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On Sunday, the threat is reduced, but still there is a chance for damaging wind, large hail and a few tornadoes from Austin, Texas, to Davenport, Iowa, and includes Shreveport, Louisiana; Little Rock, Arkansas; Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri. "Confidence continues to be high in a major flash flood event unfolding for portions of east-central Oklahoma with higher end rainfall totals Saturday beginning late this evening into Saturday night," the Weather Prediction Center said. A flood watch is in effect for eight states from Texas to Iowa until Monday afternoon.
Speaker of the House
There is a chance for strong long-track tornadoes as well as very large hail up to 3 inches in diameter and thunderstorm winds up to 80 mph. "Another day, another completely unsubstantiated lie from David Covey," Cait Wittman, Phelan's communications director, told the American-Statesman. "Covey’s lies are as baseless as they are tiresome, and about the only thing voters can reliably expect from him if elected." Phelan, however, contends that Covey is skirting an opportunity to address Southeast Texas voters in a televised debate, painting his intraparty challenger as a political pawn for outside interests.
Residents begin going through the rubble after tornadoes hammer parts of Nebraska and Iowa
Patrick has warned that he would push the Legislature into a special session if additional work on the grid is not accomplished by the regular session’s end on May 29. When members cast ballots, the only support for Tinderholt came from the two members who nominated him. All of the members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus appeared to back Phelan; the group has not yet released its roster for this session.
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Ahead of the bill’s Tuesday hearing on the House floor, workers and labor groups rallied outside of the chamber and handed out water bottles to protest the bill. Phil King, a longtime Republican state representative from Weatherford, replaced her as the senator for District 10 in North Texas. The majority of House Republicans (51 of 84, or 61%) occupy a middle ground between these two ideological poles.
He said the record $32.7 billion budget surplus should allow lawmakers to make a “down payment on the future of Texas,” citing additional needs including roads, clean water, flood mitigation and high-speed internet. Phelan said he would shepherd bills through the chamber that have the support of a majority of members while also ensuring that lawmakers from the minority party would have a meaningful voice. State representatives are ranked from most liberal to most conservative based on their Liberal-Conservative Scores, with the 95% credible interval (CI) for this point estimate also provided. If two legislators’ CIs overlap, their positions on the ideological spectrum might be statistically equivalent, even if their Lib-Con Scores are different. In no case in 2023 did the CI of a House Republican overlap with that of a House Democrat, indicating that every Republican is significantly more conservative than every Democrat, and every Democrat is significantly more liberal than every Republican. In addition, the legislation has faced fierce pushback from labor groups that say it would roll back many hard-fought local measures like Austin’s and Dallas’ heat break ordinances, which both mandate a 10-minute break every four hours of work for construction workers.
The department’s final rule, which will go into effect on July 1, 2024, will increase the standard salary level that helps define and delimit which salaried workers are entitled to overtime pay protections under the FLSA. These bills were brought forward under a contrived process to achieve a pre-determined outcome — a $100 billion, unpaid-for foreign aid package while failing to secure the southern border. Supporters of Burrows’ and Creighton’s bills have countered by saying local regulations can harm the state’s economy.
Therefore, I was unfortunately forced to vote no on this measure, a position only reinforced when AIPAC scored the “rule” vote to proceed to the total package, despite the aforementioned aid to Hamas and the lack of border protection for America in the package. Ann Baddour, director of the Fair Financial Services Project at the advocacy group Texas Appleseed, said the bills would prevent more local governments from regulating payday and auto-title lending. They would also ban cities from updating their ordinances in order to effectively keep up with new predatory loan products. A bill backed by Gov. Greg Abbott and business lobbying groups, House Bill 2127, would bar cities and counties from passing regulations — and overturn existing ones — that go further than state law in a broad swath of areas including labor, agriculture, natural resources and finance. It passed the Texas House by a vote Wednesday after clearing an initial vote the previous day. Also gone is Amarillo state Sen. Kel Seliger, a business-oriented Republican who had an independent streak and would sometimes tank legislation supported by Patrick.
Brent Money beats Jill Dutton in rematch for Texas House seat - The Texas Tribune
Brent Money beats Jill Dutton in rematch for Texas House seat.
Posted: Tue, 05 Mar 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Tornado threat continues after 4 injured, hundreds of homes damaged
“Texas doesn’t typically wait on Washington to solve our problems for us,” Turner said. The Burrows and Creighton bills are seen as the broadest attack yet in Texas Republican leaders’ efforts to erode the authority of large urban areas often controlled by Democrats — a battle they’ve been waging for the better part of the past decade. The bill’s opponents — which include Democrats, local leaders, advocates for low-income workers and environmental groups — see a major power grab in the making that would prevent local officials from responding to their communities’ needs. “I have never been as excited about a session as I am about this session,” he said. In the Senate, Patrick, who won reelection in November for another four-year term, welcomed senators back to the chamber cheerily.
Ducking or dodging? No political debate set for Phelan, Covey ahead of runoff
Preliminary information suggests that two "strong, rare tornadoes" touched down in Douglas County, Chris Franks with the National Weather Service said during a press briefing on Saturday. The National Weather Service found evidence of EF-2 and EF-3 tornado damage there following Friday's storms, Franks said. A moderate risk -- level 4 out of 5 -- is in the outlook for parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri Saturday, with storms expected to flare up again in the afternoon and evening across a huge area of the country.
Unlike other state legislatures, the House rules do not formally recognize majority or minority leaders. The unofficial leaders are the Republican Caucus Chairman and the Democratic House Leader, both of whom are elected by their respective caucuses. The Speaker of the House is the presiding officer and highest-ranking member of the House. The Speaker's duties include maintaining order within the House, recognizing members during debate, ruling on procedural matters, appointing members to the various committees and sending bills for committee review. 8038, the so-called “sweetener” package, including the bill to force CCP divestiture from TikTok, of which I was an original cosponsor in the House. However, this measure was packaged with the REPO Act to seize assets to fund Ukraine, which could further implicate the U.S. in the conflict and further undermine America's dominance of the international financial system.
Nick Maddux, a general consultant for Covey, in a statement Thursday reiterated the campaign's frustration with Phelan over the debate and took issue with the arrangements for the April 1 offer from the news stations and over its potential moderator. "David Covey’s habit of telling lies, and repeated attempts at gaslighting Southeast Texans into believing them, are all qualities that make him the best candidate for the position of a snake oil salesman — not State Representative for House District 21," Wittman said. Criticizing and down playing Patrick's and Paxton's interest in the race, Phelan over the past month has gone on the offensive against Covey, painting his challenger as being solely responsible for keeping voters from hearing the candidates debate. In the March 5 primary, Covey bested Phelan by roughly 3% of the vote in House District 21, along the Texas Gulf Coast, forcing Phelan to become the first House speaker to face a runoff since the 1970s. Burrows’ bill “is the very definition of big government,” Turner, the Grand Prairie Democrat, said on the House floor.
Severe weather left a trail of destruction in the Heartland on Friday with 83 reports of tornadoes across five states. The most recent Texas House speaker to be ousted in his own party's primary was Rayford Price, a conservative Democrat, in 1972. He was defeated by a progressive Democrat, Fred Head, who was a sitting House member who moved to Price's district to challenge the speaker, according to "The House Will Come to Order," a history of the Texas House speakership published in 2010. "Dade Phelan has dodged debates since the beginning of the race for Texas House District 21," Covey said on Thursday in announcing his newest campaign ad. "Why? Dade Phelan can’t defend his liberal record to the people of Southeast Texas." "It’s been 19 days since Ducking David Covey started hiding from SETX voters by REFUSING a local televised debate and for 19 days, Ducking David has neglected to accept the invitation, negotiate, or answer to House District 21 voters," Phelan posted to X in early April.
At the most conservative end of the House GOP ideological spectrum is a set of 15 representatives ranging from Patterson to Terri Leo-Wilson of Galveston. As a group, these 15 representatives are significantly more conservative than more than three-fourths of their fellow Republican legislators. Patterson is significantly more conservative than all 83 of his fellow Republicans (100%) while Leo-Wilson is significantly more conservative than 63 of her 83 GOP colleagues (76%). One of the basic principles of the American workplace is that a hard day’s work deserves a fair day’s pay. A cornerstone of that promise is the Fair Labor Standards Act’s (FLSA) requirement that when most workers work more than 40 hours in a week, they get paid more.
"Instead, he is making up excuse after excuse to avoid facing me directly." While Phelan has accused Covey of "ducking" the debate, Covey has returned fire in kind, saying Phelan is "dodging" an opportunity to address voters' concerns ahead of the May 28 runoff election. Ultimately, opponents of the bills worry that if the bills pass, cities and counties will be powerless to tackle problems plaguing their communities — and that a disinterested Legislature won’t fill the vacuum. Standalone and narrower legislation that targets local labor regulations, like Senate Bill 130 by state Sen. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels, has already cleared the upper chamber. Many Democrats raised those issues during the House debate and tried to carve out a range of local labor protections by amending the bill, but their efforts failed.
In a speech to the Senate, Abbott expressed unprecedented anticipation for the session to begin, saying lawmakers had a “once in a generation” opportunity to chart the course for the state because of its budget surplus. Senators lauded him as a “man of faith” and a workhorse legislator with expertise in various subjects, including veterans affairs, energy and business. Patrick embraced Hancock in a hug after he took the oath as president pro tem. In a speech, Hancock thanked his son-in-law, Greg Cox, for donating his kidney to him. Phelan guided the House through the 2021 legislative sessions, which some observers called “the most conservative” in state history.
Kelly Hancock, a North Richland Hills Republican who appeared to be on the outs with Patrick last session after refusing to go along with his push to claw back billions of dollars made by energy providers during the 2021 winter freeze, was elected president pro tem of the Senate. Hancock, first elected to the Senate in 2013 after serving six years in the House, received a kidney transplant last summer after being diagnosed with a rare genetic kidney disease. He replaced one-term speaker Dennis Bonnen, who retired after becoming embroiled in a secret recording scandal in 2019 in which he bashed members of his own party. Political scientists have for decades used roll-call votes cast by members of the U.S. Congress to map their places on the Liberal-Conservative scale along which most legislative politics now takes place. This ranking of the Texas House members does the same thing, by drawing on the 2,769 non-lopsided roll-call votes taken during the 2023 regular session.
