BG Reads | News You Need to Know (October 19, 2021)
[BINGHAM GROUP]
EVENTS // Thursday, October 28 (6PM - 10PM0, A Night In Verde Presented by St. David’s Healthcare - benefiting the 4ATX Foundation (Austin FC’s non-profit arm).
[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]
Longtime U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett will run in the Austin area's new congressional district (Texas Tribune)
Longtime U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, has decided to run for reelection in Texas' 37th Congressional District, opting to vie for one of Texas' two new congressional districts — a bright-blue seat concentrated in Austin — rather than his current district, which reaches down to San Antonio.
Doggett announced the decision Sunday in an email to supporters and then shared it in person Monday outside Bryker Woods Elementary School in Austin.
“Nobody, me included, has any entitlement to public office, but Bryker Woods does issue reports cards," Doggett said, "and I’m ready for my neighbors to grade my service in Congress and my devotion to the families of this city."
Doggett currently represents the 35th Congressional District, which runs from Austin down along Interstate 35 to San Antonio. The proposed 37th District is far more compact, contained almost entirely within Travis County, home to Austin. Both are currently safely Democratic districts — and likely to remain so after redistricting.
Members of Congress do not have to live in the district they represent. Texas was the only state to get two new congressional districts due to population growth over the last 10 years. The latest census found that 95% of Texas' growth was fueled by people of color. The other new congressional district was drawn in the Houston area.
The congressional map proposal is close to reaching Gov. Greg Abbott's desk after House and Senate negotiators hashed out their differences Sunday.
The packing of Democratic voters in the new Austin district spares several Texas GOP congressmen of having to represent parts of Austin after 2022… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Developer aims to create ‘legacy’ music venue with massive 20,000-seat amphitheater in southwest Austin (KXAN)
Developers hope to add a crown jewel to the Austin area’s already bustling live music scene: a 20,000-seat amphitheater at the center of a 71-acre entertainment and residential project near Bee Cave.
International Development Management Co. aims to open the first pieces of the Violet Crown project in 2023, with the amphitheater targeted to open by Labor Day 2023. Plans also call for two luxury apartment towers, a distillery and tasting room, a Top Golf-style driving range and a parking garage. The site is northwest of State Highway 71 and Southwest Parkway.
“Austin has been given the moniker of the [Live] Music Capital of the World. By God, I’m going to solidify that with this project,” said IDM President Craig Bryan, who noted the Violet Crown development should cost between $600 million and $750 million… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Reshaping Austin’s political boundaries (AXIOS Austin)
Austin is reshaping its city council boundaries — and the redistricting commission is hosting public forums to get input.
Why it matters: Austin’s population is larger and more diverse than it was when districts were first drawn in 2013. Redistricting changes how Austinites are represented in the city council — including their political clout and the makeup of the council itself.
Austin’s population grew by 21% (!) between 2010 and 2020, per new Census data.
Yes, but: Even as the city is more diverse, its percentage of Black residents has fallen and grown more diffuse, challenging map makers to create a district with a decisive mass of Black voters.
What they're saying: “We’re trying to give the possible opportunity for a person of color to elect a representative of their choice,” Christina Liu Puentes, chair of the redistricting commission, tells Axios.
Puentes was speaking chiefly of Black and Latino Austinites on Austin’s East Side.
The redistricting commission decided to forego an “Asian opportunity district” — even though Austinites of Asian descent now outnumber Black residents.
“Essentially, we don’t have an Asian opportunity district in Austin because Asians in Texas don’t have the precedent for levels of voter suppression and oppression as Asians in the West,” Puentes said… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[TEXAS NEWS]
First lawsuit filed challenging new Texas political maps as intentionally discriminatory (KUT)
Before they’ve even been signed into law, Texas’ new maps for Congress and the statehouse are being challenged in court for allegedly discriminating against Latino voters.
Filing the first federal lawsuit Monday in what’s expected to be a flurry of litigation, a group of individual voters and organizations that represent Latinos claim the districts drawn by the Legislature unconstitutionally dilute the strength of their votes and violate the federal Voting Rights Act.
The lawsuit was filed in El Paso by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
The legal challenge comes as the Legislature rounds out its redistricting work to incorporate a decade of population growth into new maps for Congress, the Texas House and the Texas Senate. Of the 4 million new residents the state gained since 2010, 95% were people of color; half were Hispanic.
Yet the maps advanced by the Republican-controlled Legislature deny Hispanics greater electoral influence — and pull back on their ability to control elections. The House map drops the number of districts in which Hispanics make up the majority of eligible voters from 33 to 30. The Congressional map reduces the number of districts with a Hispanic voting majority from eight to seven… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Supreme Court speeds review of Texas abortion law after fed seek freeze on enforcement (Dallas Morning News)
The U.S. Supreme Court signaled interest Monday in providing a quick review of Texas’ six-week abortion ban, giving abortion providers and the state until Thursday to argue whether they should or not. The order came shortly after the Justice Department filed an emergency application asking the court to halt enforcement of Senate Bill 8, which outsources enforcement to anyone willing to sue doctors or others who help a woman obtain an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected. The court already plans oral arguments Dec. 1 on a Mississippi ban that kicks in at 15 weeks — also long before the threshold set in Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 landmark that stemmed from a Dallas County prosecution. Although the Supreme Court rebuffed efforts to prevent SB8 from taking effect, it has not ruled on its constitutionality. Roe held that women have the right to terminate a pregnancy until a fetus is viable outside the womb, roughly 22 to 24 weeks, making the Texas law an aggressive challenge to five decades of precedent.
On Monday, the Biden administration asked the high court to so something it refused to do just before SB8 took effect on Sept. 1: halt enforcement until federal courts sort out its legality. Abortions plummeted in Texas until Oct. 6, when a U.S. district judge in Austin halted enforcement on grounds it was a blatant violation of Roe. A panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that ruling two days later and on Thursday, the 5th Circuit extended that order. The Justice Department announced Friday that it would ask the Supreme Court to vacate the appellate ruling, restoring the lower court injunction and allowing pre-viability abortions to resume in Texas. “For half a century, this Court has held that ‘a State may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability,’ ” the federal government argue in its filing on Monday. “S.B. 8 defies those precedents by banning abortion long before viability — indeed, before many women even realize they are pregnant,” the application reads. “But rather than forthrightly defending its law and asking this Court to revisit its decisions, Texas took matters into its own hands by crafting an ‘unprecedented’ structure to thwart judicial review.” Justice Samuel Alito, who handles legal emergencies out of the 5th Circuit, gave Texas until noon ET Thursday to respond to the Justice Department request. Soon afterward, the court issued an order setting the same deadline for Texas and abortion providers challenging its law to provide input on whether the court should take up the case… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
Texas legislators pass most — but not all — of Gov. Greg Abbott’s priority measures in final flurry of lawmaking (Texas Tribune)
The Texas Legislature adjourned from its third special session of the year early Tuesday morning after a final flurry of activity that included an agreement on how to spend billions in federal COVID-19 relief funds, approving a negotiated new congressional map and signing off on a last-minute proposal that will put to voters whether to increase the homestead property tax exemption.
In an 11th-hour effort to deliver on property tax relief, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s top priority for the session, the Senate fast-tracked a constitutional amendment to raise the state’s homestead exemption for school district property taxes from $25,000 to $40,000. That bill sailed through both chambers Monday evening with bipartisan support within hours of it being filed and heads to Texas voters in May.
For the average Texas homeowner, that would translate to roughly $176 in savings on their property tax bill, said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, the Houston Republican who authored the bill… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
[NATIONAL NEWS]
U.S. lawmakers step up pressure to adopt tougher tech laws (Wall Street Journal)
Legislation to curb the influence of big technology companies, including putting new restrictions on online content, is starting to gain traction in Congress as lawmakers narrow their targets and seek to build on public attention.
A bipartisan group of senators including Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) and Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) came out last week in favor of legislation that would prohibit dominant platforms from favoring their own products or services, boosting similar efforts already under way in the House.
Leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, meanwhile, offered their own far-reaching proposal to discourage social-media companies from promoting harmful content.
“There’s a different sense of urgency now, coupled with a level of bipartisanship that is truly rare,” said Tim Wu, special assistant to President Biden for technology and competition. “This is, as they say, the moment.”
Underlying much of the recent action were disclosures in The Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files series, including one that Facebook Inc.’s internal research showed that its Instagram app makes body-image worries worse for a substantial minority of teen girls. The disclosures prompted two Senate hearings and renewed calls for legislative remedies.
One of the measures with the best chance of passage is an update to the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which has bipartisan support among lawmakers and is also backed by children’s advocacy groups.
“If there’s going to be anything, it’s around kids,” said Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, a nonprofit group formerly known as the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, speaking to the prospects for tech legislation… (LINK TO FULL STORY)
FDA mulling to allow 'mix-and-match' COVID-19 vaccine booster shots: report (The Hill)
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is planning to announce that it will allow vaccinated individuals to get booster shots from vaccine makers that differ from their initial doses, The New York Times reported.
Sources familiar with the matter told the Times that the agency could announce the decision as early as this week. The FDA would not recommend one COVID-19 shot over the other, though it may note that using the same COVID-19 vaccine for the booster shot as the first two doses may be preferable.
The reported decision comes less than a week after a preprint study from the National Institutes of Health found that receiving vaccine booster shots different from what was initially administered is safe and effective. The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed yet, found that Pfizer and Moderna's mRNA vaccine booster shots offered the best protection… (LINK TO FULL STORY)