State Government

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.

The political air is different in sixteen legislative districts: Republicans win statewide races, but Democrats dominate in legislative contests.

Redistricting, with just a few exceptions, still has a strong hold on the makeup of the state Senate and the Texas congressional delegation. But several House members continue to confound the mapmakers, winning in districts where, on paper, they shouldn’t.

We pulled the numbers from campaign reports filed with the Texas Ethics Commission and the Federal Election Commission and ranked officeholders and candidates by how much they had in their accounts at mid-year.

Nathan Hecht’s battle over Harriet Miers’ appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court is lasting longer than hers did.

Legal arguments about how the Texas House should run have picked up, but it’s still too early to tell whether Attorney General Greg Abbott will weigh in and whether, if he does, it’ll make any difference in the final outcome.

The state’s biggest phone companies and their competitors are fighting over a fund that subsidizes companies that provide phone service where it would otherwise be unaffordable. AT&T;, the biggest, says the Universal Service Fund doesn’t cover its costs. Competitors say the company gets at least twice what it should.

Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn won’t get a cakewalk in 2008, but neither will the Democrat who faces him a year from November.

Just as state officeholders were racing to stock their election accounts by an end-of-month deadline, the state and federal courts got busy on the subject of campaign finance. The state’s highest criminal court had good news for former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, while the nation’s highest court had good news for corporations and unions and groups that campaign on so-called issue ads in the last week’s before elections.