Politics & Government

Dallas had 41 homicides in May, compared with 15 homicides in the same month the previous year. People are talking about why. Is it poverty? Is it meanness? Last Sunday evening, a woman was shot to death and four others injured in what police called a gun battle at Jim’s…

For the moment, at least, Texas sure does look a lot like a purple state. According to a poll from Quinnipiac University released Wednesday, President Donald Trump would have a significant fight on his hands with many of the top challengers for the Democratic nomination. Digging into the poll, the…

Last week a few readers posed a fair challenge to a Dallas Observer story by Stephen Young. The story confirmed that mayoral candidate Eric Johnson was anointed by a wealthy Dallas oilman looking for somebody to stop four-term City Council member Scott Griggs from getting elected mayor. The challenge posed…

Turns out there may have been a third Texas official who had more than a little to do with the state’s recently failed attempt to purge about 100,000 people from its voter rolls. According to emails made public Tuesday and first brought to light by San Antonio Express-News reporter Guillermo Contreras,…

For the literally hundreds of Dallas voters who are tuned in to the city’s municipal politics, Saturday’s mayoral and City Council runoffs have turned into entertaining scraps over the last week or so. There have been secret tapes, accusations of illegal electioneering and more Facebook fights than one could count. Scott…

Beto O’Rourke is starting to look a lot like a presidential also-ran. The former U.S. representative from El Paso, the darling of Texas liberals and national political media during his ultimately unsuccessful bid to take down Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018, has been relegated to the chasing pack for…

Through the first week of May, the Dallas City Council race in downtown, Uptown and Oak Lawn was relatively quiet. Incumbent Philip Kingston had easily won reelection in 2015 and 2017. The Dallas Morning News had endorsed one of his opponents, David Blewett, but that was hardly a shock. The paper’s…

Texas’ state government is still, just as it has been for a couple of decades, dominated by Republicans. The GOP holds every statewide elected office and big majorities in both chambers of the Legislature. Twenty-three of the state’s 36 U.S. House representatives are Republicans. Texas is still severely conservative, no…

Just as quickly as it came onto the scene in January, the 86th Texas Legislature faded into the background Monday night, closing up shop for the next two years. With Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s tweeted promise that he would not call a special session, Texans can rest easy knowing that…

Victor Vital, the lawyer who represented Dallas City Council member Philip Kingston before the city’s ethics advisory commission this week, won a victory even harder to achieve than a favorable verdict in court. In court you have the rule of law. The ethics commission, on the other hand, is sort…

Dallas City Council member Philip Kingston did nothing wrong when he advocated for zoning changes to make building and renting garage apartments easier in Dallas before building a garage apartment on his own property, Dallas’ Ethics Advisory Commission decided Tuesday. Kingston was under fire after an anonymous member of the…

One could be forgiven for not noticing that Texas Secretary of State David Whitley, the man behind the attempted voter purge that drew so much local, state and national media attention during the first half of 2019, exited the political stage Monday afternoon. It was Memorial Day, after all, and…

There have been times, during the five years that I’ve spent at the Observer, that I’ve been surprised when a subject provoked hate mail or Facebook comments from you, our lovely readers. The ad hominems, for instance, fly far more frequently than I ever would’ve thought after articles about the…

David Blewett is not Philip Kingston. If you aren’t Blewett’s wife, one of his seven kids or The Dallas Morning News editorial board, that’s probably all you know about him, but Blewett wants people to know he’s more than that. To that end, and in the interest of pulling together as…

The runoff campaign in the District 14 East Dallas City Council race is a mirror of the citywide runoff for mayor. In both contests, a challenger backed by the business community accuses a long-term City Hall incumbent of being a jackass. It’s the jackass question that I have a particular…

First I was confused. Too many great Democrats running for president. But then I saw the Fox poll: Biden beats Trump by 11 points. I said that’s it. Biden’s my man. Then I watched Beto O’Rourke’s town hall the other night on CNN. Now I’m confused again. I do have…

Attention all Dallas Lost Cause fetishists: Dallas’ Robert E. Lee statue, the same one you so desperately tried to keep on its pedestal in Oak Lawn, can now be yours, assuming you win an auction with a low, low opening bid of $450,000. That’s right, thanks to a 12-3 Dallas…

George Hale is a journalist, an occupation that confers on him no special legal status beyond what any American citizen enjoys and may even, on any given day, rate him a little lower. Being a reporter has taught him that somebody at some point will always want to shut him…

All this because San Antonio didn’t want a Chick-fil-A in its airport. The Texas House of Representatives signed off on Texas Senate Bill 1978 on Monday, saving Texas Republicans from their worst fears about religious discrimination or opening the state’s LGBTQ community up to further discrimination, depending on who’s talking…

Texas likely won’t have to wait on the courts to fix its 4-year-old revenge porn law. Sunday afternoon, the Texas Senate voted unanimously to support a change to the law that attempts to protect third parties’ free-speech rights while allowing the statute to retain its teeth. “One out of every…

Last week, the Texas Senate threw the state’s Confederate fetishists a bone. Spurred in part by Dallas’ votes to get rid of the Robert E. Lee statue from the park that used to be named after the treasonous general and remove the towering Confederate war memorial from Pioneer Park near…