Texas Tribune
Amid civil war, Texas GOP to decide its next chapter
by By Robert Downen and Carla Astudillo, The Texas Tribune – 2024-05-23 05:00:00
SUMMARY: The Republican Party of Texas faces significant internal division and financial challenges. Under Matt Rinaldi, the party focused on purging moderates and aligning with ultraconservative megadonors Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, who significantly increased their financial support. This realignment has led to a sharp rightward shift in the party's platform, but also dwindling broader donor support and staffing reductions. A race to replace Rinaldi, who steps down amid controversy and declining party unity, underscores the internal strife. Candidates like Abraham George, backed by Rinaldi, are viewed as continuing the current divisive direction, eliciting mixed reactions from the party's members.
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In one of his last speeches as chair of the Republican Party of Texas, Matt Rinaldi declared victory.
“We've changed the game,” he told members of the Texas GOP's executive committee in February. “The biggest con that has been propagated against grassroots Republicans is that you have no other job other than to be a cheerleading society for anyone with an R next to their name.”
Rinaldi has indeed accomplished what he set out to do in 2021, when he was first elected chair. Whereas most of his predecessors focused on traditional party duties — courting donors, recruiting candidates and voter outreach — Rinaldi has turned the chair into a bully pulpit, using it to attack and purge more moderate Republicans and help usher in a dark-red wave in this year's primaries. But when he steps down as chair this week, he will leave behind a deeply divided organization, with a decimated staff, that is increasingly dependent on two ultraconservative megadonors who have played key roles in the party's ongoing civil war.
Last year, the Texas GOP's fundraising dropped to its lowest level since 2017, and the number of corporate and individual donors to the party's state account sank to their lowest levels in at least a decade. The party currently has just five employees — compared to 50 at the same point in 2020, the last presidential election year.
In its most recent federal filing, in April, the party reported having $2.7 million on-hand — three-quarters of what it had at the same point in the 2020 cycle, when adjusted for inflation. And much of the funds reported by the party in April have already been spent to cover the estimated $1.8 million cost of this week's convention — which is projected to operate at a $38,000 loss for the party, executive committee members were told at a Wednesday financial briefing.
As its donor base has shrunk, the party has increasingly relied on two West Texas oil tycoons, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, who have for years funded attacks by the far right on fellow Republicans, pushed for hardline restrictions on immigration and LGBTQ+ rights, and faced recent scandals over avowed white supremacists and antisemites working for their political network. In the decade before Rinaldi became chair, the party received $310,000 in donations from Dunn, Wilks or their political action committees. Since then, they have given more than $1.2 million to the party — and last year, as Rinaldi increasingly used his position to attack their political enemies, the billionaires made up a quarter of the party's total donations.
At the same time, some Republicans say, they've seen a noticeable drop in solicitations from the party for donations.
“I have gotten precious little under [Rinaldi's] leadership asking for funding — precious little,” Andi Turner, a Republican lobbyist, said on a recent podcast. “And having done fundraising for a major organization in this state, I can tell you that if you're not asking every month, then you get what you deserve.”
The party's divisions and proximity to Dunn and Wilks have turned the race to replace Rinaldi into a referendum on his tenure, and whether to continue its direction by electing his endorsed candidate, Abraham George, as the party's new leader. Earlier this year, Texas GOP Vice Chair Dana Myers announced her candidacy for chair, saying the party was in a “state of disarray, fractured by internal divisions and marred by turmoil.”
In his late campaign announcement last week, Travis County GOP Chair Matt Mackowiak blasted what he said has been “five years of neglect, dishonesty, self-dealing, and blatant anti-Semitism.” And at a candidate forum days earlier, Houston-area businessman Ben Armenta argued that the party's “chaos” has come at the expense of voter outreach initiatives and stronger partnership with grassroots groups.
The party “has not gotten the grassroots the resources it needs,” Armenta said. “Everyone is on the frontlines, waiting for the supplies to get there.”
Rinaldi did not respond to interview requests, but downplayed some of those concerns on a recent podcast. The party's tiny staffing levels, he said, are due to cuts to regional employees who were replaced with contract labor. Other employees, he said, were working at the direction of the Republican National Convention, which scaled back in reliably-red states. That's a “good sign” of the Texas GOP's strength, Rinaldi said. He has similarly downplayed the party's broader infighting, saying that it has good relationships with most elected leaders — save for House Speaker Dade Phelan and the Beaumont Republican's “closest lieutenants.”
Longtime party members disagree.
“His time as chair is going to be seen as the time when the Republican Party no longer came together,” said Derek Ryan, a veteran consultant and adviser to GOP campaigns. “There is a certain portion of the party and electorate that is thrilled by that, and there are financial backers that are thrilled by that. And they may be effective right now at getting their agenda through. But is it coming at a cost in 2024, 2026 and beyond?”
“Win elections and beat Democrats”
As the party's executive director from 1997 to 2004, Wayne Hamilton was on the frontlines of the fight against generations of Democratic dominance over the state. Hamilton credited the GOP's rise to close collaboration between the party, Govs. George W. Bush and Rick Perry, and a coalition of business, socially conservative and grassroots groups.
“The party was focused at the time on what the party is supposed to do, which is win elections and beat Democrats,” said Hamilton, who later served as a national political director for Perry's 2012 presidential bid and campaign manager for Gov. Greg Abbott in 2014. “We worked with anybody who would work with us.”
By 2008, however, the Republican Party of Texas was insolvent, with nearly $750,000 in debt that had accumulated over more than 15 years, as the party borrowed from future election cycles to cover convention costs, salaries or to pay outside groups that assisted with fundraising efforts. Deep in the red, the party and its new chair, Steve Munisteri, spent the next few years beefing up their outreach to donors, consolidating and streamlining its fundraising initiatives and working closely with officials such as Abbott and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.
“Our teams were always over at their teams' shops,” Munisteri said in a recent interview. “The way I tried to govern was to bring all the factions together, find the common ground and create good dialogue and cooperation between the elected officials, the donors and the grassroots.”
Under Munisteri, the Republican Party of Texas sent out more than a million mailers each election cycle, created a network of phone-bankers and set up “victory centers” in major cities and predominantly Hispanic regions of the state. Aided by anti-Obama anger and the tea party movement, the party saw stunning results. From 2010 to 2015, Texas Republicans picked up nearly 1,200 seats across the state, grew their narrow advantage in the state Legislature into a supermajority, and zeroed out the party's debt.
By the time Munisteri stepped down as chair in 2015, that political marriage was showing early signs of acrimony. As tea party lawmakers and groups gained influence — often with major funding from Dunn and Wilks — they increasingly accused fellow Republicans, namely then-House Speaker Joe Straus, of being weak conservatives, and attacked them for working with House Democrats on bipartisan legislation.
Meanwhile, Dunn and Wilks continued to build their influence. In 2015, they were crucial to then-Sen. Ken Paxton's election to attorney general. And in 2017, Rinaldi and other lawmakers funded by the billionaires formed a new group, the Texas House Freedom Caucus, that continued to attack House leaders from the right, laying the groundwork for the party's eventual civil war.
Hot topics
At each of the party's biennial conventions, delegates debate and approve its platform, a sprawling outline of conservative policy priorities which has for years been viewed as a bellwether for broader Republican sentiment.
And for years, party leaders cautioned that the platform should be understood not as an end-all-be-all list of Republican stances, but as a broad set of positions that reflect the party's diverse coalition of business, activist and grassroots groups.
“It's false to represent that each one of those platform planks necessarily represents … the view of the majority of the delegates, let alone a majority of Republicans,” Munisteri said in 2014, amid criticism of the platform's calls that year to repeal the Voting Rights Act, endorse conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ people and end in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. “The Texas Republican Party has millions of people who vote for it, and every individual Republican has their own views on issues.”
That's changing, however, as the state's ultraconservatives continue to consolidate power. While the platform has always trended toward the right — the 2014 platform also called for the end of hate crimes laws and the restoration of Confederate symbols — by 2022 it had turned into what Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas-Austin, called a “Frankenstein assemblage of up-to-the-minute GOP hot topics.”
That year, the platform included calls for a referendum on Texas secession; resistance to the “Great Reset,” a conspiracy theory that claims global elites are using environmental and social policies to enslave the world's population; proclamations that homosexuality is an “abnormal lifestyle choice”; and a declaration that President Joe Biden was not legitimately elected.
Over the same time — and reflecting the party's ongoing division and purity tests — the platform has begun to shift from merely a compromise document, and into a vehicle for punishing dissent. In just the last year, it was cited in censures of three prominent Republican officeholders: Phelan and outgoing Junction Rep. Andrew Murr, both of whom were central to Paxton's impeachment; and U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, of San Antonio, over his vote for a bipartisan gun law in the wake of the school shooting in Uvalde, which is in his district.
Heading into this year's convention, a Texas GOP committee also adopted language requiring state and county chairs to reject ballot applications from any official censured in the two years prior, a move that would give the party unprecedented sway over who can run in GOP primaries. “The party apparatus has gone from being the means of sorting out tensions within the Republican coalition to being an ally of the more extreme and ideologically driven factions, interest groups and organizations within the party,” Henson said.
That was evident by 2020. Furious that the party's convention was virtual because of the COVID-19 pandemic, delegates ousted then-Chair James Dickey and replaced him with Allen West, a former Florida congressman who has long flirted with conspiracy theories.
In a recent interview, Dickey downplayed West's election as a sign of the party's shift, instead blaming his defeat on elected Democrats in Houston who fought against allowing the convention to be held in person there because of the pandemic. “It was a very unpleasant experience,” he said. “And as happened to President Trump, incumbents don't fare well in unpleasant experiences.”
West was an immediate lightning rod. He suggested that “law-abiding states” should secede from the United States after the U.S. Supreme Court shot down Texas' lawsuit challenging the 2020 presidential election results. He pushed for the Texas GOP to have an account on Gab, a social media website frequented by neo-Nazis and other far-right extremists. He appeared at a convention for QAnon conspiracy theorists, and repeatedly used some of the movement's best-known slogans. He referred to the party's then-vice chair, Cat Parks, as a “cancer” (Parks is a cancer survivor). And he repeatedly blasted Abbott, at one point leading protests outside the governor's mansion over his pandemic orders.
In June 2021 — barely a year after he was elected chair — West stepped down, and soon after announced his campaign against Abbott for governor. The Texas GOP's executive committee met soon after to choose between four potential successors that included David Covey, the former Orange County GOP chair who is currently in a runoff against Phelan; and Rinaldi, a West ally who had remained involved in party affairs after losing his House seat to a Democrat in 2018.
Rinaldi won, and immediately called for unity. “We cannot lose Texas — and will not lose Texas — if we work together,” he said in his victory speech
Rinaldi's reign
The reconciliation period was short.
After running unopposed for a second term in 2022, Rinaldi began to stoke a broader civil war. As other donors pulled back their giving, Rinaldi further aligned the party with Dunn and Wilks, using his powers to attack the billionaires' Republican opponents and to help them survive a series of high-profile scandals and potential setbacks.
In March 2023 — and hours after leaving a small, private donor retreat with Rinaldi and Dunn — Rep. Bryan Slaton, a Royse City Republican who was heavily funded by the West Texas oil billionaires, invited a 19-year-old intern to his downtown Austin apartment, plied her with alcohol and had sex with her. Rinaldi was later criticized for what some said was a delayed and muted response to the allegations against Slaton, who the Texas House later expelled unanimously.
He spent the next three months vociferously attacking House leaders for impeaching Paxton, a key ally whose two largest donors are Dunn and Wilks. And when some Republicans publicly worried about the party's paltry fundraising, the then-leader of Dunn and Wilks' main political action committee responded with insults and assurances that the billionaires would make up the gap.
“Quit being such an obvious lackey,” Jonathan Stickland, who was at the time president of Defend Texas Liberty PAC, wrote in one social media exchange. “[The party] will have everything it needs.”
In the wake of Paxton's acquittal by the Texas Senate, Rinaldi, Stickland and other allies of the billionaires' political network vowed scorched-earth revenge against anyone who supported the impeachment.
Those retribution plans were disrupted two weeks later, when the Texas Tribune reported that Stickland had hosted notorious white supremacist and Hitler admirer Nick Fuentes for several hours. Rinadi was spotted outside the meeting, but denied knowing Fuentes was inside. Subsequent reporting by the Tribune uncovered deeper ties between the network and avowed antisemites. As other Republicans condemned the meeting and called for the party to cut ties with Defend Texas Liberty, Rinaldi attacked critics of Stickland and his billionaire funders — while quietly working as an attorney for Wilks.
The series of scandals did not hinder Dunn and Wilks' political network. After spinning off a new PAC, Texans United For a Conservative Majority, ahead of this year's GOP primary, the billionaires saw massive electoral gains that will likely give them more control than ever over the state Legislature. Rinaldi endorsed most of their candidates and, 10 days after primary day, announced he would not seek a third term as chair.
Hamilton, the former Texas GOP executive director, said the last few years have made him increasingly worried that current infighting and purity tests have made Republicans vulnerable. After seven years as the party's executive director — the longest-ever tenure — and stints on Abbott and Perry's campaigns, Hamilton started Project Red TX, a grassroots group that recruits and supports candidates in south Texas, which he says has been almost entirely neglected by the party.
Today's party, he said, is a “night-and-day” contrast from two decades ago, when a united coalition of Republicans worked together to flip the state's political landscape on its head and cement a generation of GOP dominance.
“It's becoming more of an advocacy group — similar to an industry group, business group or sector group — rather than a functioning campaign organization,” he said. ”It leaves a big void. … Meanwhile, the house is on fire.”
When delegates choose this week between six candidates to replace Rinaldi, they will do so at a convention replete with signs of the party's new alignment. The leader of Dunn and Wilks' political network, Luke Macias, will lead the group that nominates party representatives to the Republican National Convention; the convention's sponsors include Wilks' development company and three other groups funded by the billionaires; and the event schedule features a breakfast hosted by the Dunn family, and five events — by far the most of any other figure — hosted by Sen. Bob Hall, an Edgewood Republican who has received $853,000 from the billionaires.
Among the frontrunners in the race is George, whose endorsements by Rinaldi and his allies have helped him overcome backlash after reports that he was intercepted by police last year as he left his home with a loaded gun to confront a man he believed was sleeping with his wife. George, the former chair of the Collin County GOP, has said that he wants to expand the party's fundraising and is running on a platform to, among other things, “defeat the Austin swamp.” But Republicans broadly agree that his election would continue the party's current direction under Rinaldi. And they are, yet again, divided over whether that'd be great or cataclysmic.
“Rinaldi made it very clear that if you think the party has been doing just perfectly the last two years, then George would be the candidate to support,” said Dickey, the former chair who is supporting Mike Garcia in the race. “I think it is clear from the amount of candidates that have stepped up that there are concerns about doing just that.”
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The post Amid civil war, Texas GOP to decide its next chapter appeared first on TexasTribune.org.
The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Texas Tribune
Texas STAAR test: Student math and science scores plummet
by By Sneha Dey, The Texas Tribune – 2024-06-14 12:47:49
SUMMARY: State testing data reveals significant declines in Texas students' math and science scores post-pandemic. Only 26% of fifth graders met science standards, a 21-point drop since 2019. Math scores also fell, with 41% of students demonstrating adequate understanding. The data underscores COVID-19's severe impact on learning, with concerns about lasting workforce implications. Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath noted that disruptions have hindered students' math proficiency. However, bilingual students showed notable gains, surpassing pre-pandemic levels in reading and social studies. The story is developing, with upcoming appearances by political figures at The Texas Tribune Festival in Austin.
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State testing data released Friday shows students' math and science scores slipped as they continue to struggle to catch up after the pandemic.
Texas elementary students who took the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness exam this spring saw striking drops in their understanding of science. Only 26% of fifth graders met science grade-level standards this year, a steep decline of 21 percentage points from 2019.
In math, Texas students lost ground after two years of modest post-pandemic gains. About 41% of students demonstrated an adequate understanding of math on their tests, with declines across grades compared to last year.
The results further illustrate the toll the COVID-19 pandemic exacted on student learning and the long road toward recovery still ahead. Education experts worry the disruption in learning could have long-lasting impacts on how students fare in the workforce.
“It's clear that math performance is not where students need it to be for success after graduation,” said Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath. “Pandemic-induced disruptions to learning exacerbated students' difficulties in mastering fundamental math concepts.”
Elementary and middle school students from third through eighth grade are required to take the STAAR test in math and reading. In addition, fifth-graders are tested in science and eighth-graders in science and social studies.
A bright spot in the STAAR test data was the gains bilingual students have made, though their scores still lag behind the rest of the state. They've surpassed pre-pandemic levels in reading and social studies by 12 and 6 percentage points, respectively. Bilingual students have narrowed the gap between their pre- and post-pandemic performance in math and science, compared to their peers.
This is a developing story; check back for details.
Just in: Former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming; U.S. Sen. Jon Fetterman, D-Pennsylvania; and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt will take the stage at The Texas Tribune Festival, Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Buy tickets today!
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Texas Tribune
Austin gun shop owner wins fight to overturn bump stock ban
by By Dante Motley, The Texas Tribune – 2024-06-14 11:20:58
SUMMARY: An Austin gun shop owner, Michael Cargill, won a Supreme Court case overturning a federal ban on bump stocks. The court's 6-3 decision ruled that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) wrongly classified bump stocks as machine guns under legislation banning such weapons. Bump stocks enable semi-automatic rifles to fire rapidly. Cargill's case, supported by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, argued that ATF overstepped its authority. Justice Clarence Thomas stated that bump stocks do not make a semi-automatic rifle a machine gun. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, asserting bump stocks fit the machine gun definition.
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An Austin gun shop owner succeeded Friday on a years-long quest to overturn a federal ban on bump stocks, winning a 6-3 victory from the U.S. Supreme Court.
Bump stocks are devices that allow semi-automatic rifles to fire hundreds of rounds in a minute. The court ruled the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives can not include bump stocks under legislation banning machine guns. The overturned ATF rule required owners of bump stocks to either destroy them or surrender them to the ATF to avoid criminal prosecution.
The case was filed by Michael Cargill, the owner of Central Texas Gun Works and an outspoken proponent of gun rights in Texas, after he surrendered two bump stocks to the ATF. He argued that ATF incorrectly identified bump stocks as machine guns, and overstepped its power in banning them. He brought the case with the support of the advocacy group the New Civil Liberties Alliance.
The almost 100-year-old law banning machine guns defines the weapon as “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” The ATF began including bump stocks under the definition of “machinegun” during the Trump administration in response to the deadly mass shooting on the Las Vegas Strip in 2017.
“We hold that a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a ‘machinegun' because it cannot fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger,'” wrote Clarence Thomas in the majority opinion. “And, even if it could, it would not do so ‘automatically.'”
This case does not directly address the Second Amendment but rather the limits of executive agencies' authority.
In an X.com video, Cargill expressed hope that this ruling would prevent the ATF from banning other gun accessories like braces and triggers.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, disagreed with the majority's interpretation. She wrote, “When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.”
She argued that a bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fits the definition of a machine gun because it fires “automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”
As debates over gun control and Second Amendment rights continue, this ruling underscores the ongoing tension between legislative intent and regulatory authority.
Just in: Former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming; U.S. Sen. Jon Fetterman, D-Pennsylvania; and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt will take the stage at The Texas Tribune Festival, Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Buy tickets today!
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Texas Tribune
Texas Supreme Court denies case that could have imperiled IVF
by By Eleanor Klibanoff, The Texas Tribune – 2024-06-14 10:38:05
SUMMARY: The Texas Supreme Court declined to review a significant in vitro fertilization (IVF) case involving Gaby and Caroline Antoun, who divorced in 2022 and disputed over their frozen embryos. Despite Texas' abortion laws labeling embryos as unborn children, courts upheld the original agreement granting the embryos to Gaby Antoun. Caroline appealed, arguing the embryos should have the same rights as living children, but both the lower court and the Texas Supreme Court rejected this. Historically, courts have treated embryos as a unique category. This decision leaves Texas' IVF practices unchanged but highlights ongoing legal ambiguities around reproductive technology.
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The Texas Supreme Court has declined to take up a major in vitro fertilization case that could have potentially upended access to the procedure.
The justices allowed a lower court's opinion to stand, and, for now, sidestepped the question of whether a frozen embryo has the same rights as a living child in post-Dobbs Texas.
The case centers on Gaby and Caroline Antoun, a Denton couple who divorced in 2022. They divided up their assets and settled on a custody agreement for their children. The major point of contention, however, was the frozen embryos the couple created while doing IVF in 2019.
While doing IVF, the couple signed a contract saying that in case of divorce, the embryos would go to Gaby Antoun, the husband. At a hearing on June 29, 2022, a judge upheld that contract and awarded him the embryos.
Two months later, Texas' near-total abortion ban went into effect, and Caroline Antoun asked the court for a new trial. She pointed to the abortion law, which defines an “unborn child” as “an individual living member of the homo sapiens species from fertilization until birth, including the entire embryonic and fetal stages of development.”
“Because fertilization has occurred, the embryos are unborn children and thus people as Texas defines them,” her lawyers wrote in a brief. “They are unborn children and should be treated as having all the rights and constitutional protections of children.”
The court disagreed, and Caroline Antoun appealed. The 2nd Court of Appeals in Fort Worth ruled that her arguments were “a classic example of taking a definition out of its legislatively created context and using it in a context that the legislature did not intend.”
“Dobbs held that the United States Constitution does not guarantee a right to an abortion,” the judges wrote. “Dobbs did not determine the rights of cryogenically stored embryos outside the human body before uterine implantation. Dobbs is not law ‘applicable' to this case, and thus its pronouncement did not justify a new trial.”
Caroline Antoun asked the Texas Supreme Court to consider the case. In an unsigned order without any comment, the court denied her request.
Historical precedent
Even before the overturn of Roe v. Wade, courts have been called on to wrestle with questions about the legal status of frozen embryos. In the earliest case in 1992, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos were somewhere in between person and property, an “interim category that entitles them to special respect because of their potential for human life.”
The Texas courts waded into the issue in 2006, when a man named Randy Roman wanted his frozen embryos destroyed, as was delineated in the contract he and his ex-wife signed before beginning the process. His ex-wife wanted to use the embryos.
A Texas appeals court ruled that it would honor the “emerging majority view that written embryo agreements … are valid and enforceable,” a stance that “best serves the existing public policy of this State and the interests of the parties.”
The Texas Supreme Court also declined to take up that case, so that appeals court ruling is the most recent precedent governing this issue.
Earlier this year, in a high-profile case with significant repercussions, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos qualify as people under the state's wrongful death statute. The state's fertility clinics halted their work, throwing the future of reproductive technology into legal limbo until the legislature stepped in to clarify.
While the details are different, this case was expected to have similar implications in Texas.
“Recognizing ‘personhood' status for a frozen embryo, as requested by Petitioner, would upend IVF in Texas,” the American Society for Reproductive Medicine wrote in an amicus brief. It would “inject untenable uncertainty into whether and on what terms IVF clinics can continue to operate in Texas.”
Juan Salinas II contributed reporting.
Just in: Former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming; U.S. Sen. Jon Fetterman, D-Pennsylvania; and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt will take the stage at The Texas Tribune Festival, Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Buy tickets today!
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The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
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