It's going to be a real surprise.

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

I'm Jeronimo Cortina, a political science professor at the University of Houston.

And I ran a running house, also a political science professor here at the University of Houston.

Thanks for hanging out with us and talking politics.

There's just a lot of churn this week.

Let's get right into it.

Off the top.

Literally.

I just checked my phone and it turns out that Donald Trump is going to pardon Henry Clay, our representative here from Texas.

Representative Quah has been accused of various bribery schemes under federal indictment.

No more.

So what do you think that this means for, I don't know, Texas politics, for the politics of South Texas in particular.

Maybe just how scandals work or don't.

I don't know.

You're the expert on scandals.

Short answer is.

Yeah.

Well, Skittles don't matter if you don't let them matter.

And so that's one thing.

The other thing to note, I think, is just that it wasn't going to matter anyway.

I didn't have any real solid primary opponents.

There's a chance he could lose in a general, but it's a pretty rare occasion where that happens.

So, I mean, this is good for quiet because he.

Knows he's going to switch parties.

Maybe so.

Right.

I don't know, to watch because yeah, maybe a little quid pro quo which he totally illegal.

But you know, as long as you don't get caught it's.

Oh yeah.

I kind of think not.

But like that's the rumor, right.

And there's always a risk of that.

You know, these conservative Democrats are kind of on that line.

Yeah.

The Democratic Party continues to kind of shift the left.

Maybe that flip is kind of the most politically expedient thing to do.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, automatic flip.

Yeah.

You go.

There you go.

Well, you called it so well, actually.

We'll say we'll see.

I said this maybe just thinking all of this.

Is a maybe my friend.

Right.

We don't know.

Except there's one thing we do know and that's that we have seen some results in the Tennessee special election.

Correct.

And the Republican, expectedly won and beat the Democrat by about nine percentage points.

But it's all about the margins because this is a Trump plus 20 district.

The Republicans should have won this in a walk, but it cost millions of dollars in order to hold the seat.

What do you make of the outcome of this and what does it mean for the kind of, you know, election upcoming?

I mean, one of the interesting things is doing, what is Monday?

Quarterback.

Yes.

Quarterback.

Monday.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, now football is on like every day.

So it's like I don't know.

Wednesday Wednesday water clock in the morning quarterbacking.

So one of the thing is that during the campaign the Republican candidate like did not embrace Trump.

You know, 1,000%.

Right.

It was more adjacent in that sense.

Okay.

Maybe there's going to be some distance.

Do you think that was like a liability?

Oh, absolutely.

That was 100% a liability because over the past weeks, President Trump has said, you know, affordability.

A couple of days ago, he said, that's a con job.

Yeah.

Democrats.

Democrats are just making things up.

The economy's great, etc., etc., etc.

and we have say this year 11,000 times he's doesn't matter is when you go to the supermarket and you cannot buy Captain Crunch because they're very expensive for your kids.

You feel it.

There is no you got to buy the generic stuff.

I mean, even the generic stuff, right?

It's expensive.

There is no, amount of, misinformation that can not bring you to that space.

That's reality.

That's the supermarket.

It happens every day or every week for a lot of people.

So I think that that is going to be important.

And both the Democrat and the Republican run in this issue of of affordability.

So I think they're testing waters.

But yes, from 22% when President Trump won that district to 9%.

Yeah, it's it's interesting.

It's a real swing.

And I mean, like I said, the margin matters.

People are looking at the margins in new Jersey and in Virginia last month when the elections were held there.

So this is definitely, I think, an alarm bell for a lot of Republicans.

But at the same time, of course, special elections are special for a reason, right?

They're unique and they're kind of rare.

The turnout was like 90% in some counties, which you're probably not going to get, you know, yet in a midterm where people are really agitated.

Some fundamentals were still true.

Republicans still basically perform well in rural areas, and some of the suburban areas.

So like, it's not the case.

It's like red districts.

Yeah.

From that.

Yeah.

I mean this is like this is like your sweater level red.

Like it is very, very red.

Like you're not going to see a Democrat win this.

And obviously ten .9. spread is pretty significant.

But like it's the difference in margin that's more important.

And because you're seeing a lot of the redistricting efforts, you know, basically shrink some of the margins of these districts to about a ten, you know, 5 to 10% Republican plus district.

That means a lot of Republicans maybe get swept under here because, you know, they're not going to be able to overcome this.

So we'll see how that plays out.

But, you know, it's certainly worth noting that this is a pretty important kind of moment and may spur some additional retirements.

Right.

We're seeing those retirements even here in Axios, which will tease, to a point we'll talk about in a second.

But before we get there, let's talk about the Senate race, which is of just constant intrigue here in Texas.

On the Democratic side, of course, we've got James Talarico running, we've got Colin Allred running.

And maybe, just maybe, we have Jasmine Crockett running.

She has proposed an announcement that she's going to give, next week, which comes about 90 minutes before the filing deadline.

She hasn't said what she's going to do.

Right.

There's a lot of speculation that she'll jump into this race if she does.

What can we.

Expect?

I have no idea.

Yeah.

We're just going to put our heads down and just wait for.

I mean, for the end of it.

I think it's it's very characteristic of the Democratic Party in Texas.

Right?

So on the one hand, you have a, let's say moderate, Democrat that would be calling out outright, pretty in the middle issues, very Democratic issues.

Then you have, la Rekha in the sense of being these new wave of Democrats, but in a different way.

Just trying to, I like the one percenters.

Right.

And how the economy and the political system is not working for the average American.

Yeah.

And then, on the other hand, you have Jasmine Crockett that is just a firebrand and goes left, right, boom, boom, boom, boom.

It's like just like.

A sledgehammer to.

Exactly.

All of it.

And that's what Democrats like.

And that's frankly why she's ahead in the polls.

Right?

I mean, before she even announced this, like a month plus ago, you saw her leading the field.

She, in a hypothetical matchup, leads everybody else by 31%.

Or Roarke, who is, of course, also, you know, not running, is tied for second with Talarico at about 25%.

So even not running, you know, Crockett's already ahead.

But really it's beyond that.

That is important in terms of the demographics she puts together that make this work.

And that's that.

She's got strong support among black voters and 45% the next person closest is already 33%.

You've got a gender advantage for her, which again in a Democratic primary is huge right?

27% to 19% for Talarico, generational support among Gen-xers, she leads by 29% to 24% for Talarico.

So she's leading in a bunch of these, including like Democrats, who are more likely to vote in Democratic primary.

So she basically is already ahead without having actually even said she's running.

And I think that's shows significant strength.

If you look at the matchups of her versus the potential Republican candidates, she has basically a 2 or 3 point lead on, on John Cornyn and is more or less tied with, with Ken Paxton.

So even again, without having raise a dime for this, she's able to really jump to the top of the field.

And I guess my question to you is, you know, again, the Democrats are in a bit of disarray here, right?

Because I think they prefer not to have, like, their heaviest hitters all running against each other.

It's not like 1980s anymore.

Like they need to spread this out.

But is this going to be, potentially successful enterprise for Democrats?

Is this the moment where Democrats find their way out of the wilderness?

Right.

And, you know, for the first time since, you know, Jurassic Park was in theaters right now.

Right.

Well, I don't know.

I mean, the Democrats would have to one way or the other, sit down and say, like, why don't you run for this one?

You stay in Congress or you stay in Congress, you stay in the House, whatever it is.

They tried that, right?

Right.

They tried.

And Castro said, yeah, you know, no one can agrees.

Yeah.

And clearly they can't.

I'm they're not going to agree.

So just let it, you know, play out and see.

Let the market decide.

Yeah.

Let the market decide.

But I think that, you know, Democrats are going to need for this campaign someone that can rally the base and both I mean, especially when we think about Ken Paxton, he really is he's based in a very, very, very good way.

So true.

Yeah.

So in order to be competitive, let's say Paxton wins, you need the same opposite effect on the Democratic side.

Yeah.

So you mean a firebrand candidate that is going to be willing to, debate Paxton if that happens?

Yeah, he's going to be a marvelous debate.

And he's going to be rallying the base because that's how Jasmine Crockett is politically speaking.

Yeah.

And then the other ones are fine.

But it's what's going to rally the base.

It's again turnout.

Yeah.

And that's what she can offer.

And that's why Democrats like her I've seen some Colin Allred kind of out not ads but like kind of the digital stuff lately where he goes and does like a job for, afternoon or for a day or something.

There's one where he goes to become a bartender.

It's pretty interesting.

Like he's good at it, but could be better at it.

And it certainly highlights the affordability question, which is going to be, I think the watchword for the next election.

But he doesn't rally the base the way that she does, even having not decided to run.

So we're going to watch this.

Obviously we don't know what she's gonna do exactly, but speculation is she's going to run.

And so we'll see how this changes the dynamics of the Senate race, which then changes the dynamics of like the Senate.

Yeah, potentially nationwide.

Right.

Because a lot of the money is going to flow here as a result of that.

And it's going to change the dynamics of races all over the country.

So we're going to watch this.

But also something is going to change.

The dynamics of races all over the country is the redistricting fight.

While we were eating turkey and enjoying some mashed potatoes, the Texas, kind of battle on redistricting got to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court, in a nutshell, basically says, well, let's hear some briefing on this.

Let's make a decision about what to do next.

So we're still in a bit of a holding pattern.

What do you make of all of this?

And what do you think it's going to mean for the nation's politics.

I don't know.

Yeah.

I mean, I've been saying that, but the Supreme Court can go either way.

Now, if the Supreme Court says, yeah, what Texas did is fine, then forget about the Voting Rights Act.

Basically, it's going to be dead, right.

They could use this as leverage to.

Get I mean, that's it.

I mean, and the other cases that we have in Louisiana and, that's also, you know, something that matters, then, on the other hand, we have, for example, will how the Supreme Court will, in the case of Alabama.

Right.

So right now he's like, which one is going to be this time how.

They're going to go.

If they go with the Texas map that these three panel judge in El Paso said, you know what?

This is racial, gerrymandering.

Then the Bra Voting Rights Act would be basically useless dead, etcetera, etcetera.

Yeah.

That's it.

I it's hard to know what they're going to do because the court could do lots of different things here, but they seem to signal that they want to kind of have the maps that were redrawn into effect and then litigate the rest of it after.

So it could mean that we kind of have to redo this, which is a real pain.

And I think people are still confused about this.

Right.

And we know this is confusing for voters.

A lot of members are still waiting to see kind of where they're going to run because they don't know what the district lines look like.

But yeah, but but but that's a consequence, right?

It's a consequence of saying word December.

Yeah.

They're going to I mean January 5th is like you have to filing January.

We're at the goal line here.

Yeah.

Right.

It isn't like you cannot say like well you know what.

We're going to change it and then change everything else.

Right.

Affecting you know all the counties in in the state of Texas.

Yeah.

And then depending on how it goes one way or the other, then for example, Indiana, that has been a little bit, reticent to say about the redistricting, even though they have a 4010 majority in the Indiana Senate.

They're saying like, yeah, we don't want to go there.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

And then Florida.

So it's and of course, California.

Yeah.

So it's a lot of stuff.

Right.

Moving right.

That needs yeah a clear signal.

We're not going to wait much until the Supreme Court rules.

Yeah I the thinking is that they'll do this soon because they have to make some kind of determination in order for this to go forward.

So we'll wait and see.

In fact, they may be doing it as we speak, you know, working hard at, you know, putting this together.

But this is really the question that is going to dominate the elections going forward.

So we'll we'll keep an eye on that.

But to me, what I think is interesting is that like the Democrats like leaving the state, breaking quorum, using this and highlighting this as a political story may have helped because they're basically priming this to say, look, this is all about the politics of this, right?

And you're using essentially the one tool that is not permissible to be able to draw these lines.

And that's what the court agreed to.

That is race that they are using these lines and drawing these things in ways that basically organize this in a way that's unfair and unconstitutional.

So this may have actually helped.

So Democrats are taking a bit of a victory lap, but it could be one where they trip, you know, right before the Cold War before the end.

And so we're going to wait and see, you know how that plays out.

But yeah, that's the question.

In addition to that, we've got a bunch of new laws going into effect in Texas, right?

By virtue of the Constitution, some of these laws don't go into effect until until later on.

And so, what are some ones that highlights, in your mind?

So we have the replacement of the star test.

So now we're going to have shorter tests throughout the school year.

I think that's that's a great option.

Having lived through three star tests, with my kids, I think.

That's I see the trauma, like, enduring.

It is like.

And I know a lot.

Of people get it.

Yeah.

But also, I mean, I think it changes the dynamic in which teachers are going to be able to teach and not to teach in order to pass this start test, because there's a lot of things associated with this test.

So I think that allowing teachers, especially at the high school level, to be, focusing on, promoting creative thinking or critical thinking, whatever it is, I think it's wonderful.

Civics, please.

Oh, I 100% right.

Civics, some other laws is the law.

So rights for abortion fetal distribution.

And my favorite is in momentum availability.

Good.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

That's right.

That will be available without a prescription which is a medicine that is used I think for I guess for.

Like horses or.

Yeah.

For horses.

Commonly used.

Yeah.

So it, Okay.

Like you're going to be first in line.

Yes.

I agree, I think those are great ones.

A couple more that I highlighted are really thematic.

One is about the pressing of the legal questions, and that is a range of these different types of law.

So one, as you said, allows people to sue anyone who manufacture distributes the abortion pills, in or into Texas.

That's going to get litigated as being litigated.

The Ten Commandments litigation is going on, right?

That is required.

The law requires there to be a post the Ten Commandments that's being litigated.

There's a ban on Dei in K through 12, which restricts hiring instructional materials, in secondary education.

So that again is going to get challenged.

So there's a lot of these where we're seeing just messaging happening in these bills.

And they may or may not be legal.

Ultimately in other cases we've seen these states kind of resolve this in an out of court fashion.

So it's possible that will happen in Texas.

But I think somewhat unlikely given the politics of it.

I also am noticing some things that in basically reduce the power of local government.

And so this is an example.

I think, covers a couple of different dimensions.

One is that, there's a requirement that county jails enter into these to 87 agreements to cooperate with race.

There's another that bans governments, from, companies and individuals from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, from owning land in Texas.

Yeah.

And then another one that bans cities and counties from funding travel for abortion related services out of state.

So again, we're seeing a kind of continuing clampdown on what local government can do.

The state is sort of big brother here.

They're basically, you know, restricting what local governments can do.

Democrats are saying we need to have a local control.

Republicans are saying your local control is sort of to lefty.

So that I think dimension is going to continue as, as things go on.

But my very favorite is the pimps.

Bill.

This is in front of a Thompson bill.

This is a bill that basically protects human trafficking victims from being prosecuted for, crimes they commit while they're basically coerced to do so.

This was a Symphonia Thompson bill.

That was a couple of times at the governor's desk.

He vetoed it.

It ends up being a Senate bill because a lot of the friction with respect to the politics of the walkout led to them essentially ignoring Democratic bills.

And so this is a Symphonia Thompson bill.

Misty gets credit for this.

But, it is a bill that she was very adamant about and made many references to taking on the pimps in and, they allege.

So that's an interesting bill to so that is now law.

Let's shift gears a bit and talk local politics.

All right.

John Whitmire is once again in a bit of hot water with the local Democratic Party.

What's going on?

Well, he got a resolution that condemns, his political behavior, quote unquote, because he went to a fundraiser for, Republican congressman, then Crenshaw.

So is this bad for him?

I mean, is it I don't know, I mean, I don't think so.

I don't think so either.

I mean, my sense is it that it's, it's definitely a knock, but not a fatal blow.

It is certainly something that people have, along, assumed about John Whitmire that he's not, like, the best Democrat.

He's certainly not the most progressive Democrat.

Well, in my telling, he's basically a blue dog Democrats.

Right.

But but that was clear since day one.

I feel like no surprises there.

No.

And he had that.

The, key has been very transparent about it.

Yeah.

And and the way that he works is he crosses the aisle, more often than not.

And we have seen that in, all his years in the state legislature when he was in the House, when we was in the, in the Senate.

So there is no surprises.

Yeah.

So.

No, this is my take is that he's the last Blue Dog Democrat.

And this was a time in Texas history where people were willing to cross the aisle and really more issue focused than party focus.

And that's definitely where he is.

Yeah, that's a winning strategy, at least to some degree, because he's able to focus on things like safe streets and like, you know, getting the garbage picked up on time, you know, making sure potholes are filled, like, these are really kind of basic nuts and bolts things.

And like, you know, wasn't it a relative who said that there's no like Republican or Democratic way to fill a pothole?

Right?

Right.

People aren't voting slavishly based upon partizanship in local elections.

I mean, it certainly motivates people, but it's not the same kind of thing.

Like, you see in a midterm where Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket.

So this is a different kind of world.

And John Whitmire is pretty good at navigating that.

And so this is a a little embarrassing, I think you'd have to say.

But I don't think that this is like a fatal blow for his politics or for his reelection.

But someone's going to run against him, right?

Somebody in the Democratic primary or in the primary is going to try to go after him.

Do you think it's going to work?

I mean, is he going.

To get a second term, I guess, as a result of some of this?

Well, I mean, I think this is irrelevant.

I think that, people do not necessarily focus on partizanship.

As you said, it's bread and butter issues, right?

Am I being kept safe?

Yes.

No.

Is the recycling coming on Thursdays?

And it should be.

You know what?

It's great.

It it's.

Come on.

Time for the last couple months.

There you go.

You know what?

Thumbs up.

Well, John Whitmire may maybe sticking around, but Troy Nehls, the representative from the kind of Fort Bend area and point south is not.

He's deciding to hang it up and not run for office.

This actually is pretty significant for a couple of reasons.

Number one is that we're seeing a mass exodus of Republicans nationally, but we're certainly seeing that in Texas.

This is the sixth open seat in Texas.

That's a lot more, almost as many as we saw in the Texas in about 2018, two, 16, 2018.

So there's a lot of churn happening in the Republican Party in Texas.

What's going on?

Well, he said that he wants to spend more time, with his family and then pass the baton to Turner Nehls.

Yeah.

Okay.

So probably this family who is also going to be in Congress now.

Well, I mean, I don't know, I mean, it's going to be a very interesting race, right?

To say the least, super interesting.

Because for been county has become more and more competitive.

So I think that that's going to be, one point and also the fact that, I mean, he's quite young, he's 57.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And he's saying enough.

Yeah.

I mean, we talked about this last week because we've seen this happen a couple times.

Marcus Luttrell, you know, Michael McCaul, they're all retiring.

And they're for different reasons.

Right.

But one common reason is that there's a chance that the Republicans won't win the House, and that means you're in the minority.

And being in the minority is no fun, right, in Congress.

So you don't have any power.

You're basically kind of cut out of the deals that get made.

And so I think this is probably a writing on the wall for a lot of these members.

The other thing occurred to me is this.

And that's that a lot of people now are kind of short termers like they don't see Congress as a career, whereas we know that, you know, the longer you're in Congress, the more power your crew.

Right?

But seniority is key in this.

But a lot of members don't care about that, right?

They want to come.

They want to make a splash.

They want to talk about the issues, want to press the things they care about, and then they're willing to get out.

So we don't have term limits or anything kind of close to it.

But this is basically kind of the effective term limits where like you're seeing people kind of bail out after a couple of years saying like, well, I've done what I wanted to do or there's no path here to do what I need to do.

So I'm just going to kind of step aside and let somebody else do it.

Well we'll see.

Yeah.

And people have jumped in here because there are a couple of interesting people running here, like Jesse Jackson, who's a former member of the Texas House.

Absolutely.

That could be an interesting, again, to say, race.

I mean, especially for the Republican primary.

Right?

Yeah.

Is this a winnable seat for a Democrat?

I would say that it's going to be competitive, and he's going to depend on, who is running for the Republican side and who is running for the Democrat.

It's a good point.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Because you could see a kind of extremism, an ideology.

Oh, yeah.

One way or the other, turning off a lot of voters in this area, which does include a significant chunk of Fort Bend County, which is rapidly changing politically and in terms of population.

So this is possibly winnable seat for for Democrats, especially if you've got this tidal wave happening.

Well, Troy Nehls is not running.

But the sham wow guy is I had to look up what this damn well guy's actual name was.

Salame.

Okay.

Yeah, he's running as a Republican to try to unseat John Carter, who's 84 years old.

So John Carter says, you know, welcome to the race.

I think outside the box, too.

What do you think about this?

Do you have a sham?

Well, I do have I do.

Okay.

Oh, yeah.

How's it work?

I mean, I bought it probably, you know, ten years ago or more.

It still works good.

So what about a slap chop?

He also was part of one.

I did some deep dive on this, my friend.

Yeah.

I don't know, this laptop.

It's like you put the your your vegetable down.

You just, like, hit the top of it and it chops it up randomly chops it up.

Yeah.

No.

Okay.

You do your own shopping.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, I do.

Well, let's talk about, the kind of national politics.

The one thing that's on everybody's mind is about the crisis happening in Venezuela this week.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is in hot water over reportedly authorizing a follow up boat strike in the Caribbean that ended up, killing two remaining survivors.

After an initial hit on the boat, 11 people were on board and only two people survived the order was then to basically kill those people, which they did.

And the blowback has been pretty intense.

What do you make of this?

Well, he said that he was not sticking around to make that decision.

Right.

So now there is this deflection from the president, from the, defense Secretary.

Just saying, we don't have anything to do.

Which is giving Congress an opportunity to say, well, look, all these conflicting stories and confusion here could only invest the only offers more investigation.

Oh, there's going to be an investigation because they're not talking to, Admiral Frank Bradley.

That, in theory, was the one who gave, the order of the I guess, you know, killing the survivors.

We don't know anything.

This is just from what we know from, media reports.

But the issue is about if, there were international laws broken and crimes, war crimes committed.

Yeah.

Interesting, too, is that although the Trump administration is trying to kind of quell who can get what coverage from the Department of War, it didn't work right.

The coverage is still pretty, pretty, pretty wall to wall here.

It is going to be what we talk about all week next week.

And that's a topic that we will return next week.

I'm Geronimo Cortina and.

I'm Brand running house.

The party keeps up next week.

It's good.