You You You Declaring war on the Texas lottery of all things. Welcome to The Texas Take, the number one political podcast in the great state. I'm Scott Braddock and he's Jeremy Wallace. His work, of course, is always at HoustonChronicle.com and you can find the inside story on Texas politics at Quorum Report. Jeremy, let me start with some reminiscing this week. And there's a reason I'm doing this. So you grew up in San Antonio.
Right in San Antonio. I grew up in the Houston area, as everyone knows who follows along with what I do. I didn't grow up in Houston, and no one from Houston would say that I grew up anywhere near Houston, but it was in the Houston media market. I was in Wharton County. on a farm not far from Matagorda Bay, actually, about 40 minutes from Matagorda Bay, right? And so I grew up watching the TV stations out of Houston. And again, there's a reason I'm telling you about this.
And going back to the old days of Houston TV, because the TV stations there, they won't like me saying this, but it was so much better back in the day. And you mentioned when we were talking earlier today that growing up in San Antonio, that y'all had a station that y'all watched all the time. Which one was it? Yeah, we watched Ken's News all the time. You had Dan Cook, the Express News writer, who was also a sportscaster. Oh, gotcha. Okay.
you said to me that if it didn't happen on Ken's, if it wasn't there, if it didn't show up on Ken's, then it just didn't happen in San Antonio. As far as, as far as y'all were concerned, right? As far as the news. Now I can tell you that back in the day in Houston, um, The station that had the biggest characters was – and Evan mentioned in his household they watched KPRC Channel 2. But by the time Evan was growing up, what I'm about to say wasn't the case.
Back then, I'm talking 70s and 80s, back in the day, the big characters. I mean, you think about Marvin Zendler and Wayne Deltrofino. who would have been so marvin zindler would have been the guy you know on your side you know the guy who's over there you know talking about certain businesses that are screwing people over or whatever and wayne dolcefino would have been the guy just shoving you know finding a politician somewhere like at their house and shoving a microphone in their face
In fact, I knew a guy who helped run the communications department for a school district in the Houston area, and he had a whole training that he would do for school principals and teachers. what to do if Wayne Dolcefino showed up on your yard. And basically the answer was just call the main office and don't go outside. So they had that going on.
Dave Ward, who was one of these larger-than-life news anchors. He was the news anchor on KTRK for 50 years, I think. Something like that. It was crazy, legendary stuff. And every city has their version of this. But in Houston, it was extra. Extra nuts. Let me give you the example here. So you know, and this got statewide attention and national attention. It ended up in a movie, right? A big Hollywood production. Marvin Zindler was the reporter who busted the chicken ranch.
This is the Evan. Do you even know this phrase? It was a house of ill repute. And everyone knows about the location in LaGrange because that ended up being the song by ZZ Top, right? So people know what I'm talking about. But did you know, Jeremy, there was also a location in Seeley? Right outside of here. So listen to this. I went back and pulled this flashback to the 70s. I think this is 1972 or 73. Marvin Zindler reporting on this. this house of prostitution.
that was still open and had been operating in texas for about a century it was the summer of 73 marvin had been working for channel 13 for only about six months when he got a tip from none other than the texas attorney general john hill It's illegal to operate a house of prostitution in Texas. Body houses are operating in both Silly and LaGrange. The house just outside of LaGrange had been operating for 129 years. The going price, 15 bucks, no frills attached.
I have a boarding house here. Is that all it is? It's enough. You're not operating in houses of prostitution? Whether I am or not doesn't come in the heading of your business. Past history shows they cannot function without someone in authority protecting them. Now that's before I was even... I was born in 1980. So that's 72 or 73. Marvin Zendler was still on television when I was a kid. And the thing he was really known for at that time...
He still did all the consumer reporting and all of that at that point, Jeremy. But he also did, and people loved this, Friday nights he would do the dirty restaurant report. He would tell you where there was, you know, I'll just, I'll warn people right out of the gate about what I'm going to say. You can skip right past this part if you want, but I wouldn't. This is some of the best stuff.
that we've ever honestly that we've ever talked about on the show he would talk about and what an appetizing thing to do on a friday when people are going to go out and try to have their weekend right he would talk about where they had found roaches in the kitchen rat feces near the food preparation stations and things like that, Evan. And he would always talk about the slime and the ice machine. In fact, there was a song that he would play on Channel 13 about the slime and the ice machine.
And he would always, at the end of his reports, he would always scream his name. And I found one of those examples where he had said, you know, some of these restaurants are just terrible. Listen to this. And believe me, some of those restaurants are so bad you can't believe it. Marvin Zendler!
Eyewitness News. Here's why I'm telling you all of this. You know who would have been on television in Houston at the same time as Marvin Zendler on a different station? I know where this is going. It would have been a sportscaster by the name of... Dan Patrick. Now, did you – he was on – let's see, KHOU. And he ended up leaving KHOU and opening his own sports bars. I don't know if the sports bars that Patrick ran ever ended up –
on Marvin Zindler's dirty restaurant and bar report, but I could do some research on that. But did you see Dan Patrick do his own little investigation of the Texas lottery this week? He put out a YouTube video. That in my mind, as I'm watching this, I'm thinking he's channeling Marvin Zindler.
You know, it sounds like he's the reporter who's on your side and looking out for you. So he did his investigation on this, and we'll get into the particulars here, but here's how he started. He was in Austin, and he went to the location. How much was this jackpot the other day? $80-plus million. The winner was announced on Monday. And it turned out that...
There was something that, at least in Patrick's estimation, the estimation of a lot of people seemed kind of fishy. So he just went to the location to check it out. So this is the location of Winner's Corner, where someone won $83 million on a Texas lottery ticket. And I had a question because Winner's Corner is also affiliated with a courier service who purchased the ticket.
It's Jack Pocket is the name of the courier service. Winner's Corner is the name of the retail outlet. Both affiliated are owned by DraftKings. So he goes into the store. And he said it doesn't look like the normal, the usual place that you would buy lottery tickets, like a convenience store where you've got all sorts of things that you could purchase. It's supposed to be a commercial establishment that sells everything. You have to sell something. Well, it looks like they sell.
Some games. Some games. Then he confronted the guy who's the manager who was standing behind the counter. Hey, Mark. Nice to meet you. Are you the manager? I am the manager here. So help me understand because... um we're looking at the lottery now in the legislature because they're up for sunset which means they have to be renewed so you sold an 83 million dollar ticket yesterday was that through a courier yes it was through a courier
Okay, and did the courier buy lots of tickets? Bring lots of tickets or one? I just processed tickets here. But did you process a lot from him? Were you here? I don't know. They don't tell us customer information or anything like that. They don't let us give out any information. I do have a media contact for y'all. If you would like to reach out to them. A lawyer will probably.
better but we'll see but anyway my question is so how do you know it was a courier then we are you're a courier yes so the courier owns the store so let's stop for just a second here what is he talking about i mean i i know what he's talking about jeremy but i don't think that this is something that is is widely understood the way people are playing the lottery now um for a lot of folks is not the way that most people would think of which is just go to the convenience store you know
down your money, get a lottery ticket and try to win. Instead, a lot of people are using these apps now. Well, they'll basically process the whole deal for you. And what they say, what these different companies say, one of them is Jackpocket, which he was talking about.
What they'll say is that you can pick your numbers and you can win and they'll just take care of it for you. And so because they're doing that for lots and lots of people, that means they're buying a lot of lottery tickets at once. And the way this looked to Dan Patrick seemed suspicious, but I know this was written about, I guess.
what, within the last year here, you know, at HoustonChronicle.com. And who was looking into it? Yeah, Eric Dexheimer at the Houston Chronicle has been doing a lot on this. You really kind of, you know, Google Dexheimer in the Houston Chronicle and Lottery and you'll see.
all the work he's done on this. Think of these courier services, the way they pitched themselves or told the legislature, consider them like DoorDash. What they do is they collect orders for people, go out and get the physical lottery tickets.
and then send the lottery tickets to people all over the globe, essentially. But somebody in Massachusetts obviously can't walk into a convenience store and buy a ticket. So that's how they pitch themselves. But what Dexheimer found out... what you're hearing dan patrick talk about there's machinery that is being operated in these places that the courier services used to
to buy all these tickets and to get all the combinations together. And so there's like a lot going on there. And last year, Dexheimer found that it was one of these, you know, The lottery ended up giving $95 million award out to one of these operations that ended up just buying every combination of ticket with help.
from people at the lottery commission and former people at the lottery commission. So you kind of get this kind of like, wait a minute, wait, who's getting these tickets now? And what's the lottery commission do to help other people? Get this. He just had a report out earlier this week, you know, talking about how it almost looks like they had kids working these, you know, machines, you know, in the back of some of these places, you know, on the state authorized terminals to.
get all these numbers out to print out all the tickets and stuff so you can see like it's kind of getting a little weird if not yeah feeling a little creepy yeah so patrick after he was done with his field reporting he went back to his office and said this after we left the shop and came back to the capitol i began thinking you might say well why hasn't the legislature done something about these courier services and these
retail units all being together because it just doesn't feel good it doesn't look right well we did last session the texas senate senator bob hall passed a bill 29 to 2. That's about as bipartisan as you can get with support to ban courier services. We sent it to the House and it died. It's time we take a deep look at these courier services.
and these retail units especially when they're owned by the same company because you deserve to know when you buy a lottery ticket that you can trust that everything is on the up and up and fair and then he said dan patrick No, he didn't say anything.
Anyway, so Jeremy, you see where he's going with this, that the Senate has tried to do something about the couriers. He did say in – as part of his report, in a different part of the report, he said, look, we're not saying that they're doing anything – illegal here.
Now, you had a Senate finance hearing in recent days in which one of our dear listeners, Senator Paul Betancourt, questioned the Lottery Commission about this and said, doesn't this look like something where you could have money laundering? And then someone was talking about whether or not they may have kids buying lottery tickets, which it doesn't look like that's actually anything that's going on. But it seems to me, Jeremy, where this is going, a few things. One.
is when we've talked about the potential expansion of gaming in Texas, whether it would be casinos or sports betting or any of that stuff. People keep asking me about this every week, so it keeps coming up. But the way that...
Patrick is talking about it in the Senate, seems like all that discussion is going in the opposite direction. Not that we would have an expansion of gaming, but maybe a crackdown on the gaming that we already have. So that's one thing. And then two, and look, the lottery is... It's gambling, right? I mean, I love when we act like we don't have gambling around here. We do. In fact, we have a giant gambling operation called the Texas Lottery.
But the other thing I think that's interesting in the mix here is that I don't think because I had a few people call me and say or text and say, hey, does this mean they're going to kill the lottery? That Patrick's out to kill the lottery and just not have the lottery. I don't think that it'll go that far. One thing that I'll just mention here as a point of – just for context is that Patrick's consultant –
the powerhouse Republican consultant, Alan Blakemore, who's also a lobbyist. One of his clients now is a company called, I've got it here, it's called Scientific Gaming. Scientific Gaming, if you look on their website, they run lotteries. And I can imagine they might want to run the Texas lottery. Now that you know who runs it now is a company called IGT. So for listeners who have ever gone to a casino where you would have seen the name IGT.
is all over slot machines, right? It's a big gaming company. They have the contract right now to run the Texas Lottery. And here's what I could imagine. There would be some attempt to quote unquote reform. the lottery, make some changes to the lottery. Patrick will probably want to change the entire commission and change out some people over there. But then also, I could imagine...
Someone making a play, I don't know, maybe scientific games, making a play to get that contract going forward to run this giant gaming operation that we have here. Yeah, anytime you have these legal... gambling options uh there are people who are going to try to manipulate those right we've known that through time this was the warning back in i think it was 91 when we legalized the lottery i just remember this conversation clearly back then uh where
The concern was, well, where will this go? And so you see what these courier services are using to try to game the system to favor people who have the money and the resources to kind of put into this, right? Yeah. bingo system, right? You know, bingo, you think of bingo halls all around Texas as you think of like, like, you know, you know, old ladies, you know, B-29 type stuff, right? You know, but it, but what it also is, is things that look like casinos, you know, that, you know,
where the slot machines are considered bingo games. But it looks like your slot machine anywhere else, but it's just set up differently, just a little bit differently than your traditional slot machine, but it's still kind of building off of the concept of it. And so you have, like, what you're seeing happen here with this lottery is there's clearly a hole here that, like, certainly Patrick has a problem with and a lot of other people. A lot of those, you know, those bingo hall turns.
casino-ish type things have run into trouble with attorney generals in the past. You go back to John Cornyn fighting some of these when he was the attorney general. It's been a history of the state to kind of go after some of them, at least. But there's a lot of them. You'll see them in your strip mall.
small parking lots all over the state of Texas, that stuff somehow gets to keep going on. But another important note, like you brought up DraftKings. Well, he brought it up in his report. Yeah, Patrick said that – wait, just to remind people, he said that the DraftKings –
actually owns one of these services that we're talking about here, which is JackPocket. Yep. Well, it's interesting. I'm not sure what all the connections will ultimately be in the end here, but people should know DraftKings is what bought...
Tillman Fertitta's Golden Nugget online gaming part. Because, of course, you know, there's no online gaming in the state of Texas. But, you know, Tillman Fertitta, the Houston billionaire, he owns Golden Nuggets in other states. And they had a sports, you know.
of betting thing that DraftKings ended up buying. I'm not sure how this will all fit into the discussion of DraftKings, you know, being part of all this stuff, but it's certainly going to be in the minds of some people going, whoa, you get this mega...
Republican donor, you know, kind of like has some relationship with draft connections and was actually a board member for a stretch. And so you're like, okay, so how's this all going to play out? This is a lot to unpack. So you can see if, if Patrick is serious.
about this. And again, keep an eye on the stuff that Eric Dexheimer has written. I think he's done a lot of the questions you heard from Paul Betancourt. You could hear the influence of that story and that collection of stories on what...
uh you know the question sounded like so you know keep an ear off for him because if you're going to see like you know he's been on top of this from the start he's the one who broke the 95 million dollar uh i'm going to call it a scam he's not doing it but like the the manipulation of that $95 million jackpot back, I think it's now almost two years ago now, but where, again, it was an outside group that was able to game the system.
to make sure that they could get access to it well i mean it's gaming the system or it's just figuring out how to beat the game yeah you know in the so in so what's it's interesting to me because all of this stuff gets real gray real fast i was in um uh just to just to back up your point on that it was in
Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago and walked right through Golden Nugget. What's in there? The DraftKings deal. So, I mean, it's all over the place. And when you talk about beating a game in gambling without getting too technical about it, It's this. It's like if you're playing blackjack. You know, blackjack is the most popular card game on earth, Evan. And did you know that you can beat it if you can do what? You can...
Count cards. Now, you have to be some kind of a genius to be able to do that. There's a movie that's just entertaining. It's called 21. It was the true story about these kids from MIT. who were recruited by their professor. They were good at math. So then he kind of brought them into a little blackjack club. And then on the weekends, they would go to Vegas and beat the game because they could count the cards. Here's the thing about that. Counting cards is not illegal.
in Nevada. So if you're in Las Vegas, you're counting cards, you can't get arrested for it, but the casino can ask you to leave. Or you know what else they would do? They would say, and this happens all the time, somebody's counting cards. and they're beating the game, they're beating blackjack, and the difference is, this is all, again, all gray area, but if you're beating the game, you're not gambling.
You know what's going to come out of the deck when they deal it to you. So you're not gambling anymore if you're counting cards correctly. So the host there or the sort of enforcer at the casino will come over to the person who's... clearly counting cards or they're suspected of counting cards, Evan, and what they'll do is they'll say, Mr. So-and-so, Mr. Wallace, we would like to invite you to play any game here at the casino that's not blackjack.
So they would say, go play the slots or go play roulette, which is, of course, just guess the number. But I could see this being like that where Patrick, as sort of trying to act like an enforcer here, is going to ask some of these. actors to, if they figured out how to beat the game, you know, it's just maybe a more neutral term than, you know, than gaming it or whatever, manipulating it or whatever. He may just ask them to leave.
Leave the casino, the giant casino that we have in Texas, which is the Texas lottery. So just something to keep an eye on. I got more text messages and messages on... Twitter and calls about this than anything else this week, Jeremy, with everything else going on. Some of that... I think is because a lot of the other things sound like a record on repeat. Let me tell you what I'm talking about. So you were in San Antonio. Was it on Monday? Yeah. On Monday night.
Greg Abbott. At San Antonio Christian School. School, okay. Greg Abbott was there. The governor, again, he's just on repeat with this stuff. about school vouchers. He's pushing the school vouchers, right? And now you have the House and Senate that are both...
filed their versions of this. And Abbott said to the crowd there, how many people were there roughly, Jeremy, if you had to guess? Yeah, probably like 200 people, 300, you know, mostly parents of students at the school. He said that the kids today... these kids today, he said these kids today are not being taught to love America. Well, the fact of the matter is that in too many schools today, kids are not educated like you and I were educated. And of course, that leads him.
to one of his greatest hits like i said it's like a record on repeat he said this again and you pointed it out uh on your twitter feed jeremy he has used this line over and over again probably if i had to guess He's used it about precisely one million times since he started pushing for vouchers. Schools are for education, not indoctrination. So all of that is the same.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We have heard that a million times, but here's something new. He also talked about Speaker Dustin Burroughs, newly elected leader of the House from Lubbock, Texas, who was there on stage with him. Tonight. It's the first time ever in the history of our great state that we've had a speaker of the Texas House of Representatives raise his hand and say, yes, we will pass school choice in the state of Texas.
When it comes to this topic, it's a rare moment of Abbott telling the truth. That is what happened. Burroughs said exactly that. Every family deserves access to high quality education. And if a parent is not satisfied. with their child's school, they should have the freedom to do something about it. The Texas House will vote to give you that freedom, and Governor Abbott will be signing that bill into law in June.
Burroughs also made this bold promise. He spoke for the Republican lawmakers in the Texas House and said they're going to pass this sucker. I'm proud to say the votes are there to do this in the Texas House. Now, Jeremy, at that event, did he, and I mean he, Abbott, get into the question of school funding and how much they're going to spend on public education, or was that reserved for later when he was at TPPF?
Yeah, he talked about it a little bit at that meeting. More in that general term, like where he kept, you know, he, you know, we... We just had this last week, obviously, about like, you know, will schools be defunded or not or the public schools? And he made that continued effort to try to walk that back a little bit and say, look, we're not going to defund.
public schools. These are separate tranches of money. Public schools are still going to get their funding, and this is going to be separate. And he keeps saying that it's separate like a road fund. It's like money for the roads won't be going to the schools. money for the private school, you know, ESA fund will not be going over here. So he did make that clarification. But you can see, like, you know, just the back of what you said, like, I normally wouldn't take my day off.
off on a Monday, a holiday day, to go all the way down to San Antonio. I love San Antonio. Always a good taco to be had. But I wouldn't go all the way down there if he was just going to say the same old shtick, right? By having Burroughs there, that made it a very different...
event right you know he had burrows there he had brad buckley there the education chair uh in the house you know both of them were on stage you know it had abbott putting Those guys end the game in a different way than we've seen, obviously, in the past. Yeah, so Abbott at Texas Public Policy Foundation's event this week, which I mentioned, did get into this question about whether schools are – the public education system that we have, those public schools, are they still going to be –
Well-funded, and he – this is interesting. We have the policymakers in the House and Senate talking about putting additional dollars into our schools. Abbott is saying it a little bit differently. Take a listen. When this session ends. We're going to be providing more funding for public education than ever before in the history of the state of Texas. We're going to pay the highest average teacher salary ever in the history of the state of Texas.
First student funding will be higher than it's ever been in the history of the state of Texas. At the same time, we're going to set aside enough that Texas will start. school choice program that will be the largest start to any school choice program in the history of the United States of America. You know, doing a school finance bill would be complicated enough without throwing in this stuff about
school vouchers. And so I can tell you that even after the Texas House, you know, the version that they're going to do on this came out on Thursday, it was made public yesterday. Some of the people who do this for a living, the school finance.
experts, the people who will go through this with a fine-tooth comb and figure it all out. As we are here at lunchtime on Friday, Jeremy, I can tell you they're still trying to figure it out. They're putting together, they'll have charts that are side-by-side comparisons of the Senate.
plan and the house plan, and they'll go through all of this stuff. School finance bills in and of themselves are so complicated mostly because of our geographic diversity in Texas. We have those schools that are out in places like... Presidio County out in the Big Bend area, which is the poorest county in the state. Their median income there, I think, is $20,000 a year.
Something like that. So we have places like that. And then we have places like River Oaks in Houston where the median income is a little higher than that. And so trying to give kids an equitable education in those two places.
And we have way more than those two places. But even if you're just trying to do it in those two places, it would be a challenge, right? And what happens on these school finance bills is that at some point – All of the members of the house, you've seen this before, Jeremy, all the members of, and it's.
This part of it is more pronounced in the House because there are 150 members who all have to look out for the school districts in their areas, and they all have different needs and have access to different resources. At some point, they will be given basically... a list of how their school districts will fare under the plan. It basically shows you who the winners and losers are. And it's not partisan. It's not ideological.
It's just, you know, my school district's getting, you know, it's getting screwed on this and their school district's doing great or vice versa. And so that's a big way that some of this stuff can fall apart. Now, in the House version that we got our first look at this week of this package of a school finance and voucher bill, and they're in separate bills, by the way, but it's a package. They're selling it as the Texas Two-Step.
It's real original. We've heard this before. It's always do these two things back to back. It's the Texas two-step. In the House, the leadership says we need to do both, that they have one bill that's going to put as much as $8 billion. additional dollars into public education. And we'll also have something like a $1 billion or so school voucher of, as we know, the Senate version.
of the voucher is a lot more expensive than that, according to the fiscal note. And, you know, I haven't seen the fiscal note yet for the house version, so we'll see what that actually looks like. But the way they're selling this so far sounds like... The version in the house is going to be a smaller version, a little more constrained, and a whole lot of money for public education, which is, Jeremy, that's not that different from where we were two years ago. It's about $2 billion more.
than what they were talking about two years ago um if you don't adjust for inflation which you should because it's important but if you don't it's it's two billion dollars more so will that be more attractive to school districts and will they want to go along with this it all you know it There's a lot of baseball left to play here.
And that is a really important point. You've said this a lot. Look, it looks like all the pieces are moving in the right direction for Abbott to get this thing through. But you just never count the votes. before they happen, right? You just don't know where these things are going to end up. And one of the things that's really interesting, and I thought about this when I was in San Antonio watching this all play out, Burroughs might be doing a kind of a master step.
here by showing up at this event with Abbott. Because one of the things he does by showing up there, well, certainly, look, it's great for Abbott because Abbott gets to show, look, I have the House Speaker this time. You know, this should help. But what Burroughs gets out of this is he gets... a public acknowledgement that he's on stage with...
governor on board with this thing. So if it fails somewhere down the line, don't blame me. I've been trying my best to do it. He's not going to get the same kind, like I think he's insulated himself better politically than Dade Phelan. was able to do. Dave Taylor didn't really do much to do that installation, but Burroughs, by reaching out to Abbott and being on board with this thing in such a public way, going all the way to San Antonio that is very far from his district.
in Lubbock, just saying, as like just to hang out in San Antonio to make this case. I think he, you know... positions himself well politically to, like, look, if it gets through, he'll get, you know, applause from Abbott. But if it doesn't go through somehow, if something happens, look, he was on calendars. He knows there's a thousand ways to kill a bill in the Texas House.
There's just like so many ways to do it. One way to become law and a thousand ways to kill it. And so I think so you just never count on anything until we get something on the desk of the governor. Yeah, well, Burroughs versus Phelan, I would say Burroughs is presiding over a different house. This is the house after Abbott went on that scorched earth campaign against Republicans who disagreed with him on school vouchers, a school choice, whatever you want to call it.
I call it a voucher. But look, the reality is that Phelan was doing his best to protect House members who were against the governor's position. He was defending Republicans. Who basically were being attacked by – even during the session last year were already being attacked by the governor for their position on this. And Burroughs has a Republican caucus. And some of them are still being attacked, right? That's right. Some of them are still getting heat from him. Yeah, 100 percent.
And now Burroughs has a Republican caucus that is more in line with where the governor wants to be on this after that primary last year, right? So that's happening. But like you said, there's a lot of ways that this could fall apart. I mean, the House and Senate versions, we know this, they're not the same. You know, they're not alike, even if it gets through calendars, even if it goes to the floor, even if the house, you know, here's, here's one thing of it this way.
If the House passes a version of this, which it seems like they're on track to do, what Burroughs is doing is he's positioning himself to defend the House's version of it. Correct. He now, the politics have shifted on this. Burroughs now, if it doesn't work out, he can go out and say, we passed a version that's better than the Senate plan. Yep. Which Phelan was never in position to be able to do that.
And it looks like Burroughs may end up in position to do that, which is part of why he would appear with Abbott and say, look, I'm on the same page with the governor. We may have a few differences about the details of this, but I'm basically supportive of his position. But Dan Patrick's plan.
is Patrick's plan. And I don't think Dan Patrick's going to back off of his plan, right, that they already passed in the Senate. So if they end up passing competing plans on this, and if they can't reconcile those plans... well, then it still won't make its way to the governor's desk. Yeah, and remember, Burroughs was in the middle of some of those early property tax debates in the Texas legislature a few years back. And I think there's more shrewdness.
in him when he comes to negotiating with the senate like you know i think he's gonna have something he can kind of work with them on it'll be a little bit more aggressive you know it's like and i think he's setting the stage for that right he's just not going to give them everything they want and screw the house
He's not going to do that. I think he's better positioned to at least kind of make the arguments that he's going to have to make down the road, right? So I think you're right. I think he knows this is a long game. One speech doesn't make a voucher bill or a school choice bill, like you said, whatever people want to call it, or the coupon bill. My version hasn't caught on with anybody. Nobody's talking about my coupon bill. Make coupon bill.
happen make the coupon plan just to make clear that's we're calling it to make clear at the san antonio christian school where they're having the speech ten thousand dollars would not cover your kids high school tuition
if you if they got that so you're still gonna have to go find more money to cover that so that's why i called it a coupon you're gonna get a discount in a lot of places in some schools you're gonna have no chance of getting you know still getting in there it's like even if you have that ten thousand dollars so
If the tuition is $15,000 or $20,000, whatever it is at that school, we know that at a place like St. John's in Houston, it's more like $30,000 or something. I don't know the exact number, but it's around that. It is a coupon. It ends up being... somebody's JAG payment, right? It's the difference in somebody's home budget, right? So yeah, definitely. It's a government coupon is what they're working on here.
One other thing about vouchers, and of course, we're going to keep an eye on all this stuff for y'all as we go through the session. But one other thing about vouchers was remember last week, we started to get into this discussion about how unhinged Abbott is on social media. You heard him speaking there in San Antonio, and it's his normal just sort of droning on way of speaking. He's not a compelling speaker. There have been maybe some exceptions to that. I know there have been.
But in general, he sounds like somebody who went to Toastmasters and just never got any better than that. So some of you will get that. So on social media, he's just, I mean, Jeremy, I almost wish just for entertainment value. that he spoke the way he's tweeting because he's just going nuts on people, calling them liars and frauds and everything like that. You just don't hear that kind of stuff come out of his mouth when he's talking. But let me give you an example. He's continuing to do this.
And people are trying to read into it what it means. Is Abbott, is he freaking out because maybe his voucher plan isn't on track? Or I think this might be... perhaps more likely, at least as far as his psychology, he may think that the thing is absolutely going to pass and he wants to be as Trump-like as possible and bully people on the way to passing it, right? That, oh, they all look stupid and I called them...
Liars and frauds as they were fighting my deal that I passed anyway. So Representative James Tallarico, who is a Central Texas Democrat, has been one of the more outspoken Democrats on this. I think he's leading one of the – one of the working groups on public education and vouchers in the Democratic caucus. And, you know, Tallarico, he taught sort of like Abbott.
But just from the other side, he's talking about this stuff all the time. Can I tell you what drives me crazy? Absolutely. What's that? Greg Abbott is calling his private school voucher scam school choice. But we already have school choice in Texas. A parent can choose to send their child to their neighborhood school.
a public charter school, a magnet school, an early college high school, or any number of academies and career and technical schools. So far, what Tallarico is saying there, it's just facts. And if I may, it's kind of boring. It's just kind of even keel. In other words, here's what it is, Jeremy. I'm waiting for the part of this that's so crazy that it would necessitate an unhinged response from the governor, right? I mean, at some point.
Tallarico must have really twisted off. Listen to more of what he's saying. I'm all for even more options. But what I'm not for is giving away our precious taxpayer dollars to unaccountable private schools that can discriminate against our students. Greg Abbott is saying private school vouchers create competition between public and private schools. I like competition, but only if it's fair. Private schools don't have to take the same test.
don't have to follow the same rules, don't have to accept the same students. It's like a football game where one team has 12 guys on the field and unlimited timeouts. Now, of course, Tallarico is a well-spoken guy, but that's all pretty even keel. Am I right? He's not a flamethrower. He's not out there like a...
Like a Bernie Sanders or an AOC or a Greg Kassar or anything like that. Or even a little bit. Or even like a Bernie or a Beto O'Rourke or even when Sylvester Turner, when he would give those speeches. at democratic conventions like just these fiery pulpity type kind of like none of that's coming from tal rico right we're just no it's not it's not just not jumping on top of a table at a water burger and then getting on his skateboard and you know
skating through the parking lot and scream and fuck Greg Abbott or any of that stuff like that. Nothing like that. So what was the response from Governor Abbott to that very even keel argument you just heard from Tallarico? I'm going to read you what he said. in response to Tallarico about, and it was in direct response to what you just heard. And again, I kind of wish he would talk this way and not just tweet this way because now I have to sit here and do the dramatic reading of it.
You ready, Jeremy? This is what he said. Quote, what a scam artist this guy is. He, he, in all caps, he knows that not all families get into charter schools because there was a massive wait list to get into them. He hopes you, all caps, you don't know that. He's just a liar because he's losing. School choice is coming to Texas. Parents deserve a choice, not a dictate from Tallarico. Close quote. How was that, Jeremy?
Beautiful. It felt like the raven. As you have seen the governor become, I'll just say, more personal in his attacks on the people who disagree about this. What's your thought? What do you think when you see that? I have some thoughts too, but I want to hear – I don't want to color your answer at all. What do you think when you see that? Yeah, he was blowing up Gina Hinojosa just a week ago on the same kind of stuff. He went after – the list is great. He's really going aggressively at people.
My initial response is he's doing exactly what Trump would do on Truth Social. It's like when Chip Roy sounds like he's complaining about something, there's a tweet about Chip Roy is just another jerk getting in my way type thing, right? And I think Abbott is just...
So taking some lessons from whatever Trump's mannerisms are on this thing and going, okay, I'm not Trump, but I can do this on social media. I can't do it like you said. I can't do it in an arena. I'm not going to fire these people up in this.
same way you could never right you could never hear the way i just read that which are his words i mean and look whether he did it and there's all kinds of theories about this people will say well he probably has someone else tweeting for him i do know and i'll tell you That over the years, Abbott has absolutely, there's the one account that's, I think it's Greg Abbott TX. That's the one that's him.
And when he was attorney general, I would see him out and about at different events. This is when he was more friendly to us in the press. I remember one event, downtown Austin. This is probably in maybe 2000. eight or nine. This is a while back. He was attorney general and he saw me somewhere and he said, Scott, because we were all using Twitter, but it wasn't as nasty as it is now.
But there was already some recognition that was nasty because when he came up to me, Abbott said, Scott, it's so nice to see you someplace that's not Twitter. I said, right. It is already getting kind of gross, isn't it? And at that time, I couldn't have imagined what it would turn into. But so he does do his own tweeting. Now, there are those who say, well, maybe he's handed it over to somebody else recently and they are the ones who are trying to emulate Trump. Right. But either way.
He's obviously approving. It's his account. He's approving of this. It's been going on. It doesn't just happen once. Sometimes people will put out a tweet and it's something that would be completely out of character. And they'll either delete it or say they got hacked or there could be all kinds of explanations.
With this, it's been going on for weeks at this point where he's being so personal with all these people who disagree with him, calling them liars, calling them frauds, calling them scam artists and whatever else he said there. And it – I mean that part of it. is out of character for the man.
Yeah, and definitely out of character from the first couple years we saw of the Abbott administration, right? It's like, you know, think about like his persona overall, not just on the social media, but look at how much more comfortable he is trying to take on.
things like this in a different way now. I just think he's more aggressive. It felt like in 2014 to really 2017, yeah, he was the governor, but he wasn't like... in-your-face governor uh but now it's like he's like no i'm in your face i'm in your face james talrico you know i'm in you know in your face whoever's against me and it just feels like he's a lot more aggressive overall and not just
on Twitter. No doubt about it. All right. We'll keep an eye on what's going on with this school voucher thing, of course. Jeremy, what is the question about cell phones in schools? This has turned into a real debate because I saw some folks say that, you know, when somebody has a siren going on. I don't know what's going on there, Evan. What's the siren?
Is that in San Antonio where you are, Jeremy? Yeah, that's in San Antonio outside the Express News building right now. Yeah, wow, okay. I don't know if the listeners could hear that, but I'm hearing this, and it's fine. Because when there were sirens at Uvalde... The kids had cell phones and could call the cops. We heard all of that. You see how I worked all that in, Jeremy? It was almost like I had planned that.
And so people will say the kids should have the cell phones for that reason. On the other hand, it's such a distraction in class to have the cell phones always going off. They're getting text messages. They're getting social media. updates and stuff like that. And there, I think there are a few proposals now in the legislature to have classrooms that are cell phone free. Ellen Truxclare is a representative and Republican from Central Texas.
She filed a bill on this and she talked in a video that was promoted by the Texas House GOP caucus. She talked about why. She's trying to get this done suicide rates have tripled among our teens since smartphones have become widespread The average American teen is spending upwards of five hours a day on social media receiving over 20 notifications I wish I only got 20 notifications during school hours. You got to get those numbers up, kids. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. She says that it's...
too much distraction for the kids, and I tend to agree with that. This makes it nearly impossible for any student to focus on their academics, which means that during the time that cell phone use has increased, our academic outcomes have plummeted. to this, right? I mean, you have the kids who are just looking at the cell phone all the time. And I think about it in generational terms. For me, as a 44-year-old, my cell phone...
When I was a kid, I didn't have this. I mean, Jeremy, we didn't just have a landline at the house. We had a party line. Do you even know what that is? Of course. Of course. I mean, some people who grew up in the 80s and 90s, Evan, do you know what a party line was?
Is that like a shared line? Yes, it was a shared line for our neighborhood out in the country. When I was a kid, you could pick up the phone and there might be other people making phone calls in the neighborhood and you could listen in on their calls. and someone might as a kid you might want to listen in on what the adults are talking about in the neighborhood and someone would be talking about something and but then they might hear
You know, you're breathing or whatever, and they would think, hey, is somebody else on the line? Y'all hang up. And that's the kind of stuff that would happen. But, you know. Jeremy, for me, I didn't have a phone that had notifications going off, you know, going off all the time when I was a kid. Now, as someone who does have this and, you know, I...
kind of think I understand how to balance it between paying attention to what's happening right in front of me versus what's going on on the phone. Right. But the kids now, I think it's, I mean, there's, there's a lot of studies on this. And, of course, people have strong opinions about it, which I'm sure are all correct. But there's a lot of evidence out there to support what I'm saying, which is that for those kids who grew up with this thing in their hand.
that they're so glued to it and it's like their window to the whole world. And they cannot pay attention to the teacher when they're trying to teach a class. They cannot pay attention to anything that's happening at school because they're constantly looking at...
this phone, and they don't know how to balance it. Let me say it this way. Not as someone who's older, because that's not what's different. What's different is I had a period of my life where I didn't have this, and now I do have it. But for the kids, they've always had it. And so they don't know how, so many of them don't know how to balance it. Now, I will say one thing. There is kind of a pushback from a younger generation that doesn't want to be on the phone as much.
Which is interesting. It's just sort of – these things tend to have some kind of – there's always some kind of correction from generation to generation. But as far as what they're trying to accomplish with this, what are they saying?
Yeah. So I wrote about this in the Texas Tech newsletter a couple of weeks ago. And one of the things that kind of hit on was that, look, this is part of a more of a national thing that has kind of picked up. It really kind of one of the leaders on this was Louisiana. Texas school districts already are allowed to do
are allowed to ban use of cell phones during the school day. All the kids who are listening to us now, there are clearly some of them who are like, no, no, that already happens in my school district. I know it's like, doesn't everybody else have that?
The answer is no. And that's what Louisiana had the problem with. They had some school districts that were doing it. And the state was like, no, let's just do this for everyone. Let us be the bad guy. Take the phones away from all the kids. Nobody can have them. You have to put them away when you go into, you know.
in class, you have to put them in a storage case or just don't bring them at all, right? And you've got to do something about that. Arkansas has picked up the ball on this thing. Up there is Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who you'll remember as the former White House press secretary. She is the governor up there now, and she made this a huge part of her effort. She actually gave a book on the...
the dangers of cell phone on the new generation to all of the members of the Arkansas Senate to try to get them on board with the thing. And it kind of worked. They had a test project, I guess, last year. This year, they just passed a bill there to ban cell phones everywhere. And the way the bill that, you know, Lois Kokhorst in the state senate from Brenham and Cecil Bell out of Montgomery County.
I already had other bills out there on this as well. I looked at those two bills particularly. And those bills, what they did is, again, they required all students to – put those phones away. You'd have to put in some sort of storage thing. Up in Arkansas, there's like a little sleeve type thing where kids had to put it in.
close it up and go to class and then you couldn't have it even even in this case in the the the co-course law particular bill uh she said you can't have it even during like going to like school lunch and and you know in between classes and things like that And if you're caught with the phone, it gets confiscated.
And parents could end up having to pay $15 to $30 to get that phone back potentially in the end. Again, modeled very similarly to what both Arkansas and Louisiana have done. And so you can see there's this movement.
about you know and it goes to what you were talking about this concern that not only uh is it bad for the teachers trying to keep everybody's attention but there's a social component in there that's damaging kids to have that phone on them all the time and maybe if they're without that phone for hours at a time, maybe it takes some of that pressure away from them. So yeah, so I think we're up to 11 states.
that now have some sort of cell phone ban for all school districts. And again, Texas, we already have some of the school districts that have very different laws on it, right? Some of them are just like, you know, put the phone away. Some of them have nothing at all. Just, you know, who cares?
And then others are like, no, you can't have it on campus at all. And so some districts are already doing it. HISD has some pretty – or in Houston, ISD has some pretty aggressive cell phone bans going on there. But it will be interesting to see like how – This goes everywhere else, right? Like you said, it's a big state.
And you can already feel that concern. Like you mentioned, the first time I heard this bill, I'm thinking, what about Ubalde, right? What about the kids having access to the phone during an emergency? There are parents out there who agree with the concept.
But they're like, but I want to be able to get my kid if there's a problem. But of course, law enforcement also tell you during those moments, though, like in Uvalde, the phone lines were so busy and chaotic that it was making it hard for people to communicate.
Right. You know, so it comes a double thing. Right. Where like all these parents are trying to get into the school at the same time. So there's probably some way to kind of manage all this. And we're going to hear it all breaking out because I think Texas, while we haven't had it as a prior.
item of the governor like it was in Arkansas or even in Oklahoma. I think, you know, they're working on a similar legislation. I think, you know, we're going to get there, right? It's clear like all the state legislators have kind of all around the country. It kind of has bipartisan support and bring it all together.
Absolutely. You talked to the new DNC chairman. He's been making the rounds here. Who's this guy, Ken Martin? Yeah, Ken Martin. He's the head of the party up in Minnesota. Just two weeks ago, he ended up being named. the new Democratic National Committee chairman, you know, good luck with that, right? You know, after this election cycle, I'm like, boy, you got a lot on your plate, don't you? He does. But it's interesting that in part of your conversation with him, I found it.
of note that he seemed almost, I mean, maybe even to a, I don't mean this negatively, not necessarily, almost to an obsessive degree getting into some of the detail of Texas politics. And maybe he's – I mean interesting for Democrats. Maybe he's –
And doing that with states all over the place, but Texas is certainly one that they always say, well, we're going to turn it blue. Every two and four years, Jeremy, all the stories are that the Democrats are going to turn Texas blue. What was he talking about? Yeah, the most important part to me.
Without me asking him, he knew how many seats in the Texas legislature Democrats needed to pick up. He already had that. The reason I'm here is to give people hope that, again, I feel really strongly about our chance. not just after the next census and reapportionment, but right now. We only need 14 seats in the legislature, which is a lot, right? But those 14 seats, if we're able to, as I was talking to Gina Hinojosa.
in uh austin about a month ago if we can focus on winning those down ballot seats back and give us a little bit more room in the legislature right uh that that's going to help us as we go into this senate uh this census and the next reapportionment. And so we know you're going to gain four to five congressional seats, right? What we should be focused on right now as a party is making sure, since the state legislature draws those lines, that we win back the state legislature.
I'm not going to do a clinic right now on redistricting and how it works. I will say I was kind of amused by this. I'll translate part of that for you. Jeremy, when he said Democrats only, only need to pick up 14 seats in the Texas House.
It would be like if you said, we only need a shit ton of cash for this Lamborghini that we're going to buy. And we need to be able to make the payments going forward too. And one thing about it that... also struck me as funny is he sort of has it backward right because you i mean you got to be in the majority to draw the lines um which is what republicans did do they took the majority
to then redraw the lines and make this, you know, just cement it as a Republican state back in 2002, 2003. But that was a very different environment. Now, I can tell you that before the next census, I do expect... The lines that were drawn in this last redistricting to sort of degrade from a partisan standpoint to the point where what he's saying is possible. All right. Now, I'm not going to say that's what's going to happen.
But I have heard that that is a concern of some of the top Republican consultants in this state, which is they think that before you get to the next redistricting, that Democrats do have a shot at it. But I think in a broader sense... Without giving him a whole lesson about it. In a broader sense, I think that the focus on down-ballot races is what's important. Because it seems like around here, whenever they – Democrats are going to – they're going to win the U.S. Senate race.
And it just crashes out. They're going to win the governor's race. And it just crashes out. Nothing. Every single time. They feel like they have to go for the top thing, which they're not going to get when they're going up against Republicans who have. $40 or $30 million in their campaign account, and Democrats are trying to rub two nickels together, with the exception being Beto O'Rourke putting so much money together, and Colin Allred putting quite a decent amount of money together.
You know, just running what was, in the estimation of Democrats, a joke of a campaign. But focusing on some of these down-ballot races might be the kind of thing they can put resources together for. Yeah, if there's any lesson to be taken from 2018, that's what made 2018 so much more competitive. That was the year that Democrats won 12 House seats, remember? Texas House seats. They won 12 of them. They picked up two cents.
They picked up a couple congressional seats. You know, why was that? Because they had living, human, breathing people, like, further down the ballot. for people to pick from. Look what happened in Harris County. They had living human beings running, qualified people running for all those judicial races. So you had ground up stuff happening as well as a competitive U.S.
Senate race. So you just can't do the one, right? You can't just do the, okay, we're going to have Colin Allred and no interest in congressional races down ballot and no state house races or just a handful of them. But what we had in 2018 was much more aggressive. And to your point, We saw this happen before. The redistricting that the Republicans did coming out of the 2010 census was good job. They increased their majority for the next couple of years. But in 2018, you see.
And by 2018, the power, we'll call it, of that redistricting weakened. And that's why the Democrats were able to pick up 12 seats. So when he's saying we need to pick up 14 seats, if you put it in the context... stuff at the end of the decade you're going to have a better shot of picking up some seats to make it closer it doesn't sound nearly as unreasonable as it does
coming a couple months after Colin Allred just got spanked. You know, it's just like there's no way around it. And so you can see, and I think the broader point is the fact that he was even talking about this granular level. Look, I was going to say no offense to the past DNC chairs, but no, no, I think they should take offense to it. It's like they didn't do anything. They would say things about Texas, but didn't do anything.
You know, they didn't really come here. And maybe this was just a PR campaign. But hey, that's better than nothing. That's better than what we've had for the last 10 years where the Democratic National Party said, that's all on you, Boyd. You guys are too expensive. We're not spending a time, a nickel or whatever. At least Martin – in the conversation I had with Martin – and I did have a story on it.
in the Houston Chronicle and the Express News. But one of the things I hit on was the fact that, like, he's trying to find a way in this interview I had with him, he's finding a way to try to... You mesh the stuff that Beto O'Rourke did well and the stuff that the Democratic Party can do well, like on the state level. Kind of bring those things together better than they were in 2018 and 2022 when it felt like at times they were complete.
competing with each other, right? And so this time, he wants to kind of knit that together a little bit better. It's quite a bumper sticker, Jeremy. It's quite a slogan. It would be, the Democrats of today, better than nothing. All right. Man, oh man. I'll get some notes about that. All right. One last thing here on the show. People are getting into it. Evan, are you ready? We're going to do the closing feature here, which of course is.
The Up and Down of the Week. Every day in Jeremy's newsletter, he tells you about the up and down of the day. And on the podcast, we're doing the up and down of the week. So first, Jeremy, who was up.
this week well i was leaning heavily towards abbott just because he had burrows with him on this dog and pony show it was literally a show and tell at a class you know like how could i resist right but then you got there and it was so boring that it can't be that yeah i did resist only because again like we said
It's a long way to vouchers passing or school choice passing or whatever. So I'm going to go with the Austin American statesman. And the reason is they'll be in my up today. Hearst Corporation, which owns the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express News, is... adding the Austin American Statesman to the portfolio.
All those dear listeners out in Austin and readers out there, you're going to get to see a lot more from me and the Texas Tech podcast and the Texas Tech newsletter. They're going to get more of us than they ever wanted. Yeah, there wasn't enough of us in Austin.
already. Guess what? You're getting reinforcements now. That's clearly an op. I will make an observation about that purchase, which is that the current operator of that newspaper has really and this is what i hear from people in austin all the time has made that paper into a joke and that is the opinion of a lot of people around here
And it does look like and I saw a lot of people saying this this week that that, you know, it's good for journalism in Texas that you have a company that actually puts resources into covering these issues. So I'm going to give you a thumbs up there as well, Jeremy. Yeah. And not to be Mr. Company Guy, but like.
Like Hearst is as good of a chain as you're going to get and still being committed to journalism. You see what Eric Deckheimer has done in the lottery and how much of an impact that's having on state politics right now. That's the kind of impact that you hope journalism can have on people. Who was the down of the week? Well, look, this was clear to me from the first moment this week, but it became cemented when Dan Patrick did his Marvin Sindler routine, right? Dan Patrick, on your side.
Bye-bye. the down of the week at the texas lottery commission it's not just that all these problems are happening around the lottery at just the right time and you know patrick is doing this and he kind of mentioned this they're up for sunset review right now so it just gives the legislature
even more incentive to go in there and beat this thing up and fix it and clean it up and all that. So they are clearly the down. They're going to get a lot more attention and some of it they're not going to enjoy. I think they're not going to enjoy much. of that at all unless unless you know you want to compare it to a root canal which is what happened that's what's happening for these people a legislative root canal
A root canal would be the only thing worse than what's about to happen to them. All right. That is going to do it for the show. You should check out Jeremy's newsletter where he does that up and down every day. in addition to his other reporting, you can find the link for the newsletter on his X page. It's Jeremy S. Wallace. If you would like to follow me, as so many do,
It's at Scott Braddock. Check that out. You should be a subscriber at quorumreport.com and houstonchronicle.com, and we'll see you next time.