This week in politics started with American politics' version of the Fall Classic with the beginning of the US Supreme Court's session.  Over in the legislative branch, the leading candidate for the Speaker of the House dropped out unexpected Thursday, a reflection of just how miserable divisions in the GOP caucus have made the party's leadership.  Also on the national stage, Joe Biden's decision to enter the presidential fray draws ever closer-- or not. In Texas politics, we got a double blast from the recent past with news when David Dewhurst and Rick Perry were back in the news. We also saw interim charges released by Lt. Governor Patrick's office - see some analysis of at least one way in which they reflected public attitudes here.

Don't forget: you can toggle the bars in the crosstab charts on and off by clicking on entries in the legend in each chart.

1.  It was the first Monday in October, and the Supreme Court returned, with some Texas cases waiting in the wings. Cases from Texas concerning abortion, redistricting, and university admissions (the Fisher case again) made it on the SCOTUS agenda.  The court's decision on gay marriage in their last session infuriated conservatives and many Republicans, and it's become a set peice of the 2016GOP nomination campaign to give the court a good kicking, even former conservative favorite John Roberts.  Going into the last presidential election, a plurality of Texans (34 percent) ranked the Supreme Court as the most trusted of the three branches of American government.  Most striking, given, the dim view conservatives have taken of the court post-Obergefell, is the fact that the Court's high estimation in this item was largely driven by the court being the most trusted institution among Republicans by a wide margin:  45 percent of GOP respondents trusted the Court the most, far outpacing Congress (19%) and the presidency (2%). (Democrats overwhelmingly (61%) trusted the presidency - the only branch dominated by their own.

2.  Meanwhile, over in Texans' least trusted branch of American government... The political story of the week was the sudden announcement by the leading candidate to succeed John Boehner as Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), that he withdrawing from the race.  Here in Texas, Congressional approval ratings were just beginning to recover, clawing their way back into double digits in recent polls in Texas, where one *might* think that the Republican presence in the electorate and a huge numerical dominance of the state delegation would lead to higher ratings.  Not so much.  Republican disgust with an institution in which their party holds the majority reflects in part the division between establishment and anti-establishment Republicans.  Looking at the June 2015 Congressional job approval numbers in Texas, Tea Party disapproval was ten points higher than Democratic disapproval. McCarthy couldn't bridge the gap in his own caucus and so knew he didn't have the votes he needed to become speaker.  Hard to imagine why he would really want the job to begin with.

3.  Waiting for Joe Biden. With the first Democratic presidential primary debate looming, speculation about whether Joe Biden will jump in the race reached fever pitch.  We wrote about this earlier this week in Tribtalk.  In a nutshell:  Biden's position as a strong second choice to Hillary Clinton in Texas is a good indicator of why he is a good failsafe, especially in the view of Democratic elites getting nervous about a Clinton implosion.  But he is unlikely to be the source of an existential threat to her candidacy.  The rationale for a Biden candidacy is more about having a fallback in the event her campaign is brought down by some combination of her own weaknesses and the investigations swirling around her candidacy.

 

4.  David Dewhurst came back and blamed his loss  in the 2014 Republican primary on the consultants he will nonetheless pay.  The money quote from the letter he wrote to the consultants he still owed money from the 2014 effort, as presented in the Texas Tribune article:

While there is obviously no legal obligation that I personally pay the vendors invoices, and while a few of you let me down with messaging and media that was counter-productive, plus there were mistakes in polling, we all went through a tough time,” Dewhurst wrote. “Therefore, I have decided to pay the vendor invoices in full.”

 

 

This poor performance evaluation of his consultants seems to omit the fact that polling at the time and certainly since then pretty clearly illustrates that Dewhurst's position with the voters had already been eroded by his loss to Ted Cruz in the 2012 GOP primary contest for the US Senate nomination. Cruz's rise exposed how Dewhurst's appeal had lost some of its currency with a Republican electorate inflamed by the Tea Party insurgency. While its fair to observe that the delay in the 2012 primary contributed significantly to Cruz's ability to overcome a de facto incumbent candidate advantage in name recognition and money, looking at Dewhurst's favorability numbers going into the 2014 campaign in the context of Cruz's suggests Dewhurst's comparative weakness - and why he proved so vulnerable to a similarly positioned candidate like Patrick two years after losing the nomination to Cruz.

 

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5.  Rick Perry's going back to court -- in the meantime, it's "deep stealth mode."  Mid-week saw reports that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals will decide whether the charge of abuse of official capacity is unconstitutional as applied in the indictment against him.  Meanwhile, the former governor has reportedly been involved in helping promote a semi-mysterious software product for a company that is also employing former Perry team stalwarts from his time as governor.  The Austin American Statesman story that looked into the company, GovWhiz, that is developing...something had some droll moments as the involved parties sought to avoid comment.  No word on how Texans might view the governor helping to promote vaporware, but responses to his indictment were viewed largely through partisan lenses as early as October 2014 -- a sign that Perry's legal and communications team had successfully sold his indictment as a partisan prosecution.  If he can sell software like he sold that, keep an eye out for the GovWiz IPO.

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