Welcome to Power Politics, where we prepare you for your next political conversation.

I'm Karen Cortina.

Political science professor at the University of Houston.

And I'm Brenda House, also a political science professor here at the University of Houston.

Thanks for hanging out with us and talking politics on a very big week.

Once again, Texas is the center of the political universe.

Yes.

We've got Ted Cruz thinking of running for president.

We've got a lot of things happening at the state level, but we've also got, of course, redistricting as one of the most important nationwide stories that's happening.

So we'll talk all about those things.

But let's first get into something happening very locally.

And that's that.

The governor has set the date for the runoff election to Congressional District 18 for January 31st.

It's been a long time, Jeronimo.

By the time it actually comes, it'll be 11 months since that inspires.

This is actually not that uncommon.

In fact, there's analysis that suggests that this delay is more or less politically motivated.

And it's not just Governor Abbott that's making this delay or who would minded this delay.

This is something we've seen a lot since 2010.

Governors have average nearly two extra months of delay when the vacant seat belongs to the opposition party.

Nine of the ten longest periods between the absence of office and then the actual election since 1997 have occurred in the last ten years, and have been when the governor is of the opposite party of the departing incumbent.

So it is basically pretty much explainable and understandable that we have delay.

But what are the.

Go.

Fixations to it?

Yeah, I. Mean, there's no real I mean, implications in terms of, given that we operate in a polarized world and you would expect Democrats and Republicans to do the same thing, right?

You mean polarized?

Like we don't like Cowboys fans?

Or you mean politics?

Like we don't like Republicans or Democrats?

All of these.

How about we could do both, maybe.

Yeah.

I mean, like, I'm equal opportunity for football teams.

Oh, you're on shopping okay.

No, no, no, as long as I'm from Texas, I'm fine.

I guess it's fair.

I'm not a big.

But yeah, football fan.

But baseball.

Baseball is another thing.

Okay, 100%.

But football is fine.

Fine, fine.

Okay.

Sure.

Understand?

Whatever.

So yeah.

Politically speaking.

Well, that's the thing, right?

I guess from, logistical perspective, I think that this gives enough time for some of the candidates to run.

I'm prepared to go and knock on doors and, it's going to be also a crowded field once again.

Yeah, yeah.

And this is really a temporary seat, right?

Basically, this is designed to kind of be the remainder of the term for Sylvester Turner, who passed away.

So this will only be, in effect for a couple of months because then the primary starts.

We'll talk in a minute about the chaos of redistricting and like, what exactly people are running for.

But it will be temporary.

But the implications are pretty profound.

I mean, it's meant a slow down for federal aid, for people who are from this district.

And that by itself, of course, means lack of representation.

So, I mean, we've been watching Ken Burns's PBS documentary on the revolution and rallying cry is no taxation without representation.

Well, some agree they've had this.

Yeah, everything comes back to full circle.

Right.

So this is obviously going to be upcoming.

It'll probably be a pretty low turnout.

Yeah, right.

I mean, a January 31st is a kind of random day.

Yeah.

And obviously runoffs don't have as much, but the passion of the people who do show up will have a meaningful impact.

So that means that the ability to swing an election comes down to just a handful of people.

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, let's talk about the big news of the week.

And that is redistricting, which obviously is the cornerstone of Donald Trump strategy to get more House seats.

It looks like this might backfire, like double faulting at the US open in front of everybody.

Right.

People paid thousands of dollars for a ticket.

And you double fault.

That's a bad look.

And it could be that this ends up blowing up in the Republicans faces.

But we will see if you haven't followed this news.

What's going on is the federal court this week blocked Texas Republicans efforts to draw new congressional lines.

A Trump appointed judge, basically as the head of this panel and wrote a scathing, politically dripping review of what the Republicans in Texas did, essentially saying that these maps are going to get thrown out.

They're unconstitutional.

The old maps, the 21 maps are going to be the ones that we use right here.

Break us down like in this.

What is going to happen here in terms of the politics of in terms of the legal process You have one minute.

Oh, well, the first thing is, is, the surprising ruling of these three panel judging in El Paso, right?

That basically said like, no.

Yeah.

Like if there is enough substantial evidence, I'd like very much.

Yeah, yeah.

To say that this is racial gerrymandering and no, you cannot do that stuff.

Right.

They also question how the DOJ letter that prompted all these movements, right.

Was typed typos or legal on reasoning?

Et cetera.

It's like when I send you a draft of a paper working on just replete with errors.

What is it?

It's all all in red.

Right.

So that was also very, very interesting.

But here, beyond that and beyond that, governor Abbott and Attorney General Paxton have already asked the Supreme Court to say, yeah, I think the Supreme Court, even its docket, is going to say, oh, wait, what.

Like like hands on knees?

Yeah.

He's like.

Exhausted from the.

Year.

No, no.

But anyways, we'll see what happens there.

But but the interesting thing is from a logistical perspective, right.

We have March 3rd primaries next, next next year, filing for position starting November 8th.

And it will last a month, right?

Yes.

So if the Supreme Court says anything.

Right.

Yeah.

And said no.

Yeah.

You can have these maps or anything like that, logistically speaking, then I don't know how it's going to work.

And given the proximity of the, of the, of the primaries, right.

For the secretary of state, for counties, for everyone that is involved in running elections, yeah, it becomes just a nightmare to implement.

So true.

So far, I don't think he's going to have he's going to yeah, I don't know.

And just connecting to the prior issue, one of the reasons Greg Abbott said that he postponed the runoff, postpone the calling of that election, was that there was this kind of churn inside the Harris County effort to get votes out.

Right?

So for the for the, election officials.

And so that obviously can only be more complicated when you've got this thrust of effort to try to make these changes very quickly.

I don't know what the court will do.

Obviously, they're tied up with a bunch of different issues.

It's certainly the case that they're going to decide, along with this, a case out of Louisiana that may very well undo the Voting Rights Act.

And if they basically eliminate section two of the Voting Rights Act, then what that would mean is that right, there's no more kind of racial balance required.

And if Texas wants to draw these lines based upon race alone than they can.

So there are a lot of implications to this new bride.

And and that case is very interesting.

Right.

Because, yes, I mean, that practically would destroy the VRA and Voting Rights Act and that's the end of it.

Right.

But going through that.

It's also a mixed message because in Alabama, a previous Supreme Court, ruling said no, you cannot do these things right.

So if, if the Supreme Court, takes that precedent.

Right.

And all the jurisprudence that there is in same party thing is good, etc., etc., right?

You cannot mess with protect the classes of the PRC, then that would be a huge, huge mistake.

But if that happens, I think that Democrats for the midterm could win both the House and the Senate.

Yeah.

And then pass, interesting federal regulation in terms of elections and just have it on the books.

That's a great point.

Yeah.

I mean, still have to have the president sign it.

But if they flip that, then there's an option for them to fix this.

But yeah, there's a question, two questions.

One is about mid-decade redistricting.

Right.

Which they could and have introduced legislation to try to pass.

That hasn't gone anywhere.

The other is to have.

The John Lewis act.

Yeah, exactly.

And the other is to have this as a kind of, you know, sort of set in terms of race, like what isn't is not allowable and or, you know, offer some guardrails for states.

So we'll see how that plays out.

But to me, it's interesting because the kind of holding itself was very unhappy with the way that this went down.

Obviously it's a rebuke to Donald Trump, but it definitely slapped around Greg Abbott.

It slapped around the legislature for all the mistakes they made and for implying that this was racially motivated.

It was all.

The 20, 21, four.

Years.

Yeah, the 2021 maps.

The DOJ on the letter said that they were racially motivated when the state legislatures, when they pass it, they say, absolutely not.

So it's just a big telenovela, you know, what's the drama inserting it.

It just like you'll never know where it's coming from.

You just want some new a good guy and then the good guys suddenly the battle I don't know.

It's very confusing.

Yes, it is.

And confusing for voters.

And like you said, for candidates who have to decide if they're going to run for particular offices, it set off this odd chain of motion where, like some people like Mark Beasley in North Texas or like Lloyd Doggett out of Austin are saying, well, I'm not going to run again because my district went away and now they're saying, well, I will run again.

Interestingly enough, it could apple implications for Jasmine Crockett running now.

She was probably going to run again for the house.

But there was sort of a rumor she might run for Senate if she decides to, you know, kind of stay in position because these maps are now more stable and there's going to be a majority Democratic, led House, then maybe she wants to stick around there instead of kind of dip your toe in that water.

So lots of interesting implications.

But I wanted to ask you about the way that this politically went down.

Right.

Obviously the Democrats broke quorum.

This became a huge national issue.

Yeah.

It became a big state issue in terms of whether or not these folks are going to keep their seats, are not that still being litigated.

But to me, it actually may have amplified the point that this is all about politics.

And one of the things you see in this ruling is that they were unhappy about how politics became a very big motivating factor in this.

So it could be the case that the Democrats, led by Jean, will basically did themselves a favor and made this a very political issue and highlighted the fact that this was a Partizan effect and was done for these racially motivated reasons.

The other thing to note is that I think that the Supreme Court has a lot of pressure on it to make this decision.

Right.

They're going to have to make a pretty tough call here when it comes to what race can and can't be done, it's possible that this will be like a single decision that you could see.

You know, Sam Alito, who is the in charge of the Fifth Circuit, and the overseeing of those cases in terms of stays, stay the case and have it revert to the 21 or to 26 maps.

And so there's a lot of pressure on the courts.

To construct the so far in these cases, have said I are going to mess substantially with this issue.

Right.

We're going to let it run right through the process.

And once that process finishes, then send it to us, right?

We'll see.

Yeah.

And then we'll discuss the matter in substance.

In that sense.

Then the timing of this matters, because the Republicans kind of rushing to get this done sets this.

And people start filing for the new seats, right?

People like Briscoe Cain right out of the ninth.

Biden, who then can say, well, look, I mean, I'm filing for this new seat.

And the court could say, well, let's just keep doing it this way until we can litigate that which might undo those maps later on.

And have it just be way more chaotic.

So, yeah, still a lot of uncertainty about.

And I think that, Chief Justice Roberts is basically regretting that, holder decision back in the day.

Right.

Just getting rid of, maybe some of that particular aspect of preclearance.

Yeah.

In, the voting Rights Act, because if we had preclearance, these would not have happened.

Yeah.

It's true.

Yeah, they would have.

They at least they would have had some more guardrails and it would have slowed things down.

Now he's like they just the, the training wheels and put you on a hill and then push you down on a bike.

And yeah, Lee's.

Probably regretting ever having seen the white House.

Like he could have been in private practice and made $1 billion, like in on a boat right now, sipping a margarita, just laughing and laughing.

Yeah.

No, but but service.

Yeah.

Exactly that indeed.

So we will obviously catch this.

We'll talk actually next week a lot about the court and how they're going to handle executive power.

But for now, we're just going to have to kind of wait and see how this transpires.

But this is huge political news.

An earthquake coming out of Texas.

Maybe another interesting earthquake coming out of Texas.

And that's the Ted Cruz, the junior senator from Texas is flirting once again, Geronimo with a running for president.

He is using essentially the split in the MAGA movement over Israel to be able to kind of leverage, I don't know, maybe kind of, former Republican glory in terms of foreign policy and in terms of, kind of demographic connections run for this.

It might work.

Ted Cruz, of course, has some advantages here.

He's got a lot of eyeballs on his podcast.

Right.

And I'm all in favor of podcasters.

Yes.

Running winning team 14 on this.

Let's get you up into elected office so you can be miserable like the rest.

You know what?

Any of them I think you'd be great at?

Fair enough.

Let's start with like, something.

Something tangible.

Yeah.

Where you can tax people.

I think you'd like that.

Okay.

I feel like you'd be good at that.

I would be a tax assessor and then knock on doors.

Pay me your taxes.

To pay the taxes.

Right.

So Cruz has got a lot of eyeballs.

Obviously, he, you know, is in a position where people know who he is, which is a good thing for running for president.

He also got a response from Donald Trump, who said, nothing bad, nothing good, but said, basically, it's early.

You know, he's a friend of mine, which probably for now, if you're running for president and you're not Donald Trump is a pretty good thing.

But give me your take on this.

Do you think that Ted Cruz has got a chance for the Republican nomination?

I mean, I would say yes and no.

Okay.

I think that, and we have said this before, I think that Ted Cruz, in terms of, his political mind and the way that he has the polls, some public opinion, especially, his constituents, he's very smart.

I think that he reads political movements and waves like, you know, like Yoda.

Yeah.

Trying to understand.

Right.

You can see things happening on different planets.

Exactly.

Boom boom boom.

Right.

So if he's seeing an opportunity.

Right, I think that he's trying to propel himself very early.

So people start talking about and then perhaps, run and concede and get, you know, Secretary of state or whatever it is, a new one, right?

Or getting the nomination.

Now, the downturn on that is that I think Ted Cruz, he's very polarized.

Yes, yes.

And either you like him or you don't.

Yeah.

It could be a problem in a general electorate.

Also, it's the case that J.D.

Vance has got a pretty sizable lead at this point.

Now it's very early, of course, for 2028 speculation.

And we haven't even got to 2026 yet, which will have a serious, of course, play in terms of what happens for the presidential.

But we're I think seeing right now, group of people who are offering to run that probably aren't Ted Cruz.

That can, of course, change, but it might be a good timing for him.

If you look at his numbers in Texas, his approval ratings are as low as they've ever been.

35% of people approve overall, 13% of independents approve, and only 71% of Republicans approve.

So this is not a good space for him to be in.

And maybe leaving the Senate and finding new, environs would be good.

He's probably have to shave that beard, though, right?

When was last time we had a president with a beard?

So sorry.

You can't be president either.

If you're going to keep that beard.

But, yeah, that's true in the beer state.

That's it.

Yeah.

So you're like, I'm going to pass on.

Yeah.

Thank you.

But it would be interesting if you ran because it would set off this domino effect.

Right.

For the Senate seat.

Right.

People like Dan Crenshaw, people like, you know.

Oh yeah.

And if he doesn't win, you know, for the Senate, this round is definitely going to create a reshuffling of what goes on in Texas.

And it's going to basically nationalize Texas politics.

All the things that are happening in Texas will become very, I think, national, very kind of prominent.

So things like border security issues, property tax issues, how schools are funded and how they function, these things are all going to become very much a part of kind of how people talk about national politics.

So once again, Texas at the center of the political universe, right?

Yep.

Well, let's talk about, what's happening in North Texas.

Obviously, one of the things that the governor did, in addition to setting the race, for the 18th, is to set the runoff for the ninth Senate district, which would be a pretty competitive race.

It was a place where the Democrats did better than expected, but probably it's a Republican leaning seat.

But beyond that, Tarrant County has really become a kind of bellwether county.

Yeah, it's the biggest kind of purple county in the state.

That's not Harris County.

And we're seeing there the GOP chair, Bo French, who's been in the news a lot for various things that are not so good, has, announced a bid for statewide office.

He's going to run for a railroad commissioner.

He's got a history of incendiary social media posts.

To say the.

City is attacked.

People who are Muslim.

He's made anti-Semitic comments.

He's had derogatory slurs against people who are LGBTQ.

Plus, he's talked about people with disabilities and negative ways.

There's just a lot of things he has said and done that have often received a rebuke from his fellow Republicans.

So what do you make of him running for office, like in a statewide level that, you know, is a pretty prominent role?

I don't know, I mean, I think that, it's going to be an uphill battle, right?

Because I think that thankfully there's still a line.

Right.

And he's running against Jim Wright, who's already an incumbent Republican.

So, you know, it's still a tough fight regardless.

But yeah.

And and you know, these rhetoric, does not necessarily help anyone.

Right, right, right.

And as you said, he has been rebuked by the GOP.

And the GOP is like, no thank you.

Yeah.

I mean, like I said, Tarrant County is a huge bellwether district.

If they underperform there, then there's a chance they're underperforming in other places where Republicans want to be able to get some traction there underwater of the Republicans, which is not a good place to be this cycle in the election.

And so, yeah, I think that's a problem.

But also highlights just some of the flaws that certain candidates have within the Republican Party.

And any of these kinds of comments are all going to come to light.

It's going to make our party look like they're intolerant, and that's not where they want to be either.

So there's just I think a lot of implications for how this kind of plays out.

So the same reason that people worry about Ken Paxton, they should worry about Beau French and whether he wins or not.

You know, we don't know yet, but him running, I think, does send the signal that the Republicans, you know, aren't able to stop this kind of rhetoric.

And it could very well come to backlash against them.

Speaking of backlash, let's talk about the US Senate race here in Texas on the Republican side, John Thune, this week, a Senate majority leader endorsed and did a fundraising letter for John Cornyn, stressing basically how important it is that John Cornyn gets that, kind of institutional support.

A couple of weeks ago, former Texas Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison and Phil Graham also endorsed John Cornyn.

Oddly, this might hurt him.

I saw some negative comments on this.

One of which stuck out was, was that John Cornyn could become a paleontologist with how much fossils he's digging up.

I thought that was both rude and, pretty much on point.

Right.

The Republican Party is very split when it comes to the establishment, and Ken Paxton is very much running against DC and against John Cornyn.

Cornyn's are prodigious fundraiser.

He's raised $400 million and his total time in office for himself and for other Republicans.

But he is not doing well.

We've talked about his reelect number at about 20%.

That's 20% of people would agree to re elect him.

And that's not a good space to be in if you're John Cornyn.

So what do you make of this effort and the kind of problem he faces with the establishment, in Texas?

Well, I think I mean, it's once again, we have seen it before.

We have seen how, the new Republican Party, the new, I guess MAGA leaning party, that is packed with new, yes, minds and different ways of seeing politics etc.

have destroyed the GOP as we know it.

Yeah, we.

Have remade it significantly.

Right.

Exactly.

Reshaped that.

Ryan, we have seen here in Texas the war against the Bush legacy, for instance.

Right.

Completely obliterated.

Yeah.

Blown out of the water.

Yeah.

And we have seen also those Republicans that have taken a more moderate, name villain, for instance.

Right.

The hard by no shape of the imagination moderates or liberals or anything like that.

But are, you know, a different type of conservative called rhinos and.

Yeah, liberalizing like the Dade feel in picture with Nancy Pelosi where they're like hugging like that came out during the campaign.

It's just like mind boggling.

Yeah.

Like how but that's the new reality it is.

And a lot of Republicans like John Cornyn, who basically cross over this whole boundary and now are find themselves called liberal, which seems odd.

Yeah.

The worst affectionate affliction he has is that he basically led some compromise on guns, and that's something where he's very liable to be able to take a hit from a Republican audience.

Yeah.

So definitely worth watching and seeing how that plays out.

Another thing that's playing out in Lubbock is that the beloved buddy Holly crosswalk is in jeopardy of being painted over, because Greg Abbott and the Department of Transportation has essentially put together this sort of series of reports, series of, edicts, I suppose you'd say, rules that say, you know, no political ideologies in crosswalks, or other kind of roadway encumbrances.

So, what do you make of this?

Well, buddy Holly, City council over there is, saying that.

Yeah, I mean, we just have to, get rid of it, and.

Not much they can do.

Not.

I mean, Dallas is fighting back, saying, we want to pause this and really investigate this.

It's possible that they can sue based upon some administrative law capacity where without a statute, the edict is meaningless.

So First Amendment question possibly two.

So there are a couple of ways maybe they could challenge this.

But I think the thing that to me that's interesting is that there's just not very little local government left, right.

And oh yeah, what the state and what the federal government is doing is really a kind of, you know, movement towards essentially just standardizing, centralizing all of government.

And that has real implications for lots of policy issues, not the least of which is, you know, what crosswalks look like.

Yeah.

Because the issue here in terms of that, analogy is that if you as a local government, right, and don't even think about counties, but now city levels, if you're curtail about that, right, you can not respond to the needs of the population.

Right.

So that's very bad because we're going to end up at the end of the day, with the state regulating, if cities can take away, you know, beehives or infested bee houses or something like that and or scooters.

Right.

The city council's debating the Houston here that whether scooters can be used in various times and ways and the state could come in and say, yeah, we'll forget that and we're going to tell you what to do.

So that does have implications.

Yeah.

Across the board.

Yeah.

Let's talk about other big issues.

All right.

That's a national issue.

And that's the Epstein files.

Right.

Which we can never not talk about.

The House voted 427 to 1 to release the Epstein files.

This is after a reversal of Donald Trump who said, like, okay, I'm okay with this.

Trump went from basically saying, there's nothing to see here to investigate Democrats for this, too.

Hey, let's move on.

Yes.

Like that French politician who said famously, there go my people.

I must hurry up and go lead them.

What are the implications to the release of the files, regardless of what actually is in the files?

Right.

What are the kind of sort of big picture takeaways from this?

I think it's it's just a political stunt, right.

Because when you read the the bill, the bill says like, yeah, we're going to release the files.

But if there is no, ongoing federal investigation.

Yeah.

Suddenly President Trump asked the Department of Justice, Pam Bondi and said, oh, by the way, I want you to start a federal investigation to investigate, Larry Summers, Bill Clinton, etc., etc., etc.. So what's going to do?

Why do you think he's going to do Pamela?

That's a great point.

Yeah, I can hear the conspiracy theorists keyboards clicking away.

To me.

One implication to this too, is just that Donald Trump may have lost his hold on the MAGA movement.

Right?

These little fissures, these little cracks, right, like if left untreated, could be problematic.

So you could see that this is the beginning of a problem for Donald Trump.

The other is that it maybe is the case.

The Congress is back, maybe now they're investigating and willing to kind of put their efforts to stop things.

Well, in terms of what the executive might want to do.

Well, absolutely.

Right.

They see the opportunity and maybe that's something that they see.

Well, let's try to push it and see if we can actually be, you know, the other, power balance of the branch.

Exactly.

But that is a question that we're going to continue to do and observe next week.

I'm here and.

I'm brand around house.

The party keeps up next week.