The Texan Podcast - Daily Rundown - August 20, 2024

Starting point is 00:00:00 Howdy folks, today is Tuesday, August 20th, and you're listening to the Texans Daily Rundown. I'm the Texans Assistant Editor Rob Lausches, and here is the rundown of today's news in Texas politics. First up, the Harris County Commissioner's Court voted along partisan lines last week to revive a guaranteed basic income program for select residents with more restrictions and higher costs, although a previous version was halted by state courts earlier this year. Under the original version of the program, named Uplift Harris, the county planned to send no-strings-attached $500 monthly stipends to 1,928 recipients for 18 months. But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed suit challenging the constitutionality of the program last April. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of Texas halted the plan indefinitely. Now, Harris County Judge Lena Hidalgo says the revised program, Uplift Harris 2.0, will provide preloaded cards with restrictions on how the funds may be spent. Hidalgo said, quote,

Starting point is 00:01:10 That's not the spirit of a guaranteed income program. If the state gets in the way of this and the program becomes stuck in court again, then the funds will be reallocated to programs that already exist to support people living in poverty. Hidalgo did not specify the restrictions on how recipients could spend the funds, but said the debit cards could be used for medicine, groceries, and etc. The county has not yet published details of the revised program. Hidalgo did not specify the restrictions on how recipients could spend funds, but said the debit cards could be used for, quote, medicine, groceries, etc. The county has not yet published details of the revised program. Next, this week, the Tarrant County Commissioner's Court voted unanimously to approve a tax rate of 18.75 cents per $100

Starting point is 00:02:00 in valuation for its residents. The tax rate is a reduction from last year's rate of $19.45 and is also below the no new revenue rate, the state calculated tax rate that would produce the same revenue as the prior year. The average homeowner in Tarrant County would pay $518.60 in taxes to the county, down from $554.30 the previous year. The average single-family home in the county is valued at about $276,000. According to County Administrator Chandler Merritt, the county has either maintained its tax rate or lowered it every year over the past decade. In other news, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that a novel type of search warrant used to collect digital record data is unconstitutional

Starting point is 00:02:51 under the Fourth Amendment. The case arose from the robbery of a postal service worker in Mississippi, where surveillance video showed one of the robbers checking his cell phone during an escape after taking a mailbag containing $60,706 at gunpoint from the postman. After coming up short of other ways to identify the perpetrators, postal inspector agents obtained what are known as geofencing warrants, which ultimately led to Gilbert McThunell's arrest and conviction for the crime. Geofencing warrants, the court explained, are different from normal search warrants that are based explained, are different from normal search warrants that are based on probable cause and allow the police to search a known specific person

Starting point is 00:03:30 or thing. Instead, law enforcement uses geofencing warrants when the identity of the suspect isn't known, such as in this instance. The warrants work in reverse from traditional search warrants. Most commonly, as with this case, investigators ask Google to search a database containing data from every one of their users who has their location history enabled on their smartphones. Last but not least, a temporary injunction against nine Texas massage establishments allegedly facilitating human trafficking

Starting point is 00:04:01 was granted to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation. The injunction follows the owner, Xinwei Chen, also known as Andrew Chen, failing to comply with an order to close all massage establishments licensed under his name and leave the industry entirely after multiple human trafficking indicators were found by TDLR at his establishments. Chen agreed to all those closures in June, a month after TDLR issued an emergency closure order for his massage therapy center, Shinway Chen & Foot Reflexology Star, after an inspection presented, quote, several indicators of human trafficking. The original emergency closure order was made possible by State Representative Ben Bumgarner's House Bill 3579, legislation that

Starting point is 00:04:46 allows for the closure of massage locations if either TDLR or law enforcement suspects the establishment of human trafficking. Passed by the 88th Texas Legislature in June 2023, HB 3579 went into effect that September. This was the first emergency closure of a Houston-area massage establishment as a result of the law. Thanks for listening. To support The Texan, please be sure to visit thetexan.news and subscribe to get full access to all of our articles, newsletters, and podcasts.

The Texan Podcast - Daily Rundown - August 20, 2024

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.