Fort Worth Star-Telegram
January 4 editorial: “A.G. Paxton’s request to change gender on driver’s license raises privacy concerns.”
It takes a lot of effort to change your gender on your driver’s license. According to the Travis County Law Library, a person must first show a court order or change gender on a birth certificate. For this they need a court order. In order to obtain a court order, they must have a letter from a mental health professional stating the diagnosis and that “it is in your best interest to provide a gender change/gender marker,” as well as additional documents.
The right to such changes can and should be discussed in the public sphere, among medical professionals and in courtrooms, but even if the changes seem unnecessary to (Attorney General Ken) Paxton, this does not give his office a green light to go for the witch. hunt.
Another disturbing aspect of this search is that Paxton’s office did not go through the usual channels, such as the DPS General Counsel, and immediately went to the Driver’s License Department. Additionally, when the Washington Post attempted to query Paxton’s office about the tapes it had exchanged with the DPS, the Attorney General’s staff said no such tapes existed.
Marisol Bernal-Leon, a spokeswoman for the Attorney General’s office, later emailed that the office “has reviewed its files and has no information to match your request” or in relation to the records, The Post reported. This is one of the most damning lines in history – it clearly happened and the Attorney General is playing games to cover it up.
Not only is Paxton snooping around the DPS office targeting employees who don’t have decision-making authority, but his office assumes there was no such exchange of information.
– Editorial Fort Worth Star-Telegram
San Antonio Express News
January 2 editorial: “New Democratic Party primary schedule is more representative.”
But due to long overdue changes, Iowa and New Hampshire are about to lose their status as top Democratic presidential gatekeepers.
The Party Rules and Bylaws Committee accepted President Joe Biden’s recommendation that South Carolina be the first to hold a primary on February 3, 2024. South Carolina will be followed by Nevada and New Hampshire on February 6, 2024. Georgia on February 13, 2024 and Michigan on February 27, 2024. The committee will vote on the proposal in early 2023.
The Republicans will continue the nomination process in Iowa and New Hampshire.
If Iowa and New Hampshire insist on being first in the country, the Democratic Party could punish them and the candidates campaigning there by losing delegates.
These changes are personal to Biden. As a former vice president, Biden was an early 2020 Democratic nominee before finishing fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire. He then saw his campaign revitalized in South Carolina with a decisive black vote victory.
Biden never looked back and was transferred to the White House from South Carolina.
In a letter to the rules committee recommending changes, Biden wrote, “We must ensure that voters of color have a say in choosing our candidate much earlier in the process and throughout the initial window. As I said in February 2020, you can’t be a Democratic candidate and win the general election unless you have overwhelming support from voters of color.”
The new primary schedule is not only more representative of voters of color, but also more regionally inclusive, including urban and rural areas.
— San Antonio Express-News editors
Weatherford Democrat
December 31st Editorial, “Keeping ‘Public’ in Public Notices.”
Two lawmakers from Plano and San Jacinto County have filed a bill that could make such surprises a reality. The bills, if passed, would remove requirements for counties, cities and school districts to place public announcements in local newspapers.
They will also remove an additional layer of transparency by giving governments the ability to print these public notices only on their websites. This means regularly searching the websites of each organization, one by one, for the public information you are looking for.
Besides removing the ease of being able to have all this information in one bin, there are many other problems with this potential new legislation.
Newspapers and their respective websites are generally the place where the public gets government news, not government websites.
You may hear the argument that public announcements are too expensive to publish, while organizations can publish their own for free on their websites. It would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge that we make money from these ads, but in fact the funds these organizations spend on publishing public ads represent a very small percentage of their budgets. It also does not take into account that newspaper rates for government public announcements are lower than standard rates for newspaper advertisements.
By digitizing everything on websites, governments are also completely missing out on low-income or elderly people who may not have easily accessible Internet access.
It also eliminates any “paper logs” or physical liability. Government agencies are bound by laws that state that they must publish notices in advance in order to provide the public with sufficient information about the problem.
— Weatherford Democrat
Dallas Morning News
January 3 editorial: “It took 375 days for Dallas Police to respond to document requests for documents.”
In November 2021, we called the Dallas Police Department to find out how many disclosure requests were made to the agency this year. We were told to file a record release request to obtain this information.
So we did. We received the information – in a year and 10 days.
This is unacceptable. But it’s not just this one request. Getting a prompt response to a request for public information is also a gamble in the mayor’s office.
The Dallas City Council must review the volume of requests handled by city departments and the Dallas Police and provide the resources necessary to respond in a timely manner as required by law.
Over the past three years, the number of inquiries filed with the Dallas police has increased. We know from the city presentation that between January 2020 and January 2021, the department received 31,281 requests. Four-fifths of those requests were for incident, arrest and accident reports, and emergency call sheets.
Last year, the Dallas police filed 42,485 requests and complied with or closed almost as many. As of December 9, over 42,400 requests have been submitted this year, and about 36,190 have been completed or closed.
Requests for open records at DPD have increased by about 30% in three years.
Under the state’s Public Information Act, government agencies must “immediately” release records. If the agency takes more than 10 business days to provide information, it must inform the requester and set a date and hour “within a reasonable time” when the records will be available.
In our case, DPD told us last November that it expected a response to our request within 20 business days.
– Dallas Morning News Editorial Board
Houston Chronicle
January 5 editorial: “Harris County election report is not a smoking bullet. Just smoke.”
On November 8, at nearly 800 churches, schools, and community centers, thousands of judges and election clerks helped guide more than 1 million Harris County residents through the voting process. Most voters had a smooth experience. But not all. It is only fitting that one of our country’s most cherished institutions – its elections – is ultimately in the hands of the people, including civic volunteers willing to help.
It’s also messy, as the Harris County Electoral Administration’s long-awaited assessment showed this week.
Part of this mess is understandable: holding elections with ever-changing technology and laws remains a major logistical challenge. The report, for example, notes that some volunteers simply did not show up on election day, while others were unable to enter the building at 6 am.
But some problems that are actually too many, including reports that polling stations are running out of ballots, are institutional failures that our fragile democracy cannot afford.
The report is far from the smoking gun that some Republicans were hoping for. In her lawsuit, Erin Lunsford, who lost the race for a seat in the county court in civil cases, argued that the county “totally screwed up” the election, arguing that the day’s errors represented “an inexplicable failure of epic proportions.” The lawsuit alleged that due to a shortage of ballots, “at least 3,135 voters were prevented from entering 26 polling stations.”
In its report, the election commission searched for these voters, but to no avail. This is not necessarily because the people weren’t turned down, but because the office apparently doesn’t have the tools to confirm if they were or not.
The smoking gun may or may not be in the county’s nebulous conclusions. Too cloudy to say. And that in itself is disturbing.
— Editorial Board of the Houston Chronicle
