It’s time for the week that was in Texas politics with Patrick Svitek, political correspondent for The Texas Tribune.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Laura, which made landfall early Thursday morning, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott made a trip to tour the damage along the Gulf coast. President Donald Trump is also expected to pay a visit to storm-affected areas in Texas and Louisiana this weekend, but details are still pending.
“It’s notable that [Abbot] just expressed a lot of relief that the damage was not as bad as they had expected going into this,” Svitek said. “He said that he spoke with a lot of local officials who told him that they really felt that they had ‘dodged a bullet.’ U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz was also at that press conference, and he said something along the lines of Texans today should be ‘breathing a sigh of relief,’ things could have been much, much worse.”
Meanwhile, a special election has been scheduled to replace state Sen. Pat Fallon. Fallon has been tapped to replace former Congressman John Ratcliffe on the November ballot.
“Because that congressional district is so reliably Republican, Pat Fallon is likely to win that election in November meaning that there would be a vacancy in his state Senate seat,” Svitek said. “And just recently over last weekend he went ahead and resigned that state Senate seat to try to get the process going to fill that seat as quickly as possible.”
That emergency special election is slated for Sept. 29.
