The Texan Podcast - Weekly Roundup - November 13, 2020

Episode Date: November 13, 2020

This week on The Texan’s “Weekly Roundup,” the reporters discuss border counties that shifted towards President Trump, Obamacare in the Supreme Court, the University of Texas under fire for free speech violations, the scandal surrounding Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Texas GOP chairman taking aim at the presumptive Texas House speaker, El Paso businesses facing another lockdown, the beginning of bill filing for the 87th legislative session, inaccurate polling, and the Alamo.

Hello, hello, folks. This is Mackenzie Taylor, senior editor at The Texan. This week, Texas border counties shift toward President Trump. Obamacare is once again challenged in the Supreme Court. UT comes under fire for free speech violations. The scandal surrounding Attorney General Ken Paxton evolves. The Texas GOP chairman takes aim at the presumptive Texas House Speaker. El Paso businesses face a lockdown. Bill filing begins for the 87th legislative session. Polling got it wrong. And the Alamo is back in the news. Folks, thanks for sticking with us and we'll catch you next week. Hey folks, Mackenzie Taylor here with Isaiah Mitchell, Brad Johnson, and Daniel Friend.

Gentlemen, we are basically just in recovery mode from last week that's kind of what it feels like that is a fair assessment do you agree with that have you recovered from the general election coverage of last week yeah man oh isaiah's on it he's ready that's impressive you bounce back very quick because he's the youngest of us all the rest of us are very old i'm actually 22 yes as of yesterday. Yeah, as of Wednesday. Like the baby of the office. Yeah, that's right.

Nothing but a chubby, tiny baby. A spring chicken. Is that a thing? A spring chicken? Yes. Yeah. Thank you. I just needed clarification.

That is a term. Because sometimes I mix my metaphors and don't get the right idiom. Congratulations. So congratulations. Thank you. I did well. Daniel, have you recovered? No,

no, no. Yeah. Bradley, what about you? I'm about halfway between those two. Yeah, there you go.

Mid a midway point. Cool. Well, on that note, let's start talking about some stuff. We'll cover some election, you know, things this week,

but mostly we have the news just keeps on going. So we'll we'll go on with what's next. It hasn't stopped yet. I don't know that it plans to anytime soon. Daniel, we're going to start with you. As of last week, there were some surprising results here in Texas in terms of how counties, you know, turned rather blue or red and the margins by which they did. So walk us through perhaps the most notable of those changes. Yeah. So I think the thing that everyone is kind of looking at

right now is the Rio Grande Valley and really all the border counties up from, you know, just east of El Paso down to the very south Texas, the Rio Grande Valley. All of those counties, historically, they've been very strongly Democrat, very supportive of local Democratic officials. Even if you go and look through all the state house races in this past election, most of those state house districts along the border only had Democrats running. They didn't even have Republican opposition in most of them. There were a few who did. And in those races, it is becoming more apparent that Republicans are actually gaining a little bit of a foothold in this region. And so, you know, back in 2016, when you had the first presidential election with Donald Trump in it, you had some really strong opposition to Donald Trump then. So, you know, if you look at, you know, Starr County, for example, is the county that has swung the most that's down in the uh the south texas region

and in 2016 uh donald trump received 19 of vote in that county and this year uh he did not receive he still didn't receive 50 but he received 47 so it goes from from 19% to 47%. You know, with a count of about, you know, a little under 20,000 votes cast this election. So it's just like this huge, drastic shift. And, you know, not all of the counties necessarily shifted that much. That was a, you know, 28 point shift from 2016 to 2020. But, you know, there were three others that shifted over 20%. And then another good few dozen that were above 5%, 6%.

There were just a ton out and along the border. So I think that you're saying that that region is shifting. Now, the reason for that shift is still, you know, people are kind of debating that, you know, you have Democrats saying that they just weren't doing a lot of outreach out there. And this was just kind of a one-off thing where, you know, people came out in support of the president, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're shifting toward the Republican Party. But if you look even at elections in 2018, where throughout Texas, most districts, most counties were voting more Democratic in 2018 than they had been in the past. Those counties were still, even though they were still Democratic, they were still voting a little bit more Republican. So you could see the shift already begin to happen there. This year, it was just a whole lot more

prominent. And it's kind of what everybody's talking about. And I think, I believe something similar happened in Florida with Hispanic voters. And so people are kind of looking at that demographic and seeing if they're changing their leanings, their partisan leanings. And I'm sure part of that has to do with, you know, just different political views, where I think Hispanics tend to be a lot more traditional and value those types of, you know, social issues. So I think that could be one of the big reasons. Yeah. And we see even from a religious standpoint, you know, there's a very deep religious vein in those southern Texas counties. And a lot of those, just like you were saying, those social issues are tied to that. nature of the rhetoric being thrown around by both parties, particularly with the left

continuing to go further and further to the left, it makes some sense that there would be a little bit of a shift there. I don't think any of us could have foreseen the severity of that shift, but regardless, it was very interesting. Well, Daniel, thank you for covering that for us. And y'all should really go and look at this article on our website. There are a plethora of maps color-coded with all sorts of wonderful statistics so make sure to go check that out with the visual representation of the data as well bradley i'm coming to you this week a an oral

argument is being heard in front of the supreme court which is backlit by one the confirmation of a new supreme court justice as well as the attorney general here in Texas. You know, he's at the forefront of a lot of this, and there's certainly scandal going on back home. So all sorts of drama and nuance surrounding this. But by and large, this, you know, this argument relates to neither of those things. Walk us through what's going on. So this is the, by and large, fourth substantial challenge to Obamacare. Of course, famous or infamous, depending on how

you look at it, law that was passed during the first two years of the Obama administration. And, of course, with a united democratic Congress and, you know, the problems that have come from that are well documented. But this is, like I said, the fourth challenge. The first one was NFIB, I believe it was NFIB v. Sebelius. And that was the one that, again, famously or infamously was upheld via the Commerce Clause. The Chief Justice John Roberts construed the mandate and the penalty therein as a tax. And NFIB, for those who don't know, the National Federation of Independent Businesses, it's a small business organization that seeks to lobby or advocate on behalf of small businesses.

Right. And so, you know, years later, the Republican Congress, along with President Trump, passed and signed the tax cuts. It's probably the marquee legislation of his presidency thus far. And included within that was a zeroing out of the penalty for not purchasing insurance in the Obamacare exchange. And so that is what the topic of this lawsuit is. And basically, the challenge is, and it's led by Texas, as you mentioned, Attorney General Ken Paxton has been, it's kind of, he's corralled the coalition, the plaintiff coalition, and he's been in charge of the case overall. In fact, Texas' Solicitor General was the one arguing that side of the case in front of the court this week. Which is interesting even in terms of the optics, the Texas v. California. Yes.

It's fun. Yes, yes. And the California Solicitor General was the main defense attorney. Although, you know, this case started out, the federal government was being sued, but the Trump administration was not defending it. They actually wrote an amicus brief siding with Texas. is whether the way Chief Justice Roberts wrote his opinion in NFIB Sebelius still stands, considering there is no penalty. That's the question. Is there a penalty and it's just zero?

Or is there effectively no penalty at all? Therefore, in the plaintiff's opinion, rendering the entire thing moot. The other aspect of it is severability. And it's this doctrine used in the legal system of, you know, if one part of a law is struck down as unconstitutional, and there's a bunch of other parts, especially in this era of passing massive laws, can the rest of it be held up? And that's the second question of this case here, whether let's say the Supreme Court does decide that the individual mandate, because Congress zeroed out the penalty, is now unconstitutional, whether the rest of Obamacare, that includes the subsidies, the regulations that come with it, the website,

whether all of that, the exchange itself, whether all of that should be struck down as well. And so they argued in front of the court. And really, the justices that are there to be watched or you should watch closely are Barrett, the newest Supreme Court justice, and Brett Kavanaugh. Both of them are kind of question marks. And obviously, John Roberts, who was the one that decided NFIB v. Sebelius. And so we'll see what happens. But the kind of the assessments that I've read are that, first of all, they don't know if the plaintiffs will get standing. Right. And that is the very first question before you can even get to the individual mandates, constitutionality or the severability questions. And so, you know, the various coalition of states have claimed, you know, injury from the Obamacare law. And they're trying to basically prove that they have been injured enough to warrant being able to sue. And I don't really know what's going to happen with that that's kind of that's

definitely up in the air although i think it's um from what i've seen and read it's probably you know it's a better than than not chance of them you know pass it or approving the um the standing and moving forward from there and then then it's a whole different ballgame. Who knows what's going to happen? But there's been a lot of arguments, especially among conservative legal circles, the more originalist types that say, you know, even if the mandate is struck down as unconstitutional, claiming the rest of the law as inseverable or as inseverable would be a violation of the court's jurisprudence and that centers on whether do you go based on the the first congress that passed the law and obviously their intention was that you know this whole thing be upheld together.

And in fact, the Obama administration, when lobbying for this law, stated outright that without the mandate, the rest of the law is inoperable. Because you have to have people in the exchange in order to offset the costs of those with pre-existing conditions for the exchange overall. And the other argument is that Congress, when they passed the tax cut, and all they did was zero out the penalty rather than striking down the law entirely or repealing the law entirely, which they tried to do but couldn't, that in itself is the governing intent, legislative intent that you go off of. And so, you know, those are the two general sides. I'm frankly not sure what's going to happen.

I know I listened to the oral arguments and there was a lot of question about standing, especially from Justice Barrett and Kavanaugh. So, you know, that right there tells you that, you know, they're strongly considering this, just, you know, denying it outright based on a lack of standing. You know, that doesn't mean that they will. But there's concern there. Yes. And so, you know, we'll see what happens. But that's the latest saga of Obamacare. Well, thank you, Bradley. Certainly one that has not seen much drama at all over the last few years. And a decision on that likely won't come out until the spring, unless it gets denied out of standing.

Then it'll probably be quicker. Got it. Thank you, Isaiah, for laughing at my sarcasm. I appreciated that there was somebody who understood what I was going for. Oh, yeah. Yeah, thank you very much. Speaking of Isaiah, we'll go to you next, my friend. The University of Texas is once again battling some free speech issues on campus. Talk us through what an appeals court ruled and kind of the timeline of events.

Yeah. Speaking of lawsuits, too, and primarily actually the issue of standing here as well. In 2018, this free speech advocacy group, Speech First, filed a complaint in court against the University of Texas for stifling speech policies. And that complaint was dismissed. It essentially argued that UT violated the First and also 14th Amendment. A lot of the argument didn't really center on that one. I'm kind of interested to poke into that further. But the real meat of it is that the UT speech policies violated the First Amendment. And so this was dismissed in district court. And in very late October, October 30th, the ruling at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals revived it. And this ruling vacated the lower court's judgment and held that the students

represented by Speech First at UT had standing to sue. So long story short, it was a major victory for Speech First at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. And we'll go into the arguments involved because it's been going on for kind of a long time. Cases can go on a lot longer than two years, but enough court paper has built up to kind of, it's a bit of an imposing mountain of arguments here, so we distilled it here in this mixed metaphor. Anyway, so in their original complaint, Speech First argued that UT had established these stifling rules and mechanisms to enforce them in a number of arenas. So it wasn't just when you're walking around on campus

or in class, but they had rules for when you're in the dormitory, when you're using the UT computers and things like that. And if it sounds confusing, that was kind of the basis of speech first complaint, is that the rules are too vague, they're too broad, and they're omnipresent in a way, in a decentralized way that makes them kind of hard to pin down in court. And that came up a lot, especially at the end of the Fifth Circuit, and we'll get to that. So in their own words in the complaint, speech first alleges, the University of Texas at Austin and its officials have created an elaborate investigatory and disciplinary apparatus to suppress, punish, and deter speech that other students deem offensive, biased, uncivil, or rude. All those adjectives are in quotes because they're taken from these rule books, of which there are four main ones. There's the institutional rules, which are more general, and actually begin with what the Fifth Circuit called

a pay-on to free speech. There's the acceptable use policy. That's one that has to do with using university computers. There's the residence hall manual for behavior in the dorms. And then there's the hate and bias incidence policy, which also created this team called the Campus Climate Response Team. And their responsibility is to receive these anonymous tips about offensive language and investigate them and potentially take action on them.

So those are kind of the four main rule books at hand. So speech first failed at district court because it was ruled that they did not have standing to sue. The reason was that, according to UT, and factually so, under the institutional rules, students hadn't been disciplined for free speech at UT. So Greg Fenvis, whose name I'm almost certainly pronouncing wrong, and this year moved on to Emory University, he's not even at UT anymore, just how long this case has gone on. He was the prime defendant, and he argued in his brief that UT has never actually resorted to enforcing these speech codes. So the students have never been punished, meaning that they don't have any injury, meaning that they can't sue. That's why they lost at the district court before they really even got going with the lawsuit. And so then it got bumped up to circuit court.

But before we get to that, we'll do some justice to UT's rebuttal and their arguments. Like I said, first and foremost, Fenvis and the UT administration argued that they never actually enforced their speech rules, meaning, in other words, that the students in Speech First were never injured by these rules and there was no injurious enforcement, so they didn't have standing to sue. So the judge, Lee Yeekle, who was himself actually a UT grad back in the day, found in his own words that Speech First fails to present sufficient evidence that its members intend to engage in speech proscribed by the language of the challenge university policies nor does speech first present sufficient evidence that its members self-censorship is objectively reasonable based on a credible threat of punishment under the university policies so to summarize that and dumb that down a little bit what that basically means is that according to speech first argument, the students that they represent were self-censoring, meaning that they feared some kind of threat of enforcement that while didn't actually actualize was still possible. And the judge at district court found that there was not enough evidence presented to make that threat real. So then it bounced up to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

But before it did that, right after speech first filed this appeal in 2019, UT changed many of its rules. This made the Fifth Circuit very suspicious because of naturally the timing of it. And it seemed evasive, and that showed up in the ultimate Fifth Circuit ruling, and I'll get to that here in a little bit. But that's kind of an important step in this timeline. And UT themselves, or itself, argued,

because the university consolidated and revised its policies governing expressive activities in time for the 2019-20 school year, the challenges to the use policy and residence hall manual are focused exclusively on language that was eliminated. And to this day, you can't find the old residence hall manual. If you Google it, there's a link to it that appears that says 2017 to 2018. And when you click on it, it will only go as late as 2019 to 2020. Oh, wow. And that kind of evasiveness made the Fifth Circuit suspicious.

So the big cheese, the final ruling. The Fifth Circuit ruled in favor of Speech First. This only established that they had standing. So the lawsuit will still be going on, but this did establish that Speech First is able to sue and that the students they represent have incurred actual injury, in fact, through constitutional harm. So the ruling sides with Speech First on two major points. The students' complaints are not moot and the students have standing to sue. So on the first one, like I pointed out, Fenves and the administration argued that their rule change rendered all of the students' objections no longer important.

And the Fifth Circuit had a number of arguments as to why that was wrong in their ruling. First, is that stopping a practice doesn't mean that the court can't rule on its legality. In terms of precedent and setting legal precedent for other colleges and in direction of the future, the court is still able to rule on a practice even after it stops. Importantly, the court also noted that the same unchanged definition of harassment lived on in the hate and bias incidents policy. So all the rule changes took place kind of everywhere else in the acceptable use policy, the institutional rules

and everything. But in the hate and bias incidents policy, which the Fifth Circuit found to almost be the most objectionable of all these rules, there was the same unaltered definition of harassment. So Fenves was still defending the original policies in court and there were still, that was still the center of the debate. When it came to standing, uh, speech first had to kind of had to meet a number of standards to prove that they had actually found injury. And ultimately, spoiler alert, uh, the court found that chilling the plaintiff's speech does count as constitutional harm and that counts as injury.

So a lot of this comes from the fact that UT's rules are vague, and the other kinds of punishment are still punishment, even if the university doesn't call them student discipline. So Fenves and the administration argue that they've never actually disciplined students under the institutional rules. But for example, in the residence hall manual, there are a number of actions of recourse that can be taken against students who don't abide by the speech policies, which are largely based on standards of offense to others. So if somebody reports that somebody else does something or says something offensive, that can count as harassment. And there is still punishment that takes place that is not technically called student discipline by the university. And on top of that, to circle back to the campus climate response team, they have been called into action countless times involving hundreds of events since 2012. So the labels of student discipline came into question here

But the court ultimately found that calling the campus climate response team into action to investigate somebody for alleged harassment And these other courses of action in the dorms and on computers these all counted as punishment They also noted if there's not going to be any enforcement, then why have the policies at all? Yeah, you know and The obvious answer is that the policy does cause self-censorship among the students. So that's as short as a summary I can make it. You can go into that more.

It goes into a lot of other court precedent from University of Michigan, actually read and and some other schools. Yeah. And we link all these documents on the article. So go ahead and check them out. Awesome. Isaiah, thank you for covering something that is so nuanced and explaining it in such layman's terms for myself and our readers. That was very, very well done.

Daniel, I'm coming to you next. We briefly spoke about Attorney General Ken Paxton's woes. You wrote a piece last Friday that walked through a timeline of events. Tell us a little bit about what's new in the scandal and essentially what's happened up to this point. So if you go to our website, you can find the timeline. The article is a timeline of the criminal allegations against Attorney General Ken Paxton. If you haven't been following us for very long, if you're new to Texas politics, this scandal has kind of come up in the past month, uh, at the beginning of October. Um, seven of the top senior aides in the attorney general's office raised allegations

of bribery and abusive office and different things against attorney general Ken Paxton. And so, uh, there's been, uh, a lot of, a lot of, uh, stuff that is, that is unclear what's going on. So there's a lot of questions that have been raised since that kind of came out. So we've been looking into that and compiled a timeline of the different events that have happened dating back to as late as October of 2018 up to the past week. Now, the allegations centered around Nate Paxton's relationship with Nate Paul, an Austin real estate developer. And so this isn't someone whose name comes up quite frequently in politics.

He's donated some to politicians, but not a whole lot to be widely known in political circles necessarily. But he donated to Ken Paxton in 2018, $25,000. And he's had some sort of a relationship with Paxton since then. And so the senior aides kind of raised allegations centered around Paxton's relationship with Nate Paul. And so there's a lot going on here. Back in last year, Nate Paul's offices and home were raided by the FBI. And then Paul turned around this year and kind of started pursuing an investigation against the FBI and different federal and state law enforcement officials. I believe in relation to the raid, but I'm not necessarily positive about that. There's, like I said, a lot going on here. So Paul filed a request with the

Travis County District Attorney's Office to investigate the FBI after this raid. And then that was referred to the Texas Attorney General's office because at that time, the Travis County District Attorney didn't have the resources to do it. And while they would normally refer an investigation like that to the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Texas Rangers, or even the FBI, since officials in those offices were the ones being questioned about, they referred it to the Attorney General's office. And so the Attorney General's office then began this investigation kind of on behalf of Nate Paul and his allegations that he's bringing against these authorities.

And then that's kind of when questions started getting raised. And then on September 30th was when the senior aides reported the problem that they saw. And so, yeah, that is kind of what has been happening lately. In October, there wasn't too much news going on other than the aides that had been bringing these accusations against Paxton were all kind of put on leave, investigative leave. And eventually, I think all but one of them have been fired and one is remaining on investigative leave. And so that's kind of what has happened in the past month. Now, most recently in November, just last week, there were new reports that surfaced about Ken Paxton's relationship with Nate Paul and a deposition in one of the cases involving Nate Paul. During that deposition, it was revealed that Nate Paul

actually hired someone who had an extramarital affair with Ken Paxton. And so there's some questions about what extent their relationship is. Nate, you know, Nate Paul denied that that was a favor in any way, uh, to Paxton, but apparently he said that it was, uh, Paxton's recommendation to hire her. Um, and so there's some more questions surrounding about that and yeah, there's just lots of questions. Yes. I feel like the more information we know, the more questions we have and the information don't, you know, that is released doesn't necessarily answer any of the questions that we have.

Bribery, abusive office. What exactly does that look like? And we still don't know at this point. So thank you, Daniel. Thank you for covering that for us and, you know, demystifying a lot of that craziness that's been going on there. Bradley, I'm coming to you. If you must.

To speak plainly, there has been some drama this week. More drama? No. I know. Wow. News is a lot of drama sometimes. But walk us through the chairman of the Republican Party of Texas and the presumptive speaker, the presumptive Texas House speaker and some of the, you know,

conflict that's gone on there this week. Yeah. So, you know, last week, day after the election, Representative Dave Phelan, he announced that he had the support to become the next speaker of the House. And obviously that vacancy is there because Representative Dennis Bonin, soon to be former speaker Dennis Bonin, decided not to run for re-election because of the Empower Texans recording. Why, Brad? Why did he decide?

I've restated that like a million different times in stories, and I'm losing the ability to try and say it in a different way. That's how I felt last year. I get it. Yes. I totally get it. But anyway, so he has, like you said, he's the presumptive speaker. He has support from more than 100 legislators within. Has that list been released, though?

Because we don't have those names. We have like 83 names and some swaps that have happened. An updated list has not been released, at least that I have. Yeah. But he has said that his original list of 83 has grown to over 100. So taking him at his word, he easily has the support. He did with the 83. You need 76. Right, exactly.

Yeah. And he's only built upon that, at least according to him. And so that kind of started a tiff. It created a conflict within the Republican Party. The first group that actually came out against him because um as state affairs chairman in the last session he kind of slipped in a pro lgbtq provision within a religious liberty bill um and so they obviously that's their big issue. They did not like that. They opposed him right off the bat as soon as he announced. Right. But that has kind of snowballed somewhat.

And, you know, it it brings in now Texas GOP Chairman Allen West. And he indicated I think it was after he announced he indicated his opposition. Now, it wasn't as pointed as it was this week at feeling himself it was more of the the process the back door smoke-filled room nature of the insert your adjective that alan west used and he's saying that because the caucus the republican caucus in one way or another is me has been meeting for the last you know month with different groups of legislators whether some were invited not all of them or the entire caucus was invited and west objection up to this point was when a particular sect of the of the caucus would just be invited to a meeting yes um and then since phelan announced, he has also been critical of the fact that Phelan has a lot of Democrats on his support list.

And that led to this week where the chairman sent out an email and basically planted firmly against Phelan, saying the Republican Party of Texas will not support nor accept State Rep. Dade Phelan as Speaker of the Texas House. He continued, said Texas does not need a Republican political traitor. And that is a reference to both having support from Democrats and that LGBT provision that, snuck into a bill. Not at a time when the two diverging philosophies of governance are this lucid. And so that sparked quite a response from various members of the legislature. You know, they came out defending their guy, basically. And everyone that came out for or in defense of Phelan here, I believe was on his list of support, which makes sense, right?

And so there was State Rep. Jeff Leach. He criticized West, saying calling Representative Phelan a traitor is petulant and patently untrue. Lyle Larson of San Antonio also came out in support, as did James White. And so it kind of culminated in this, in the grand scheme of things, a small group of representatives hitting back at the sitting GOP chair. But it's not a small thing. First of all, the fact that the gop chairman is wading into this yeah whereas you know james dickey the previous chairman kind of kept his hands out of it and especially in the last session he did not really um he did not really interject and criticize his own elected officials. Whereas West is, not only is he criticizing, but he's joining lawsuits against.

Like he joined a lawsuit against Governor Abbott. Yeah. As did Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller. And so West has not been shy at all about this. Dennis Bonin, the outgoing speaker, he went onad hasty uh his radio show the lubbock radio host and um you know he took a parting shot at west that he needs a one-way ticket back to florida and not mincing words at all calling him a petulant child trying to get his parents attention donna sponin has not been known as one to mid-torch.

No, no. And he does not shy away from conflict whatsoever. So that's where things stand with this. Alan West was supposed to be on Hastie's radio show today. This is Thursday. There was a scheduling conflict, so I have no update there. He'll probably be on tomorrow. And so by then, by the time this podcast is out um he will have probably responded

in kind to uh dense bond so um it's unfolding we'll see what happens feeling has kind of kept himself out of it he's let his supporters kind of do the talking and uh you know i think that's to be expected he's not going to jump in where he doesn't feel he needs to, especially when he has other people to defend him. And I think it's pretty obvious that Allen West is going to continue criticizing where he sees issues. And that will likely continue into the session. Interesting in that representative feeling, you know, a lot of grassroots conservative types have come out with with, you know, spoken public opposition of his candidacy for speaker, particularly in regard to his scorecard ratings. Right. So there are a myriad of different conservative groups, liberal groups, you know, groups that care about one issue in particular that score legislators based on their voting record. And most of those kind of more conservative groups, young conservatives of Texas, Texas scorecard, all those groups have rated Phelan pretty poorly in the past. His voting record has been pretty poor. Even not a conservative ranking.

Mark P. Jones had him 60th out of 82 Republicans. Um, another one that I polled was club for growth and they gave him a 59 out of a hundred score in that place and tied for 48th. So, um, yeah, like you said, it's, there's a lot of, a lot of opposition to this and, uh, um, but you know, there's no, there's no opposition to him as speaker at least right now well and that's what i was going to say is on that same note we have you know legislators who are ranked far more conservative than feeling like you're jeff leeches um or your i believe our representative kraus also came out with a statement this week that was relatively supportive of just saying hey you know i'm excited about the speakership matt shaffer was on his his

original list the freedom for several freedom caucus members so you have this interesting uh layer of support and opposition coming from you know groups of people who typically see eye to eye so and really the only delineation there is whether they're a legislator and they're actually serving in an elected capacity or they're you know grassroots and you know the that the group of support behind phelan has generally been called team bonin and uh the reason for that is that a lot of almost all of the bonin lieutenants are uh you know supportive of phelan and he is one of those but he also has support like you mentioned from, from Freedom Caucus members. And, you know, the number of people in up of legislators in opposition to him is waning. Yeah. And, you know, probably

will continue to. Thank you so much for covering that drama for us. Isaiah El Paso has been in the news this week. Walk us through what's happening there. Another lawsuit. This one a little bit weirder because there was a little twist at the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. And so the long story short is that El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego has been issuing lockdown orders and other orders of that kind because coronavirus cases are rising in El Paso at a pretty worrisome rate,

as Daniel could probably expound on. And the one that I thought would get the most attention was his Executive Order 13 or 12 that established a curfew. That's kind of unusual. But the one that's in court right now in this article is EO 13, which is a lockdown order the same that we've seen in other towns, other counties. And a number of businesses joined in suing over this order. I believe that they're all restaurants.

Some of their names are kind of ambiguous, but I just did a simple internet search of these businesses, and they're all serving food or alcohol, so restaurants and bars. They joined as a coalition to sue San Diego and El Paso County for EO13, the lockdown order, and they were joined by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton, they lost at district court initially. And Paxton took it up to the Eighth Circuit, who agreed to hear it. But the important thing to remember here is that there is the suit, and parallel to that is a temporary motion, or a motion for temporary injunction. And so if that were to be granted, that would just essentially mean that until the lawsuit itself, the other side of the parallel reaches its natural end, the court would order El Paso County to stop forcing a

lockdown. That is what made it all the way to the Supreme Court of Texas so far. Paxton sought a writ of mandamus, which if granted by the Supreme Court of Texas would force the lower court, the 8th Court of Appeals to grant a temporary injunction and hear the case faster essentially and the Supreme Court of Texas denied that motion for temporary relief so this is distinct from the lawsuit itself which in a very dry statement, the Supreme Court of Texas emphasized. They mentioned that the court expresses no opinion on the likelihood of success of either party on the merits. This is a very split decision.

Chief Justice Nathan Hecht joined Justices Jeffrey Boyd, John Devine, and Jimmy Blacklock in dissent. So Jeffrey, John, and Jimmy, with Chief Justice Nathan Hecht. It's a great band. Some almost alliteration. Yeah, exactly. A great band name.

Also Paxton and the Defendants. That would be a cool band name. Anyway, this case is full of them. But the funny thing is, when I was researching this case, I looked up how long the order lasts. And originally it was 14 days. So not getting this writ of mandamus for the Supreme Court, or on the flip side of that, if Paxton had gotten the writ of mandamus for the Supreme Court, that would mean essentially that the businesses could open one day early. You know, since this order was issued back on, I think, October 30th. And 14 days from then is by the time this podcast comes out, like today.

You know, yesterday was the 12th by the time this podcast comes out. And that is the date that the Eighth Circuit agreed to make a decision on temporary relief. But the reason this became relevant is that a couple days ago, Samaniego actually extended his order. So it's going to keep on going until early December, I think December 1st. So the case is still relevant, the lawsuit is still relevant, and the motion for temporary injunction is still relevant. We don't have, I just checked this morning, the Eighth Circuit has not yet released any kind of

documentation or decision on that yet. By the time this podcast comes out, who knows? We'll probably update the article with that. But that is the long and short of it. I like it. Thank you, Zay, for covering that for us. Daniel, one of the fun things that happened this week, and I think it's fun. Bill filing started for the 87th legislative session this last Monday. You zeroed in specifically on bills relating to the second amendment and what has been filed thus far. Walk us through the proposals. Yes. So as you can expect, the gun bills that have been filed, there's been a lot from Democrats and a lot fewer from Republicans, but they are kind of divided along partisan lines,

how you would expect where Republicans are making proposals to kind of divided along partisan lines, how you would expect, where Republicans are making proposals to kind of bolster the Second Amendment and defend Second Amendment rights, and Democrats are more making proposals to increase gun control. So some of the noteworthy bills brought forward from Republicans include one from Representative Steve Toth in the Woodlands, which is the Texas Fire and Protection Act. And if you are familiar at all with the Second Amendment sanctuaries that we kind of covered really toward the end of last year was when they were coming out in full force, where counties were coming out and saying, if there's an unconstitutional gun law that's passed by the state or federal government, we're not going to enforce that.

And so what Toth's bill would do, and this was actually, you know, first Greg Abbott, when he was attorney general back in 2013, helped draft the first version of this bill. A throwback. So, yeah, quite a ways back, different time period. But you also had a Democratic president right then, President Obama, and people were concerned about gun control then as well. And so that was kind of why it was brought forward then. And now with President Trump being projected to lose to former Vice President Joe Biden in the presidential election.

People are concerned about gun control proposals again, of course, because of the things that Biden has said, including saying that he was going to put Beto O'Rourke in charge of the gun control issue. And I think everybody is familiar where O'Rourke stands on that. And so all that to say, back to the Texas Fire and Protection Act, it would essentially create a Second Amendment sanctuary for Texas by putting in code that if there's any federal law that is pretty much an unconstitutional restriction on the Second Amendment, essentially, it has a little bit different language than that but essentially if there's any laws like that from the federal government then it's saying that local law enforcement can't enforce that or else they'll

be penalized and so you know i didn't cover any lawsuits this week but that would be one that could potentially be a lawsuit sometime in the future if it passes. Another one from a Republican, Drew Springer, who of course is running in the Senate District 30 race against Shelley Luther in a runoff that's scheduled for December 19th. He prefiled a bill that he's touting as constitutional carry, and it's very similar to that. I don't know if you would necessarily call it exactly constitutional carry, but it definitely expands the all the requirements for a license to carry, which includes not being convicted of a felony and other pretty basic things like that, and you're not a gang member, if you meet all of those requirements, then you can carry without a license as long as the gun is either concealed or holstered.

And it's worth noting on the SC-30 campaign trail, carry without a license as long as the gun is either concealed or holstered. And it's worth noting on the SC-30 campaign trail, constitutional carry has been a big talking point with Shelly Luther saying, you know, Drew Springer did not want to help constitutional carry get passed, didn't sponsor, you know, all these different allegations. And the previous bill author, Representative Jonathan Stickland, an outgoing state rep from North Texas saying, you know, coming out with a video saying that Drew Springer denied to help him pass the legislation. And Springer saying, no, of course, I'm support of constitutional carry. It's just it's worth noting, right, that this got filed right before the runoff election. Yes, definitely worth noting. And, you know, also I'd say in comparison to Representative Stickland's bill last session, Stickland's bill was more focused on scratching out of the law that basically penalizes people for carrying without a permit.

Whereas Springer's law comes in and adds an exception so that basically nobody can carry. So it's taking two different approaches to the issue. And, you know, whether it's a political move or not, I'll leave that up to people to decide. Um, Springer also did something in a piece that I'm going to put out here in the next couple hours. Um, something similar, uh, another constitutional amendment, um, that would strip the, um, the ability of the governor under emergency code, you a disaster, to regulate, restrict the sale and disbursement of,

among other things, firearms, also alcohol and ammunition. And so to that end, he's really trying to show, at least project what he thinks voters want him to be supportive of. Yeah. And on that same subject, Representatives Valerie Swanson and Briscoe Cain, both Republicans also filed similar bills on that subject to basically, if there is a disaster declaration, strip away the governor's powers to regulate firearms and ammunition. Which, you know, earlier this year when that was kind of the debate,

can gun stores be closed in this pandemic, you had Attorney General Ken Paxton come in and basically say, like, no, they can't. But under the state code, they sort of can because the governor has the power to regulate firearms and ammunition during a disaster declaration. I need to correct myself. I was thinking of Briscoe Cain's legislation that you just mentioned. Springer also did the implementing a requirement that the governor call a special session 21 days

after of consecutive disaster declaration institution. So similar similar topic not quite the same thing yeah uh so yeah there's those ones another one that briscoe kane did was um basically there's there's talks about the red flag laws or these extreme risk protective orders where it's been implemented in other states if someone has a mental illness or something and a friend or a family member is concerned that they're going to use a gun to harm themselves or others, they can, uh,

you know, bring this raise, raise an alarm to authorities or a red flag, so to speak. And, um, the authorities can go and get a court order without any sort of warrant or anything and have the, um, firearms be taken away kind of in a roundabout way like that.

And then as far as the Democratic proposals, there's a lot of those. A lot of them were filed by Terry Mazza, from, you know, things that would create extreme risk protection orders to things that would ban so-called assault weapons to expanding background checks. And a lot of these policies were things that the House Democratic Caucus brought up in a press conference last year after the mass shootings in El Paso and Odessa and Midland. They brought up five policies that they wanted to see enacted. Some of them weren't quite as extreme as, you know, banning all guns. Like I think, you know, some of these more progressive members have filed bills more towards that end.

But their five policies that they have had two the red flag laws and expanded background checks in the republican party there's been talk about kind of accepting both of those now at the state level lieutenant governor dan patrick has pushed back against red flag laws while at the at the same time he's kind of come out and say that he wants to see these expanded background checks which would in order to expand background checks, you know, under state law, if you're a federal firearms dealer, if that's what you do for a living, if you're a business that sells firearms regularly, you have to do background checks for anybody except for those who have a license to carry and have already gone through a background check. So expanding them would expand them to individual persons transacting if you want to

a friend give sell a firearm to another friend then they want to create some kind of a way to have a background check there um which yeah some states have done that i don't know how you can necessarily enforce that but that's an entirely different conversation. But all that to say, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who's going to be presiding over the state Senate this session, you know, he's pushed back against red flag laws. And I expect that that would probably continue the session. But he's also been supportive of expanding background checks. So we'll see what happens there. I like it. Well, Daniel, thanks for covering that for us. Certainly something that a lot of our readers care about. Bradley, we're coming to you post-election. A lot of the vitriol and anger just from the right, particularly, was aimed at the polling, the pre-election polling.

Walk us through a little bit of what we saw on a national and a state level and the differences between those predictions and the results. Well, well by and large it was abysmal um you know that's in multiple places there were polls that showed president trump down by massive margins in wisconsin i think one was 17 and he lost it but, but narrowly, very, very narrowly. That did happen, not quite to that extent, but somewhat in Texas. You know, we saw the the polls, especially from national outfits, projecting a tie between Biden and Trump. Even a few of them had Biden ahead. And in the end, Trump won by 5.8%.

Now, I think it's important to note that that's down from his nine-point margin four years ago. And it's down even further from Mitt Romney's, I think it was almost 15-point margin in 2012. But that notwithstanding, the polling was way off. And, you know, I averaged some of these places out to see which ones were more accurate than others. Of the national ones, Quinnipiac had Trump at a plus 0.2% throughout the race. And how I did that was I averaged all of their polling results that they had. And, you know, compare that to the 5.8 margin that he won by. Emerson was pretty close to that at 0.75%. UMass Lowell was at 2.5%. And Rasmussen was, you know, probably the closest of the national ones that had him at plus 7%. Now on the local level, they were much more accurate. For example, the University of Texas and Texas Tribune's polls averaged out to 5.25%. And so, you know,

that's pretty, pretty dang close. The University of Houston's poll in the middle of October, they only did one, but that was at five Trump plus 5.3%. However, the Dallas morning news was, you know, on par with Quinnipiac and Emerson. They had, or actually it was worse. They had Biden at an average of plus 0.5%. And that was a constant theme. Um, you know, I, I all, another thing I did was I averaged all of the national, um, the national results, national outfits results and the local outfits results. And, uh, you know, locally the, um, it was, the average was about, uh, plus 2.5%. Now, when you remove the Dallas Morning News polls as outliers, which they are, Trump was at plus 0.25%, much closer to the actual margin. So, that's a lot of numbers to throw at you, but the long and short of it is national polling outfits were abysmal, by and large.

There were a few examples here and there that, that were pretty close. Local were much more accurate. Although the one that got it wrong the most out of any other was the Dallas morning news, a local institution. Well done. Well done.

The Dallas morning news. Well, well done. Well, Brad, thanks for covering that for us and ensuring our readers can kind of cut through all that. And thank you for being so nerdy about it.

We appreciate you nerding out about these numbers. Isaiah, we're coming to you. The Alamo has been something you've covered a lot for us. Walk us through a little bit of the developments this week. That'll be easy because there are not many. Today, meaning the day that we recorded this, I had to interrupt my viewing of the city council briefing on the Alamo project to record this podcast. But before that time cut us off, I was able to see the city's entire plan and rundown for the Alamo renovation. And I think that it's about the exact same thing that they presented to the Texas Historical Commission, which voted down their permit to move the Cenotaph. So they even had a whole section emphasizing that the move of the Cenotaph is of the utmost necessity to continue with the rest of the plan. And we can get into, you can look at some of those arguments for and against that in

our previous article. The meeting was on september 22nd our article was published on september 23rd and there's a lot of back and forth there between the commissioners and the city with some good authoritative arguments there the problem is that on that meeting on in late september the texas historical commission as i mentioned denied the permit to move the cenotaph because that was really the only unpopular part of the plan yeah aside from um a lot of suggestions from city council member roberto trevino he's got some some suggestions that are not quite so popular but they tend to distance themselves from that and the rest of the leadership of the alamo renovation plan for the most part um they have not tinkered with their plan really at all,

according to the meeting that I saw today. After I left, city council members had started to question city manager Laura Houston, or project manager Laura Houston on that, and city manager Eric Walsh. And again, like I mentioned, despite being denied the permit for the Cenotaph move, that is still being set up as the first domino of this plan that has pretty much been stalled for five to seven years, depending on where you put the beginning measurement. Yeah. Well, thank you for keeping us posted on that. Definitely something, again, that a lot of our readers sincerely care about. Gentlemen, this is a well let's do an actual fun topic this week i know isaiah previously for good reason goodness

has had you know a little bit of uh hesitation about the qualifications of our previous fun topics being they were political and things we were covering so unquestionably fun and this is a daniel original daniel came up with this idea if you could time travel i kind of regret it now you kind of why do you regret it because i couldn't think of anything okay dude exactly hey you did it you did it to us my friend if you guys could time travel to one point in history please tell us what time period that would be i always thought the middle ages would be pretty cool because really yeah i like studying that stuff for my major in college like holly will like that yeah she would dig that you know like i i always like

jeffrey chaucer i love bea wolf that's one of my favorite poems and um those guys are pretty cool so that i always thought that would be that'd be pretty sweet back to middle ages interesting there's there's a lot of inconvenience that comes with the middle ages a lot of disease a lot of yes a lot of grime a lot of like batting cats against your rug in front of the house so that i mean that surprises me a little bit but i understand having to cut down trees with herrings it's impossible it can't be done no yeah you can't do it mac has no idea what we're talking about i don't know what you're talking about bradley what about you i would not go back to the middle ages because of the squalor that everyone lives for such a monty python fan i'm surprised you wouldn't just go back to, you know.

That's actually what we were referencing. Some lovely filth back there. Oh, wow. Interesting. This filth over here is wonderful. Some lovely filth. No, I would not go back to then. You know when I would go?

When would you go, Bradley? I would go back to the early 20th century i think it was then yeah and experience the great emu war depression no this is far better than the great depression the great war so you traveled to Australia. I would go to Australia, and I would watch the Australians lose a war to emus. You know, Isaiah and I were talking earlier when this was brought up last, and we were like, we are witnessing the Great Feral Hog War right now. That's so true. Yeah, depending on how you define a war,

this could be one of those post-World War II situations where we're just not deciding to declare war on the hogs, but it's effectively what's going on. But the thing is, there were far more than 35 to 50 emus running around. Maybe. Yeah. And had a legion. I mean, the fact that the Australian military couldn't do it. Maybe.

I mean, it's just fascinating. Maybe they were losing to something else, and they just made that up as an excuse. I'll admit, when you sent the information about about that last week i didn't read it so i'm woefully unprepared for this kind of conversation about the great emu war but it was a wildlife population curtailment effort and they failed interesting so there weren't literally emus running around with guns firing them at the australians yeah i thought that's what it was bradley contrary to popular belief it was not um the emus did not dig in like guerrilla warriors uh yeah dang it but they did outlast they ran a they ran a fabian strategy just like george washington did they outlasted

the australians i don't know what that means but i would not go to the future Strategy, just like George Washington did. They outlasted the Australians. I don't know what that means. But I would not go to the future because I don't want to see the Morlocks, if that's their name, terrorizing those wimps from the future. This doesn't make any sense to me. Daniel, let's salvage this conversation. You need more culturing. So there's two we know two places that i thought of the first one is easy and maybe it's too cliche for someone in politics but

the constitutional convention oof um that would be fun to go back there and see if i could you know break into the hall while they're trying to keep up just walk and say hi i'm a reporter freedom of the press like i know about, I know about Madison's plan. Hey. You could just prophecy all of what was going to happen. Right. So that would be fun. Or I could learn Russian and go back to the Russian Revolution in 1917.

I think that would be really interesting. Those two would just live out in the farms. Yeah. Very different. Very, very different. That's right. It would be cool to compare them you know yeah so you'd want to do both maybe okay i mean time time wise you could do both yeah if i had a time machine well i mean yeah i'm not saying that i do but yeah but i am neither confirming um i'd probably go, this is very cliche as well. I think I'd want to go post-World War II and just watch America start to really get its economic feet under it post all that insanity.

But I also... So you're taking the easy way out. You're going in an economic boom. Yeah, 100%. Not in a strife. Okay. I mean, I'm not going to go live in some Hoovervilles. That's not really what I'm wanting to do.

But if that floats your boat. Well, you can get a glimpse of that here in Austin. That's true. That's true. The other thought would be roaring 20s right before the Great Depression. You just want to be there when Calvin Coolidge is president. That's exactly what I want. Yes, that's exactly.

That was my next sentence and you stole it from me. I stole your thunder. You truly did. But anyway, those would probably be my two time periods. Well, gentlemen, and I'll say they're close enough to the future where you still have running water. There's still some luxuries there of the 20th century that are a little bit...

Indoor plumbing? Sanitation? It's a Monty Python reference. Okay. It's the life of Brian. Okay, gentlemen. Any wise words to end our podcast with or to leave our readers pondering?

I mentioned this earlier in a private message to Brad I'm neither silly nor a goose those are my wise words if you become a radio host that's got to be your sign off for everything that is wonderful folks thank you for sticking with us on this hour long podcast we appreciate you and we will catch you next week thank you all so much for listening

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