September 19th, 2023 – Digging into the Texas Senate’s Vote to Reinstate Ken Paxton as Attorney General

[0:00:00 Intro]  Welcome to the second reading podcast from the University of Texas at Austin. The Republicans were in the Democratic Party because there was only one party.  So I tell people on a regular basis, there is still a land of opportunity in America. It’s called Texas. The problem is these departures from the constitution, they have become the
norm. At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room?

[0:00:30 Jim] And welcome back to the second reading podcast. I’m Jim Henson, Director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Happy to be joined again today by Josh Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project. How was your weekend, Josh,

[0:00:47 Josh]  you know, mix. I guess it’s funny this, this last weekend, it just

[0:00:53 Jim]  happened that

[0:00:56 Josh]  it was, you know, it was, it was, it was

[0:00:57 Jim]  great. good answer. Good answer.

[0:01:00 Josh]  All weekends are great.

[0:01:01 Jim]  All right. Well, over the weekend on Saturday to be exact, the Texas Senate voted to reject all of the impeachment articles passed by the House against Ken Paxton in case you haven’t heard, reinstating him as Attorney General, this has been covered in great great detail in the Texas Press and, and you know, the various reading sources that you probably have if you’re listening to this, but there was a bit of variance on the Democratic side on a count or 21 of them in particular, I think on the open records request didn’t convince even a lot of Democrats, but for the most and two republicans voted in favor of most of the articles that is, and that would be Kelly Hancock. And, and of course, Senator Robert Nichols, but the vote was largely among part along party lines. In essence, Republicans delivered for the attorney general after a summer of speculation about whether Republican senators would be willing to follow the house and holding fellow Republican accountable for these, you know, relatively serious and documented charges. And we’ll get to what that means. You know, soon enough Paxton has been returned to office. You know, there’s been a lot of biblical illusions through this whole trial. Just before he came up for the podcast was a relatively new post at Texas Monthly. And forgive me, I don’t remember the author, I just kind of saw it before I came up and, and read through it on kind of religious underpinnings and, and themes in Senator Paxton’s postings throughout the trial. When we post on that, we’ll do a post for this podcast and I’ll try to include a link on that. If we can remember to do that. Very interesting. If you’re interested in that kind of thing. I, you know, I would say that as biblical illusions go, there was a lot of New Testaments during the trial, I think, will we be, we will be shifting into an old Testament mode? I’m, I’m not a biblical scholar but I, I would go with the Old Testament. Use vengeance is mine. Sayeth the Lord. I, I think we will be, yes, a little smer. I think it’s very good. There will be some smiting going on. I think in the aftermath of this by the victors. So, you know, we’ll talk a lot about the dynamics and, you know, within the chamber, within the jury, within the legislature of the vote. But I think Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick characteristically to some degree, was able to, to draw a lot of attention to himself with his comments immediately after the vote. And so immediately after the, the, the votes were taken and the results registered Lieutenant Governor Patrick who had presided over the trial after repeatedly invoking both the importance of and providing a guarantee of impartiality in the process weighed in after the voting was done to just excoriate the house. I think that’s a fair word saying they engaged in a flawed process and claiming that sending the charges to the Senate was fundamentally flawed and, and without foundation and, and violated the spirit, if if not the letter of the constitution, now those comments were couched at least initially in terms of getting some procedural notes on the historical record. But ultimately, you know, and, and, and along those lines, Patrick also called for constitutional changes to the process and for an audit, you know, and, and for an audit of what the impeachment investigation and the trial, the whole shebang cost. And he made that, that formal request to the auditor on Monday of this week, I

[0:04:46 Josh]  believe my guess is it would have been cheaper to pay the settlements. Well,

[0:04:50 Jim]  you know, al almost certainly, I guess. and, and this was quite a turn and, and you know, what do we, so this was quite a turn both Patrick’s comments and the outcome itself lot to unpack in terms of explaining, you know, our understanding, which is going to be necessarily incomplete, I think is an important thing to, to point out here, you know, the why and how this happened, the weighting of different factors and, and what the fallout will be. And I guess, you know, we should probably start with a conversation, a couple of conversations we’ve had about this one in this, the search for the one thing which I think is important to flag because you can start digging into the multiple elements here. But like most things and I think especially in this case, there’s not one factor that’s going to explain all this,

[0:05:39 Josh]  I don’t think. Yeah. No, I mean, I think you and I are in an interesting position because we get asked to comment, you know, on these, you know, sort of current happening, sort of in real time and provide some sort of, some sort of context, some sort of, you know, I like to think, like, helpful commentary to give people a better understanding of what’s going on more so than an argument one way or the other. And in the aftermath of this, I think there’s a, there’s a, a rush one to hot takes which is fine. I mean, whatever that happens, I think it’s nature the thing. But I think in something like this, it’s actually, you know, fairly complex and complex in a particular way. I think it leads to hot takes that in some way are actually less clarifying than they sound. I mean, I think, you know, you get, you get advantage in some ways by being someone who, who comments confidently about this sort of stuff. But if you said to me right now, hey, what, what one factor explains what happened. I mean, I might be very resistant to tell you. It was, it was this because really this is what we talked, we talked about this in the past before. There’s a lot of factors that probably were pushing in a similar direction towards this outcome. And so given that and we’ll kind of unpack some of that I think now to say that it was this one factor over other factors in some ways. I think it, you know, it, again, it doesn’t really clarify because what’s actually going on is there’s a lot of things we can’t disentangle the relative impact of all of these different elements that we’re gonna talk about here to sort of get into the outcome that we got to. And so what it means is that anybody who says, oh, well, you know, it’s because the House and the Senate hate each other and that’s what this is like. Yeah, look, no doubt that contributed like we’re Yes, absolutely. You know, you know, so some people say, oh well, you know, you know, national, you know, force is like, yeah, I mean, sure national forces come in and maybe activate forces that exist here. We gonna go into these, but it’s not gonna be one thing in such a complicated process filled with al with players, all with their own set of, you know, risk calculation, risk, reward calculations for how to behave in a process that honestly was evolving as it’s happening and changing as it’s happening.

[0:07:29 Jim]  And we’ll, we’ll circle back to some of the kind of meta implications of that and, and, and, and why there’s such a tendency to look for the one thing and then the other, the other thing I kind of want to talk about, you know, is this, you know, the language and I think this is both an observe, you know, this is, and I think for both of us it’s a, it’s both an observation and a caveat, right? Which is so was, was Ken. And I’ve already sort of dipped into this in the intro, was Ken Paxton exonerated. Was he found not guilty? Was he, you know, how do we talk about? This? Was the case made or not made? And you know, so why we, why we’re flagging this, I think will become clear as we talk more. But the language here is, is even very tricky to some degree and in how you talk about this and the kind of impression certain kind of language leaves. And I think it’s even more important because as I list, as I, you know, I spent some time in the last day going and, you know, trying to track what some of the actors are saying, what kind of language is Ken Paxton gonna use? I mean, sort of more to, to the front of my mind. What kind of language are the senators using? What kind of language is Lieutenant Governor Patrick using in describing this outcome?

[0:08:42 Josh]  Yeah. And I mean, just even just to put meat on the bones and we’ll get, again, we’ll probably talk a little bit more directly, I’ll be quick. But I mean, you could imagine Paxson saying I was completely exonerated. You see Patrick going and again, like a lot of the defenders of Paxson in the House, you’re really pointing to the process and how that led them to basically have no other conclusion. But then you’re also seeing senators who voted to acquit actually saying, well, you know, the burden of proof was so very, very high, which is a very different message, right? And so again, for people like us trying to understand what happened, it’s very easy to sort of slip into sort of your own assumptions about how convincing or unconvincing the evidence was. And then thinking about the actions in terms of your own baseline expectations because look, if you’re a conservative, you know, Republican primary voter who heard all the messages and completely thought that Ken Paxton was being railroaded by Democrats and Rhinos or something like that, then regardless of how they got to the end point, it was the right outcome and no, under no other analysis that doesn’t, you know, take that into account would be, would be right. But I think we just have to acknowledge here that people are coming at this with different sets of baseline assumptions about what exactly happened, what the process produced. And that’s sort of what I think should have been, what the process should have been. And I think that makes interpretation again, something that is very, you know, conditional on a lot of things

[0:09:54 Jim]  and the language the language is,

[0:09:57 Josh]  and that makes it again, coming to really strong convictions, you kind of have to say, well, ok. Well,

[0:10:02 Jim]  ok, so you can, you know, that, you know, that kind of points towards, you know, a starting point. So, you know, being trained as academics at least. And I, I’ve started with this a lot in terms of in talking about this to people that have asked about it and talking to reporters and et cetera. You know, I think if we start with institutional factors, I mean, we talked about these a lot, particularly when the rules were written and when it began to become, you know, I shouldn’t say it began to become more clear, that’s not the wrong, the right way to put it. We thought about this a lot when the Senate received the case and was discussing the rules and passing the rules and we were trying to read the tea leaves on what was in the rules. And, you know, there’s this very lengthy discussion and that repeated itself in a lot of different ways throughout the, throughout the process that looked at what was going on as this, you know, mainly political but also a hybrid of the legal and the political. But in the end, I think you have to say that the trial rules adopted by the Senate turned out to matter a lot.

[0:11:09 Josh]  It, it certainly looks like they did. You

[0:11:11 Jim]  know, I mean, it’s certainly they’re mattering a lot in the postal explanation. And I, I, you know, as we hear snippets about what happened during the deliberation process and, and the internal dynamics in the Senate as the case was unfolding a couple of aspects of that two or three aspects of that loom very large. I would say the beyond a reasonable doubt standard as you kind of alluded to, it was a good transition turned out to be very important. I mean, and I think, you know, we sort of recognize this, particularly as Paxton’s defense sought to take explicit advantage of it during the course of the trial. I mean, this was a high bar, but it wasn’t just that it was objectively a high bar in the way that we would think about it in a criminal trial. It was a high bar in the sense of creating latitude for the senators that did not have strong dispositions going in or for one reason or another, shall we say, you know, were very fluid in their decision making and how they were going to approach this and just to put, you know, some empirical, you know, I mean, if Senator Drew Springer who was somebody who was thought of as being somewhere from a swing vote to a kind of high probability, yes, to convict, I think inside the, the political community, he was not one of the packs then six in terms of the, the early dismissal votes, you know, invoked this in terms of his, you know, his explanation for why in the end, you know, he voted against, the impeachment articles and he was fairly explicit in saying that, you know, it was close and had, had, had the threshold been, been

[0:13:00 Josh]  lower preponderance of the evidence or whatever.

[0:13:02 Jim]  So, had it been a preponderance of the evidence kind of argument? You know, and he sort of clouded this a little bit with, you know, the difficulty in separating out what was in the public realm and what was in the evidence, et cetera. I mean, he sort of, there were, there were a lot of, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there were a lot of, you know, trial balloons launched and this is, you know, and, and, and the source on this is in, in one of spring and one of the newspapers in Springer’s District and I can’t, I don’t have the link right here with me. It’s, it’s, it’s been pretty commonly linked to in the last 12 hours. We’ll put this on the website too. But then also it’s not just the latitude that it gave those that might have been on the fence or that were sort of waiting to sort of see what developments look like. We also, have heard a lot about this from those who voted in the attorney, you know, essentially in the attorney general’s favor. You can go to the Chad Hastie Show and, and in podcast form, Senator Paul Betancourt, one of the, you know, the quote unquote Paxton six. He had voted to dismiss in the beginning, but also, you know, invoked this in his discussion of this among a lot of other things. So, functionally, you know, this had a lot, this was a big thing. So I said a few things, there’s also the denominator for determining the two thirds threshold for conviction, including Senator Paxton. Right. Right.

[0:14:20 Josh]  And, and two senators who, you know, under any other, you know, and let me just put it this way as the rules that were adopted. Right. Essentially, they gave the defense essentially the strongest protections as a criminal defendant would receive as opposed to a civil trial where again, the burden would be less that the protections would be less yet at the same time, included in the denominator for figuring out how many votes would be required to get two thirds his wife, the defense, like someone, someone named in one of the, impeachment charges and Senator Hughes and someone directly involved with one of the key witnesses who didn’t make it to the stand. Interestingly, you know, Paxson’s alleged mistress who worked for Senator Donna Campbell. Now, at some point, yeah, at some point and, and I think is any, you know, sort of any person with any sort of legal knowledge point out and no jury trial, would anyone with this kind of a connection to the case be seated as here? Now, look, this is not a normal jury trial, but this is where you,

[0:15:15 Jim]  you know, look to be fair to that decision on the Senate Rules Committee that, that, that, Lieutenant Governor Patrick put together it’s a fair reading of the constitution to say that they, that, that had to be the denominator nonetheless. That was a decision.

[0:15:30 Josh]  Yeah, I, 100% agree. I also know that, I mean, this is sort of, you know, it’s interesting. I mean, we initially started, we go right into like the rules and you say we’re going to be a good political scientist. But this is the thing when you’re, you know, I mean, this is true. I mean, when you’re looking at sort of outcomes in an institution in political science, especially in a legislative body, which this is, it’s not a trial. The first thing you look at is the rules because the rules explain a lot about this and to your point, I agree with you, I think that probably, you know, push came to shove if the trial got held up because of the rules they adopted may violate the constitution, which I think, you know, I don’t put it past them to push that. And by the, I mean, the defense to push that argument, I’m not sure that they would have said no, it’s got to be all the senators, you know, present, these are the senators, have

[0:16:08 Jim]  they not done that? It would have been challenged in a defense

[0:16:09 Josh]  motion at the, at the same time. It’s not, it’s not a de facto truth that the Senate couldn’t have adopted different rules.

[0:16:16 Jim]  Right. And then, you know, I mean, I, I kind of said three and then, you know, there, there are lots of others, but I think the third you have to say is the fact that the lieutenant governor presiding over the, presided over the trial, he was empowered to do so, but he was also empowered to step aside for somebody that was more neutral. And certainly in the aftermath of the speech he gave after the trial, there’s a lot of, a lot of doubt has been cast on his neutrality. And I think that is a legitimate source of doubt. I mean, I don’t, I don’t understand how you can read that, hear or read that speech and not feel like, well, this certainly sounds like he had a view of the process that was in place at the outset and he did nothing to dispel that he was also on the Chad Hastie Show yesterday. And he did nothing to dispel that there’s a certain era of. And this is a little bit glib, but I think it’s not, not too much that was like, well, you just got to, you know, trust me. I, I can, you know, he sort of said, I kept my mouth shut essentially and I presided fairly over this thing I knew was completely unfair. And I think that’s given that he had the option of stepping aside and didn’t take it. I, I don’t know how you don’t factor that into the consideration of this. Yeah. I

[0:17:30 Josh]  mean, I think it’s kind of impossible and you kind of imagine, you know, if a district court judge in Austin had, you know, issued some consequential opinion on state government and then basically said immediately after issuing the opinion. Ok, I’m not a judge anymore. But let me tell you, you know, basically how screwed up. I think the state is on this. And I’ve always thought this and by the way, this actually fits into a long running battle that I have, you know, with state agency, it’s like you’d like that person would probably be removed from the

[0:17:55 Jim]  bench. And then the, you know, the whole factor of the money that was given him by the Texas liberty pack, you know, all of the financial pieces that we talked about, which, which

[0:18:03 Josh]  are problematic when they happen, that have been

[0:18:05 Jim]  well aired out all of that together, you know, I mean, those are political factors, but I think you also have to, you know, it’s very easy to look at them through an institutional frame if you’re gonna assess what the institutional factors in this process were. And then, and so it does, it raises the question of how neutral Patrick,

[0:18:24 Josh]  you’re right the way you said it I think is perfect just a minute ago, which is to say, like, you know, basically, you have to take all this, all these factors that seem to point in one direction and then basically take the other side of it is, trust me, I was just to judge that it’s fine and it’s sort of like, well, you know, that’s, that’s a challenge. Right? I mean, it’s been made a challenge, I think was, and look, I think, I, I think there’s an argument to be made for almost all the other things and, and I think the things that are harder with evidence, like the way that, you know, he was ruling on motions throughout the trial and kind of and ruling on objections and things like that. That’s gonna be, that’s a much tougher thing to kind of parse out and sort of figure out if there’s a direction to that or whatever. But the fact is, I mean, I think the, you know, the smoking gun, if you will on that piece of it is the trial ends and not the next day on the Chad Hastie show not in a press release immediately. This was written up and ready to go. Yes. Part of the trial record is basically what his opinion was on these charges, apparently had no influence on anything he did. And there’s a

[0:19:22 Jim]  footnote to that and this is not, this bears not much on where we are, but I just can’t help but mention it. I mean, you know, I think people were sort of just disingenuous and say initially critics of Patrick were like, oh wow, you know, and again on social media, the source of, you know, all kinds of straw men for stupidity. But, you know, it was like, oh, so I guess he just wrote that speech after the verdict. Well, of course, he didn’t, nobody serious, really thought that, but he did say on the Chad Hastie show again that, you know, he had two speeches. And so I think, and, and I, you know, the question I would raise is what, what is the legal status? And this is for my lawyer friends. What is the legal status of that other draft? I mean, you know, will we see that? Do we have to wait to see that in the archives? If he wants to burn it, can he burn it? You know, I would like to see, I would like to see that other speech as well. So I just, I just wanted to flag that. He, I didn’t know if you would listen to that. He did say, yeah, I’ve got another one, I’ve got the other one I wrote too. It was very interesting

[0:20:21 Josh]  proof of his neutrality.

[0:20:22 Jim]  Right. Yeah. So I, you know, well, ok, so you know, what else, you know, what else might we ask about this? You know, I think we could do this in, in, in, in different orders. Let’s start, I mean, to me, one of the things that looms very large here that I think got lost in a lot of the run up to my mind. And if you’re somebody that included this, you know, in one of your stories, if you’re a journalist, I’m not saying nobody wrote about this. So, I mean, if you want to send me something fine, but I think something that did get short ripped, particularly in national reporting was the friction between the House and the Senate and between Dan Patrick and Dave Felan again, not to, you know, just be monomaniacal in our focus on Patrick’s speech. But it is a rich text. you know, it seems to have bloomed large, at least in the lieutenant governor’s mind.

[0:21:19 Josh]  Yeah, I mean, you know, when this, when this started, you know, we recorded a podcast after the house delivered, its impeachment articles. You know, I, I said something at the time to you and I know I said to other people also, which is, you know, the analogy I used was, you know, a flaming bag of dog poop on someone’s doorstep. In this case, it was the seventh doorstep, right? It was the end of the session. There’d been a lot of acrimony that had ratcheted up over property taxes over school vouchers and ultimately, you know, has been building session after session essentially as the house does not meet, you know, ba basically Lieutenant Governor’s expectations it that way. Right. So this is, this is an ongoing story and when the house essentially kicked the, you know, kick this over to them to the Senate. I mean, one of the things I was thinking at the time was, you know, if nothing else, this is just a big mess for them to deal with and, and I’m not sure that that wasn’t. And look again, this is going back to the whole, you can’t say, oh, was that why the house did it? No, I don’t think that’s why the House did. I think there’s a lot, again, there’s a lot of factors why the House impeached Paxson, including

[0:22:17 Jim]  or why the Senate voted the way they did or

[0:22:19 Josh]  why the Senate voted the way they did. But it doesn’t mean that this wasn’t, you know, again, when, when the individual house members were weighing up their various considerations, including the evidence that was available to them, including whatever else they wanted to weigh the politics of it. Who knows? And, and in choosing to, to ratify, you know, those articles of impeachment sent to the Senate. You know, I don’t think it’s unlikely that for some members part of this, what was funny was like, ok, well, now the Senate is going to have to deal with this mess and in some ways, Patrick’s speech was the book end of that. He was basically to say, yeah, you know what you did? Put a flaming bag of Turds on my, on my, you know, my front staff and, you know, what I dealt with it and now I’m gonna try to throw it back, you know, at your car or whatever, you know, whatever, whatever the, whatever the follow up is to

[0:22:59 Jim]  that, you know? Yeah. No, I mean, I think a lot of, you know, the, the, the, the thought, the thought experiment that I sort of engaged in at one point was, you know, if, you know, if you were somebody that watched the process and, you know, you watched the house deliver the impeachment to the Senate and then the following week or so you watched the house come back in the special session, side with the governor and then adjourn. So two, you know, it was basically another bag. Oh, by the way, here have another. And then you left Austin because the weather was too bad and you went someplace where you had no media access or you couldn’t follow the process and then you drop back into town about the time that Patrick was giving this speech, you’d kind of go, well, it seems like I didn’t miss much, nothing happened. So still, still going and just getting worse. And so, you know, I mean, I, I, and I, and I think that, you know, that that gets missed, I think in a lot of, again, from a national perspective on this and you really can’t, you know, I mean, I, I think any, any explanation that looks at this dynamic and it, of course, leads you to other ways which i, it will lead us to this, to the next factor or another factor. It overlaps with other things. But there is something right there that again is right at that, right, at the, you know, the, the, it’s like the intersection of two, you know, major thoroughfares, you know, of politics and institutional factors, right, where they’re over, you know, it’s ideology and institutions, right? I mean, there’s just, and they’re really fueling a lot of conflict that clearly is at play and is continuing. and is, and is only gonna get worse.

[0:24:39 Josh]  Well, you know, the thing is, and, I mean, you know, I said this before and I think this is true, you know, you know, Patrick woke up that day and chose violence, you know, I mean, because look, I think, you know, I said all along, you know, my expectation was that they were going to acquit him and what they were going to say was, and even the, the republicans who didn’t vote to dismiss the charge early on, it would have been easy enough to say these are serious charges. We’re going to listen to the evidence. But, you know what, we listen to the evidence in some cases, what they already says it either. They actually, I thought they’d say and it wasn’t enough to, to remove someone from office. We respect this process too much. Now, they found another way, which is to say, at least again, among the sort of a lot of the senators who seem to have some misgivings about their voter feel like they need to explain it. They, they, they pointed to the high burden of proof as sort of an out for them because that allows them to say they’re not really saying what they thought either way they’re saying, well, the burden of proof was so high, right? And that kind of gets them out of it. Patrick could have said something similar. It’s like we agreed that this was the burden, it was a high burn. He could say, hey, look, this wasn’t enough, but instead, he said this is the house’s fault. And so he really, I mean, he threw more gas on the fire when it wasn’t entirely necessary. But that’s a choice that’s been made now. So it really is an escalation.

[0:25:42 Jim]  You know, one of the things that I think we’ve talked about in here and, and certainly, you know, has been discussed is that and, and is reflected in the point you’re making is that if you assume that, you know, look, one of the biggest questions all along was where is, you know, what, you know, where, where is the lieutenant governor in all of this? What are his priorities given his obvious control and influence over the Senate and his large role in the political system, writ large. And if you were to say, oh, you know, what are, you know, Dan Patrick’s top five priorities here. I don’t think looking out for Ken Paxton was in the top five, you know, maybe, you know, certainly one in the top three. And I think the way that you put that, you know, it was interesting is Lieutenant Governor Patrick did not spend any time in that speech saying, and by the way, this really shows you that Ken Paxton did not deserve any of this and is a great guy. It was just, you know, thumping on the house and, and, and to, to move on to a kind of another factor here and invoking and re inflaming the factional politics in the Republican

[0:26:49 Josh]  party. Yeah, I mean, I just, I can’t help but point this out. It doesn’t matter. I just have to say it. But, I mean, the idea that he’s excoriating the house for basically their rushed process while lauding the Senate for basically limiting the amount of time that they could, they could devote to this incredibly important task was like, again, you can’t, you can’t follow politics closely if you get too upset or consistency. Yeah. But I mean, but I mean, that moment in and of itself to me was just amazing just for what it was. But it also shows that, you know, and maybe it wasn’t really about the process. And

[0:27:17 Jim]  so, you know, I mean, I think so let’s, let’s talk about the you know, the House Senate conflict obviously overlaps in complex ways and I, I, you know, it, it’s tricky to sort this out and we’ll try to do this in, in a, in a reasonable way, you know, with the factional politics in the Republican party and it’s tricky because, you know, as we’ve said in here, but just to sort of hit the point again, I think, you know, for immediate use, you know, the, it’s, it’s oversimplifying to say that as some people will try to say, and I think it sort of favors one side over the other to say that the Senate is the conservative chamber and the House is the moderate chamber or the less conservative chamber or because I think there’s a lot of evidence that you can look at output vote analysis. A lot of different things that say that, you know, we’re talking about a pretty narrow ideological, ideological spectrum here. You have to parse this very carefully. That’s not to say that the quote unquote movement slash dissident conservatives don’t have more sway in the Senate than they do in the House because I think they do. But it, it is to say that you can’t, you can’t just sort of put the, get an ideological space and say, oh, Senate Chair House is here and the Senate is just a more conservative body. Yeah. And

[0:28:38 Josh]  just, you know, I mean, just for the sake of it, I mean, it’s interesting the way you put that because it is sort of, you’re actually talking about two different things. You know, in some ways, I think you actually see a true, I mean, I should say this is true across both, both chambers on the votes that you can, that get taken, right? I think you can see more of the ideological spread in the division that exists in the house because one, there are more members and there are more numbers, but two, there’s no Patrick who is standing over, who is going to say if you don’t vote this way, this is what’s gonna

[0:29:06 Jim]  happen. And the house process is very different than the Senate process

[0:29:09 Josh]  is very different. And it’s not even the case that Patrick even needs to say to a senator who wants to vote against a conservative priority of his, you don’t vote against it. That senator knows that he or she cannot vote against that without the possibility of engendering some kind of retaliation. And I think even on this trial, there’s been a lot of accounts kind of floating around out there that, you know, there were probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 19 to 20 votes overall that would have gone for a conviction. But once those Republicans learned that they weren’t going to get to 21 against where the numbers come in against kind important that basically there was no, there was no benefit to them to actually, you know, take a take a principled stand on the evidence because ultimately, they were just gonna get punished both by Patrick directly. They don’t, he doesn’t need to say that. And, but also by outside groups, by potentially by voters

[0:29:55 Jim]  to be fair to Patrick, he has plausible deniability on that. This is an interpretation on.

[0:30:00 Josh]  No, it’s absolutely. But I, but I’m talking about, but what I’m saying is I’m just, yeah, I’m applying, what is, I think is pretty well known and standard mode, you know, mode of operation when we talk about most legislative affairs votes bills, things like that. Does it apply to this process? Well, I’d like to say no, but again, looking at, looking at what we’ve seen, it’s kind of hard to think that this is totally different.

[0:30:21 Jim]  I mean, I, you know, I mean, I think it would be naive to think that that just because this is institutionally a different process and nominally a different process that it’s not taking place in the context of the Texas Senate as run by Dan Patrick. Yeah,

[0:30:36 Josh]  it’s, I think it’s just easy, it’s very easy to, to sort of maximize the distance between the two chambers. When in reality, if you were to just, you know, look at the preferences of, of the individual members in each chamber, they’d probably be closer looking than I think some of the conflict suggests on some of these big issues because really you’re talking about Patrick, who is very conservative and has very conservative policy priorities and a house that has a little bit more ideological, a little bit more ideological heterogeneity on this stuff. OK.

[0:31:04 Jim]  So, yeah, I, I agree with that. So, you know, so like, so one aspect of this has been then, you know, in terms of like the assessing where factional politics played into this, the, you know, the drumbeat from the very beginning of this process back in the spring from, you know, again, language, what are we gonna call them, the dissident, right? Groups?

[0:31:27 Josh]  I like the dissident, right? I think, and I like you, you use it a while ago on the reason I like it. And I just want to say is the way that I think about it is that we know that there are individuals on the far right of the party, especially in the house who have been to some degree outside of the levers of power. They’ve been incorporated in by leadership sort of session over session, really going back to the beginning in the tea party way and then kind of going to now. But I mean, when we talk about what is, you know, what is ultimately underlying, you know, a lot of this sort of angst and stuff, it’s agenda control and it’s about power and they don’t, they don’t drive the agenda to the extent that they’d like to or feel that they should. And I like the

[0:32:00 Jim]  term dissident to, to, to, as a shorthand for that. And also, you know, it’s also, you know, it’s a, it’s a little bit of a, it’s a slightly more, both flexible but also a little more, maybe a little bit more precise than just saying ends versus out. Although there’s an, there’s an, you know, there’s an aspect of that, I mean, look, it’s not,

[0:32:19 Josh]  I like this. Yeah, because it, it, it shows a range because sometimes they’re in, sometimes they’re out. Right. And it,

[0:32:24 Jim]  and it, right, and, and, you know, two of the loudest voice pro Paxton voices, you know, are former house members who, you know, who’s made a judgment at some point that they were no longer viable in the house. Now there’s all kinds of other rationales for deciding to leave the house but in situations and so all of that kind of leads to, you know, you know, an interesting sidelight here that I don’t, I think both of us want to talk about and, and that is, you know, there was an interesting axios story that it was credited to Mike Allen, the head of axios and, you know, sort of, you know, came from Politico, you know, really a DC guy, you know, actually has been primarily an email outlet. It seems to me the subject line and headline is a, is a scoop in all capitals that based on his sourcing, it was supposed to be a sort of AAA big part of the explanation here or the explanation, that sort of national right wing forces had worked through these dissident forces, you know, elements in the state to pressure potential anti Paxton senators or a anti Paxton votes in the Senate through, you know, email campaigns and phone calls and social media media appearances. Now, one of the things that’s interesting about the whole, there’s two key things I want to focus on. There’s a lot that we can focus on. One is there’s a lot of pushback from Texas, not a lot, but there was some public and, and some other behind the scenes pointed pushback from Texas based journalists about the fact that this was some kind of scoop because in fact, it was pretty common knowledge. I mean, look, Steve Ban, I mean, that was part of the strategy, Steve Bannon and Donald Trump both now declared their allegiances to Paxton and you know, criticized the House and you know, echoed, echoed and amplified the lines that had been coming from inside the state for quite a long time. Now, there, you know, there are a few new dots to connect that I think were in the Mike Allen story. But I think that it really underlines, you know, this is kind of one of our exhibit a I think on this where we started in terms of think not thinking about this is liable to a mono causal explanation, not to be too wonky about it. But I mean, to read, you know, to read that angle on the story, I think was to walk away with the impression among other things that what really carried the day here was a coordinated effort by national right wing forces out of state from outside the state to kind of come in and Bigfoot this and, and, and provide the decisive push in in Paxton’s Paxton’s

[0:35:15 Josh]  defense. Yeah, I think this is a great example of the sort of over determination thing. And what I mean here in some ways is, you know, it’s easy to look at the, the outcome here and say, well, this was politics as usual and I think a really simple example of like read of politics usually. Well, yeah, the Republicans voted against the Democrats and he got out. It’s like, that’s not what we mean. When we say politics as usual, when we’re talking about politics as usual in the state of Texas, we’re talking about the oversized influence of the activated engaged segments of the Republican primary electorate, who’s a very small share of the Texas population overall, but generally tend to have an outsized influence on most political outcomes, on setting the agenda and on, on things like this. Now, look

[0:35:55 Jim]  and on the other hand and joining to that the risk and work sensitivity of incumbent Republicans in the state,

[0:36:03 Josh]  right? And, and again, we talked about it here too, especially senate incumbents who have to face a very large district in which you know, if you can mobilize a significant share of again of this very small share of the district against you. And you have a reason

[0:36:17 Jim]  in low turnout Republican primary, there

[0:36:18 Josh]  is always a candidate but also because of this factional policy we’re talking about, there are, there’s always funding and there’s funding within the state that has nothing to do with national groups, has nothing to do with like Texas is not receiving a bunch of money from out of state to run Republicans in GOP primaries, full stop. That is not happening there. Well, not there’s no evidence but, but just take a step back and think, do you really does anyone out there really think that going into the next election cycle, the priority of national Republican groups is going to be to spend money in Texas on statewide races to move Republicans out of office to replace them with candidates who might have a, a lower electoral probability was opposed to maybe, I don’t know, spending money in competitive states on the presidential election. I mean, it’s kind of insane, but the other piece of this to the over determination is like if this is politics as usual, this this the powers, what it means is like these, these are, these are also politics

[0:37:11 Jim]  as usual as we see it or as they see it as

[0:37:13 Josh]  usual as we see it. So if this is politics, as usual as we see it, then what are the other features that, well, the other feature that we talk about all along is that, you know, Paxton’s biggest strength is with it, engage Republican primary voters. He has cultivated that constituency consistently activating that constituency for, for to about an alleged cabal between Democrats and Rhinos is something that within state forces do on a regular basis. So look, does this mean that the national money that came in and, and, and amplified that message or, or echoed it or reverb, it did not have an impact. Sure, I’m sure it did have some kind of an impact, but it’s a marginal impact over what is already kind of baseline politics in the state and what was already going on really from the moment, the impeachment, you know, charges were sent to the

[0:37:56 Jim]  Senate, right? And, and, you know, we’ve been, this is in no way meant to imply, you know, look, we told you because I certainly didn’t, but that was really apparent in some of the numbers that we published, right? I mean, I think maybe the second post after we released the post, after we released the latest poll results in August from the August Bowl. You know, I think there was a point in that post that was, this is where Paxton’s support is strongest allowing for the fact that there were particularly compared to Trump, a lot of people that were reserving judgment in those groups too. But nonetheless, if you just looked at the people that weren’t reserving judgment that were expressing a view, Paxton’s support, no matter what dimension you looked at whether, you know, your view of whether this was mostly politics or based on the facts, your view of, you know, your job approval of Paxton, your view of whether the impeachment was justified, your view of whether he should be removed, his support was strongest against those who identified as strong republicans and especially those who identified as extremely conservative. And so, you know, all of that, if you step back, I think underlines, you know, this kind of how the politics of the House Senate conflict and the ideological factional politics. There’s a Ben diagram there that, you know, was, you know, I think not super clearly determined going to this, but you know, there were some, there were some leading indicators that if you were an entrepreneurial opportunistic national political figure like a Steve Bannon or these other folks that, that Mike Allen, I think is talking to or watching, you know that there was, you know, an obvious target for your efforts. Everybody also has an incentive now after the fact to call up reporters and, and, and say, hey, you know what we did this, you know, I love this, I think, and I think that’s got to be kept in mind here.

[0:39:49 Josh]  Yeah, there’s an observation always that, you know, the winners of the, you know, the winners always stick around and claim credit and the losers kind of walk off. Yeah.

[0:39:56 Jim]  Yeah. You know, what’s the, what’s the old cliche? I’m not, you know, I’m sort of proud that I probably can’t get this right. That, you know, failure has 1000 failure. Success has 1000 fathers and failure. None. You know. So I’m like, along those lines. All right. So we’re gonna, you know, we’ve been going for a while but let’s, you know, let’s hit a couple more things and we’ll, you know, we’ll come back and, and start talking about the future, maybe, you know, next week or the week after, but hopefully begin to move to some other things. I will admit to our listeners. I, I think you’re probably interested, I think we’ve been following the market, but I was looking at the podcast, I were fully aware that probably four of the last six podcasts have been largely packed and focused.

[0:40:37 Josh]  But I mean, we could have done it every day. We could have done.

[0:40:44 Jim]  You did float it like, so are we just gonna do a podcast every day after

[0:40:48 Josh]  the?

[0:40:48 Jim]  Right? And I, you know, this gave me stomach and headaches enough as it was. how does this impact Dave feeling standing in the house?

[0:40:58 Josh]  Yeah. It’s a tough one. Right? I mean, I think, you know, the question, you know, I think the, the basic first question I asked, you know, does this embolden again, these sort of dissident, you know, forces that exist in the house. I mean, ultimately, you know, it’s tough to say, I mean, I think that there’s a way to think that he looks weakened because, I mean, if just, just based on the, on the most basic thing that we talk about a lot, a lot in here which, you know, the speaker is usually likes to not be known. And Dave, yeah, Dave Vi’s name has been basically taken right through the mud multiple times in the last few weeks, very directly. And, you know, to the extent that blame is being laid, you know, at his feet among conservative republicans especially, we’ll see what happens. I mean, I think what’s interesting going into the institutional piece of this, we’re still not at a, we’re still on a session right now. We’re not even in a special session yet. So the legislature is gonna go away for a little bit. But, you know, if, if the trial ended with Patrick being Patrick, you know, which is kind of normal in some ways and, and the way that he sort of force this House Senate, you know, argument. Yeah, the question becomes, do the forces are there aligns that are aligned against feeling and again, a majority of House Republicans who put him in that position, do they feel emboldened by this? And what do they do with it

[0:42:06 Jim]  and, and to be fair and not to echo his, the criticism of him, but it would be unfair to not mention this, that put him in this position with the cooperation of a critical mass of democrats. Right? Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, I think in some ways you, you can oversimplify this but I think is a starting point, you know, it’s not is this going to solidify feelings support in the face of Patrick’s posing of this as, you know, so directly, like, you know, the Senate had to come in and like, correct all this crap that the house did or how much is it gonna activate in some ways the house being the house that even if you’re the most successful speaker, there are always a lot of people in the chamber that think, you know, I could do a better job of this. And so, you know, how is, you know, the oppositional the in, you know, again, a different version of the, the in group, out group tension between the Senate and the house that Patrick is clearly stoking as are some of his allies. And, you know, look, I, I if, if you start looking and reading between the lines of some of the, the responses of the senators who voted with Paxton, even some who didn’t. There’s a lot of very complex signaling going on here. Some subtle things are going. Yeah. You know, look, I was in the house, you know, it was cool, you know, I, I’ve also been in the Senate now. I, you know, there’s a certain amount of, hey, I don’t want to get involved in this but, you know, maybe mistakes were made. I don’t

[0:43:30 Josh]  know. I mean, I always think that if you’re, if you’re a member in one of these bodies and someone can take the arrows for you, you’re pretty happy for them to do it till they’re dead and feeling is gonna be that guy. The flip side is, I think, you know, the house has shown itself pretty explicitly that one of the dimensions that they have considered in putting a speaker for the last few sessions has been someone who is going to stand up to Patrick. And really the question becomes after all of this, does this fundamentally change it in a way that the House is. And again, the majority of House Republicans are more inclined to put someone in charge who more sympathetic to Patrick than someone they put in recently. And that seems a little, that seems a little hard for me to

[0:44:08 Jim]  imagine. No, I think that’s right. But I think the other scenario is, and you know, I’m choosing my words carefully here. You don’t, you don’t want to underestimate the, the opportunism that is always at work. These are, look, politics is always in part. I mean, there’s no other area I think of life in which maybe business in which opportunism can be coded in a positive way is an attribute. So, you know, to the extent, you know, to go back to your metaphor, I mean, yep, it’s great to have somebody that you can use to, to absorb arrows until there’s no more room to absorb any more arrows. And then what do you do? You toss them aside and think about what’s next, what’s next. And so I just don’t, you know, I don’t know what the, you know, look, my gut feeling is that for the most part, people are going to rally around feeling but, or at least, you know, a critical, a sufficiently critical mass will continue to, to back him. And I think that’s probably the safest bet, but we’re also gonna have to see what the politics of the next special session look like. It’s gonna be, I think it’s gonna be very critical, you know, in terms of, you know, giving us more data about and, and providing shifting the ground a little bit in terms of, you know, how strong feeling support is and, and, and if people stick with

[0:45:35 Josh]  him or not, I think the one thing I think you can say is does this significantly increase the probability? That feeling sees a challenge for speaker next time around? Yeah, I think it does. I mean, just as I think, you know, that’s, that’s something we can say right now. So you want a couple, do a couple more,

[0:45:50 Jim]  a strong, a stronger challenge than you had last time, put it that

[0:45:52 Josh]  way.

[0:45:55 Jim]  You know, I think the Washington, we can’t, you know, I think we should get out of here soon, but I think we can’t do this without also ending with how does this, I, you know, the, the interesting question of how this impacts Ken Paxton standing to go back, you know, this is in some ways, maybe a slightly backhanded plug for a, for a, you know, axios led in their, in their Texas. Yeah, but I think it, it appeared in at least one of the, but I think it was also in the, in the AM briefing if it didn’t, although it didn’t lead, you know, axis is also leading to is leading today with the contention that the trial has raised Paxton’s profile by connecting him with a national audience of conservative voters. And that, you know, in the end, this has been, you know, a boosting effort for, for Paxton. I, you, I think you’re a little more skeptical of this than I am, but I’m not sure in terms of our early conversations, I might be misreading that wrong or I may have just not expressed myself. No,

[0:46:50 Josh]  I mean, I, I am, I think, I think it’s, I mean, I’m not saying it’s wrong on its face. I just think it’s, it’s too simple. I mean, the idea like, you know, it’s one of those like all publicity is good publicity kind of like maxims, which isn’t true, you know.

[0:47:02 Jim]  Well, I think that would have been more applicable if he had been convicted. But,

[0:47:05 Josh]  well, I mean, but even so, I mean, here’s the thing, I mean, I think to the point where we started on this is actually nice wrapping it up is, you know, what’s the takeaway from? This is the takeaway that Ken Paxton was exonerated, that he was found to have done nothing wrong. I mean, ultimately, you know, we had two weeks where a lot of evidence was presented that was clearly very troubling even to many of the senators who voted to acquit him. So, I mean, I don’t necessarily, and, and I look, I used to

[0:47:27 Jim]  talk about the threshold being very high.

[0:47:29 Josh]  Yeah. And the other, and the other piece, you know, I just don’t think that being impeached by a Republican majority legislature in a state that I think people outside the state think of as being dominated by Republicans is so easily rational, well, rationalized in the way that it’s been tried to be rationalized, which is, oh, this is really like Rhinos and Democrats. And, you know, and I think if you, if you’re, you know, a Republican from New Jersey, you’re saying, what are you kidding me? And I think, you know, that that’s actually not an unreasonable reaction. So I think there’s that piece. The other thing is, I think there’s something that, you know, we wrote about this just before. I think the weekend about how, you know, the ways in which Ken Paxton’s attitudes in Texas lead towards Ken Paxton are not synonymous with sort of attitudes towards Donald Trump along these dimensions. You know, we found a lot more benefit of the doubt for Donald Trump. We found over time that generally, regardless of sort of his legal problems of anything, it solidified the Republicans mostly with him. For the most part, we don’t really see that with Paxson. We saw the opposite. We saw that as Republicans learn more about this, they were more likely to be skeptical. They were more likely to say the House was justified. They were more likely to think he might, you know, be removed from, maybe should be removed from office. They were more likely to think that the charges were fact based. And so, you know, to me, part of it is because everyone’s sort of focused on the process and the site and I think for pack and you come out and you say, hey, I was persecuted and exonerated. And I, you know, and I’m just, you know, someone who’s generally a little bit reticent. I’m reticent about Donald Trump’s national standing because of the fact that the trials. Well, I don’t think that they necessarily, or all the indictments. Well, I don’t think that the actual content of them necessarily matters. I think it’s going to affect his campaign. And I think one of the challenges Donald Trump has is in mobilizing people to basically take his grievances as their grievances. You know, which I think, you know, when you’re talking about like it’s harder

[0:49:11 Jim]  to do is the grievances get more

[0:49:13 Josh]  rarified. Right. Exactly. So that’s, that’s a good way to say that. And I think, but yet Donald Trump has been able to do that, but Donald Trump has also demonstrated himself as a uniquely of, of an incredibly unique political entity. People talk about how he, you know, basically talk about how, you know, Teflon Don and all this stuff and how these things seem to make him stronger and how unique that is and they seem to be applying that same framing to Paxton. Yet none of the the data or evidence indicates that, you know, his level of support among Republicans or the trend in it at all looks anything like Donald Trump over that period of time in the sense, Donald Trump seems to have gone stronger despite these things, Ken Paxton has definitely gotten weaker in the polling data and the fact that he was whatever you want to say, the Senate did, let let him off whatever on its face that to me doesn’t read. Ok. Now this guy is gonna go out there and, and you know, basically use his grievances and say, oh, you know, you should, you might get impeached too. Let me

[0:50:04 Jim]  buttress your argument slightly and then dissent slightly. So why buttress I mean, part of the problem with it is also that Donald Trump has only gotten stronger to the extent that as the presidential campaign has nomination campaign has started, he has demonstrated consistent strength versus the rest of the field. His overall numbers are actually a little bit down. And as we’ve said in here, and as we put in the piece, you know, whether that maintains or not, as we get into a more, you know, if he’s the nominee and as we get into a more polarized general election, you know, whether those numbers change again or not open question, but for now they are down, they’re not down a lot, they’re down, you know, depending on the polling, depending on, you know, whether we’re looking at Texas or we’re looking at national aggregate polling, you know, down like 5 to 8 points, maybe in some places more like 3 to 7 now, closely divided national electorate mobilization. Election numbers have fallen among independents. He’s actually not stronger. And so I think the whole, you know, Donald Trump is like the Hulk, the angrier, he gets the stronger. He is, is kind of bullshit, right? And I just, I think we need to be clear about calling bullshit on that. And so there’s that now in terms of, I think, you know, the, the, the, the Paxton thing, I mean, I think it’s more interesting and I think, you know, I mean, this is like stating the obvious in some ways it’s obviously, like, more helpful to him to have not been convicted than to have been convicted. Right. But I do think that, you know, one of the interesting things about our polling numbers this far and the kind of thing we’ve been, you know, the drum we’ve been beating kind of all summer. And certainly since we got the August numbers is that people were not paying attention and that they were not. And it, something that was not a top tier interest of them as our numbers shown in August compared to other big political issues on the news, something that they were not receiving clear, unambiguous elite signal, partisan signaling on because in part, the gag order and in part, because there were a lot of Republicans that were reticent, we don’t really have a good sense of what people are gonna think. I mean, I would argue that and we’ll see the empirical question. Hopefully we’ll have an answer to after our next poll, you know, are people gonna report having heard more about this in our next poll? I don’t know. I kind of think so and I think we’re also gonna see relative, you know, we’re now going to see more, relatively, more unified Republicans signaling on this that it’s gonna break in Paxton’s way. So I, you know, I think it’s fair to say it’s a net game for him. But I also think that, you know, to go back to, you know, the A OQ, I wouldn’t want to go too far with

[0:52:58 Josh]  this. Yeah. Well, look, I think here’s the key point. Right. I think I just to, I want to use our data for one second and I think this is the key point here. We don’t know yet how this has affected him, which is fine. Here’s the reason I’m reluctant to say that this is, this is some sort of net win for him. So, in our last poll, right? And here we’re just looking, just talking about, you know, in, in August of this year, right before this, right before the trial, right, you had 23% of Republicans disapprove of the job tax and he was doing and approval was 46%. That was the lowest approval he’s had and the highest disapproval he’s had among Republicans at the, at the beginning of this trial, 24% are Republican. So a quarter, one in four said that, you know, basically he took action to justify removing him from office. One in four Republicans. That is a lot, right. 28% said the Texas House was justified in impeaching him. and 23% said it’s mostly based on facts. So you have about a quarter of the Republican electorate who heard about this. And basically, you know, pretty much consistently said this is a serious problem. Now, look, maybe with the verdict they said, oh, my bad, you know, I guess he was exonerated. Everything’s fine and maybe these numbers bounce back but having something happen that basically has a quarter of your electorate essentially turn on you. I don’t see how you can interpret that in the short, medium, long term as good. I don’t know how he could have that happen here. And the idea that somehow a completely different sort of nationalized version of this is filtered out in such a way again to a smaller share of the national audience. But I mean, if you say right now is Paxson strengthened or weakened by this, based on what we know at the moment, this was not good for him. I mean, I mean, because again, you know, to your point, it’s like, yes, he was not another way to put the impeached Attorney General be impeached by a Republican House and Texas Attorney General. I mean, there’s, there’s a lot of baggage to this that I think we have to, we’re gonna have to wait and sort of withhold judgment on with the polling data. But again, to sort of kind of come out of this and sort of say, with such confidence, like, well, this really strengthens Paxton and it’s like, I wanna just, let’s, let’s hold off on

[0:54:48 Jim]  that. So you’re saying it’s another instance in the podcast while this was before we came on that, which Nietzsche was wrong.

[0:54:54 Josh]  And with that,

[0:54:56 Jim]  I think we’ll see, there’s a lot to unpack there. I think in terms of how this institutional, you know, again, what the signaling is gonna be like as, as more Republicans in particular pay attention to what they’re hearing about this. You know, I mean, II, I think we’re gonna see something sort of in the middle, which is, I, I don’t know, but I kind of suspect his numbers are going to improve. Yeah, I think they, and they, you know, will they improve dramatically? I doubt it. But, you know, among whom is

[0:55:24 Josh]  also? Well, the question, I think the question, I think that we’re going to look at just to, you know, pull the current bag is, you know, do, does this floor and do, does this floor and ceiling change from this? I mean, presumably a lot of people got introduced to Ken Paxton into this process who weren’t paying a lot of attention to him. It’s a little bit down ballot relative to the governor, lieutenant governor senators, things like that. You know, now that this is all kind of wrapped up and we go into the field again at some point in the not too distant future, you know, let’s see what the trend lines look like.

[0:55:50 Jim]  And you know, whether it’s a shift in direction, I mean, I mean, in a, in a more technical sense, that’s kind of what we’re talking about, right? The decline you were talking about was really pretty kind of steep and ongoing. I expect it to, to reverse will it, what is, what is that reversal gonna look like? And so that means it won’t just be the next poll and it’ll be like, what are we going to see in the next three or four? I think. So on that, Josh, thanks for a very stimulating discussion. Thanks to all of you for listening. As always, thanks very much to our excellent production team in the DEV studio in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. We have talked about some data today and as I said, we’ll, we’ll put a post together if you’re listening to this on a podcast platform that will appear at our website, Texas politics dot U Texas dot edu. Soon as we wrap up here, I’ll make a list of all the things I’ve promised and try to deliver. So thank you for listening and we’ll be back soon with another second reading podcast. The second reading podcast is a production of the Texas Politics project at the University of Texas at Austin