POLITICS

After Decades in Power, Texas Republicans Campaign on Affordability For years, Greg Abbott built his political brand around border security, school choice, public safety, and an increasingly aggressive conservative agenda. Legislative sessions revolved around immigration, Operation Lone Star, parental rights, and repeated clashes with the federal government. Affordability existed in the background, although it rarely occupied center stage. Now it does. Abbott's reelection cam

DOJ Says Egg Producers Manipulated Prices During Election Years By 2024, eggs had become more than breakfast. They had become one of the defining symbols of the presidential race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Every trip to the grocery store came with another reminder of inflation, and a carton of eggs became one of the easiest ways to measure the rising cost of living. Now, the federal government says there was more going on behind those prices. The U.S. Department

Daughter Says Cuban Mother Has Spent Eight Months in ICE Detention Despite Dismissed Removal Proceedings Xiomara Companioni González walked into what her family says was a routine immigration check-in on Nov. 13, 2025. According to her daughter, Yaimi Yanet, she never walked back out. ICE detained the 63-year-old Cuban national, and she has remained in federal custody while her immigration case continues through the legal system. Court records confirm she has remained detaine

New Poll Delivers Bad News for Trump The warning lights flashing around President Donald Trump no longer come from political opponents alone. Polling data now delivers its own verdict, carrying numbers few presidents welcome as the midterm campaign accelerates. A new CNN poll places Trump's job approval at 34 percent, matching the lowest rating of his political career. The same survey finds 73 percent of Americans believe he focuses on the wrong priorities. Among Republicans,

The Feds Found a New Kind of Terrorist A government analyst in Philadelphia flagged a Facebook meme joking about sabotaging AI data centers as a potential domestic terrorism concern. According to Wired, internal government records show federal analysts have begun tracking what they describe as "anti-technology violent extremism." The paper trail begins with NSPM-7. President Donald Trump signed the memorandum in September, weeks after Charlie Kirk's assassination, under the t

Texas voters used to have a shortcut. Checking one box locked in the whole party's slate, and you never had to read another name on the ballot. It was fast, easy and convenient. Republicans killed that shortcut in 2017, during Donald Trump's first term as president. House Bill 25 was quietly passed by the Republican-controlled legislature that year. Governor Greg Abbott signed it without the fanfare he usually reserves for culture-war victories. The straight-ticket option dis

Washington’s Closet Has Always Been Political Hunter Biden wandered into one of Washington’s oldest forbidden conversations this week, and Don Lemon did not exactly rush to change the subject. During a July 22 appearance on The Don Lemon Show, Lemon asked Biden, “Why are Republicans obsessed with gay people, men, especially?” Biden offered a theory rarely stated so plainly in political conversation. “You know why? And this is a serious statement,” Biden replied, before claimi

Donald Trump sold his immigration crackdown with a familiar economic promise: remove undocumented workers from the labor market and American workers will have more opportunities. The economics have proved considerably less cooperative. A 2026 working paper distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research examined communities exposed to increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity during Trump’s second term. Researchers found that as likely undocumented men di

The World Cup Had One Champion But Someone Else Tried to Win the Spotlight Spain spent years earning the right to lift the 2026 FIFA World Cup trophy. President Donald Trump apparently thought he had earned a spot in the victory photo. If you've followed Trump over the years, none of this came as a surprise. He has long demonstrated a remarkable ability to turn virtually any event, whether it belongs to him or not, into a stage where the spotlight somehow drifts in his direct

Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez identify as Democrats, and Americans generally respect how people identify. Their party affiliation says Democrat, and nobody needs to deadname either congressman a Republican. Their congressional voting records, unfortunately, keep complicating their promise to democracy. Three neighboring congressional districts in South Texas share similar political terrain. Their populations are overwhelmingly Hispanic, their communities live with the re

Everyone knows about the raids, but fewer people are tracking the paperwork behind them. Wednesday morning, unmarked vehicles circled unsuspecting subjects, carrying them away in handcuffs. The raids that people see on the news are now happening in Starr County. Residents believed this would never reach them. What's landing in Starr County didn't start there. It started with a plan built in Washington, long before any vehicle circled a parking lot in Rio Grande City looking f

Ken Paxton stood behind a podium in Fort Worth on Tuesday, flanked by more than a dozen sheriffs in cowboy hats. "While we have been working to support law enforcement, there have been others working to undermine it," he said, aiming the remark at Senate opponent James Talarico over a 2020 donation to the Austin Justice Coalition. A reporter offered Paxton a chance to respond to The New York Times investigation about multiple properties he owned. Paxton asked that the questio

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not attend the vote on the Basic Law: Torah Study at all. Two days later he showed up for the second bill, took his seat, then left before lawmakers cast their votes. Opposition members shouted "shame" and "go" as he walked out. Both bills passed that week, both years in the making, both centered on military service for ultra-Orthodox men. The first enshrines Torah study as a fundamental value in Israel's Basic Law, the constitutional lay

Remember when we were told those giant orange buoys would secure the border? Texas remembers. So does the Rio Grande. For days now, South Texans have watched surreal images of enormous orange floating barriers, some weighing nearly a ton, drifting helplessly down the Rio Grande, piling against international bridges, disrupting commercial traffic, forcing emergency declarations, and turning one of the busiest trade corridors in North America into an obstacle course. What was m

The Trump administration filed its first application with the Alien Terrorist Removal Court on July 15. Congress created this tribunal in 1996 and no administration used it until now. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act established the court and authorizes the chief justice to appoint five district judges from five different circuits to decide whether noncitizens accused of terrorism-related activity should be removed from the country. The mechanism sat untouche

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not attend the vote on the Basic Law: Torah Study at all. Two days later he showed up for the second bill, took his seat, then left before lawmakers cast their votes. Opposition members shouted "shame" and "go" as he walked out. Both bills passed that week, both years in the making, both centered on military service for ultra-Orthodox men. The first enshrines Torah study as a fundamental value in Israel's Basic Law, the constitutional lay

A post on Threads has gone viral: immigration is paperwork law, and nobody should die over paperwork. No caveats can soften that sentence, and none are needed. It sets a moral floor that predates any statute. The floor has needed restating all year, in different states, under different agencies. An ICE officer fatally shot a man on Canal Street in a predominantly Latino neighborhood of Houston in July, prompting LULAC to demand release of all body cam, dash cam, and bystander

The 2026 midterms are still months away, yet Washington is already behaving like it's the night before Election Day. The consultants are consulting. The pollsters are polling. The fundraising emails are multiplying faster than mosquitoes after a South Texas rain. And governing? Well... they'll circle back to that after the campaign. House Republicans are pushing an early government funding vote, a move that supporters call strategic and critics call political theater. The tru

Greg Abbott spent years courting data center developers with tax exemptions and a permissive interconnection framework, treating incoming investment as an unconditional good. As recently as late 2025, he described Texas as the "epicenter of AI development." In June, he sent a formal letter to the Public Utility Commission and ERCOT directing both agencies to immediately shield residential ratepayers from data center infrastructure costs. By July 1, at a campaign event in Bull

Sean Teare serves as the Harris County District Attorney in Houston, a Democrat elected to oversee prosecutions across the county. Before taking office, he spent close to twenty years in law enforcement, including more than a decade teaching cadets at the Houston Police Department Academy. That background now places him at the center of two competing investigations into a federal agency operating largely outside his jurisdiction. He told CBS News this week the vehicle-stop ta