<Music> Welcome to Party Politics.

Where we prepare you for your next political conversation.

I'm Jeronimo Cortina.

And I'm Brandon Rottinghaus.

We are professors at the University of Houston, and we are here to give you the details about the week's craziness in politics, international intrigue.

We've got things happening in Texas.

We've got prison discussions, reforms on the table that are going to be potentially very expensive for the legislature.

Indeed, Let's get all the way into it.

The first is a discussion about how President Trump sees the world and what the U.S.

role is in it.

The president gives an annual address to the United Nations.

The president has been very pointed in his discussions about the rest of the world and where they might be going with respect to heaven and hell.

Yes.

Last year he was very, very pointed about his observations about what country should do to help the U.S.

and what he thought the U.S.

was doing to help them and that they weren't gracious enough for he suggested that basically that they're all going to H-E- double hockey sticks this year didn't change much in terms of tone.

Maybe the language changed, but he had some very specific things to say about what the U.S.

is kind of role in the rest of the world was going to be.

And this contrasts very specifically with what the secretary general of the U.N.

said, which was that he hoped that there would be a more interdependent world.

What are we looking at here Jeronimo over the next couple of years, while Donald Trump is president?

Not what the outgoing secretary general, of the UN, wants to the contrary.

So it was an ultimatum to Iran.

So it was like sign a deal or we're basically going to erase you from the map.

Condemnation of the International Criminal Court, the Greenland security deal he stands on, artificial intelligence or superintelligence call regional dominance Venezuela oil a little bit of everything.

Right.

For the record, I think you the most super intelligent among Thank you.

Among the elite leaders of this Thank you very much indeed.

Great nation.

He also mentions Cuba hinting that there would be some kind of conflict there.

Now, president's been, you know, I think kind of discussing this internally for a long time.

It's trickled out here and there that they'd like to try to make some regime change in Cuba.

The Cuban delegation walked out during this part.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

It's a it is a it's a fraught moment for the world.

And it definitely is a big question mark, what the U.S.'

role will be in it.

The president has a very specific objective here.

I mean, number one, obviously he's not talking to the U.N.

per se or the rest of the world's leaders.

He's talking to American voters and trying to re- emphasize the idea that this is the sort of America First foreign policy.

Not sure people are really still believing it just because there is a serious disconnect between what he's saying and what he's actually doing during the war is a good example of that.

So lots of kind of uncertainty here.

But in particular, I think, though, from a kind of political science perspective, it's interesting to see the way that the president can sexualize the foreign policy of the nation.

Right.

He's basically rejected a kind of multilateralism emphasizing unilateralism that is the U.S.

sort of role alone in a lot of these things, but also bilateralism, more like we're going to kind of make deals with specific places we need strategically.

This is a different kind of mindset than what most presidents take.

These things ebb and flow.

So it's not like a Trump phenomenon from a Republican phenomenon.

Right?

The ebb and flow of foreign policy for the presidents has been consistently, over time, kind of zigzags around these sorts of issues.

So it's not like, you know, it's permanent.

And that's sort of one of the other questions is like, you know what this is going to look like going forward.

Is this a Trump moment where it's sort of his philosophy, or will this continue with other Republicans or with other Democrats?

Well, I mean, sure, I think that the message that he's I mean, I get what he's saying, that he wants to communicate with American voters.

But I think that the message is very confusing.

Well, first of all, I think that today's foreign policy is a mix of pre-war I isolationist stance.

Right.

It's we are the city up on a hill kind of Reaganesque Wilsonian, I guess, solid.

The beacon of, like, democracy.

Exactly.

Look to us as the sort of oracle.

On the one hand, then on the other hand, bashing, as you say, multilateralism with other countries bashing in international institutions.

So not being 100% completely isolated, but then, on the other hand, are talking to Europe and saying like, why are you not playing with me?

So I think it's it's a very confusing message.

And not only American voters are not going to get it because it's frankly quite complicated to make sense of this thing on the one hand.

But also markets don't like to have a lot right.

saber-rattling produces this instability Like we want a little bit of of certainty in terms of what you gonna do.

Yeah yeah yeah yeah I think this kind of muscular unilateralism has its limits.

And, you know, it also has its place.

And that's something that the president is trying to emphasize.

But it hasn't really played out in reality in every instance.

And so no foreign policy has the kind of purity of its own right, kind of ideology.

It's always sort of a mix of different things because the work is constant.

So the president is trying to kind of adhere to this, which is complicated, and it's complicated even more because the future of the Republican Party will likely be fought about these kinds of issues.

Right.

It's going to be a question about what Trumpism looks like after Trump.

You've got JD Vance on one hand, saying that this is a kind of continuation where we need kind of us in this isolated state and kind of protecting our own borders.

And then you've got candidates like Ted Cruz who are saying more like what the secretary general said, which is that we should have this more interdependent world between these problems or confronting as a global society are all kind of, you know, everyone's problems.

And I think that vice president's stance is a far away from reality.

Because the global economy is 100% integrated.

So you cannot say like, we're going to take everything back and dismantle.

I mean, you could, but it take would take decades to have that infrastructure coming back to America on the one hand.

Then on the other hand, you have other issues in terms of the world saying, okay, we have had two years of these, foreign policy relations and we're tired and we have seen it with Canada.

Now, we're seeing now a little bit more with Europe.

Right?

We have seen behind the scenes.

China mingling, you know, in an economic policy perspective with other countries and said, wait, the US controls 30% of the GDP.

We all control 70% of the global GDP.

Do we need the US in this case?

And in some cases, yes.

No.

But now with AI, that, whole improvement on technology is like I mean.

Things are changing and the question is, yes.

And and Cruz, I think is in the right path to make that case.

So we'll.

See and we'll see.

if republicans believe it or not because there are definitely wings of the party.

Yes.

Objective and want to go to the Trump route.

So we'll see how that plays out.

Obviously that's going to be a discussion for 2028.

My goodness.

We're going to be there before you.

know it.

Even after November 3rd.

We start immediately.

Literally doing it right away.

Yeah.

But let's talk about the impacts of the current election cycle.

In particular, let's talk about the Trump administration and the role of policing immigration on the ground in Austin this week, there was another ICE related shooting.

An individual, a Venezuelan was shot and was effectively, demobilized.

He's in stable condition.

As the time of a recording.

The agency said that this, was justified.

They've said that this individual was in the country without documentation, and it's not surprisingly, sparked a lot of protests, in Austin which is slightly more liberal than the rest of Texas, but probably not out of step with where people are generally on what it means to be policing immigration in the current moment.

So I guess my question for you is, what do you think this will mean in terms of the politics of the cycle?

And does it change the trajectory of what the Trump is hoping to accomplish with the kind of mobilization of of immigration?

I mean, I think it's as we have said 11,000 times here is the problem is not enforcement.

The problem is the laws.

The problems is that we need, labor force come into the country.

How you do that?

Well, you need to revamp the law.

Can you have a comprehensive immigration reform?

Absolutely not.

But you can have a piecemeal immigration reform to make it work for migrants and also for our economy and for us.

But I think that initially, the Trump administration told us that what were we going to do is we're going to start deporting bad hombres, right?

And it's going to be drug dealers.

Convicted felons, you know, people that we don't want.

And I think that when you make that case, it's easy, right?

It's easy to say, okay, fine.

But the problem is that the data that we have doesn't suggest that more people that have been deported have no record.

Are members of our community, contribute to our economy.

Right.

So the question is, is what are you doing?

And then they're being deported to other countries in other continents.

And, and and that does not reflect American values?

No, it's a good point.

And we talk about this on an After Party episode, which are available on YouTube.

For any time you want to get a little update on stuff that happens between shows.

But our discussion there was about what the enforcement issue was doing for the Latino vote in Texas since we're in election mode.

That's an important topic to think about.

We talked about the fact that the the support among Latinos, for Republicans have fallen significantly.

And it's in part because not of the goals of the per se, but rather the method of how it's done.

Right.

And so in this place case, it's not so much like a why they're doing it, but really how they're doing it.

Right.

And that's become the problem.

People are literally getting shot.

You know, this individual is still in custody but is in some medical jeopardy.

We've seen this happen in other cases here in Houston and other states.

So there's a lot of, I think, kind of problematic way this is being implemented.

And there was, if we remember a whole fight in Congress about the use of body cameras for ICE agents.

The ICE agent wasn't wearing his body camera.

So there's a lot of uncertainty about what this all looks like.

So that's one issue, right?

It's the fact that the way that it's being done is problematic, and it's the case that there's not much accountability here.

That kind of transparency is becoming a political issue for a lot of people, specially for Latinos, who, as we said, are going to be the biggest swing vote in this cycle.

So I think that's one thing.

The other is that it really has a tendency to kind of mobilize people against this.

I mean, in a political sense, it's going to mean clearly Democrats are looking at the same.

They don't like it.

But increasingly, you're seeing broader swath of independence and even conservatives say, I don't like the way this is going.

It's hurting our process.

It's hurting the electoral, hurting the economic bottom line.

And it has real ramifications for how this plays out.

We saw this congresswomen from Florida.

Posting a video on X, she got endorsement from President Trump and she was saying, your immigration policy has gone too far.

And now Latinos that supported you are seeing this as a treason.

And I think that you're completely right.

Is that have I mean, at least 24 people have been shot.

We have four people that have been killed.

By this type of enforcement.

And the other type of things is this issue about accountability one of the most important things, foundational, I guess beliefs of this country is that no one, absolutely no one is above the law.

And that has been a tradition for years and years and years and years.

So we're seeing the lack of accountability, right?

Because, you know, the tough stance of whatever, whatever, those have an impact, diminishing trust in institutions.

And that is a very dangerous path when people do not respect institution.

And that's what we're seeing right now.

Yeah, it's playing out, I think politically, right in the middle of very important election cycle.

We love talk about divides, right.

Because it's really how we think about where they're going to be.

Coalitional split.

Right.

One other wave of coalitional split.

Please do.

Tell has been for Republicans who are still internally battling kind of exactly how to proceed in a general election.

It's more competitive than expected.

So two things happened this week of note that highlight that divide.

Number one, you have George W Bush, former president, and John Cornyn, senator from Texas in Dallas, doing a fundraiser for a lot of Republicans, but not Ken Paxton.

Oh, okay.

I guess they forgot to give him the invitation.

Got lost in the mail.

The other issue is that a split Republican executive committee voted against, but by a very narrow margin, condemning Senator Cornyn and Commissioner Miller for not supporting the GOP ticket for like, wink, wink to Ken Paxton.

So there's a lot of sour grapes here, a lot of coalition splits.

But I guess I wonder from you kind of what this all means going forward.

Is this divide going to be a problem republicans to try to rally support going into it?

Yes, absolutely.

I think so.

And and the math is like, when you're playing divide the money game with your kids.

Monopoly has a brutal effect on our household.

And the issue is that you have competitive races in Maine, Ohio, Alaska, Iowa.

Right.

And also Republicans are trying to flip seats in Michigan and New Hampshire.

Right.

So that's you have $100, right, to divide that.

And then you have Texas.

Texas should not have been in the equation.

So if you're saying you cannot lose Texas, right.

So if you're seeing that you look you're going to lose taxes.

You're going to put all the money into that.

But then you're going to leave Maine, Ohio, Alaska and Iowa completely undefended.

Right.

So it's like this game of Risk that you move.

Your.

I guess, soldiers one way, and then you open a flank to defend one castle, but then you left undefended four other castles.

Right?

So at the end is something that I don't know.

It's hard to be able to play defense in multiple fronts, right?

Yeah.

Right.

I think that's right.

Or it's like a Catan or you've got too much wheat.

Exactly.

You don't exactly.

You know.

But I Catan like light.

Not not the big one.

You like a slow burn, like fast version.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because the other one takes too long.

Forever.

Yeah I agree.

Yeah.

And that's the problem, I think, is that Republicans need to play like Catan fast because the elections upcoming quickly.

And this divide highlights the fact that there is this concern about what the strategy is in primaries versus a generals.

Right?

Texas is a very red state.

And for most Republicans, they're looking to be able to win in primaries.

So that's really where their focus is.

A competitive general election is a completely different animal.

And so far, it's been a real challenge for them to figure out what that messaging looks like.

Right.

To this point, it kind of shifted almost entirely to mobilization, right?

All of the ads from Paxton are basically against Talarico saying he's weird and he's too liberal etc.

And so that's really a mobilization strategy for the GOP, which they desperately need.

Their numbers aren't as strong in terms of support among Republican voters for republican candidates as it has been in this past.

So that's one issue.

I also think that the Bo French issue, which we've talked about at nauseum a kind of real bright line, right?

There's this thinking that this is the where the kind of, you know, the cow eats the cabbage that happen to where it's like in one hand, you've got this kind of, you know, Republican, you know, very conservative ideology, and on the other hand you've got a kind of more moderate facing version that's going to appeal to independents, even conservatives.

And so that's the real crisis that the Republican Party faces itself.

So I think that's the issue is that basically, you know, where you draw that line in terms of the general election versus the primary election.

And as the state becomes more competitive, you're going to see more of these fights come out.

So the split between Cornyn and Paxton is a personal split, but it also represents something much broader about what the party strategy is going to be.

Right.

Right.

I mean, it is a personal split, but also I think it's the, I guess the tip of the iceberg of the real fight that is being happening within the Republican Party in Texas and also at the national level, and also within the party.

Right.

We see those clashes also between moderate Democrats and more progressive Democrats.

And we're seeing it today.

And the fact that, Senator Cornyn and George W Bush can especially Cornyn, can break hundreds of millions of dollars, right.

Tells you that it's like, this is very interesting because I thought that it was going the other way.

If he was not competitive in terms of the ideological battle within the Republican Party, he would have had the same amount of money I have in my checkbook.

That's a good point, nothing.

So, no, I think that's the real liability for the state.

And if they lose, it's going to be in large part because they simply couldn't generate the money fast enough and didn't have the kind of right messaging to be able.

To and the right candidates to, to one way or the other.

Right.

But it's the issue of the primaries, right?

Who participates in the primaries.

And that happens in the Democratic primary, but also in the Republican primary that that determine the vote.

But I think the point that you made is exactly right for once.

Thank you.

It's the issue that if you have a competitive election, then the primary that is ideologically charged to one way or the other then doesn't play very well with the medium voter.

Yeah, that's that's true for the Democrats, right?

I mean, all the odds are against Talarico and the sort of statements he's made in the past that were very kind of woke 1.0 to quote, AOC.

So there's a lot of that, I think, for both parties that have to be reckoned with.

And this election will sort these out, but, you know, there will be a winner eventually, I hope.

Yes.

So we can talk about something else.

But I want to keep talking about this for just one minute longer.

And that is that the money issue is important, right?

Elon Musk has decided to be more aggressive in Texas.

He's already spent almost $4 million in the race, this cycle.

He's going to put in $1 million on behalf of Ken Paxton.

It's a symptomatic of kind of the, you know, world in which we live.

But you certainly see a lot of this happening.

Beyond that to the spigot is open for Ken Paxton and you're just seeing the flow of money.

Come in now.

Sort of supported Paxton ads have outpaced support of Talarico ads.

So the money advantage that Talarico had for so long has gone away.

Whether that early lead will hold up.

You know we don't know polling still has Talarico.

you know a little bit of sometimes neck and neck depending on the margin.

So there's definitely some questions here.

But I wanted to highlight this because Talarico has been running ads that say that billionaires have too much power and politics we need to reform that.

And here's Elon Musk comes in and the most visible, most high profile of them saying, I'm going to spend money against you.

So it gives Talarico a real foil to be able to talk about these issues.

But obviously, it's also the case that Texas is attracting the sort of national level resources in a way that you're going to be inundated with a friend who's visiting from out of town and made the comment that looking on like TV, when you turn it on, it's just you're a wash with the ads, like there's nothing else.

No more Tide, no more like, you know.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

I like those Tide commercials.

At this point I welcome any commercial that's not like about politics, right?

I mean, if you watch the infomercials around 3 a.m., you won't see any.

You're going to get up early.

Yeah, you won't see any of those ads.

I like to watch old commercials from, like, the 80s and 90s.

Okay.

That's just.

Yeah.

That's fair.

Brings you back and there's no politics.

Correct?

All the better.

Right.

Let's keep talking about politics, though, because, there's some other issues that may highlight this divide that we're seeing.

We're in a very populist movement in the kind of election cycle, and candidates are picking up on this.

Greg Abbott this week did a couple of things.

I think that highlight that.

One is that he presses pause on the promotion of new data centers.

He has ordered the Texas Commission on the Environment and Environmental Quality TECEQ to pause permits for data centers until the auditor complete, basically postpone until after the election.

And he also ordered TXDOT to stop issuing permits for automated license readers and flock cameras.

What do you make of this?

We talk a little about these sort of issues going forward, but now we see the governor kind of full stop using the power of incumbency, kind of put a limit on these things which have become a real flashpoint.

I mean, it it is because it became a political issue, as simple as that.

And we're an election and we are in an election that is more competitive.

Now, having said that, I think that the governor is 100 percent, right.

From the policy perspective.

Right.

To sit down and say, wait a minute.

Right.

We need to regulate these things, whether it's flock cameras, I mean, flock cameras.

Depending on how you use them, can be good or bad, right?

When you go for example to the UK, the UK is is 102,000% packed with cameras everywhere, right?

Every club has got a flock camera.

has got a flock camera.

Right.

Well, yeah, but my issue is that when there were terrorist attacks a couple of years ago, I mean, the cameras followed the person the person was arrested in, you know, a day or something like that.

So how you use them is very important, right?

And then the issue of data centers.

AI is here to stay.

Right.

Data centers are going to continue.

So how you embed them?

Protecting water resources and power resources are extremely important.

But we need to have that conversation.

I know that I'm wishful thinking.

That has to be a policy conversation, not political conversation.

A logical conversation.

Yes, sir.

Texas legislature.

Yes.

Let's see.

Yes.

Well, I agree with you.

And there is something that is going to be done about this.

It's too important to the issue and one that cuts across the policy.

So there's going to be some movement on this.

But the question is yeah.

What.

But I do think you're right.

I mean, there's some possibilities here and potential here for this to be successful.

Right.

Flock cameras is a good example.

Here in Harris County there was a road rage incident, and they caught the person who did it because they had flock cameras and they could track it.

So it's, you know, obviously has privacy concerns.

And that's why there's this cross-cutting kind of coalition that's worried about this.

But there are common sense things that I think will be done in the next session to try to like, figure out how to fund it because limitations of law enforcement can have on.

Right.

I mean, privacy concerns, we also need that conversation because everybody has a smartphone and it's always.

There's no privacy anymore.

There's no privacy.

I mean.

I think people are listening to them right now.

Right.

And you have the Alexa thingy or the Google Voice or whatever it's called.

So I mean, it's it's just a matter.

Can't get away from them.

Right, right.

We need to, to talk about these things.

Yeah.

From a policy perspective.

I think so.

But it also kind of gets to the bottom line of what Texas growth model looks like.

The economy has to continue to improve has to continue to improve for Texas to be able to continue to generate revenue.

Absolutely.

This is critical.

And if that goes aside then it's a problem.

So there have to be kind of common sense ways to go forward on this.

Something is going to be done about this.

Yes.

And we'll look forward to having this conversation when we get to talking about the legislature next session, which is upcoming.

In fact, on that issue, there was a pretty big ruling this week from the federal courts who said that basically, Texas has to air condition all prisons by the end of 2029.

At this point, they're not all air conditioned, which you can imagine in Texas, heat is pretty bad.

About a third of Texas prisons are fully air conditioned.

The estimate of how much this is going to cost ranges into the billions, like about $1.5 billion.

That's a lot of money overall.

And for each biennium, probably about $300 million takes a big chunk out of the state's general budget.

So, yes, how is this going to play out?

Despite the kind of, you know, aggressive sort of posture Texas has taken, the feds still have control over federal prisons.

There was a lot of, and state prisons, too, in this case because of the nature of the complaint.

So there's a lot of, yeah, complexity here.

Well.

From the financial side, it's very complicated, right.

Because what we have been saying over and over and over is we have put a lot of stuff into the credit card.

So now you have an emergency, right, that you have to.

Do it .

You have a flat tire.

Uh oh.

A $1.5 billion.

So where is that money going to come from?

So that those are the big issues, right.

That when we're thinking about investment policy in Texas to keep the economy growing, you have to diversify, but also you have to have the real investments, infrastructure, water, internet, broadband access over and over and over and over that can keep us competitive.

So we can generate enough money to have these kind of emergencies and not waste on other stuff.

No.

At a time when the state's budget is going to be a little leaner.

Right.

You've got essentially the big three asking for about 3% cut in agency spending.

So belt's going to be tight this session.

I know, but we're going to continue this conversation after our diet.

I'm Jeronimo Cortina.

And I'm Brandon Rottinghaus.

We'll see you next week.

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