Blogs: December 2019

As the 2020 election campaign gets underway in Texas, independents have become more important -- and more interesting. They are more important because Texas elections appear to be more politically competitive than they’ve been since before the turn of the century. They are more interesting both because their votes have the possibility of determining some election outcomes, and because their responses to the most powerful political figure shaping the 2020 election, Donald Trump, are much more divided and less fixed than are those of traditional partisans, most noticeably on the subject of Trump’s impeachment. This combination of factors makes independent voters more consequential in Texas elections than at anytime in recent memory, yet harder to handicap when it comes to their voting behavior.

The morning after four constitutional law professors testified on the constitutional context for the impeachment of President Donald Trump before the House Judiciary Committee, the print version of The New York Times ran with the headline “Tension as Scholars Debate If Case Was Made to Impeach.” In a much shorter and less politically staged discussion of the impeachment provisions in the U.S. Constitution, Professors Jeffrey Tulis and Gary Jacohbson sat down with Professor Dan Brinks, chair of the UT Austin Government Department, for a conversation recorded November 8 in the Liberal Arts Development Studio at UT.