How do texans act

Posted in Texas April 30, by Kristen Lawrence. During these uncertain times, please keep safety in mind and consider adding destinations to your bucket list to visit at a later date. Texas In Your Inbox spinner. Love Texas? Get more stories delivered right to your email.

Desperation suffuses the chamber on Budget Night—the last stand for bills that have not been funded. The trick is that, in order to get the money for your legislation, you have to take it from somewhere else.

The members were on guard, lest their own bills be raided. More than four hundred amendments to the budget were awaiting their turn. There are some extraordinary people in the House. Senfronia Thompson is a seventy-eight-year-old former teacher from Houston.

Known as Ms. Unlike a lot of other state legislatures, the Texas legislature still follows a tradition of awarding important posts to members of the minority party. Thompson once told me that, when she was a girl, African-Americans were not welcome in the capitol. Now she is the longest-serving woman and black person in Texas legislative history. Among her many accomplishments is a hate-crimes act, passed in , that includes protections for homosexuals.

She has also fought against racial profiling and passed measures to help low-income Texans pay their utility bills. Armando Martinez, a forty-one-year-old Democratic member from the Valley, is a firefighter and a paramedic. A business conservative in the Straus mold, he is deeply respected in the legislature, and Straus selected him to craft the House version of the budget.

The fund, which is amassed largely from oil and gas taxes, is designated for emergencies. It is projected to grow to twelve billion dollars by , which is more than the annual budget of a dozen other states. An incident in the afternoon had suggested how the budget fight would play out. A freshman member, Briscoe Cain, presented an amendment to shut down an advisory panel on palliative care. Normally, freshmen keep quiet, but Cain is an assertive member of the insurgent Freedom Caucus.

Soon afterward, Zerwas came to the microphone and stood there, giving Cain what Jonathan Tilove, in his blog for the Austin American-Statesman , jokingly called the morem pellis hispidus distentione nervorum: the hairy eyeball. The Freedom Caucus members gathered with Cain at a microphone in the front of the chamber; the traditional Republicans, along with some Democrats, stood beside Zerwas at a microphone in the rear.

It was the Texas version of the Montagues versus the Capulets. The old warhorses in the House knew, if Cain did not, that Zerwas had lost his first wife to brain cancer. He wore a ring on his right hand in her memory. Zerwas forced Cain, several times, to admit having made false or uninformed statements. He lives in a wealthy, intensely conservative bedroom community that was all cow pasture when I was growing up nearby. Many young legislators, like Fallon, are not originally from Texas. I asked him how he came to live in the state.

He said that, after playing football for Notre Dame, he joined the Air Force, and was stationed in Texas. This term was his third. Of course, anything attacking Austin—a spore of the California fungus that is destroying America—is popular. Ken Paxton, I reminded Fallon, was under indictment for securities fraud.

He has pleaded not guilty. One of the most feared is the Fiscal Responsibility Index, a powerful weapon against less than ultra-radical Republicans. Sullivan is tall and friendly. Corps of Cadets , and his three children. A right-wing zealot, he is sometimes described as the most powerful non-elected political figure in Texas. Empower Texans is funded largely by a reclusive Midland oilman named Tim Dunn, an evangelical Christian who hopes to create in Texas an example of small government that could be replicated by other states and countries.

He has steadily pushed Republican lawmakers farther right, eliminating the kind of middle-ground figures who support Joe Straus. Dunn has made it a mission to bring down the Speaker. While Fallon and I were talking, Jonathan Stickland approached the front microphone.

Stickland, a member of the Freedom Caucus, is generously supported by Empower Texans. He is a former pest-control technician from Bedford, near Arlington, who now calls himself an oil and gas consultant. Stickland is plump, with an imposing beard, narrow-set brown eyes, and an occasional broad smile revealing beautiful teeth.

He made news in the session by posting a sign outside his office:. Stickland called the program ridiculous and a waste of money. They converged on Stickland from all sides. Everything came to a dead stop. A brass rail circumscribes the chamber; only members, pages, and clerks can go inside. I was hovering around the rail, and Speaker Straus came over to say hello. He seemed totally at ease: smiling, hands in his pockets.

Straus was in no hurry to impose order. He looked at the scrum of lawmakers around Stickland. At the rear microphone stood Drew Springer, a Republican from North Texas, whose district—twice the size of Maryland—is copiously supplied with wild pigs. The measure passed, with undisguised enthusiasm. Stickland pulled his amendment down, but then charged toward Springer. They met in the middle of the chamber, nose to nose.

Stickland is known to carry a concealed weapon, so I was a little worried. But other members separated the men, and Straus reluctantly gavelled the House to order. I left before the budget was passed, long after my bedtime. Earlier in the session, Patrick had demanded an up-or-down vote on subsidizing tuition for private schools, and it was crushed, — Paxton, the attorney general, would lose more than twenty million dollars from his budget for lawsuits; that money would be redirected to foster-care programs.

None of these changes had become law yet—they had to be ratified by the Senate first. The exhausted Democrats and Republicans made a deal: the Democrats agreed to provide only nominal opposition to the defunding of Planned Parenthood, which was going to happen in any case; in return, the bathroom amendment was pulled from consideration.

Other controversial amendments were placed in Article 11 of the budget, a kind of wish list of things to be debated in the future. The relationship between the capitol and the city of Austin is antagonistic. The city has long been known as a blue dot in a red state.

It sees itself as standing apart from the vulgar political culture of the rest of Texas, like Rome surrounded by the Goths. Republican politicians bridle at the disdain. And you know what that fragrance is? When Abbott was attorney general and living in Austin, he was infuriated when he had to compensate the city before cutting down a pecan tree that stood in the way of his future swimming pool. On the Sunday after Trump was elected President, about a hundred and fifty people gathered on the capitol steps and marched down Congress Avenue.

A small group of Trump supporters was staging a counter-protest. According to news reports, one man was especially conspicuous: Joseph Weidknecht, a laid-off sheet-metal worker, who is six feet six and weighs three hundred and fifty pounds.

A number of the anti-Trump marchers, some wearing Guy Fawkes masks, ripped the sign out of his hands, grabbed his hat, and tried to set his shirt on fire. A small woman wearing a hijab forced herself between Weidknecht and the people assaulting him. She was Amina Amdeen, a nineteen-year-old student at the university, who had immigrated to the U. The police arrested six of the protesters. In February, two weeks after the Trump Administration began its attempts to block Muslims from entering the U.

Around this time, a mosque was firebombed in Victoria, two hours southeast of Austin. Muslims account for about one per cent of the U. He previously advocated dropping nuclear bombs on the Muslim world. My wife, Roberta, has a close friend, a writer, who is married to a professor. As the sanctuary-cities bill, S. It threatened the lives of their children, by name. In April, S. Among Republicans who vote in Texas primaries, the hottest issue is immigration. Many state legislators who otherwise might not support the bill seemed intimidated by the political environment, and it was apparent that Straus and his team had no battle plan.

Supreme Court. I represent a district filled with immigrants. Some are here as citizens. Some are here without papers. But they are all my people. Knowing that the law would inevitably be challenged in court, Republicans offered to shelve the amendment if the Democrats made some minor concessions.

But the Democrats took too long to agree on terms, and the Republicans withdrew the offer. After sixteen hours of emotional debate, the House passed S. A week later, Governor Abbott signed it into law, on Facebook Live. As usual, the Texas legislature passed anti-abortion bills. One bans the safest and most common procedure for second-trimester abortions: dilation and evacuation.

The new legislation gave raises to the underpaid caseworkers, but in some ways it was yet another anti-government measure. The bill partially stripped the state of responsibility for its wards, handing them off to contractors. And a new law allowed the hunting of wild pigs from hot-air balloons. Speaker Straus continued to sideline the bathroom bill.

He asked Governor Abbott to stand with him against the measure. Abbott is better known as a business conservative, like Straus, than as a cultural conservative, like Patrick, but he showed little interest in choosing a side, because he was bound to create enemies in either case.

On May 21st, the House began debating the measure. Once again, hours of anguished testimony ensued. Shortly before dawn, the House committee members retired without a vote, effectively killing the measure.

At the last minute, several lawmakers had asserted their conservative bona fides by signing on as co-sponsors of the doomed legislation. It was the most desirable outcome imaginable. One of the major forces behind the bathroom bill, and a big supporter of Dan Patrick, was Steve Hotze, a Houston physician and a longtime ultraconservative kingmaker.

Starting in the mid-nineties, he made a fortune from alternative hormone-replacement therapies and the sale of controversial supplements, such as colloidal silver, which he recommends for treating colds and the flu, and for promoting pet health. In the aughts, Hotze hosted a show on the talk-radio station that Patrick now owns in Houston. In , Dan Patrick ran for lieutenant governor, and Hotze became one of his chief fund-raisers.

They will control the country. This is it. All of its major urban areas except Fort Worth are Democratic and have been for decades. Dallas went for Obama in both elections. Harris County, however, which encompasses Houston, has Republican judges in the courthouse. San Antonio has always been a progressive stronghold, though it often votes Republican in statewide races. In the election, Trump garnered fifty-two per cent of the vote in Texas, compared with sixty-five per cent in neighboring Oklahoma.

Hotze runs a political-action committee called Conservative Republicans of Texas. May they be consumed, collapse, rot and be blown away as dust from their current positions because of their wicked works, thoughts and deeds.

On May 20th, Tom Mechler, the chairman of the state Republican Party, resigned, citing personal reasons. He issued a letter pleading for party unity. He also warned that the Republican Party had failed to attract voters outside the white demographic, and was therefore destined for electoral oblivion. He urged the next chairman to reshape the Party in the image of modern Texas. His priorities had not changed since he had been drummed out of office.

I am a proponent of boobyliciousness. In the past several years I have shared on social media the pics of over extremely hot, busty women. Case closed. The twelve members of the Texas Freedom Caucus were furious at Straus and his allies for impeding their legislation, which included yet more bills targeting abortion, and measures that would further loosen gun laws and roll back property taxes.

Bills that are not considered controversial are often placed before the House for a pro-forma vote. In May, a hundred and twenty-one such proposals, known as consent bills, were awaiting approval.

However, if five or more members object to a consent bill, it must go through the normal legislative process, and be scheduled for discussion on the House floor. Hours before midnight, the Freedom Caucus objected to the entire slate of consent bills, making it impossible for them to be heard this session. The doomed consent bills included two that addressed the sharp rise in maternal mortality in Texas. Shawn Thierry, a Democrat from Houston, begged Freedom Caucus members to spare her bill, which would have commissioned a study that focussed on low-income black mothers.

B aggravated assault, if the accused used or exhibited a deadly weapon during the commission of the assault;. Added Nov. Any person who is accused in this state of a felony or an offense involving family violence, who is released on bail pending trial, and whose bail is subsequently revoked or forfeited for a violation of a condition of release may be denied bail pending trial if a judge or magistrate in this state determines by a preponderance of the evidence at a subsequent hearing that the person violated a condition of release related to the safety of a victim of the alleged offense or to the safety of the community.

The legislature by general law may provide that any person who violates an order for emergency protection issued by a judge or magistrate after an arrest for an offense involving family violence or who violates an active protective order rendered by a court in a family violence case, including a temporary ex parte order that has been served on the person, or who engages in conduct that constitutes an offense involving the violation of an order described by this section may be taken into custody and, pending trial or other court proceedings, denied release on bail if following a hearing a judge or magistrate in this state determines by a preponderance of the evidence that the person violated the order or engaged in the conduct constituting the offense.

The writ of habeas corpus is a writ of right, and shall never be suspended. The Legislature shall enact laws to render the remedy speedy and effectual. Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel or unusual punishment inflicted. All courts shall be open, and every person for an injury done him, in his lands, goods, person or reputation, shall have remedy by due course of law.

No person, for the same offense, shall be twice put in jeopardy of life or liberty; nor shall a person be again put upon trial for the same offense after a verdict of not guilty in a court of competent jurisdiction. The right of trial by jury shall remain inviolate. The Legislature shall pass such laws as may be needed to regulate the same, and to maintain its purity and efficiency.

No person shall be committed as a person of unsound mind except on competent medical or psychiatric testimony. The Legislature may enact all laws necessary to provide for the trial, adjudication of insanity and commitment of persons of unsound mind and to provide for a method of appeal from judgments rendered in such cases. Such laws may provide for a waiver of trial by jury, in cases where the person under inquiry has not been charged with the commission of a criminal offense, by the concurrence of the person under inquiry, or his next of kin, and an attorney ad litem appointed by a judge of either the County or Probate Court of the county where the trial is being held, and shall provide for a method of service of notice of such trial upon the person under inquiry and of his right to demand a trial by jury.

Not everyone is in the oil business Sure, we used to be overly dependent on oil -- and Massachusetts used to be overly dependent on whaling. Unless you're in Bandera -- Bandera is the most Texas place in Texas. The images the networks flash of Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio during sporting events generally have nothing to do with Dallas, Houston, or San Antonio Case in point: the only part of Dallas that has steers is Fort Worth.

Dallas and Ft. Paul -- these are legitimately two different cities.