This would be an entertaining slap fight if it weren’t for the fact it was distracting two of the highest profile Republican office-holders in the state from real work.
Texas’ top lawyer says House Speaker Dade Phelan needs to resign after being in a state of “apparent debilitating intoxication” while presiding over the House.
Attorney General Ken Paxton made the announcement in a statement released Tuesday afternoon.
“After much consideration, it is with profound disappointment that I call on Speaker Dade Phelan to resign at the end of this legislative session. Texans were dismayed to witness his performance presiding over the Texas House in a state of apparent debilitating intoxication,” said Paxton.
His comments are in reference to a viral video that circulated on social media over the weekend showing Phelan slurring words and acting in a manner that some allege is consistent with intoxication.
Here’s video of Phelan, and I’ve got to say: Point Paxton. Pretty positive Phelan’s pickled:
Is asking him to resign an overreaction? Probably. Back in the halcyon days of yore, back when Democrats controlled the chamber, legislating blotto was a regular occurrence, though I’m not sure any speakers were visibly soused.
A case of improprieties was laid out by a Texas House committee Wednesday morning against Attorney General Ken Paxton, detailing long-public allegations against the state official of securities fraud and abuse of office dealings with real estate mogul and donor Nate Paul.
The House General Investigating Committee heard three hours of testimony from its team of legal counselors, who since March have been looking into various cases against Paxton that have been playing out in court for years.
Chief Counsel Erin Epley announced formally that the investigation into “Matter A,” one of the anonymous titles the committee uses to conceal the identities of those being investigated and the topics therein, concerns the attorney general himself.
The handful of attorneys involved in the committee’s investigation each have a Harris County background, including working in the Harris County District Attorney’s Office or a U.S. Attorney’s Office. In an apparent attempt to underscore credibility, Chairman Andrew Murr (R-Junction) made a point to note that Epley worked under former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas Ryan Patrick, son of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.
Epley said the committee has interviewed 15 individuals with connections to Paxton and the allegations, including the four whistleblowers involved in the years-long lawsuit by multiple former employees of his: David Maxwell, Ryan Vassar, Mark Penley, and Blake Brickman.
“General Paxton refers to these men as ‘political appointees,’ but they are his political appointees,” Epley told the committee.
In November 2020, those former employees accused Paxton of abusing his office to assist Paul — who’s donated substantial sums of money to the attorney general — with an ongoing federal probe into his real estate business.
Paxton settled with the whistleblowers in February this year for $3.3 million to conclude the case out of court, but that settlement has since stalled out after the Legislature — specifically the House — denied the attorney general’s request that the state pay for the settlement.
In February, Speaker Dade Phelan (R-Beaumont) said he did not consider the settlement a “proper use of taxpayer dollars.”
The committee also laid out in detail the findings surrounding the eight-year-old securities fraud indictment against Paxton that has bounced around in court for years with no resolution.
The securities charges are bunk that’s already dismissed at the federal level. I’m not sure how much fire can be found in all the smoke of the more recent charges.
My rooting interest here would generally be with Paxton, since he’s doing an excellent job of suing the federal government over various far left lawbreaking, while Phelan is another in a line of squishy Republican speakers backed by business interests to thwart conservative legislation. But neither have exactly covered themselves in glory this week…
More lawsuits are pouring in against the Biden administration’s recent decision to redefine firearms with pistol braces as short-barrelled rifles (SBR) under the National Firearms Act (NFA), with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Gun Owners of America (GOA) filing a joint lawsuit seeking to block the rule.
The lawsuit, State of Texas v. ATF, was filed in the Federal Southern District Court of Texas on Thursday, joining two other lawsuits filed in federal district courts in Texas. Those include a challenge filed by attorneys with the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty in the Northern District, and a challenge filed in the Eastern District by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF).
GOA called their lawsuit “the most comprehensive” among those filed, writing, “Our complaint makes clear that the agency’s rule violates the Second Amendment ‘text, history and tradition’ standard set forth by the Supreme Court in its recent Bruen case.” GOA also said their case argues the rule violates several other constitutional provisions, including being an “invalid” exercise of taxing authority.
Paxton also released a statement on the lawsuit, saying he is hopeful they prevail in blocking the rule.
“This is yet another attempt by the Biden Administration to create a workaround to the U.S. Constitution and expand gun registration in America,” Paxton said in the release. “There is absolutely no legal basis for ATF’s haphazard decision to try to change the long-standing classification for stabilizing braces, force registration on Americans, and then throw them in jail for ten years if they don’t quickly comply. This rule is dangerous and unconstitutional, and I’m hopeful that this lawsuit will ensure that it is never allowed to take effect.”
Today, Gun Owners of America (GOA) and the Gun Owners Foundation (GOF) jointly filed a lawsuit challenging the Biden Pistol Brace Ban with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.
This new rule, which took effect on January 31st of this year, will force Americans to register or destroy their approximately 40 million lawfully owned brace firearms within 120 days, or face possible felony charges.
Erich Pratt, GOA’s Senior Vice President, issued the following statement:
“Millions of Americans are facing a very tight deadline to destroy or register their lawfully owned property under this draconian new rule. We hope the court will hear the pleas of gun owners across the country who will be irrevocably harmed by this rule, and GOA stands ready to fight it at every turn.”
Sam Paredes, on behalf of the board for GOF, added:
“This rule will have some of the most wide-reaching impacts nationwide in the tyrannical history of gun control. We the People will not tolerate this abuse.”
Having a state Attorney General join your lawsuit tends to do wonders to establish standing to sue the federal government. Like bump stocks, ATF has decided to retroactively make an entire class of widely-owned firearms accessory illegal, along with turning millions of lawful gun owners into felons for continuing to possess the same accessories they had already lawfully purchased. The composition of the Supreme Court has changed since Gundy v. United States was decided, and the current court may be much more inclined to reign-in delegation of congressional powers to regulatory agencies.
Texas is taking a time-honored approach to dealing with the Biden Administration’s refusal to enforce the rule of law on the border: They’re suing him yet again.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that Texas is suing the Biden administration over the new U.S. Department of Homeland Security parole program, which unlawfully allows thousands of illegal aliens into the country.
According to Paxton’s office:
Congress has authorized parole only for foreign aliens who meet very specific standards that have not been met in this instance. Yet, contrary to existing law, the program creates a pathway for program participants to apply from their home country and gain lawful status to enter and stay in the U.S. for up to two years, or even longer.
Indeed, parole can only be granted for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,” according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. “Parole is not intended to be used solely to avoid normal visa processing procedures and timelines, to bypass inadmissibility waiver processing, or to replace established refugee processing channels.”
Victor Avila, a retired special agent for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), was authorized to give out parole paperwork in very specific circumstances; he previously told Texas Scorecard parole was generally only awarded to confidential informants or in a matter of life and death.
However, the Biden administration has created a parole program for Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Cubans, and Haitians simply because they were crossing the border in record-breaking numbers.
“Every state in America, especially border states like Texas, is being crushed by the impacts of illegal immigration,” said Paxton. “The Biden open borders agenda has created a humanitarian crisis that is increasing crime and violence in our streets, overwhelming local communities, and worsening the opioid crisis. This unlawful amnesty program, which will invite hundreds of thousands of aliens into the U.S. every year, will only make this immigration crisis drastically worse.”
Texas isn’t alone in this fight. The lawsuit filing itself shows that Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming have all signed onto the lawsuit.
It’s obvious that the Democratic Party has determined that getting as many illegal aliens as possible across the border is one of its top priorities. Can the courts force the Biden Administration to actually enforce the law?
Here’s a lawsuit against Texas Attorney General filed under the pre-Musk Twitter regime that was just dimissed.
In a Tuesday press release, Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed legal victory over Twitter after a federal appeals court threw out the social media company’s lawsuit against him.
After President Donald Trump was banned from Twitter following the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, the Texas Office of the Attorney General issued a “civil investigative demand” (CID) for Twitter to reveal information on how it moderates content.
Paxton said he wanted to determine whether Twitter had violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
As we know from the ongoing Twitter revelations following Musk’s takeover, there was a whole lot of deception (and censorship) going on.
Twitter then sued Paxton in the Northern District of California for violation of the First Amendment. The district court dismissed the case as not “prudentially ripe,” meaning it would be better decided in the future when there was more information.
A discussion of “ripeness” as a legal concept in lawsuits is far beyond the scope of my expertise. (Ditto “standing.”)
A panel of judges affirmed that decision and added that the case was “not constitutionally ripe,” meaning it rested on hypothetical future events rather than present facts because Twitter did not claim the CID had a “chilling effect” on its free speech at the time.
Twitter then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which affirmed the panel’s judgment that the case was constitutionally unripe.
“The issues here are not fit for judicial decision,” wrote Judge Ryan D. Nelson in the opinion, “because Twitter’s allegations do not show that the issuance of the CID is chilling its speech or causing it other cognizable injury that the requested injunction would redress.”
Paxton’s press release claimed the lawsuit was a “thinly-veiled distraction.”
“I’ve been asking Twitter for years to answer questions about its content moderation and large-scale censorship, but Twitter’s only response has been to try and hide behind its bogus lawsuits against me,” he wrote.
“Now that yet another court has ruled in our favor and more details surrounding Twitter’s censorship have come to light, I look forward to helping get to the bottom of any actions that the company took to mislead consumers.”
Musk might want to order his Twitter employees to go ahead and comply with Paxton’s records requests.
After releasing so many details of Twitter’s censorship regime, Musk might think about releasing the memos behind Twitter’s lawsuit strategy under the previous regime…
Incumbent governor Greg Abbott walloped Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke by about a point less than he walloped Lupe Valdez in 2018, the year O’Rourke got within three points of Ted Cruz in the Texas senate race. 2018’s Betomania seems to have slightly raised the floor for Democrats in various down-ballot races, but not enough for them to be competitive statewide. This is O’Rourke’s third high-profile flameout in five years, and one wonders whether out-of-state contributors are getting wise to the game.
Vote totals seem down a bit from 2018, with the governor’s race drawing about 266,000 fewer voters.
Incumbent Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick increased the margin by which he beat Mike Collier (also his opponent in 2018) from about five points to about ten points.
For all the talk of Ken Paxton being the most vulnerable statewide incumbent, he also won his race over Rochelle Garza by about 10 points, as opposed to a three and half point victory over Justin Nelson (a man so obscure he has no Wikipedia entry) in 2018. (Thought experiment: Could Beto have beaten Paxton this year? My gut says his money would have made it a lot closer than his race with Abbott, but I think he still would have lost by about the same margin he lost to Ted Cruz in 2018. But his lack of a law degree would have worked against him, and I doubt his ego would ever consider running in a down-ballot race like AG…)
In the Comptroller, Land Commissioner and Agriculture Commissioner races, Republicans were up a bit around 56%, and Democrats were down a bit more. (And Dawn Buckingham replacing George P. Bush should be a big improvement.)
Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian had the biggest spread between him and Democratic opponent Luke Warford, 15 points (55% to 40%).
Three Republican statewide judicial race winners (Rebeca Huddle in Supreme Court Place 5, Scott Walker in Court of Criminal Appeals Place 5, and Jesse F. McClure in Court of Criminal Appeals Place 6) were the only statewide candidates to garner 4.5 million or more votes (possibly due to the absence of Libertarian candidates).
In the House, the GOP grew its ranks by one — giving them an 86-to-64 advantage in the 150-member chamber for the 2023 legislative session. The Senate has 31 members, and Republicans previously outnumbered Democrats 18 to 13. The GOP will hold at least 19 seats next session. Democrats will hold at least 11, though they are leading in one Senate race that is still too close to call.
The Republicans’ victories were felt prominently in South Texas, where the GOP won key races after targeting the historically Democratic region of Texas after Democratic President Joe Biden underperformed there in 2020.
In House District 37, now anchored in Harlingen, Republican Janie Lopez beat Democrat Luis Villareal Jr. The seat is currently held by Democratic state Rep. Alex Dominguez, who unsuccessfully ran for state Senate rather than seek reelection. The district was redrawn to cut out many of the Democratic voters in Brownsville from the district to the benefit Republicans. Biden carried District 37 by 17.1 points in 2020 under the old boundaries, but would have won by only 2.2 points under the new map.
Lopez would be the first Latina Republican to represent the Rio Grande Valley in the House.
In another major South Texas victory, Rep. Ryan Guillen of Rio Grande City, who defected from the Democratic Party and ran this cycle as a Republican, won reelection handily.
In another crucial battle in southern Bexar County, which has traditionally been dominated by Democrats, Republican incumbent John Lujan prevailed over Democrat Frank Ramirez, a former San Antonio City Council member.
Who did well? Incumbent Republican congressman Dan Crenshaw. Remember this ad from 2020? In addition to Crenshaw winning reelection by some 73,000 votes, August Pfluger and Beth Van Duyne won reelection to their districts, and Wesley Hunt, who ran a close-but-no-cigar race for TX7 in 2020, managed to win the race for newly created TX38 this year. (My guess is that, just like Rep. Byron Donalds (FL19) and Rep. Burgess Owens (UT4), Hunt will be blocked from joining the Congressional Black Caucus.)
Is there any sign of black support for Democrats eroding? A bit. In 2018, Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (one of the very dimmest bulbs in congress) received 75.3% of the vote from her black and Hispanic majority district. In 2020, she received 73.3%. In 2022 (post redistricting), she received 70.7%. Slow progress, but progress none the less.
Leftwing fossil Lloyd Doggett was elected to his fifteenth term in congress, crushing his Republican opponent for the newly created 37th congressional district, while communist twerp Greg Casar (formerly of the Austin City Council) was elected to the 35th, formerly Doggett’s prior to redistricting.
Tarrant County had been trending more purple recently, going for O’Rourke over Cruz there by about 4,000 votes in 2018, and going for Biden over Trump by a mere 2,000 votes (less than .3%). But Abbott beat O’Rourke there by some 25,000 votes.
Jefferson County (Beaumont) is another county that’s flipped back. It went for O’Rourke over Cruz by about 500 votes,and flipped back to Trump over by around 500, but Abbott walloped O’Rouke by over 8,000 votes this year.
The runoff in the Austin Mayoral race will be on December 13 between hard lefty Celia Israel, and soft lefty retread Kirk Watson. If Watson picks up a clear majority of third place finisher Jennifer Virden’s voters (which seems likely), he should win.
This is a side effect of Williamson County, formerly a reliable Republican bulwark, becoming decidedly more liberal as Austin has become a hotbed of radical leftism. Abbott still edged O’Rourke by some 2,000 votes here, but Biden beat Trump by about 4,000 votes in 2020.
If 1978 is the year this election reminds me of nationally, then 1984 is the template year for Texas politics. In 1982, Phil Gramm resigned after Democrats threw him off the House Budget Committee (because why would you want a professional economist on a budget committee?), switched parties, and ran for his own vacancy in a special election as a Republican, winning handily.
Gramm’s switch showed that the time for conservatives to remain welcome in the Democratic Party was drawing to a close, and the way he resigned to run again rather than just switching made him a folk hero among Texas republicans. In 1984, Gramm ran for the senate, walloping Ron Paul, Robert Mosbacher, Jr. (a sharp guy who eventually did better in business than politics) and former Texas gubernatorial candidate Hank Grover in the Republican primary before decisively beating Lloyd Doggett (yep, the same one that’s still in congress) in the general by some 900,000 votes.
Gramm’s victory showed that the political careers of conservative Democrats who switched to the Republican Party could not only survive, but thrive. Between 1986 and the late 1990s, a series of high profile conservative Texas Democrats (including Kent Hance and Rick Perry) would switch from an increasingly radical Democratic Party to the GOP.
So too, this year showed that Hispanic Democrats could leave a party increasingly out of tune with people they represented (largely hard-working, law-abiding, entrepreneurial, conservative, and Catholic) for the Republican Party and win. Republicans may not have flipped terribly many seats in south Texas, but except for recent special election-winner Myra Flores, they held their gains.
The combination of Trump’s distinct appeal to working class Hispanics, deep opposition to disasterous Democratic open borders policies, and Gov. Abbott’s long term dedication to building out Republican infrastructure there have all primed Hispanics to shift to the GOP. Just as it took years for all Texas conservatives and most moderates to abandon the Democratic Party (Republicans wouldn’t sweep statewide offices until 1998), it will take years for the majority of Hispanics to switch.
But if Democrats continue to push open borders, social justice, radical transgenderism, soft on crime policies, high taxes and socialism, expect Hispanics to make that switch sooner rather than later.
That’s my Texas race roundup. If you have any notable highlights you think I should have covered, feel free to share them in the comments below.
According to auditor’s records, Harris County has not yet recovered more than $1 million paid for a since-canceled COVID-19 vaccine outreach contract tied to the felony indictments of County Judge Lina Hidalgo’s staff.
In addition, invoices indicate that the contractor paid more than half a million of the taxpayer funds to data firms assisting progressive candidates with campaigns and voter turnout.
In 2021, the county awarded an $11 million contract to Elevate Strategies, owned by highly-connected Democratic strategist Felicity Pereyra. Pereyra had previously worked for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and Commissioner Adrian Garcia’s (D- Pct. 2) campaign when he ran for mayor of Houston.
After revelations that Hidalgo’s staff had sought to alter experience requirements for potential vendors, and had instructed the purchasing department to disqualify the University of Texas Health Science Center, Hidalgo announced she would cancel the contract. But the public later learned that the county paid out $1.4 million to Pereyra’s firm after the date of cancellation.
During a March 2022 meeting of the Harris County commissioners court, First Assistant County Attorney Jay Aiyer told commissioners that Elevate Strategies had repaid about $200,000 and he expected another $1 million in repayment soon.
In response to queries from FOX26 political reporter Greg Groogan, the county attorney’s office responded that they had recovered $600,000, but refused to comply with an open records request and appealed to Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office in an effort to keep the repayment amounts out of the public eye.
Attorney and former Houston mayoral candidate Bill King sought records from the county auditor, which showed that while the county had paid $1.425 million, Elevate Strategies has only returned $208,000.
Among invoices Elevate Strategies submitted to the county are expenditures of $538,057 for software and canvassers from known Democratic voter turnout groups Civis Analytics and NGP VAN EveryAction.
Founded by Dan Wagner, former chief analytics officer of Obama for America, Civis Analytics has worked to increase voter turnout for a variety of progressive candidates and organizations including Battleground Texas. The group touts data collection that can be compiled into individual voter records for use in political campaigns.
Likewise, NGP VAN’s website advertises the company as “the leading technology provider to Democratic and progressive campaigns and organizations.”
Last year, Hidalgo defended the use of political campaigning groups, saying they had the tools to conduct the outreach. But Rice University professor and political analyst Mark Jones told The Texan there is not a great deal of overlap between the kinds of residents targeted.
“Those are companies focused exclusively on likely voters, which is not the same thing as a vulnerable population that would be the target of a COVID vaccine outreach campaign,” said Jones. “The Civis Analytics and NGP data sets are not designed to reach those targets. They are designed to reach people who are likely to turnout in the 2022 county judge election.”
Jones also noted that Elevate Strategies contract lists as a sub-contractor the Texas Organizing Project, which is another group that conducts canvassing and campaigning on behalf of Democratic candidates, including Hidalgo.
Go that? Lina Hidalgo approved over $1 million in funding for a company who’s primary job is getting Democrats (including herself) elected, paid them money after the contract was cancelled, and when told to give the money back, the Democrat company kept more than $1 million, and then Hidalgo’s office tried to cover it up.
Hidalgo doesn’t just need to be voted out of office, she and her cronies need to be sent to prison for abusing taxpayer money by spending it for partisan political advantage.
A lawsuit by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton seeking to exempt Texas-made suppressors from federal regulations will move forward, after federal Judge Mark Pittman on Monday ruled against a motion to dismiss the case.
The ruling constitutes a procedural win for Paxton and co-plaintiffs in the case, which was filed on behalf of several Texas residents.
Attorney Tony McDonald, legal counsel for several of the plaintiffs, wrote on social media that the “big (initial) win” will allow the case to move forward and that the judge rejected the argument that suppressors are firearms accessories and not protected by the Second Amendment.
“Obviously this doesn’t mean we’ll win, but importantly it signals Pittman rejects [the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives]’s argument that suppressors are just accessories and are not protected by the 2A. That seemed to be a pretty clear legal question that, if accepted, meant we had no case,” McDonald wrote.
At issue is House Bill (HB) 957, a Texas law recently passed by Representative Tom Oliverson (R-Cypress) exempting firearms silencers or suppressors from federal regulations if they are manufactured, marked, and kept in the State of Texas.
The law empowers the Texas attorney general to file suit on behalf of private citizens who wish to manufacture a suppressor and to obtain a court order enjoining the federal government from enforcing federal firearms regulations before the citizen can move forward.
Under current federal laws, anyone purchasing a firearm suppressor must fill out an extensive background check application, pay a $200 tax, and wait for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to issue their approval — a wait that can sometimes take over a year.
Today’s ruling only allows the case to move forward and doesn’t guarantee either side a final victory.
The case has considerable importance not only on Second Amendment grounds, but on Tenth Amendment grounds as well. It is obvious that the Founders only intended to regulate commerce between states, not within a single state, and much government-expanding mischief has been wrought in the name of the commerce clause. Breathing new life into the Tenth Amendment would help remedy that.
Now we’ll see if the case can make it all the way to the Supreme Court…
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced his office’s latest election integrity prosecution in Victoria County. Monica Mendez of Port Lavaca pleaded guilty to 26 felony counts of voter fraud, including three counts of illegal voting, eight counts of election fraud, seven counts of assisting a voter to submit a ballot by mail, and eight counts of unlawful possession of a mail ballot. Mendez ran a vote-harvesting operation on behalf of a subsidized housing corporation in order to influence the outcome of a utility board election.
A utility board election. Stakes that low and here’s demonstrable proof that someone thought it was worth committing voter fraud. Imagine how much more temptation there must be to commit voting fraud in a presidential election?
A Victoria County grand jury indicted Mendez on 31 felony election fraud counts:
7 counts of illegal voting (second-degree felony—2 to 20 years in prison, fine up to $10,000)
8 counts of unlawfully assisting a voter voting by mail (third-degree felony—2 to 10 years in prison, fine up to $10,000)
8 counts of unlawful possession of a ballot (state jail felony—180 days to 2 years in jail, fine up to $10,000)
8 counts of election fraud (state jail felony)
The charges relate to eight mail-in ballots in a May 2018 water district board election in Bloomington, a town of around 2,000 residents near Victoria.
The Texas Secretary of State referred the case to the AG’s office for criminal investigation after receiving reports from residents of possible illegal voting activities ahead of the election, including about 275 new voters who registered using the same mailing address—a P.O. box associated with a local nonprofit housing provider ALMS.
Tenants said ALMS threatened to raise their rent if they didn’t vote for their landlord’s preferred water board candidates. ALMS wanted to oust the incumbents because they said the water district overcharged for services at their rental properties.
In 2016, Texas Rangers investigated similar allegations that ALMS coerced tenants to vote for certain candidates.
Authorities haven’t said which candidate or candidates may have benefited from Mendez’ alleged ballot harvesting.
A total of 563 ballots were cast in Bloomington’s 2018 water district election. Each voter chose up to three of the six candidates, and the top three were elected.
Just 12 votes separated the third- and fourth-place finishers.
I’ve seen various reports that Mendez is a Democrat (which the “subsidized housing corporation” part would suggest), but I am unable to find definitive proof of that. If you have any, feel free to share it in the comments below.
The Fed goes Volcker, more Welcome Back Carter cosplay, Big Yellow moves to Texas, and Florida Man makes a run for the ocean.
FYI, Blue Host has been acting weird today, giving errors when you tried to save, even though everything appears to be there upon reloading. (Shrugs.)
Fed hike rates 75 basis points. The attempt to Volckerize inflation during the Biden Recession has begun.
Speaking of St. Volcker, there were a lot of other factors that helped kill inflation in the early 1980s:
Oil was one of the primary causes of the 1970s inflation and everyone remembers the oil crisis. During the decade, oil ran all the way from $2 to $39. However, the flipside to this story is that with a lag, high oil prices will eventually incentivize production. The issue was that the US specifically disincentivized US producers and importers. Ronald Reagan signed an Executive Order in January of 1981 to eliminate oil price controls and then removed Jimmy Carter’s idiotic Windfall Profits Tax a few years later. As expected, global production expanded rapidly and with the removal of price controls, that production flooded into the US. By the middle of the decade, despite repeated production cuts by OPEC, there was a global glut of oil and by 1985, oil had collapsed all the way to $7. It wasn’t interest rates that made oil decline, it was government policy on the deregulation side, along with rapid production increases from non-OPEC countries.
President Reagan’s Economic Recovery Tax Act was signed into law in August of 1981, designed to reduce tax rates and incentivize investment by rewarding risk-taking by businesses. In particular, the Accelerated Cost Recovery System served to accelerate depreciation, reducing taxes for those that invested in productive capacity. Once again, government policy, not interest rates led to an increase in investment and ultimately supply, helping to tame inflation.
It wasn’t just Reagan working on de-regulation; The Staggers Act of October 1980, deregulated the railroads, The Motor Carrier Act of July 1980, deregulated the trucking industry, and the Airline Deregulation Act of October 1978 effectively deregulated transport industries. The net effect was dramatic price competition, better ability to invest and innovate, and the ability to eliminate unprofitable business that was funded by profitable business. Almost immediately after passage, pricing for transport services collapsed and the ease of transporting goods expanded.
Organized labor was also dealt a near-fatal blow when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in August of 1981. This may have reduced the wages for a generation of middle-class workers, but it sure wasn’t inflationary. It also accelerated the decline of unions which had already peaked out as a percentage of workers. More importantly, it reduced the militancy of unions and took the teeth out of their ability to disrupt businesses, leading to better efficiency and lower costs for consumers.
At the same time, when it comes to macroeconomics, demographics equals destiny. In this case, Volcker simply got lucky. Think of the Baby Boom generation, the last of whom was born in 1964. By 1982, these last Boomers hit 18 and started joining the workforce. The eldest Baby Boomers, born in 1946, were already 36 by then. Look at the massive increase in workers starting in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, which tamped down wages and tamed inflation—especially as female participation in the workforce expanded dramatically. This added labor slowed a key component of the inflation.
The Biden Administration looks capable of pursuing none of those policies, and the Baby Boomers are starting to retire…
How did we get here? Well, in addition to those SUPERgeniuses in the Biden Administration, decades of deficit spending, and loose Fed money printing, there’s the Flu Manchu lockdowns.
For weird reasons, some people, many people, imagined that governments could just shut down an economy and turn it back on without consequence. And yet here we are.
Historians of the future, if there are any intelligent ones among them, will surely be aghast at our astounding ignorance. Congress enacted decades of spending in just two years and figured it would be fine. The printing presses at the Fed ran at full tilt. No one cared to do anything about the trade snarls or supply-chain breakages. And here we are.
Our elites had two years to fix this unfolding disaster. They did nothing. Now we face terrible, grim, grueling, exploitative inflation, at the same time we are plunging into recession again, and people sit around wondering what the heck happened.
I will tell you what happened: the ruling class destroyed the world we knew. It happened right before our eyes. And here we are.
Last week, the stock market reeled on the news that the European Central Bank will attempt to do something about the inflation wrecking markets. So of course the financial markets panicked like an addict who can’t find his next hit of heroin. This week already began with more of the same, for fear that the Fed will be forced to rein in its easy-money policy event further. Maybe, maybe not; but recession appears impending regardless.
The polling error for the 2020 election was roughly 4% nationwide, the largest in the last 40 years.
Fast-forward to today. Inflation is 8+ percent, the price of food and gasoline is way up, crime is up, there is a nationwide shortage of baby formula, and don’t get me started on the border crisis. Yet Joe Biden’s job approval is close to 40% positive. That means almost four out of every ten Americans think Joe is doing a good job if you believe the RealClearPolitics average. And I don’t.
Snip.
If the polls are overestimating approval numbers for Biden and other Democrats, how bad is it? The political climate today is different since the 2020 election, but the Democrat poll bias seems intact, which was 4% nationwide. Since nonresponse bias, 4%, and registered voter bias, 2.6%, should be mutually exclusive, we can add them together. This gives us a total Democrat bias of roughly 6.5%
What does this mean? Until pollsters switch to sampling likely voters right before the election, you can subtract a solid 6 percent from Joe Biden’s approval numbers. And if nothing changes before the election, any Democrat who leads by 3 percent or less is likely to lose.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is enjoying a victory against a Biden administration policy that has allowed illegal aliens to cross the southern border without consequence.
In 2021, President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security issued a rule giving immigration law enforcement officials the power to decide whether or not to detain illegal aliens who attempt to cross the border (in contradiction to federal law, which says they must all be detained).
This policy caught the attention of Texas Attorney General Paxton and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, who sued to stop the rule change, arguing that Biden was violating federal law when refusing to take custody of criminal migrants.
Paxton bashed President Biden, arguing that the policy was contrary to federal law and was instituted without following the proper procedure. Over a year since the original lawsuit was filed, a federal judge issued a ruling against the Biden administration on Friday.
Federal District Judge Drew Tipton said in his decision that the rule was “an implausible construction of federal law that flies in the face of the limitations imposed by Congress.” Tipton added, “Whatever the outer limits of the authority, the executive branch does not have the authority to change the law.”
After a legal fight lasting almost a year, Texas judges ruled a final judgment banning Biden’s detention-discretion rule.
Speaking of Musk: Several snowflakes working at SpaceX circulated a letter calling Musk “an embarrassment” and demanding the company be more “inclusive.” Result: He fired their ass. Good.
San Antonio symphony orchestra shuts down and files for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. “The last bargaining session between the Symphony Society and the Musicians’ Union took place on March 8, 2022 after which the Union declined to return to the bargaining table, despite efforts of federal mediators and the Symphony. The Musicians’ Union has made it clear there is no prospect of the resumption of negotiations, absent the Board agreeing to a budget that is millions of dollars in excess of what the Symphony can afford.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
All the favorites won in yesterday’s statewide Republican primary runoff races:
Ken Paxton clobbered George P. Bush with more than two-thirds of the vote. Paxton won 67.90% to Bush’s 32.10%. Bush went from getting more votes than Greg Abbott in 2014 to garnering less than one-third of the vote in a runoff, and the only sizeable county he won was Travis. Back in 2014, a whole lot of political pundits talked about Bush as though he were some political golden boy destined for higher office. Those notices proved premature. Now everyone is talking about “the end of the Bush dynasty.” Maybe, but that talk may also be premature; that bush has a lot of branches…
Wayne Christian didn’t quite get 2/3rds of the vote against challenger Sarah Stogner, but didn’t fall short by much, winning 65.04% of the vote to Strogner’s 34.96%. So that $2 million that transexual West Texas ranching heir Ashley (formerly Andrew) Watt poured into the race may have bought Stogner an extra 2% of the vote.
In other races, Pete Flores beat Raul Reyes in Senate District 24 (as expected), and Ellen Troxclair beat Justin Berry with 56.48% of the vote in State House District 19.
Texas Scorecard notes that in open races, a lot of school choice advocates beat the candidates that Governor Greg Abbott endorsed…
