Ken Paxton Takes Manhattan
The attorney general has done everything in his power to avoid being in a courtroom. Then came the Trump trial.
Christopher Hooks is a former senior editor at Texas Monthly. Raised in Austin, he has been writing about Texas since 2013, for publications including the Atlantic, Gawker, GQ, Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Texas Observer, and the Washington Post. For Texas Monthly, he has written about redevelopment battles in El Paso; a congressional race in Amarillo; a wet/dry election in Texarkana; a Black Lives Matter rally in Vidor; and a water sommelier in Harlingen. He is probably currently somewhere between those five points.
The attorney general has done everything in his power to avoid being in a courtroom. Then came the Trump trial.
The “Texas Miracle” loses some of its magic as Oracle announces it’s moving its new HQ out of Austin and Tesla lays off nearly 2,700 workers.
Donald Trump and Joe Biden cruised to victory, the Democrats chose Colin Allred to challenge Ted Cruz, and Dade Phelan is heading to a runoff.
The Speaker governs as an old-school conservative—a crime for which right-wing Republicans are determined to banish him.
A constellation of right-wing special interests and vengeful state officials is striving to shape the Texas House in its image, in part by targeting independent-minded Republican lawmakers.
House leadership–backed Jill Dutton defeated anti-impeachment voucher proponent Brent Money in a special Texas House election.
Competing factions of the GOP have turned a small-stakes Texas House runoff into an all-out proxy war.
Long thought of as a presidential contender, the Texas governor has endorsed the former president—and supplicated for his favor.
For a long time, Texas Republican chairman Matt Rinaldi couldn’t win elections. Now he wants to decide them—by exacting revenge on opponents within his party.
After right-wing activist Jonathan Stickland hosted Nick Fuentes in his office, many in the GOP have attacked Stickland’s critics.
House managers couldn’t get more than 14 votes, below the needed 21 votes to convict, on any of the sixteen impeachment counts.
Countless right wingers could do the attorney general's job more effectively, but none would so reliably serve the interests of one faction in the Texas GOP's civil war.
His victory in the 1994 governor’s race wasn’t the election that really transformed the state.
The state Senate’s vote on Paxton’s impeachment will proceed independently from his criminal case. But the outcomes are interlinked.
The Texas GOP, which once advocated for a more humane immigration policy, is wedded to Operation Lone Star despite its exorbitant costs and failures.
The state senator was little known until last year, when the massacre in Uvalde, in his district, thrust him into the spotlight.
The governor has long suffered from the reputation that he’s a policy lightweight. He’s turning it around this year in five easy steps.
Our scorecard of the Eighty-eighth Texas Legislature’s noisy scoundrels and quiet heroes.
The Texas House has voted to impeach the attorney general. After nearly eight years under indictment—during which he won two elections—why now?
The gun bills most likely to pass aren’t restrictions but those that further protect firearm ownership.
Governor Greg Abbott wants to overrule a jury’s conviction of Daniel Perry, who murdered a man at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020.
The rhetoric at the former president’s rally hearkened back to the fringe, anti-government messaging of the nineties Texas right wing.
The lawmaker from Frisco has rallied right-wingers by promising to remove “sexually explicit” books from shelves. But he may lose them by targeting a beloved Texan classic.
The lieutenant governor has consolidated power in the Legislature and exercises near-total control of his chamber. Will anyone challenge him?
Texas lawmakers say they won’t let the attorney general settle a lawsuit using taxpayer money, but they’re letting him avoid oversight.
The ways of the Texas Legislature are confoundingly weird. Here’s a guide to the madness.
By Christopher Hooks and Forrest Wilder
On T-shirts and bumper stickers, the flag that flew during the Texas Revolution has had its cannon replaced by an AR-15. Would our ancestors approve?
From John Connally to Lina Hidalgo, these leaders have made Texas the bellwether state for the nation.
By Christopher Hooks and Texas Monthly
Like Bill Hobby, Dan Patrick has made the most of an inherently powerful position.
State leaders used to invite coverage of their activity. Now the Texas Legislature is making reporting more difficult than ever.
The Central Texas representative who is helping block Kevin McCarthy’s ascent to Speaker of the House has a long history of obstructionism.
The former president’s rally in Robstown was just like all his others in Texas, but he still commands state leaders’ attention.
The Texas governor’s plan has been adopted by Ron DeSantis in Florida, and it has grown crueler as it spreads.
The conservative legal luminary, famous for the Clinton impeachment and his leadership of Baylor, mistook piety for doing what’s right.
After the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, state Republicans near-unanimously lined up behind the former president—before details of the investigation left them silent.
“Your article may be an epitaph,” the then-president of the Houston Audubon Society told the writer.
Observers cite the party’s convention as evidence that state Republicans have gone “full MAGA.” But if anything, MAGA folks are following Texas.
After ten Texans were murdered at Santa Fe High School in 2018, the Legislature passed seventeen school safety bills. They didn’t work.
State leaders have campaigned in 2022 on saving Texas children from threats real and imagined. All the while, we’ve been selling them out.
Former Texas legislator Rick Green has built a marketplace for conservative stand-up—and proselytizing.
. . . and other key Texas Lege results from the primary runoffs.
The state GOP long opposed new regulations on corporations. Then Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick launched a crusade against “woke” businesses.
The former president played the usual hits at a rally Saturday, but rock musician Ted Nugent found new lows.
Democratic leaders have predicted that the leaked draft decision will get Texas liberals to the polls. History provides caution.
How did the former governor become a leading advocate for psychedelics?
The Democratic gubernatorial candidate says he wants to have a dialogue with Texans of all persuasions. But in one rural community, Republicans worked to make sure he would have no place to talk or listen.
There’s a long tradition in Texas of moral panics over what schools are teaching kids. The newest iteration is particularly quaint.
William Martin’s journey from Rice professor to Billy Graham expert began with a simple assignment, one that would alter his life for decades to come.
At an event of the group of “GLBT” conservatives in Houston, speakers studiously avoided discussion of their party’s anti-trans policies.
Beyond Beto O’Rourke, the candidates on the party’s statewide slate are short on experience in elective office and in statewide campaigns.