Politics & Government

Friday afternoon came the breathless proclamation from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Texas Secretary of State David Whitley: Ninety-five thousand noncitizens were on Texas’ voter rolls, and 58,000 of them had cast ballots between 1996 and 2018. Friday night and Saturday, progressive groups and Democrats pushed back, suggesting that…

Texas’ long fight over voter ID, settled just last year, is already old news. The state’s new battlefront in the war for and against voter rights is over citizenship verification, and it looks like Texas could be in for another round of litigation. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and newly…

Cold, quiet weekday afternoon. One of my favorite East Dallas sausage and egg places, Barbec’s on Garland Road, is still as the tomb, empty but for this table, where a waitress hovers over five of us with a pot of hot coffee. Here I am, chatting up a table full…

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton dropped quite the bombshell Friday afternoon: Nearly a year after his office announced an extensive voter fraud initiative, the Texas Secretary of State’s office has discovered that about 95,000 individuals identified as not having documentation of their citizenship on file with the Texas Department of…

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is nothing if not a … well, even we hate to come right out and call someone a hypocrite. We’ll let you decide whether that shoe fits. During his 2016 run for president, he positioned himself first as Donald Trump’s best friend, then called Trump a…

Some things are made for each other: peanut butter and jelly, beef tallow and fried potatoes, Jerry Jones and television cameras. Similarly, some moments are just made for Twitter, scratching the social network right where it itches. Wednesday afternoon, one of those moments fell from the sky, or was at…

Wednesday I decided to go out and check on my two favorite issues in the upcoming mayor’s race. Yup, still there: 1) The trashy mess where the city finally tore out the $6 million never-used fake whitewater feature it built in the Trinity River, and 2) the $115 million never-used…

Late Wednesday afternoon brought another twist for May’s municipal election, as Dallas City Council member Mark Clayton announced he will not seek a third term. Clayton has represented portions of East and northeast Dallas since 2015, when he cruised to an easy victory by winning almost 60 percent of the…

Tuesday brought the first true surprise of the nascent race for Dallas mayor, with state Rep. Eric Johnson announcing that he was making the field an even 10, further muddying an electoral picture that’s still a long way from shaking itself out. Johnson is a serious candidate — even if…

Turns out, former Texas state Rep. Jason Villalba wasn’t the last person to squeeze himself onto Dallas’ large field of mayoral candidates. Tuesday morning, West Dallas state Rep. Eric Johnson surprisingly threw his own hat into the mayoral ring, bringing the number of candidates running for the city’s most visible…

Former Dallas Mayor Pro Tem Monica Alonzo is looking to retake her spot on the Dallas City Council, two years after being unceremoniously dumped out of her District 6 seat in a June 2017 runoff by Omar Narvaez. While she has apparently yet to speak to the English-language press about…

A half-dozen or so candidates remain in Dallas’ mayoral race, hoping to navigate the rocky path to a one-on-one showdown and a runoff. Friday morning, former Dallas City Attorney Larry Casto announced he is no longer one of them. Casto, a North Oak Cliff resident, said he believes his remaining…

Apologies in advance, but we’re going to have to take another long look at Beto O’Rourke’s Medium blog. Late Wednesday afternoon, O’Rourke took to the blogging platform with another journal entry right out of a graduate creative writing workshop — Doesn’t the University of Iowa have one of those? —…

It’s hard to blame DFW Airport’s Transportation Security Administration agents for being unprepared at this point. For federal workers, a government shutdown is always looming, an event out of their control that can be forced on them at any time. Those employed by the TSA and other federal agencies around…

City Hall is having a big debate with itself about getting rid of the city’s long-standing youth curfew. We should do an experiment. Try this: Rigorously enforce the curfew outside late-night teenage house parties in the affluent white Lakewood and Preston Hollow neighborhoods. Then re-poll everybody on how many people…

The good news, such as it is: The Tarrant County Republican Party decided that a politically conservative trauma surgeon who also serves on the Southlake City Council is a perfectly fine choice to be party vice chairman, even if he is a … gasp … Muslim. The bad news for…

Greg Abbott gets away with a lot. He’s a firebrand, far-right conservative in a state that’s tilted significantly more liberal over the last five years. He didn’t get much done during his first term — the state’s property tax and school finance system are still in shambles — and, unlike…

It’s easy to get politically depressed. Sometimes it’s not easy to get out of bed. But we need to draw a deep breath and look at the long arc. Sunlight glows out there on the far horizon. Last week at the very moment President Donald Trump was doing his Dumbo…

Oprah, teeth cleanings and nascent beards. Among a few other tidbits, that’s where we are in Beto O’Rourke’s presidential flirtation. The maybe candidate still isn’t doing anything that actually means anything, so social media gawkers and the media are left to project their own meaning onto everything the newly out-of-a-job…

The Texas State Capitol’s ahistorical Children of the Confederacy plaque is finally coming down after a unanimous State Preservation Board vote Friday morning. The plaque, which features the “Children of the Confederacy Creed” has long been a source of controversy at the capitol. Over the last year, Democratic Dallas state Representative…