Here is your Morning Brief for the morning of May 28, 2014. Give me your feedback below and tune in to The Chad Hasty Show for these and many more topics from 8:30 to 11am. Remember, you can listen online at KFYO.com or on your iPhone/Android with the radioPup App.

Important Election Dates:

Election Day for Lubbock City Council District 3 Runoff: June 21

Texas flag
flickr.com/scazon
loading...

Texas Tea

It was a big night for the Tea Party in Texas. After being declared dead by the national media last week, Tea Party backed candidates had some big wins last night. Tea Party favorites Sid Miller, Konni Burton (SD-10), John Ratcliffe, Ken Paxton, and Dan Patrick all won their respective races. Paxton and Dewhurst won their runoff elections in convincing fashion over their more moderate opponents.

As the Washington Post wrote back in March, no single candidate has felt the sting of the Tea Party more than David Dewhurst.

Dewhurst has spent the last 12 years as Texas’s lieutenant governor, living in Gov. Rick Perry’s (R) shadow and pining for higher office. On Tuesday, content to run for a fourth full term as the state’s number two, he finished in second place, notching 28 percent of the vote against the leader, state Sen. Dan Patrick (R), who finished with 41 percent.

Patrick’s campaign demonstrated the new face of the Texas Republican Party in the wake of the tea party takeover. Where Republicans once nearly unanimously supported giving in-state tuition to the children of undocumented immigrants — a bill Perry signed in 2001 — Patrick ran a campaign focused in part on rolling back that law. He was the only candidate in the field to oppose the tuition plan back in 2001, he said in his first campaign ad (Dewhurst was a state lands commissioner at the time and didn’t have a vote).

What’s more, Patrick spent the race calling for new leadership after a decade of Dewhurst, a message of change that tea party candidates across the country have embraced.

“We will show the rest of the country what it means to be conservative,” Patrick told a crowd of supporters at his election-night victory party in Houston.

With an even smaller, more conservative electorate expected to turn out in the May 27 runoff, Dewhurst faces an uphill battle to overcome Patrick’s 13-point edge — a battle most Republicans in Texas expect him to lose.

It’s not Dewhurst’s first time in a runoff against a rival who has positioned himself to the right. In 2012, Dewhurst sought the Republican nomination to replace retiring Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison against a crowded field. He led virtually every public poll by double digits over former Dallas mayor Tom Leppert, former ESPN commentator Craig James and a little-known lawyer who once served as Texas’s solicitor general, Ted Cruz.

For most of the race, Leppert appeared to be Dewhurst’s main rival. He had a political base in the vote-rich Dallas-Fort Worth area, and the personal fortune to fund his campaign. If Dewhurst and Leppert made the runoff, Dewhurst strategists believed he could win the head-to-head matchup.

But 2012 was also the first year that Texas Congressional districts would be redrawn in the decennial redistricting process. Texas had scheduled its primary election, both for federal offices and for the presidential nomination, for March 6. A panel of three federal judges objected to the new House lines and required the state to delay its primary until May 29.

That delay gave Cruz an opening. Little-known at first, he attracted support from outside conservative groups and lit up audiences around the state with his fiery rhetoric. Leppert flagged, and Cruz coasted into a healthy second place with 34 percent of the vote, 10 points behind Dewhurst. Cruz continued to gain among conservative activists; he easily beat Dewhurst in the July 31 runoff, taking almost 57 percent of the vote.

With Dan Patrick winning 65% of the vote and Ken Paxton winning 64% of the vote, it goes to show that the conservative movement in Texas is gaining steam.

Deportation Policy

Townhall.com is reporting that President Obama has asked DHS to hold off on completing a review of policies for the United States in regards to deportation.

President Barack Obama has asked his Homeland Security chief to hold off on completing a review of U.S. deportation policies until the end of the summer, senior White House officials said Tuesday, in a move aimed at salvaging any hopes for Congress to act on immigration this year.

Obama in March directed the government to examine whether deportation practices can be made more humane, seeking to pacify frustrated immigration advocates. But that step emboldened House Republicans to argue they can't trust Obama to enforce the law, and that bypassing lawmakers through executive action would deliver a death knell to the broader immigration overhaul that Obama and Democrats are seeking.

Caught in the middle, Obama is seeking to preserve what the White House sees as a narrow window in June and July in which Congress could conceivably act before Washington's focus becomes consumed by the November midterm elections.

"The president really wants to maximize the opportunity to get a permanent solution enacted, which requires Congress," said Cecilia Munoz, the director of the White House's Domestic Policy Council.

The delay defuses an emerging split among traditional Obama allies that emerged after the president commissioned the deportation review.

Some immigration advocates and Democrats urged Obama to take immediate executive action in the face of congressional procrastination. But others insisted the focus should remain on pressuring House Republicans to act while there's still a chance — however slim — to pass a bill that could provide a path to citizenship for the 11.5 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally.

"We've got maybe a window of two, three months to get the ball rolling in the House of Representatives," Obama said earlier this month.

That window, White House officials said, has opened now that primary elections have wrapped up in many states where Republican incumbents are being challenged by tea party candidates who oppose an immigration overhaul. But a make-or-break deadline comes when lawmakers leave Washington for a monthlong August recess to focus on campaigning.

In Denver on Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden made similar remarks about Republican opposition to immigration reform and reluctance to deal with legislation during campaigns.

"They've got their chance now," Biden said. "Most of the primaries are over."

Obama informed Johnson of his decision to delay the review during a White House meeting last week in which Johnson updated the president on the review's progress, a senior White House official said. Homeland Security will continue working on the review but won't release the results until the window for congressional action has closed, said the official, who wasn't authorized to comment by name and demanded anonymity.

Other Top Stories:

These and many more topics coming up on today’s edition of The Chad Hasty Show. Tune in mornings 8:30-11am on News/Talk 790 KFYO, streaming online at kfyo.com, and now on your iPhone and Android device with the radioPup App. All guest interviews can be heard online in our podcast section after the show at kfyo.com.

More From News/Talk 95.1 & 790 KFYO