Is There A Best Primary Candidate In Texas-31 This Cycle?

John Carter (R-TX) is very right-wing-- but his district no longer is

TX-31 has a misleading PVI that hasn't kept up with reality. R+10 doesn't give you a good idea of where this district north of Austin is anymore. Most of the voters live in Williamson County, which basically went blue last year. Williamson Co. was still Trump country in 2016. He won the county 104,029 (51.9%) to 84,252 (42.0%). Districtwide, he did even better, winning it 53.5% to 40.8%. Bell County is still Republican but far fewer TX-31 voters live there. Last year came a reckoning for the Trump-GOP. Seemingly out of the blue, MJ Hegar almost beat John Carter, holding him to just 50.6%. And Beto won the county outright-- 105,850 (50.8%) to Ted Cruz's 99,857 (48.0%).

The district includes Austin suburbs like Round Rock, Cedar Park, Hutto and Georgetown, as well as Killeen/Ft. Hood and Temple up north. About a quarter of the population is Hispanic, 10% is African-American and there is also a substantial and growing Asian-American population.

After Carter proved himself so weak last year, he drew 2 primary opponents and 9 Democratic opponents. (Hegar, who probably would have beaten him next year, foolishly decided to run for the Senate nomination, along with around a dozen other Democrats.) So how do you pick between the 9 Democrats who are running. Someone suggested that I look into Donna Imam, a computer engineer and businesswoman. Her platform looks great. Her healthcare plank is epic and seeks to accomplish 7 goals.

• Establishes a single-payer plan that fortifies and accelerates Medicare for All (M4A)
• Scales healthcare infrastructure to cover everyone in the US
• Drastically lowers the cost of healthcare and prescription drugs
• Improves the quality of healthcare
• Decouples health insurance from employers
• Increases the number of healthcare professionals
• Reduces health and maternal health disparities experienced by Black Americans

She has similarly impressive planks she calls Education for All and Real Pay For All that "requires that all businesses pay what it takes for an individual to live within a reasonable commute, save for retirement, and get access to career advancement leading to higher pay." I need to make sure she understands what a minimum wage is though since she wrote that "Setting a random number for minimum wage makes no sense! Pay must reflect where we work and live." That was the rationale that conservative Democrats in Congress used to vote against increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour. I liked the way Kai Kahele (D-HI) handled that question when I spoke with him last week. He said he would back $15 an hour as a minimum wage but that he would be more comfortable with $20 an hour.





Another Democrat in this is singer/songwriter Eric Hanke. His platform isn't bad either. He's for banning the sales of assault weapons, but his health care plank doesn't indicate he understands what Medicare-for-All is, even he's grappling to support it.

Jon Curtis looks like a Brooklyn hipster-- or a Texan. He's a Texan-- with an excellent platform, all the progressive stuff you want to see on first glance.

Another candidate, surgeon Murray Holcolm, describes himself as a progressive and his platform seems to back that up.

Dan Janjigian's website has a logo, a bunch of donate buttons and a photo of himself.

Omar Kadir is the Democratic Socialist in the race and he's emphasizing Medicare-for-All and the Green New Deal.

Roderick Kutch has a Facebook page but no campaign website I could finds I have no idea where he stands on anything, although he sounds woke on his Facebook page.

Jeremiah Landin has a standard one-size-fits-all, garden variety issues page that doesn't give much away about what kind of a congressman he would be and how he would vote.

Chrstine Mann ran in 2018 and was beaten by Hegar in the primary. She knows what's right and feels an incremental approach is the way to go, the way many Democrats in Texas do. Her issues page looks like pretty standard Democratic fare if not terribly exciting.

Interesting that none of the candidates appears to berunning as an open conservative. I guess I should find out which one the DCCC is secretly backing. That would give it away. Meanwhile, I need to try to figure out which one of these candidates belongs on the Taking Back Texas thermometer on the right. Any suggestions?

MJ Hegar Is Taking On John Cornyn For Senate This Time, Not John Carter In TX-31

As the lady says, Texans don't give up easy. Yesterday MJ Hegar, the former Air Force helicopter pilot who ran a strong race against John Carter in 2018, is taking on bigger game in 2020-- Texas senior Senator John Cornyn. The was the seat everyone wanted Beto to run for before launching is ill-advised presidential run. First a note: it's still possible that other strong Democratic candidate will get into the race-- San Antonio congressman Joaquín Castro has been hinting he'll run and former state Rep. Mark Strama could run. But, no matter what happens, MJ will be a contender. On paper, the state of Texas is an easier target for someone like her than TX-31 was. The PVI of TX-31 is a pretty prohibitive R+10. The state's PVI-- slightly less prohibitive, is R+8. Trump beat Hillary statewide 52.23% to 43.24%. He beat her in the 31st 53.5% to 40.8%.

Last year Hegar did a lot better than Clinton did in the district. The final score was 144,680 (50.6%) for Carter and 136,362 (47.7%) for Hegar. In fact, she won the bigger of the two counties in the district, Williamson, but not by enough (D+2) to overcome the powerful red-lean of Bell County (R+15).

So what about the 31st? It's certainly a DCCC target but with Hegar running for Senate, is there an obvious candidate? In fact, Carter is 78 and doddering and may decide too not even run again. One thing we can be certain of-- if the new DCCC regional vice chair, Marc Veasey is charged with recruiting a candidate, Carter will be able to go to sleep now and wake up reelected in 2020. One Williamson County progressive, Mike Clark, still not officially in the race, told me just moments ago that he plans to run for the Democratic nomination and that he expects several others to do likewise. We'll be hearing more from him soon but I can tell you that he supports raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, supports Pramila Jayapal's new and improved Medicare-For-All Act and backs the Green New Deal framework resolution as way to get busy tackling the climate change crisis.

By the way, in 2018 Hegar spent $4,998,676 to Carter's $1,943,447. There wasn't any big outside spending, although Pelosi's PAC put in $138,738 and the DCCC spent $15,000. It won't be easy for anyone to outraise what Hegar accomplished, but this time the DCCC is paying attention and, at least in theory, someone probably woke up EMILY's List.

Private Prisons Want Trump's Zero Tolerance Agenda-- Can You Guess Why?

What a video! MJ Hegar is running for the Texas congressional seat that covers Williamson and Bell counties, TX-31, between Waco and Austin. It runs from Killeen in the north and Round Rock in the south. The PVI is a daunting R+10. Romney won it 59.6% to 38.3% and Trump won it 53.5% to 40.8%. Bell County includes part of Fort Hood, the largest American military base in the world. It's a traditionally Democratic district but Carter, can ultra-conservative Republican, has been in office since 2002. He never deviates from a hardline GOP approach. For example, on Thursday he voted for the extreme anti-immigration bill and for the far right Agriculture bill.

Carter is a backbencher you rarely hear about outside of his own district. He doesn't do anything except for for extreme right-wing proposals. His Trump adhesion score is 98.8%, the second highest in Congress after whip Steve Scalise. He's a member of the Tea Party Caucus. He's also a bit of a crook

On Thursday the Dallas Morning News revealed that Carter, along with John Culberson (R-TX) and Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX) have taken massive bribes from GEO and it's executives, the private prison company that stands to gain the most from Trump's "zero tolerance" policy that locks up huge numbers of border crossers and their children. GEO operates the private immigration detention facilities in Karnes City, Laredo, Pearsall and Conroe.

Culberson is facing a tough re-election race against Democrat Lizzie Fletcher. The race has been rated a ‘toss up’ by nonpartisan analyst Cook Political Report.

Culberson received the most funding from GEO out of Texas members of Congress, but GEO is also the top donor this cycle for U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, who received $32,400, and Round Rock Republican Rep. John Carter, who received $31,600.

Both Culberson and Cuellar serve on the House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee, which funds private immigration detention centers. Culberson is also the chairman of and Carter serves on the House Appropriations subcommittee on commerce, justice and science, which oversees funding for private prisons.

Cuellar’s campaign manager Colin Strother said that GEO is one of the largest employers in Cuellar’s district, and that Cuellar has not allowed campaign contributions to influence his decisions.

“If you live in a district in the state of Washington, you get boating money. If you live in a district in Nebraska, you get agriculture money. We have a district with lots of jail facilities that employ lots of people,” Strother said.

Culberson’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

Henry Cuéllar and Vicente Gonzalez were 2 of the 3 Democrats-- the other was another Blue Dog, Fireman Vela-- who refused to sign a bipartisan discharge petition to allow a DACA debate, killing it. Now we know why.

Another one of the largest groups that runs private immigration detention centers in the United States is CoreCivic. The company runs facilities in Houston, Laredo, Dilley and Taylor.

CoreCivic PACs have given less money to candidates than GEO, but still contributed to three Texans, according to OpenSecrets.org: Culberson with $11,000, McCaul with $3,500 and Cuellar with $1,500.

Thursday, the Houston Chronicle reported on the fate of the more than 2,400 children who are under 12 years old that the Trump regime separated from their parents and locked up in Texas.

“It’s chaos,” said Michelle Brané, director of migrant rights at the Women’s Refugee Commission, a national advocacy group. “Everything is just moving really fast … I am not convinced they have a plan for reunifying those they have separated.”

...Under Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, parents usually served just a few days of prison time for illegally crossing the border before going to immigration detention centers run by the Department of Homeland Security. From there, they can be quickly deported without their children. In one case, a Guatemalan father was deported and had no idea where his 18-month-old toddler was for five months until they were reunited in December.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement has said it is not routinely informed about how or when parents and children were separated and where the adults may be.

“You’re talking about 2,000-plus children scattered across America,” said U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Houston Democrat. “What a difficult challenge and our fear is that we lose one child.”

The sudden influx of so many very young children has overwhelmed the federal government, which has put out emergency calls for contractors across the nation to provide more bed space and recruit more foster parents. It has meant some children are not put in a foster home with a family, as has generally been the goal for “tender age” kids, but instead may stay for weeks and even months in a residential shelter intended for older children. Most child advocates believe this is not in the best interests of the children.

“Kids, particularly young kids, should be in a smaller, more community-based setting, as opposed to the larger scale institutional-like settings,” said Kathryn Kuennen, associate director of children's services with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which cares for unaccompanied minors.

I haven't talked to a Democratic congressional candidate who isn't concerned about this. Yesterday Randy Bryce, for one, was majorly pissed off. This is what he told his own supporters:

Yesterday, Melania Trump boarded a plane to visit the US-Mexico border, where over 2300 children have been separated from their parents, wearing a jacket that read on the back, "I really don't care. Do u?"

Yeah Melania, I really freaking care.

I care about everyday Americans. I care about hardworking families in Wisconsin and at the border. And millions of Americans, all across the country, stood up and showed that they care too.

But that isn't enough. While Trump may have signed an executive order, if you read the fine print, it doesn't solve the problem. All this order does is turn family separation into family incarceration. And to make matters worse, Donald Trump is still refusing to reunite the children the US has already separated from their parents under his watch.

We have to keep the pressure up because we have to make sure these families are released and reunited immediately. To do that, we need to demand an end to Trump's zero tolerance immigration policy.

Call your representatives now and demand they support an end to Trump's zero tolerance immigration policy. Dial (202) 224-3121 to reach the Capitol Switchboard and speak with your representative.

...We have to keep up the fight, because when we fight, we win.