Politics & Government

Justina Walford says one big reason she is running for the Dallas City Council Dwaine Caraway left in August for a stay in the federal penitentiary was the fact that she wasn’t thrilled with his potential replacements. “I was not noticing people I admire to step up to run,” Walford…

Sen. Ted Cruz has a new initiative up and running in his re-election campaign against U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, blasting his challenger for his supposed animosity toward police and touting Cruz’s own deep ties to law enforcement. One of the cops prominently featured by Cruz has a backstory worth paying…

The timing was just chance, but couldn’t have been more appropriate. As last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh stirred up talk about teenage sexual assault, blackout drinking and the dangers faced by young people, a group of Dallas teens on Saturday used dramatic performances…

The Observer’s Facebook page, thanks to our thoughtful, engaged readers, is one of the last bastions of civility on the internet. The same can’t be said for the rest of the social network, which remains today, as it ever was, a cesspool. Between the posts from former classmates who, in…

Throughout 2017 and 2018, your good friends here at the Observer have strained to make sense, any sort of sense, out of the Senate race between Sen. Ted Cruz and El Paso U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke. We’ve talked with O’Rourke about Cruz’s plan to have notorious drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzman…

The second debate between Texas Senatorial candidates Ted Cruz and Beto O’Rourke, previously set for Sunday night, has been postponed, the University of Houston announced Friday. Rather than taking on his challenger for another hour, Cruz will remain in Washington to participate in Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination process over…

Friday night, for a couple of hours at least, the sideshow will be center stage in Texas politics. After months of the Senate race between incumbent Ted Cruz and U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke sucking all the air out of the room, former Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez will get her…

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested nearly 100 people during a recently concluded 10-day sting targeting North Texas and Oklahoma, the agency announced Wednesday, continuing a trend  in Texas throughout 2018. According to ICE, its “enforcement action” was intended to sweep up “criminal aliens and immigration violators” in the area…

With the HQ2 announcement still shining in the distance — Jeff Bezos said earlier this month that it would be made by the end of the year — Dallas got a decent-sized chunk of good Amazon-related news Wednesday. By a 14-0 vote, the City Council signed off on a deal…

It took 20 years to kill the plan for a high-speed toll road on top of the river that runs through the center of the city. The reward for that long divisive struggle is a moment of relative calm when we can think about what actually should happen with the…

Monday night, a group of Washington D.C. activists let Texas Senator Ted Cruz and his wife Heidi Cruz know just how unhappy they were about the senator’s strong support for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Protesters surrounded the Cruzes at Fiola, an upscale Italian restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue near the…

Six people showed up to a protest outside Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s Dallas office Monday, demanding he call for Brett Kavanaugh’s withdrawal as Supreme Court nominee. Six people too many according to the building’s disgruntled security, who asked the small group to move off the property. A minute later and…

There is no denying that Michael Avenatti is an attention hound. He’s leveraged the notoriety of his biggest client, Stormy Daniels, into repeated media appearances, a huge following on social media and a probably pretend bid for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president. Somehow, he’s now involved in the suspension…

One of the most intriguing sideshows of Texas’ mid-term elections is basically over before it opened, thanks to a special election upset in the Rio Grande Valley. Until Republican businessman Pete Flores beat former Democratic U.S. Rep. Pete Gallego in an emergency special election to fill the last two years-plus…

To paraphrase former Arizona Cardinals head coach Dennis Green, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke are who we thought they were. That was the biggest takeaway from the Senate candidates’ debate showdown at SMU on Friday night. Cruz displayed his patented blend of know-it-all smarminess, along with…

GOP Sen. Ted Cruz faces off against Democratic challenger U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke tonight at SMU in their first of three debates, and no doubt Texans everywhere will be glued to their screens to learn the answer to the race’s most pressing question: Will O’Rourke say the word? You know…

The picture at City Hall is coming into focus. Almost two years ago the old city manager got kicked out. It had become too obvious that he was subverting the public interest in favor of a small cabal of private interests. We got a new guy. His job was to…

For Beto O’Rourke supporters, Tuesday had to feel a little bit like the day the air got let out of the balloon. The El Paso Democratic U.S. representative trying to take down GOP Sen. Ted Cruz got his first piece of serious bad news in weeks. O’Rourke, according to a…

It’s a regular complaint from candidates every election: Someone, most likely their wicked opponent, is stealing the candidate’s signs from roads and yards. Jana Lynne Sanchez, the Democrat running to represent Texas’ 6th Congressional District, has come up with a plan to fight back. Her campaign recently started spraying road…

Monday afternoon, the Republican Attorney Generals Association (RAGA) sent out a proud email, patting one their most prominent members on the back. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has a new op-ed out, you see, in which he tells the Corpus Christi Caller-Times’ audience all the things he’s done to combat…

Sen. Ted Cruz is still the favorite in his race for re-election. He’s got plenty of cash on hand, has yet to trail his challenger, El Paso U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, in any publicly released poll and, according to the number-crunchers at Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, has about a 66 percent…