The Texan Podcast - Weekly Roundup - August 28, 2026

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

The Texan’s Weekly Roundup brings you the latest news in Texas politics, breaking down the top stories of the week with our team of reporters who give you the facts so you can form your own opinion.New Poll: Talarico Holds Lead Against Paxton, While Texas Voters View Democrats UnfavorablyPaxton Unveils New Federal Data Center Proposals in U.S. Senate CampaignJudge Denies Karmelo Anthony Retrial, Paxton and Talarico Weigh In on CaseHinojosa Reaches Out to 'Hardcore MAGA' Voters in Affordability-Focused Fort Worth RallyDemocrats Lead in Poll of Closely Contested South Texas Congressional DistrictsSocial Media, Infant Mortality Take Center Stage at Interim Hearing of Texas House Public Health CommitteeReport Card: Don't Rock the BloatTexas’ Largest City Budgets Outpace Population, Inflation GrowthHere's a Look at Texas' 'Rainy Day Fund' and How Democrats are Campaigning to Spend ItEnjoy what you hear? Be sure to check out our articles at The Texan and leave us a review!Got questions for the reporting team? Email [e-mail] — they just might be answered on a future podcast.

Well, speaking of, you know, supposed bloat in spending, Isaiah, you wrote a couple of interesting sort of spending themed pieces yourself this week, one of them focusing at the local level and one of them on the state level. Can you give us a bit of insight into those? I can, and I'll say that I love the word bloat. It feels very fleshy. Well, howdy, folks. Welcome back to another episode of the Texans' Weekly Roundup. I'm the Texans senior editor Rob Laus and joining me today are Big Breath Here, reporters Mary Elise O'Barr, Meredith Dyer, Isaiah Mitchell, Steve Kapuska, and Hannah Brewer. How is everybody doing this morning? Excellent. Pretty good, although morning the loss of Dolly Parton still. Yeah, same.

Now I feel bad for saying excellent. making you look bad, Isaiah. I would want you to be excellent. Don't worry. She would not be upset with that. Yeah, I was going to say, I think that that would make her happy to know that you were still feeling happy, even though it's a sad thing. I was actually listening to one of her songs that morning in the car. It was on a playlist that I have.

And so I was meeting with somebody at a coffee shop for just like a meeting work-related, someone that knew the person that I was talking to came up and was like, I just have to tell you you have some breaking news and I didn't know if it was political or not and so then they shared that that happened it was just like

oh no I do love some like I'm in Nashville right now visiting family in the whole city is just like a funeral procession

it's sad there's just tributes everywhere like every bar every restaurant it's sweet she has a hotel in town too Well, it's great that she's getting that kind of, you know, reception, right?

Is that there's there's that many people willing to honor her. And across the political spectrum, too. I mean, President Trump called on flags to be lowered to half-mast. The Democratic Socialists of America, I believe, put out a statement celebrating her as a working-class hero. Meredith, you had a tweet this week saying, you know, one of those rare moments of American unity is that like everybody from across the political aisle came out in support of Dolly Parton. I also liked reading, of course, you know, I'm going to bring it back to some kind of reading thing.

I liked reading about her imagination library program that I actually feel weird. I didn't even really know about it. It's like sending out free books to kids in the mail. And so for years, she sent out millions of books. It's like a book club and you just get a free book. And I think she had said because her dad didn't know how to read or was something not educated or something she really wanted to like do that memory or in honor of that. So I don't know, just like really cool things that you find out about somebody. Yeah. That's just been doing the whole

time. One thing that I think is really remarkable about Dolly Parton, and that's totally not common today, especially like if you look at the country music industry, but she wrote so many songs. I think she wrote over 3,000 songs. And so usually, you know, if you look at the credits, um, at least these days, it seems like there's a whole team that wrote the songs and the need by the artist that stepped in and sang it. But she wrote a lot of her, a lot of her hits. And although one of them, I think, that I will always love you. Is that the one? Or is it rocking years that her brother actually wrote. But she's just such a generational talent. Like she truly was talented in many aspects. She also just didn't get involved in politics, which is interesting

as we're about to start our political podcast. There's a clip where she's. trying to get her to talk about Trump or something. And she's like, I'm not talking about that. I'm in show business. I want to stay in show business. And he's like, but you're a role model. And she's like, and that's because I don't talk about people. And I just like,

she kind of answered, but just got people off. She had so many of them that were just funny. She was hilarious. I think that's what one thing that. Yeah. We realize it, but it's like, actually she was very witty and how to come back for everything. I was going to say, you can see all these videos of, from interviews and all kinds of things going around social.

media right now of her really quick wit. Which makes sense given the fact that she was, of course, a great songwriter, you know, very creative, very smart. Yeah, I think we and the rest of the country will, of course, continue to be in a state of mourning for a while, you know. And of course, we also had Tim Curry die as well this past week. And the, of course, my mom always says it comes in threes. the voice actor, or voice actor, Peter Cullen, who is the voice, you might know him as Optimus Prime from Transformers.

He also passed away this week. So it's been a bit of a tough week for the entertainment industry. But it comes in threes. Well, getting right into the news for this week, Mary Elise, there was another new poll released because, of course, there just haven't been enough polls recently on Texas' U.S. Senate race, but a new poll this week from the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas, showing that State Representative James Tala Rico is still holding a lead against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Tell us about that poll. Yeah, well, like you said, there are just polls all over the place.

It seems like every week there's at least a handful release specifically on the U.S. Senate race, but then also about the different statewide races that are happening in Texas and on different issues the voters are concerned about. But we have, even though the polls are all over the place and you could, you know, you could argue about how important these polls are until you're blue in the face, but, or important or not, I should say. But this, we have been seeing a trend recently with some polls that have been put out the last several polls have shown Tala RICO in the lead against Paxton. So we covered this one in particular that showed that Tala RICO is ahead. of Paxton by three percentage points. And this was a poll that was conducted by Texas Politics Project,

which is at UT University of Texas. It was conducted among 1,200 registered voters in Texas. And then that was between, it was during the first week of August. So that was when it was conducted with 1,200 registered voters. So Tau Rico came in with 42% ahead of Pakistan's 39%. So that a three-point difference. But there were 14% of participants that said they had no preference. Of course, that's enough to sway the race in the other direction, that 14% that say they have no preference. And then Libertarian Ted Brown came in. It's kind of the usual amount he comes in. Usually with these polls, 3% of respondents chose him. So that's Ted Brown. Like I said, the last several publicly released polls anyways, because we know that, you know, there's,

I'm sure there's lots of internal polls that are showing different things and that are affecting the campaign's actions, you know, internally. But the last several publicly released polls are kind of on par with this latest one, showing that Paxton is trailing Tala Rico. And they've shown it between, we've seen a range of one to five percentage points. So there was a poll by Emerson College that had Paxton up actually against Talleyco by 1%. So very slim there, of course. and then some other polls put out that we've covered,

Texas Southern University, Texas polls, the Fox News one that got a lot of attention, those different groups who put out polling, they showed Tala Rico in the lead by anywhere from 2% to 5%. So that's kind of the range there, 2 to 5. Worth noting that this week, President Donald Trump was actually going to be in town, and he's going to be doing some fundraising

for Paxton here. Paxton's been struggling to kind of meet that meet the fundraising level that Senator John Cornyn was at and then also Talarico who's been really outdoing him in terms of fundraising. So we'll see kind of what turn how that affects the race, having Trump

looking like he's jumping in a little bit more enthusiastically into this race. But something else that's interesting that they measured in this poll. There were a lot of different things measured in this poll, but alongside the U.S. Senate race, voters were asked about what kind of the leading issues are for them

ahead of this general election. And it showed that 57% of respondents said that in general, they're against the construction of a data center, which we've covered so much in their community. So that's 57% said we're against it. And then 30% said that they support, data center construction in their community.

And then again, that 14% said they have no opinion on this issue. But yeah, data centers, of course, are like at the center of this race and other races, especially the gubernatorial race. But I think Steve has some more details on how data centers have been playing into this race in general and just the election overall. So yes, Paxson has also released some new policy proposals on data centers. So he released a four-point plan. So he said that he would introduce legislation to ban the use of Chinese technology

in the powering and the construction of data centers. And he also said that he wanted to introduce criminal liability for the companies involved if AI chatbots were involved in undermining children's safety. He also said that he would co-sponsor Arkansas Sider. Tom Cotton's Data Act, which would, at the same time,

cut red tape around the construction of data centers, and also ensured that they built their own power centers to ensure that they did not drive up energy costs.

And finally, Paxton also said that he would, that he would fully back Governor Greg Abbott's plan, which, as we've talked about previously, Abbott has instituted a statewide of moratorium on the construction of new data centers and has really moved to regulate them much more aggressively. And you're actually seeing that same dynamic in the U.S. Senate race, where Paxton and Talarigo are both accusing each other of having sold out to the data center industry and both are highlighting campaign contributions that the other has gotten from pro-data center sources.

Now, that is interesting to me that both of them are actually going after. after each other over the exact same issue. You know, both of them claiming that the other one is beholden to the data centers. I don't know. I just think it's great how data centers have taken over the entire political conversation, it seems, at least in Texas. And I'm sure also plenty of other parts of the country where, you know, I think a lot of people would rather have like a toxic waste dump in their backyard than a data center.

But Hannah, there was something else interesting that happened this week that I things worth noting that you wrote on that played into the U.S. Senate race. What's going on with Carmelo Anthony and his request for a new trial? Yes. So again, the topic, James Tellerico versus Ken Paxton, another issue that they're commenting on and having very different perspectives on. But Carmelo Anthony was denied retrial by a Kaufman County Senior District Judge this week. This is a super well-known case, but I'll go ahead and give you a little background. In April 2025, Anthony was arrested after stabbing a fellow high school student.

Austin Metcalfe out-of-school track meet. So they went to different schools, and during the jury trial, it came out that each school had tents that the students would wait under until their event. And it was reportedly raining during the day of the murder of Austin Metcalfe. And while the defense and the prosecution recounted, like, different details over. over what actually happened. What we know for sure is that Anthony entered the tent of Metcalf School. There was some type of altercation. And then Anthony stabbed Metcalfe, who sadly passed away from the injuries incurred by the stabbing.

But the case gained a ton of public and media attention because it sparked disputes over race relations about who instigated the interaction. And the defense argued that Anthony, who is black, was acting in self-defense when he stabbed Metcalf. who's white. But ultimately, the jury was deciding between manslaughter and murder, and they decided on manslaughter earlier this summer. I'm sorry, murder earlier this summer. So Anthony's lawyers bid for a new trial, but it was rejected last week by Judge Michael Chitty two days after the trial hearing. So Chitty was super brief in his decision. He wrote, I'll quote it, upon reviewing the motion, the record, the evidence, and the argument, the briefs and the relevant case law, the court has determined that the case should be denied. So Anthony will serve a 35-year

prison sentence, and he'll be up for parole in half that time after 17 and a half years. But because election season, everything's important, right? So shifting gears from the background to the perception by lawmakers, specifically Telarico and Paxton, they've had very different public reactions to the case. But we all know they're running against eachel mother, the best of friends, good bull only between them. They're just two Texas boys looking for a good time. Anyway, Tellerico was featured on a radio show recently discussing the case with hosts and he stated, I'll quote him, right now we've got a justice system that doesn't serve all Americans equally. And we know that black Texans haven't gotten the justice they

deserve in many cases. He said he wasn't an expert on the case, but he knew that there were no black members of the jury. And he said, to me, that's really the only evidence you need to prove that the system is not working for black Texans. So, Telerico then kind of quickly redirected the conversation to an adjacent topic. But earlier this month, another video had gone viral of Telerico in relation to this case, where he was nodding in agreement with a voter who called the conviction and tragedy. And Kim Paxton stated, on X on reference, like on X in reference.

reference to Tellerico's recent interview. Carmelo Anthony was a violent criminal who killed Austin Metcalfe in cold blood. James Tellerico sides with a murder. Mary Lees mentioned this, but Paxton in looking for funding, we've seen this week reporting from Axios that Senator Ted Cruz recently made a donation for $1.7 million ad campaign to Paxon campaign. and he also commented on Tell Rico's comments saying he's a radical idea. Murderers should be punished. And you know what Tel Rico couldn't manage to say that sentence. So we're seeing, I guess also as Mary Alese talked about more of more support being garnered for Pakistan from the Republican side, James Tellerico pushing back on Republican perceptions of this case in particular.

has gotten a lot of media attention. And then also the case becoming, you know, more political as election season rants up. Yeah, and it's interesting. It seems like, I mean, this is just, you know, talking around the water cooler, but it seems like a bit of a crack in Tala Rico's message discipline. And like you said, he was on a podcast

when somebody just loved him this question. But among Texas statewide Democrats in general, we've seen more of an avoidance of social topics like that than in past election cycles. And so I was at a rally in Fort Worth for state rep Gina Hinojosa, who's running against Greg out for governor on Tuesday night last week. And again, like Tilarico, who held a rally of his own elsewhere in Tarrant County earlier this month, Hinojosa focused a lot on cost of living, affordability, mostly economic topics. And the only exceptions to that would be data centers and public school,

which are really adjacent to cost of living topics, you know, depending on how candidates discuss them. And it was interesting if, you know, just to give you all some bonus facts that weren't really substantive enough to make it into the article, Hinoosa focused, her

language just felt very more libertarian than normal. And so she said, do you all trust the government? I don't trust the government. And just a lot of that kind of thematic messaging felt more, she said, for example, in reference to her plan to use the Rady Day fund to pay $1,500 to every Texas household, she said, we're not asking for

handouts. We are asking for, you know, basically our own money back. And so there was a lot of emphasis on themes like hard work, the American Dream, again, Simurito Tala Rico, that's the name of his whole campaign tour, and also a focus on Tarrant County. And I think that's interesting because Hinojosa and Tala Rico aren't the only ones who have been focusing on this area. Like I said, Abbott had a press event there the week before last with Republican members

of the Tarrant County Commissioner's Court. Vicki Goodwin and Nathan Johnson both made very public appearances out of a Tarrant County Commissioner's Court meeting with Johnson speaking to attendees outside, made it kind of a press event. So there's a lot of focus from both parties at the statewide level on this area.

and I think a lot of it has to do with, well, you know, for example, Hina Hosa at this rally had a very coalition building kind of message. And something that was interesting was that she said, she spoke to voters in Hood County who previously voted Republican. And y'all have probably, you might have seen her ad where she's sitting on the couch talking to one of these families. And she described them as hardcore MAGA Republicans.

And she said, we need these voters because that's how we're going to win in 2026. And she spoke optimistically about flipping Tarrant County, which leans pretty solidly Republican at this point, according to the Texas partisan index. And so, yeah, we're seeing a pretty similar strategy about messaging take shape among statewide Democratic candidates in Texas with Tala Rico, with Hinojosa, but also with, you know, Eckhart, Vicki Goodwin, Nathan Johnson in general. A lot of focus on affordability on what people pay for. and these themes that kind of, you know, that feel a little bit more focused on, like they would resonate with Republican voters. Okay, I'm curious you said when Hino-Hos was making these more like libertarian-style comments,

what was the crowd's reaction like? Infusive, really, you know, they responded really well to it. And there's a lot of cheering and it was a good lively crowd. Interesting. Yeah, there were a lot of cheers in particular. I think the one that would probably be the most surprising would be her remark about hardcore Mago Republicans. Because we've seen statewide Democrats describe, I mean, they all want to to poach voters from the other party naturally. But in terms of what you name those voters, how you describe them, it's one thing to say, you know, they're breaking rank.

The Republican Party is working out for them. It's another to label them hardcore mega Republicans and say we need them in our party. And there was another interesting moment in the press gaggle afterwards where another reporter asked her to elaborate on that. And he noticed his response was that a lot of those voters voted for Trump because he said the system was rigged and he's right. And the system is rigged. But now Trump is rigging it for himself and these voters can see that.

And so it's similar messaging to Trump's in many ways, but channeled toward a different end to the Democratic Party. That's an interesting thing, of course. given the fact that Republicans are very, very, very dependent on the rural vote and are themselves doing a lot of, you know, get out the vote stuff right now. Because, of course, a lot of Republicans, I think, are concerned about this, about this midterm. We were just joking about this before the podcast, but I think it is true. It kind of feels like, for example, at least in the gubernatorial race, that Abbott, it almost feels like he's trying to run to Hinojosa's left and she's trying to run to his, right, you know, on some of this stuff. And then, of course, the accusations that Talarico is just

reheating Beto's nachos, even in the instance, if you see some of these ads that have come out where they pronounce his name like it's a Spanish name, like James Talarico, right? Which, of course, is something else that, you know, Beto O'Rourke's full name, of course, is Robert Francis O'Rourke, but he had the childhood nickname Beto, which is a common Spanish language. diminutive of Robert, right? And so having that sort of having that sort of Spanish language or at least Spanish adjacent kind of name

might be helping him a little bit right now in South Texas, which is actually another thing we were going to talk about Steve. You wrote a piece on a poll that came out about South Texas congressional races. Tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, yeah. So there was a poll that came out from a Texas Texas some other university that pulled the three congressional races

in the Rio Grande Valley and and these are Texas 15, Texas 28 and Texas 34 Texas 15 is held by it's held by Republican Monica de la Cruz

and Texas 28 and 38 and 34 are held by Henry Quaylar and Mitzente A Gonzalez or Democrats. And what's unique about this area is that

is that this area swung more towards Trump in the in the 2024 presidential election than really anywhere else in the country. And what this poll found is that

is that Democrats are rebounding their point strongly. They found Henry Quaylor and Vincenta Gonzalez leading their Republican opponents. Actually, they actually found De La Cruz actually losing to the Democratic candidate, Bobby Podillo. And these are not blue seats. Trump actually won the 15th District, as it's currently drawn by, about 18 points, and he won the 28th and the 34th by about 10. And something else that this poll showed is that they polled how voters in these districts are planning to vote in the statewide races.

And what they found was that Greg Abbott was actually losing in these races by about three to four points with these voters. And Ken Paxson, I was behind somewhere between eight to about 12 points and all of that mean. And once again, all these districts vote for Trump by at least 10 points. So that's a very, very concerning sign for Republicans. Well, I cover this a little bit in my newsletter this week, but it's also interesting with this poll coming out, Steve, that you just covered that speaker Mike Johnson was actually in town this week campaigning alongside. you know, all of these Republicans that we saw are down in this particular poll in South Texas. So he was holding different events and sort of different rallies alongside them to kind of share his support.

So that's also an interesting signal that some, you know, kind of the higher up political eyes are on these areas and just really stresses the importance of these South Texas areas for Republicans. And, of course, Democrats, too. they're both really focused on this and really hoping to be able to snatch up these districts come the general election. Yeah, and especially given the fact that, you know, it's such a slim congressional majority right now. I mean, I think over the past, you know, for the past several years, right, we've been dealing with a Congress that has always had this very slim majority. But I think a lot of Republicans at the top level are concerned about possibly losing the U.S. House. I know, of course, that there was a lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick recently, you know, made a warning that Republicans could lose the Texas House. But, of course, House Speaker, Justin Burroughs pushed back against that one.

But I think it's a lot more possible for the U.S. House, whereas you noted in your newsletter, Mary Elise, Mike Johnson would lose his speakership if they lost the U.S. House. So he's got an especial interest in keeping those. seats, especially seats that, as you noted, Steve, just swung very heavily to the right to the Republicans in this past election. And now we don't know what's going to happen without Trump. I think Trump not being on the ballot is also going to depress voter turnout for the Republicans. Because you'll notice in a lot of districts, Trump overperformed relative to other Republicans. So I'm very interested to see, you know, what happens there and also how redistricting plays into it. I was just going to add in that I asked Kendall Scudder, who's the Democratic, Texas Democratic Party

chair, what he thought was more realistic flipping, like getting majority in the Texas House or winning a statewide race. And he chose the statewide race over flipping the House. So that was just off. Those is a quick comment that I was asking about. Yeah. Would you, not would you rather, but like, which do you think is more realistic? Kind of like, which one do you think would happen first? It's interesting thing. Yeah. I mean, the Republicans have 88 C. I think in the House right now. So that would require them to lose 14 seats, which is, I mean, who knows, maybe a couple of seats might get flipped this cycle, but 14 seems like a lot. I will be very excited, though, to see with the, you know, if the Republicans do lose a decent number of seats, though, that could really gum up the works for, you know, Republicans passing priority legislation through the House.

I guess it's possible that last session could prove more of an exception and not the start of a new trend, you know, if something like that happens, given the fact, of course, that the House is just so big. And getting 150 people to work together on anything is a nightmare. So speaking of, though, the Texas House passing legislation, see, I'm with it with these segways today. Mary Elise, you covered the hearing of the Texas House Public Health Committee. But last week, 10, they talked about social media, infant mortality. They created a new subcommittee. So tell us what's going on there. Yeah, it was a busy day for this committee, for the public health committee.

It was interesting. I think they met for nine hours, if I'm not mistaken. It took nearly all day. But they discussed a number of charges. Some were more contentious and more interesting than others. But yeah, that was on Thursday. So the week prior to this podcast, but one big thing that they covered was social media's impact on youth. And that's a topic that, of course, was big during last session.

They discussed just in general the impact of social media on young people and then had people come in different witnesses and talk about the different sides of this issue to talk about, okay, what are some laws that we should be passing? if any, related to the subject. And then also some witnesses that were more so just offering, like, personal experience with dealing with young people who are on social media. One of these was Dr. Daniel Flint. His testimony was particularly interesting. He's a pediatric psychologist at Texas Children's Hospital. Also is a assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor College.

So, but he, he was pretty clear. He said, you know, I don't know. I'm not quoting him directly here, but he was saying, you know, I don't know exactly what the loss should look like, but I'm kind of sharing my personal experience with this issue because he specializes in counseling teenagers, specifically with eating disorders, but just in general teenagers. And he talked about how he would always have them. he will ask them to do like a self-reported estimate of their screen time. And he said it's almost always inaccurate. But even their estimation is very shocking. You saying to the lawmakers on the on the committee is like it would be shocking to even the number that they would guess.

And then it would be even higher than that. He mentioned one patient who he saw a couple weeks ago. And he asked her, okay, estimate your screen time right now. And she said 10 hours and he was kind of expressed like, okay, that's a lot. got to be accurate, but she pulled out her phone and it was 14 hours. And then he talked about how he spoke to her about how she, she expressed feeling like she's nothing to be proud of in her life. And he was admitting, you know, how could she? She's consumed by this artificial environment. Anyway, so we shared a couple different stories like that that I think were helpful

for the lawmakers to hear moving forward just as a study this issue and figure out kind of how what's going to, these real life experiences are going to intersect with laws that they create moving forward. One piece of legislation that was discussed quite a bit was talked about by Texas Public Policy Foundations. David Dunmire, he talked about more like the practical policy side of the issue. He mentioned the App Store Accountability Act, which we've been covering because it's faced quite a lot of legal battles. It was brought before the Supreme Court recently. It's being challenged over its constitutionality. It mandates.

It requires that the operators verify the age of the consumers and then it also requires parental consent for any app store purchases and downloads for anybody that's under 18. So there were several committee members that were just expressed like visible concern and verbally whenever they heard him describing how these platforms work, kind of what an algorithm is.

You talked about what a social media algorithm is, and he talked about how they're believed to be shaped by methods including like people dilation, so to determine how you're engaging with the content, whether it gets your heart rate activated. There was kind of a general consensus

among lawmakers that it's going to take a quote, an act of Congress to fully address the issue. There was more of a broad conversation around kind of how the how what the government's role is here and how it intersects with the you know parents role um the dr flint kind of throughout there at one point he said um he either said i will never i won't give my kids social media or i won't give them a phone and so he was kind of pointing to maybe the parental role there um but you know kind of suggesting

that in front of lawmakers and admitting you know i don't know what policy should look like but this is just for my experience. I'm going to, this is how I'll coach it with my kids. But I think Rob had something to add there on this. I was just going to say that, yeah, it's, I don't think that if you're a child, then you should be spending 14 hours a day on your phone. The only people who should be spending that much time on their phone are Texas politics reporters.

Right. And even, I'm sure it's got its, uh, its mental health impacts on us as well. But Meredith, I think you were going to add something too. I was just going to, it's a little bit of a funny note that sometimes, and the members of these committees say it themselves to hear someone like explain an algorithm to these members. It kind of shows some of the age, difference generational differences where they're like shocked or they admit. We've talked about a couple of different meetings where they'll say like, I don't know actually about this or I'm not aware of this or this is kind of new to me or I don't use this. and you're like, okay, it's just, it's so funny to be like, this is how an algorithm works.

And they're like, oh, my gosh. Yeah. And I think that was one of the interesting, that was some interesting moments were produced because of that. Just a law makers are being honest. They're saying, geez, I had no idea that this is how an algorithm works. Or they say, you know, like, wow, I guess that's, that's how my social media gets to be. So, like, cater to me or whatever. Anyways, it was some interesting conversation there.

just like that age gap, considering how all this technology is developing so quickly. But one other topic that was particularly interesting that was discussed at this hearing was about preventing infant mortality, and then that also was tied into preventing maternal mortality, bringing down those numbers. the topic of abortion was brought up specifically by democratic lawmakers. They were arguing that the state is not actually pro-life and they're questioning. They were saying we've passed all these abortion-related legislation, but we have some issues with our infant mortality numbers. And so there was a little bit of some tense moments there when abortion was brought up in that manner.

but more generally they had lots of different witnesses. In general, there was a consensus that when it comes to the primary contributors that are leading to access infant mortality, there are kind of two factors. There's preterm birth, so before 37 weeks, and then also just the general health of the mother when the child was conceived. And that was something that was specifically talked about a bit by Dr. Bome at the Texas Department of State Health Services. So Dicious was there speaking, offering some of their insight. She said that they have actually recently updated their data on

the subject to include all the way up to 2025 and then was offering some suggestions about programs that Texas could go ahead and create to address the issue, to address infant mortality in the state. There was one witness who was kind of rallying against Texas for lacking certain initiatives like saying we need a SIDS program, a sudden infant death center program, we need an infant mortality advisory council and saying we don't have regional infant mortality coordinator. So kind of listing those different initiatives that she believes, Dr. Jones says, who's a family physician in Freeport who are saying just these are something that Texas is lacking that we

could get on right now to kind of start addressing the issue. One particularly tense moment was when State Representative Lauren Ashley Simmons really directed her comments towards her Republican colleagues during this discussion and she said, quote, Texas cannot tout itself as a pro-life state with carefully curated photo ops at the governor's mansion and then scoff at opportunities to save babies because we're worried about cost, where we want to argue with experts and doctors about science. There were a couple moments like that where there's a little bit of back and forth between Democratic lawmakers. and Republicans, but in general, it seemed like a pretty productive conversation, but we'll see what sort of legislation actually results from this and if there's any programs that they decide to create, but definitely an interesting subject. Just to wrap up the coverage on this hearing, Rob mentioned that they created a subcommittee. This is a part of a new interim charge issued by Speaker Burroughs, and this is a subcommittee. It's going to be focusing more on like maternal health,

men and paws specifically and just broadly women's hormonal health. So that's going to be interesting. It will be chaired by Representative Katrina Pearson. So we'll be keeping an eye out for those hearings as well to see what sort of legislation results and conversations are had because of it. So yeah, this one thing I want to talk about is the newsletter that I wrote this week. It's about bloat, which is a word that I, I don't, I realize I don't like the word bloat. You know how everyone has like, they don't like. I just don't love the word bloat. Probably because it brings back bad memories. Now, so this starts with the TEA was audited. And so that's been making the rounds on social media and the news that they, it's come to like that they have a three, one manager to every 3.5 staff members, which it's

supposed to be state requirement on the audit. It says one manager to all every 11 staff members. So a little bit of it's not, that's not within the right ratio. So in my newsletter, I have some of the TEA's responses. They gave us some reasons and things that they attribute that to. But really, the point of the newsletter jumping off is they are a government entity. They're not exactly like schools and school districts. But this is a problem in schools as well. Statewide, nationwide, any chart you look at for, I looked at multiple states that have or producing these types of data,

looked at Texas data. I didn't even get into higher ed. It's also there as well. The idea that, like, you'll look at a chart and it'll be student enrollment is like very minimal over the past maybe 20 years, 10, 20 years or so. Teachers that were hiring goes up a little bit, but it's still like always often under 10 percent and you're kind of in the five or under percentage range. And then, but then you'll see principals and assistant principals or sometimes they'll just do administrative staff that is through the roof. And so there's a couple of really interesting charts there. I mean, Texas and school administrators have grown three times faster than teachers since 2011, given the data that the TEA has. And then federally, almost a 95% growth in school district admin staff nationwide in the past 22 years from 2000 to 2022.

So not the past 22. But and then, you know, where you and then I think principals and assistant principals. and assistant principals are almost 39%. Nationwide teachers are a little bit under 10%. Students, it's like 5% growth. So the question remains, and this is what kind of dive into is, what's going on here where we're just hiring all of these adults

and that's becoming bloated in that sense where the student enrollments remain in the same and the outcomes are not improving. So it's interesting. Give it a look. Kind of does a deep dive into that. Well, speaking of, you know, supposed bloat in spending, Isaiah, you wrote a couple of interesting sort of spending themed pieces yourself this week, one of them focusing at the local level and one of them on the state level. Can you give us a bit of insight into those?

I can. And I'll say that I love the word bloat. It feels very fleshy. That's what I like about it. I don't like the word fleshy as well. I have to say that goes like. on my list too. I love I love bloat. We're going to cut that right there, clip. I love bloat. I do. So I wrote a couple pieces.

One is on municipal budgets and one is on the rainy day fund, which is a state budget. To talk about city budgets first, I just took a look at the most, the five most populous cities in the state, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin, and charted how their adopted budgets have grown over the last 10 years. And I say adopted because some elements of. of a city budget fluctuate during the course of the year because the predictions about how much they'll collect from fee-based services, for example, might be off by the end, stuff like that. So I limited this study to their adopted budgets by ordinance that they have on record for the last 10 years.

And I found that altogether, you know, as a calculation of the sum of all these five cities budgets, their total operating budgets have grown by 78% since 2016. and population overall has only grown by about 8% overall, you know, spread across these cities. And there's some fluctuations if you look at each municipality, but in general the sum of population plus inflation rates does not come close to the budget growth rate for any of these cities. So you can take a look at the specific numbers there,

but that's generally the takeaway. And some other striking results were that Austin, for example, is the smallest of these five cities. But it's got the second biggest budget. It's over $6 billion this year. And anyway, there's some interesting numbers in there. I encourage them to go check them out. I tweeted out the spreadsheet that I used to collect all of these budget documents and make these calculations. So if we want to go check that math, I would appreciate that as well.

We also took a look at the rainy day fund. This is, it's properly called the economic stabilization fund. This is in the state budget, and it's basically a piggy bank for the state as a whole that is funded by revenue from taxes on the oil and gas industry. And for the first time this year, it's projected to exceed its cap. And the cap is a calculation based on the overall state budget, and so contributions to the rainy day fund can't exceed 10% of what the state is putting in the general revenue fund. That's the formula. And right now, you know, for this fiscal year,

it's projected to exceed $27 billion. And again, surpass this cap for the first time ever, since this was, you know, created by a constitutional amendment back in the 80s. And it's relevant in this election cycle because there are always debates about what to do with the rainy day fund. But it's bigger than ever right now. And statewide Democratic candidates have floated a few ideas for what to do with them. We talked about a couple already earlier in the podcast.

Hinojosa, who's running for governor, has proposed legislation that would pay each Texas household $1,500 from the Rainy Day Fund. And she's dubbing these corruption tax refund checks. Again, we talked earlier at her campaign about her messaging on this idea and her platform in general. It generally presents these ideas as Texans getting their own money back. And according to her campaign math, this would cost $17 billion altogether, leaving about $10 billion remaining. of the fund. Sarah Eckhart, a state senator who's running for a comptroller, I talked to her and she expressed some support for Hino's plan, but she also suggested using the money to pay off the debt of all ISDs that are running deficits in the state. And according to Descartes, that would leave about

$24 billion left in the fund. Vicki Goodwin has a plan that we talked about a little bit earlier for a state health insurance program, and it has three tiers. One is just expanded Medicaid, and the other two are more under the administration of the state. And the third, the loan start preferred, which I think would be the highest tier. It's available to all Texans, not just those under a certain income threshold. And that would launch with money from a one-time payment from the rainy day fund. And after that, it would be funded from revenue from a new tax and legal cannabis under Goodman's plan. So I also go into a little bit of the history behind recent debates on the rainy day fund.

I think it's fair to say in general, in summary, that Republicans tend to see the rainy day fund as evidence of a conservative budget. That's generally Dan Patrick's argument. And he's actually proposed legislation to remove the cap on the rainy day fund to keep it growing. And on the other side, Democrats tend to favor breaking into the fund to pay for certain ideas, certain services. And so one recent one in 2025 was when Texas Democrats urged Governor Abbott to declare an emergency and use the Ready Day Fund to maintain the stat program. That supplement of nutrition assistance program, it's a federal program that was jeopardized by the government shutdown. But we've also seen some Republican ideas for using the fund as well. And so one, for example, that state rep Brian Harrison, a Republican representing Waxahatchee,

has suggested is using the rainy day fund to compress local property taxes. So it's a state buy down. And he's not the only one that's had that idea. So we haven't seen any proposals yet from Huffines, who is the acting comptroller, and he's running for the position as a Republican in November. And I bring him up because the comptroller's office is the one that administrates the rainy day fund. So it'll be interesting if Huffins actually comes out with a proposal of his own for what to do with it. Well, I'm very glad to see that that rainy day fund piece really ended up working out because I think after we saw like not just one and not just two, but three statewide Democratic candidates, you know, suggesting here's all these things we can do with the rainy day fund. I think we needed some kind of piece just explaining like, first of all, what it is for a lot of the Texans who aren't aware of it. But also like why there's so much money in it right now, you know, being that oil and gas prices have. have risen so much that we collected so much oil and gas severance taxes, which, of course, the other funny thing about the Rainy Day Fund is, you know, I think as you mentioned Isaiah,

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, he's a fan of it. He likes having that money. He says this is like proof of Texas good, you know, sort of fiscally conservative financial stewardship. But, you know, because something that has to be pointed out is that that level of sales tax collection, or severance tax collection, is probably not going to last forever. You know, we experienced this big bump, you know, in the years following COVID with the rise of those prices and collection more taxes, but that revenue might not come in forever. So, you know, if we decide we're going to spend a bunch of money in the rainy day fund, it might not get replenished.

So that certainly just adds one more thing into the big toss-up of all of these crazy statewide races. So speaking of Hannah, turning to tweeterie for this week, I thought we would start with you because you noted Dolly in Nashville, and I thought it would be nice if you could speak on that a little. No, I think I'm, you know how like around July 4th, whenever your town or your city is doing like all the patriotic things, you just feel so patriotic. Well, I feel like that's like being here in Tennessee after Dillai Parton passed away. And we're just, I mean, every night

there's stuff on TV about her. Meredith, he talked earlier about one of her, like, philanthropies that she does. And, yeah, her dad was illiterate. I couldn't read her right. She was the fourth child of 12, so she's from big family.

And not many of us know what that feels like. Mary Lease, we probably do. But they, I read she grew up in a one-room cabin in an area of Tennessee called Severe, which is like in the Smoky Mountains, Severe County. So basically my patriotism for Dolly Parton is just grown since being here as probably all America's has. But, man, talk about the American dream. I was, saw that the royal family even was honoring Dolly Parton. It's just amazing, like how far her legacy spread into the different people that are one of your loss, but I saw that the rural family put out of video.

They had put together a performance of an instrumental version of a 9 to 5. I'll have to send that to you all if you haven't seen it yet, but it was very beautiful. And I was also kind of comical to hear that song. He played with. I think it was. Well, the one being played outside of Buckingham Palace. Yeah, outside of Buckingham Palace. Yeah, that was pretty great.

That's crazy. Mary Elise, what was your tweetry this week? Well, I saw that there were three teenagers in another state that were arrested for taking down some of those flat cameras and like smashing them into the ground. They look like they're probably in high school, these three dudes. Just interesting. And I've been seeing a lot of people on X that are saying, that are stepping in for these guys and saying, no, actually, they were at my house. house painting that day. There's no way that that was them. You know, and then, you know, literally hundreds of people who are commenting, oh, yeah, I can vouch for them. They were there.

Just kind of funny. I did see a flat camera down near my neighborhood recently. And it looked like, it looked like it had been, it wasn't as if a car had run into it. It was like it had been manhandled by somebody. So, wow. Oh, okay. On the ground. Yes. That's funny. Well, Rob and I went back and forth about something that I didn't find on Twitter, but it was an article in The Plow on asking who is America's Homer? Like, do we have a poet like that that we could consider representative for America? And I would say Herman Melville, Rob said Robert Frost.

And if you all want to roommate it on that, I said this should be a whole podcast discussion topic. Maybe we could come back next, we can talk about it. But if y'all have thoughts like that, I'd love to hear him. My initial thought would be Robert Frost. I like don't love poetry, but I am trying to read more of it. I have a T.S. Eliot book by my bed that I've been like slowly making my way through. When you go to Scotland, it's great, they love Robert Burns. And it's just so, like, love him.

And they can recite it. Like, they'll get up in a middle of a dinner and like, we learn this when we were younger. So it's interesting when a group has like a poet that they absolutely love. Do you feel like there's a modern? I can't even, I'm like modern poets and be like Wendell Berry. I love Billy Collins, but. I mean, if you really want a, I mean, you know, poetry itself is kind of, I think, declined in popularity with, you know, things like popular music,

kind of picking up what it used to cover. So if you really want an example of, you know, a popular poet from, recent years, you could say Dolly Parton. I think code of many colors is as good as many poems, frankly, better than a lot of them. Yeah. I watched that video of that the other day

and cried, of course. I'm like, can we all stop posting these beautiful moments? I was like, crying through my X feet. I'm like, okay. So, it is very beautiful. Yeah. It is funny to imagine Homer back in the day in ancient Greece being upstaged by somebody who knew like

three chords on the liar, but had like a really engaging stage presence was just the pop star of the Aegean period or whatever. There's no recordings. So he got it there. And the written word won. I don't know if you all been seeing the memes on Twitter. I think they might have died down by now.

But in the recent The Odyssey movie, there is a character who is a bard, played by Travis Scott. And his, his, what do you call it? his barding, what he does is he's not so much singing as he is. He's banging a staff on the ground and saying this stuff. So it's like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, a city. Bang, bang, bang, bang, a war.

And this is really how it is. No, it's true. It created an entire, like, genre of memes people were talking about, like, of course, because I brought it up, I can't think of a single example, like right now in the middle of the conversation. But that was pretty funny. if you think of like spoken word if you ever been to like a poetry jam and hear if you'll do spoken word or vocal poetry you know got that rhythm with it

a little bit of percussion I've ever done uh never been to a slam poetry event I'm sure Isaiah has been to a million um because that's of course his favorite um I'm on the weighted one right now after this actually I hope so I think I'm going to go photograph Greg Abbott and if he starts doing some slam poetry, I've got to get that on video. Oh, yeah. That's true. That'll be a good section for your newsletter. Meredith, what was your tweet read for the week?

Well, I went and tried the chicken, Chick-fil-A chicken and waffle sandwich that we've been talking about. And it was good. I just have to say, I mean, I am kind of a breakfast fast food person. I prefer breakfast fast food over other fast food. And I love Chick-Fleys, like, spicy biscuit sandwich. That's, like, probably one of my favorite things. But the chicken and waffles, it had a lot of bacon on it, which was interesting. So I took that off because I didn't want to eat.

I didn't want to eat, I guess chicken and bacon with the waffles seemed a little bit too much. So the bacon was oddly, like, four pieces of, like, pretty good bacon at Chick-fil-A. I was kind of surprised. So I ate that. But then it was like, it was really good. I don't know. I mean, it's just like a soft, like, sweet cinnamon. A little bit of cinnamon.

in like you could taste it. And then you put you dip it and like, I feel so American. I just hear the eagle cawing in the background as he eat this dip in maple syrup and eat it in your car like a good American. You know how it is. So it was good, especially if you've had something like a McGrittle or something that has the like the maple flavor with the soft like sweet bread.

Yeah, this is gross as I say it out loud. But it was very good. So, yeah, and I heard the guy in the car next to me ordering the same thing. And so I'm sure that I was... Now you're making me hungry, which is a shame because I actually ate right before we started recording. And now I want to go get myself one of these sandwiches. It is too late. Oh, you can get it actually.

I think you can get a lunch sandwich if you want to. Oh, they don't, it's not all day. I think it's breakfast and lunch actually now that, but they're like different sizes. So there's like the breakfast version of the lunch version. So I think the breakfast one's smaller. So I think you can actually get. Eat better. Well, then I wouldn't want to get the smaller version. I'm a big chicken and waffles fan.

The only thing better than dipping that whole thing in maple syrup would be like dipping that thing in a big bowl of sausage gravy or something. Oh, that's a little too much. Y'all are making me way too hungry. I like biscuits and gravy. Yeah, biscuits and gravy. The sweet waffle and gravy would be kind of weird, yeah. I just think it all sounds good.

Waffle. Yeah, now I'm getting really hungry. So we'll wrap up the podcast soon. But my tweetery for the week that I wanted to bring up, which is something that's practically a news topic in and of itself, is that on a recent episode of Lieutenant Dan, which is Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick's own podcast, he brought on U.S. Senator Ted Cruz. And something that Cruz talked about in, I believe Mary Elise, you talked about this. in your edition of the 40 this week. But Cruz said he still wants to run for president. That seems to me like a pretty big little news topic.

You know, it's, so yeah, you talked about that in your newsletter. But, you know, there's a very good chance that Cruz is going to jump into the 2028 presidential election. I'm very interested. It's crazy to think that in less than a year's time, we will probably be seeing the first debates in the 2020 presidential election. election because, I mean, it was, what was it? Hillary Clinton announced she was running, I think, in April 2015. So comparatively, that would be April 2027. So that's really not that far off before we'll start seeing these announcements. And I think, I can't remember when the first Republican debate was later in the summer. I think it was August of 2015 or maybe July, but

we're only about a year out. And so that's just going to be, that's going to be very exciting to see what happens there. Does anybody have any other people they think might be running? Greg Abbott? It would be, oh, Abbott, yeah. It would be interesting if Rubio was running, which there's all this discussion of Vance Rubio, because Rubio and Cruz have run against each other in the past when they were much younger. Whenever those clips come up, I'm like, oh, my gosh, they were so young. But when first round of Trump, when it was like a million people on the stage.

So it'd be interesting if it was another, I think it's interesting when there's a ton of them at the front of the page. When I think that there being so many is one of the things that helped Trump back in 2015 because he was able to really distinguish himself from this great mass of Republicans. So I wonder, as everybody else is, you know, waiting on baited breath, is Trump going to give the golden endorsement to Rubio or to Vance? I guess if I had to put money down, it would probably be for Vance if, you know, Vance does and he want to run, which I'm sure he would like to.

but yeah it's it's going to be interesting because that'll be a real challenge to see if Trump's once Trump is no longer on the ballot will his endorsement continue to have an effect who can say Steve it looks like you wanted to say something yeah yeah I mean I find it very hard to imagine Vant and Rubio running against each other they're obviously obviously pretty close friends. They're pretty much aligned on policy. So I would imagine it would be one or the other of them. Are they totally aligned on policy, though?

I feel like that's something that's starting to, like, crack a little bit, that maybe they don't outwardly say certain things, but there's definitely, like, moments where people see some differences, like foreign policy and different things like that, that maybe are as outwardly obvious right now, but public opinion seems to be very different about those two but go ahead Hannah sorry no I think the one thing that I've seen at least was like isolationist policy and foreign policy that or from what I've heard or read that Vance leans more isolationist than Rubio probably went through

more traditional or more of what we've seen over the last you know 20 years but that's interesting I remember those debates with all of them on stage and the crazy comments. I felt like that was like maybe my introduction to politics. It's like such a formative memory to me, seeing them all up there. Yeah, as Trump noted, I mean, we all thought it was going to be, you know, a Bush-Clinton debate, and it certainly was not, you know. You were going to say something, Meredith? I think it's Shane Gillis that has a bit about the debates and just how that debate changed all of the debates moving forward. Because everyone was like, wait, we can just insult people's wives, you know, and stuff like that.

It was crazy. So that's actually a very funny bit that he has. Calling Rand Paul just ugly, just saying he's ugly. I mean, Shane Gillis, by the way, has the best Trump impersonation, I think, ever, second only maybe to Jamie Fox. They're both really good Trump impersonators. but Shane Gillis has one of the best Trump impressions I've seen. He does. Well, it'll be very exciting to see what happens.

But again, in just about a year's time, we'll be seeing what will be happen there. Ted Cruz will probably be jumping in to the race. So, you know, some people, I think, are wondering if Abbott might jump in, who knows, could be more than one Texan on the stage, which would be exciting. But thank you to everybody for joining us. I think we're all off to get ourselves some Chick-fil-A chicken and waffle sandwiches, and we'll catch you all next time. Thank you to everyone for listening.

If you enjoy our show, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you want more of our stories, visit us at the Texan. News. Follow us on social media for the latest in Texas politics, and send any questions for our team to our mailbag by DMing us on Twitter or shooting us an email to editor at the texan. News. Tune in next week for another episode of our weekly roundup. God bless you and God bless Texas.