State Government

One of those things bubbling in the back of the current state budget is a list of contingent appropriations—unfulfilled items on the last Legislature’s wish list. The list includes things like a pay raise for state judges and a 3 percent pay raise for state employees. It works like this: If the state is bringing in more tax money than she predicted, Comptroller Carole Keeton Rylander is supposed to watch until there’s enough extra money to fund the first thing on the list, and when there is enough, to tell the Legislative Budget Board about it. And so on.

The newest member of Gov. Rick Perry’s anti-crime task force has two unusual traits: He’s been under federal criminal investigation for more than two years, and earlier this year, he sought the Democratic Party’s nomination to run against Perry. Former Attorney General Dan Morales was appointed to the panel by Bexar County District Attorney Susan Reed and former AG and Texas Supreme Court Justice John Hill. He says it’s not politics: He’s serving on the task force because of his expertise in asset forfeiture and drug money laundering laws he helped write.

You would think the Democrats were holding their convention in the Yukon to hear some of the griping about going “all the way to El Paso” for the biennial state gathering. But the Democrats are the biggest convention that city gets, and El Paso is one of the most reliably Democratic counties in the state. They need each other.

A fair number of Republican state representatives in Texas–almost a third of them, in fact–think it would be a bad idea to decide the next speaker’s race inside the Republican caucus.

The Republican Party of Texas expects to have a relatively smooth state convention: Nobody is throwing fits about positions taken by prominent state officeholders, nobody is opposing the reelection of Chairwoman Susan Weddington, and there haven’t even been any juicy scandals lately. Expect something of a love fest when the GOP meets in Dallas this week.

Either Tony Sanchez is 25 points behind Rick Perry, as a recent third-party poll shows, or he’s 12 points behind–the margin he and his aides say they see in their own polling.

The two richest candidates in Texas—Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tony Sanchez and Republican lieutenant governor candidate David Dewhurst—are using the most expensive kind of advertising to talk to voters in a move that might have less to do with votes than with resources.

Texas Democrat Tony Sanchez broke the suspense about whether a wealthy guy would run a normal campaign for governor. The answer is no, and the evidence is on television. With six long months to go before the general election–some states haven’t even had their primaries yet–Sanchez loosed a blitz of advertising aimed, at least initially, at convincing voters he’s a good guy.

In the new districts drawn for the Texas House, and in those drawn for Texas seats in the U.S. House, there are several seats that voted for Republicans on average in 1998 while voting with the Democrats on closer races, like the one for comptroller. That’s a measure of the coattail strength of then-Gov. George W. Bush. And it’s useful if you’re trying to figure out whether a seat that initially appears to belong to the Republicans is actually theirs. Bush’s strength added as few as two percentage points to overall Republican numbers in some districts and as much as 16 percentage points in others.

Most of the newly drawn House districts–105 of them–voted Republican when you average all of the statewide races together. But when you look only at the closest race on the ballot–the contest for comptroller between Republican Carole Keeton Rylander and Democrat Paul Hobby150;the numbers are much closer. In fact, the statewide averages were skewed by the huge margin of victory racked up by George W. Bush, in particular, and make the House districts look an average of 9 percent more Republican than the comptroller’s race. In two dozen districts, the Republican statewide average was at or above 50 percent but the comptroller’s race went to the Democrat.