State Government

Add Dawnna Dukes to the list of Texas lawmakers misreporting credit card spending by their campaigns. And to the line of lawmakers going to the state to make amendments to their campaign finance reports and to try to get their fines lowered.

Weatherford Mayor Joe Tison kicked off the first day of filing, saying he’ll run in the GOP primary against Rep. Phil King, R-Weatherford. And then the flood began.

Democrat Chris Bell is suing Republican Rick Perry and the Washington, D.C.-based Republican Governor’s Association over the provenance of $1 million in campaign money in last year’s gubernatorial election.

Dan Barrett and Mark Shelton — a lawyer and a doctor, a Democrat and a Republican, an opponent and a supporter of the current Speaker of the House — will face each other in a runoff in HD-97 in a few weeks. The money is big, the stakes are big, and there’s nothing else going on in state politics at the moment. It’s a Petri dish full of what’ll be happening in House races for the next 12 months.

The filing period for candidates is still a month away, but things are already getting ugly down in Senate District 21.

To summarize: The state’s senior senator won’t seek reelection and might quit early, and hasn’t decided whether to run for governor or to get out and earn some money in the private sector.

The state’s top criminal judge has inspired a parody website and a complaint from a group of lawyers that’s dead serious.

Clunky as it is, “Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One” is a familiar name in election law circles.

Come March, Democratic primary voters will likely know all about U.S. Senate hopeful Rick Noriega’s ties to utility companies. What voters will make of it is still anybody’s guess.

Maybe nobody will remember this in six months, but the people who want Texans to approve $3 billion in cancer bonds are having a hard time keeping their act together.