All from the Texas Tribune
- As coronavirus hits Texas, the state's top health official is spending 30 hours a week on a second job — that pays $600,000.
The acting head of Texas’ massive health and human services bureaucracy, who is leading a 36,600 employee agency during a global pandemic, is also working a second job as the well-paid general manager of the Lower Colorado River Authority, a quasi-state agency — funded without state tax dollars — that provides water and electricity to more than a million Texans.
- Long a GOP voice on health care, U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess seeks a higher post.
For the last seven months or so, longtime U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess of Lewisville has run a quiet campaign to be the top Republican of a House committee that is so powerful that a past chairman kept an enormous photo of the Earth in the committee's offices to illustrate its jurisdiction.
Burgess is running to be the GOP leader of the House Energy and Commerce Committee next term — or, if the 2020 elections break Republicans' way, the chair. The committee is the congressional arm that regulates all interstate commerce, lending to it the power to investigate everything from Major League Baseball to Silicon Valley. But now, thanks to a pandemic and oil bust, the world is falling in on Congress and Texas, and Burgess is running for what is likely to be one of the hardest jobs in Washington next term.
- Texas Democrats' convention begins online-only Monday, while state GOP officials stick to in-person plans in July.
The Texas Democratic and Republican parties are planning very different conventions this summer as the coronavirus pandemic persists — and drawing a growing national spotlight along the way.
The state Democratic Party is holding an exclusively virtual convention that kicks off Monday, while the Texas GOP is pressing forward with an in-person convention in mid-July in Houston. Both events are serving as instructive precursors — if not templates — for the respective national parties, which are wrestling with how to safely hold their own conventions later this summer.