Monday, July 29, 2019

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is busy popping corn for the debates this week.

Two North Texans took on new tasks this week.



A couple of legal matters were resolved last week: the Supreme Court ruled that Trump could defer funds earmarked for the Pentagon to build sections of his border wall.

The court’s five conservative justices gave the administration the green light on Friday to begin work on four contracts it has awarded using Defense Department money. Funding for the projects had been frozen by lower courts while a lawsuit over the money proceeded. The court’s four liberal justices (opposed). [...] The Supreme Court’s action reverses the decision of a trial court, which initially froze the funds in May, and an appeals court, which kept that freeze in place earlier this month. The freeze had prevented the government from tapping approximately $2.5 billion in Defense Department money to replace existing sections of barrier in Arizona, California and New Mexico with more robust fencing.


HPM brings news about the agreement between the parties in Harris County's bail lawsuit.

Harris County has reached a tentative settlement in its historic lawsuit over a bail system that put people in jail if they couldn’t afford to pay bail on misdemeanor offenses, like driving with a suspended license.

County Judge Lina Hidalgo announced the agreement Friday, signaling that people arrested on misdemeanor charges would no longer automatically be held in jail if they can’t pay bail. Most people with misdemeanor charges — about 85 percent — would be released on personal recognizance bonds, meaning they wouldn’t have to pay a bail bond.

The controversial system that pitted poor people against the justice system has been subject to a lawsuit since 2016 and a federal judge ruled it “unconstitutional” in 2017.

Harris County Commissioners Court is scheduled to vote on the agreement at their meeting Tuesday.

But some law issues are still outstanding: with an assist from the Fifth Circuit and the Supremes, Attorney General Ken Paxton -- working on a change of venue for his own trial -- may very well succeed in killing Obamacare, but the rest of our leaders have no plan for what happens if he does.

It’s a strange thing: One branch of Texas state government is leading a crusade that, if successful, will cause another branch serious problems. (Not just about access to health care -- Pogue notes that the ACA provides $5 billion in subsidies to poor Texans to purchase insurance, money the state is unlikely to be able to pony up on its own.) That branch is watching events unfold without preparing for it.

Meanwhile, without any apparent basis in reality, everyone involved is telling the public: Everything is under control.

And as Democratic presidential candidates prepare to debate their healthcare proposals, a few other medical and health-related developments remain of concern to Texans.



In Great State climate reporting, SocraticGadfly invites you to be Simon and Garfunkel and picture the sounds of silence that a truly Green, Green New Deal on climate change would bring.


Houston Public Media, in a follow-up account to the ITC fire which burned for several days, also noted that the disaster created millions of gallons of waste water.


David J. Phillip/AP
This March 18, 2019, photo shows firefighters battling the petrochemical fire at a facility owned by 
Intercontinental Terminals Company in Deer Park.

The cleanup of millions of gallons of waste and polluted water is far from over, four months after a large fire burned for days at a Houston-area petrochemical storage site.

The Houston Chronicle reports that Intercontinental Terminals Company (ITC), the facility’s owner, must abide by a 31-page management plan that underscores how waste is sampled and identified, stored, and discarded.

The March 17 fire at the company’s Deer Park site ... triggered air quality warnings. More than 21 million gallons of potentially hazardous waste and contaminated water have since been collected from the tank farm and the Houston Ship Channel.

The Harris County district attorney’s office filed water pollution charges in April against ITC, alleging the fire caused chemicals to flow into a nearby waterway.


And in politics and elections ...


More from TXElects on Pete Olson's hitting the eject button, while John Coby waves goodbye to his Congressman.  Kuff did that thing he does with campaign finance reports from the Congress critters, and Stephen Young at the Dallas Observer noticed how one-note the Republican response to the Democratic Senate candidates is.

There is some confusion about Proposition Four, the state income tax prohibition constitutional amendment that will be on our November ballot.  Ballotpedia helps straighten it out, and Better Texas Blog explains why a 'no' vote is the right vote.

In the Metroplex, Glenn Hegar brags about the economy.


In El Paso, a group of ministers takes action on the humanitarian crisis.


Houston schools remain a topic of worry for educators, parents, and students alike.


Some new old bones were found in Big Bend.


Last: The Rag Blog's Jonah Raskin eulogizes Paul Krassner, and invites you to help celebrate Thorne Dreyer's 74th birthday this Thursday.

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