss of the powerful and politically talented U.S. congressman from Waco engenders the most speculation. What’s next for Chet Edwards?
Posted inState Government
2010: Chet Edwards Speaks
“I can swim against the stream and have done so repeatedly, but I can’t swim against a tidal wave,” he says.
Posted in
Criminal Justice
2010: No Surprises on the High Courts
There weren’t any surprises in the races for the highest courts: All Republican incumbents won.
Posted inState Government
Red November
Rick Perry won his third full term as governor of Texas on Tuesday, defeating former Houston Mayor Bill White by a convincing double-digit margin and positioning himself for a role on the national stage. And he led a Republican army that swept all statewide offices for the fourth election in a row, took out three Democratic U.S. congressmen and was on its way to a nearly two-thirds majority in the Texas House — a mark the GOP hasn’t seen since the days following the Civil War.
Posted inState Government
2010: Chet Edwards Concedes
If he had won tonight, it would have cemented his reputation as a political miracle worker. Instead, U.S. Rep. Chet Edwards lost the Central Texas seat he’s held for more than two decades to Republican Bill Flores of Bryan by a wide margin.
Posted in
Congress
Hammer Time
Today, five years after Tom DeLay’s fall from power, his trial on the money laundering and conspiracy charges that forced his resignation as U.S. House majority leader is finally slated to begin. What’s at stake, other than voyeuristic curiosity about whether a former congressman will go to prison?
