The Blast - July 23, 2025

27 days until sine die

IN TODAY’S BLAST

• Capriglione announces retirement

• Nim Kidd’s early disaster policy recommendations

• The differing THC pitches

• Another CCA judge not running for reelection

• Dem pollster finds that redistricting is unpopular

CAPRIGLIONE ANNOUNCES RETIREMENT

State Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, a rising star within House Speaker Dustin Burrows’ leadership team, announced last night that he won’t run for reelection, reversing his reelection campaign announcement from just five weeks ago.

Capriglione, a seventh-term Republican from Southlake, is perhaps the most prominent member thus far to announce his departure from the lower chamber, where he has led several key committees, carried major legislation and found himself at the center of the Texas GOP’s internal power struggle over his support for Burrows and past speakers. With Capriglione’s retirement, Burrows is losing a productive ally, and hardline conservatives — who were expected to censure Capriglione in a bid to keep him off the 2026 primary ballot — will be able to train their fire elsewhere.

“While I’ve given this work everything I have, I also feel in my heart that I’ve accomplished what I set out to do,” Capriglione posted on Facebook. “It’s time for a new chapter.”

Capriglione passed 34 bills during the regular session, tied for the second-most among all 150 House members, according to The Blast’s post-session analysis. He was also the “most improved” member, passing 19 more bills than he did in 2023.

As chair of the Delivery of Government Efficiency Committee, “Gio” became the go-to member on tech bills, filing and passing four House priority-designated measures through that chamber, three of them into law. One was an emergency item of Gov. Greg Abbott, establishing the Texas Cyber Command. He also carried three of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s priority bills.

Caprigione was the House’s top DOGE. But he wasn’t always on that trajectory.

Before being tapped as DOGE chair and his 2019 stint atop the Appropriations Committee, he hadn’t climbed many rungs, having come in with the tea party movement and spending his initial years on the periphery.

Capriglione was a client of Luke Macias and backed by Empower Texans when he ousted GOP Rep. Vicki Truitt in 2012 and was still in league with that faction when he won reelection in 2014. However, he voted for Joe Straus for speaker the following year and aligned himself with House leadership. He never looked back.

Under the speakership of Burrows predecessor Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, Capriglione chaired the Article II appropriations panel, overseeing the state’s sprawling health and human services budget, along with the House Pensions, Investments, and Financial Services Committee.

Armin Mizani took on Capriglione as the Macias-Empower Texans candidate in 2018, capturing 37% of the vote in an unsuccessful challenge.

With Capriglione out, Mizani, now the mayor of Keller, announced today that he would drop his bid for Senate District 9 — the seat vacated by now-Acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock — and instead run for Capriglione’s seat. Another potential candidate is Jill Tate of the Texas Federation of Republican Women.

Mizani raised a substantial $263,700 in his 2018 challenge to Capriglione, over half of which came from Empower Texans. Capriglione outraised him by over half a million dollars.

The last 24 hours completely change the dynamics in the race for Capriglione’s House District 98. Had he sought reelection, Capriglione would have been a well-funded, business-friendly candidate. Leaders in the Tarrant County GOP, like Chair Bo French, were attempting to censure him and potentially remove him from the ballot under the Texas GOP’s untested Rule 44.

Capriglione had previously announced his reelection campaign on June 18, and Abbott later endorsed him, according to a since-deleted social media post from the governor’s campaign account posted around July 3. The Southlake Republican held a fundraiser as recently as June 25. His retirement comes off as a last-minute decision — like a third reading “Gio” amendment.

With 12.5 years of service time and counting, Capriglione, 52, will be eligible to receive a pension. (Lawmakers with at least 12 years of service time can start collecting pension benefits at age 50.)

Mizani, meanwhile, rolled out a host of endorsements in announcing his campaign pivot, including support from U.S. Rep. Beth Van Duyne, Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare, 10 state representatives and a number of local officials. The move also gets Mizani out of the same race as Leigh Wambsganss, the old Empower Texans network pick in SD 9.

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NIM KIDD’S EARLY DISASTER POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS

House members and state senators are hours into a joint hearing on the Central Texas floods, and lawmakers are drilling in on potential legislation to respond to floods and other future disasters. 

Although they are meeting jointly now, each chamber’s Disaster Preparedness and Flooding Committee plans to meet separately later in the special session to advance proposals through the legislative process.

Sen. Charles Perry, the Lubbock Republican who chairs the Senate committee, said the goal of the panel is to find policy solutions to prevent deaths.

“Our select committee will not armchair quarterback or attempt to assign blame,” Perry said. “To do so would undermine the very goal of the committee’s creation.”

Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd, the first to testify, suggested that lawmakers could improve post-disaster volunteer coordination by making volunteers check in — for their safety and the safety of others.

“The fact of the matter is, people come in so quick that we can’t control them sometimes, and we don’t know who they are,” Kidd said. “Yet, they’re going through your personal belongings” without supervision.

Requiring volunteer check-ins would also allow officials to log the time as in-kind donations, which the state could count toward local spending requirements for federal grants.

Kidd also pointed to the need for first responders to have better equipment and baseline standards to qualify for jobs. One anecdote Kidd shared was that fire teams in San Antonio — where he used to work as a district fire chief and city emergency manager — were talking on “cheap Chinese radios” because their systems aren’t “interoperable” outside their equipment. 

He also bemoaned that local emergency management directors can appoint coordinators and assistants free of any minimum qualifications.

“We’re better than that,” Kidd said to both shortcomings.

Larger than the interoperability challenge, though, Kidd said, is the cultural challenge of merging the dozens of local radio systems used by first responders without a state standard.

“There’s no teeth and there’s no funding, there’s no carrot or no stick” to get local officials to participate in a statewide radio network, he said.

THE DIFFERING THC PITCHES

After his last-minute veto of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s THC ban, Gov. Greg Abbott is beginning to divulge what sort of hemp regulations he wants to see from lawmakers. But Patrick and the Senate still aren’t on board with anything other than a full ban.

In interviews with reporters yesterday, the governor declared that he wants to limit consumable THC products to “non-intoxicating” levels, specifically 3 milligrams. That, along with banning synthetics and setting the purchasing age to 21, forms the bulk of his vision for regulating the hemp industry.

It’s far from the Senate’s proposed blanket ban on products containing any “detectable amount of any cannabinoid” other than CBD or CBG. The Senate State Affairs Committee unanimously voted out that version, Senate Bill 5, during the Senate’s first hearing of the special session yesterday.

Abbott’s plan isn’t a ban, but it’s also less permissive than where the House was at during the regular session.

The initial House bill, HB 28, would have allowed only THC drinks. The House’s revised regulatory bill — before it was scrapped on the floor in favor of a ban — allowed edibles and beverages and set varying THC concentration limits based on the type of product.

There still are no House bills numbered 1 through 30, so the House’s proposal is still to come.

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ANOTHER CCA JUDGE NOT RUNNING FOR REELECTION

As Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton prepares to renew his campaign against Court of Criminal Appeals incumbents, Republican Judge Bert Richardson announced this week that he’s not seeking reelection to the state’s highest criminal court and is instead running for chief justice of the Fourth Court of Appeals.

In an interview, Richardson said some Republican leaders asked him to consider replacing the outgoing chief on the San Antonio appellate court that swung sharply to the right in the last election. The job pays better than his current gig, and he wouldn’t have to commute to Austin, so he decided to go for it.

He denied that the decision had anything to do with Paxton vowing to fund primary challengers against the eight CCA judges who ruled that the attorney general’s office lacked independent authority to prosecute election fraud cases. Three of those eight incumbents lost their elections in 2024. Another, Judge David Newell, has already said he won’t run for reelection.

“If I really wanted to stay on the court, I would have run a race,” Richardson said. “It’s hard to say how it would have gone, but I’ve had primaries, tough primaries before, and I’ve run positive, successful campaigns.”

Richardson has been on the court since 2015. This upcoming race will be his last; the 69-year-old will have to retire at age 75, per state law.

— Eleanor Klibanoff

DEM POLLSTER FINDS THAT REDISTRICTING IS UNPOPULAR

Texas Republicans’ effort to redraw the state’s congressional map to yield more seats is unpopular with wide swaths of voters, according to a Democratic pollster.

Z to A Research, a Texas polling outfit that works with progressive clients, surveyed 22 of Texas’ congressional districts on behalf of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and House Majority PAC. They found that 63% of Texas voters thought the mid-decade redistricting move was unnecessary, and that 53% felt Texas Republicans were prioritizing gerrymandering over responding to the deadly July Fourth floods in Central Texas.

While Democrats have few procedural tools to stand in the way of Republicans’ effort to redraw maps during the Legislature’s special session, which began Monday, the DCCC’s polling memo lays out their political case against it. 

When voters received a message that Republicans were pursuing a partisan gerrymander at the behest of President Donald Trump instead of focusing on flood relief, support for a House Republican fell by 7%, the poll found. And 62% of voters — including 67% of independents — said they were less likely to vote for Republicans after seeing the message on gerrymandering.

Left unsaid: we’re still 15 months away from the election and democracy-based arguments didn’t get Democrats very far in 2024.

Still, the polling memo has other favorable data for Democrats ahead of the 2026 midterms. Sixty percent of voters indicated that Republicans’ passage of Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” made them less likely to support GOP candidates. And among Latino voters, who helped power the GOP’s strong 2024 performance in Texas, congressional Republicans were already 22 percentage points underwater. That falls further to 34 points once voters hear the gerrymandering message.

The poll, which was conducted via a text-to-web survey of 2,449 likely voters across the state, has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

— Gabby Birenbaum

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• In addition to considering SB 5, the THC ban, the Senate State Affairs Committee yesterday considered SB 11, which would give the Texas attorney general the authority to prosecute election fraud, and SB 12, which would ban taxpayer-funded lobbying.

House Select Committee on Congressional Redistricting:

• 2 p.m. Thursday in Austin.

• 11 a.m. Saturday in Houston.

• 5 p.m. Monday in Arlington.

Senate Special Committee on Congressional Redistricting:

• 10 a.m. Friday in Austin (Central and South Texas)

• 10 a.m. Saturday in Austin (North Texas)

• 3 p.m. Monday in Austin (East Texas and Harris County)

• 9 a.m. Tuesday in Austin (West Texas and the Panhandle)

View the full list of upcoming committee notices here and here.

The Senate will convene at 9:30 a.m. tomorrow. The House will convene at 10 a.m. tomorrow.

• TX-SEN: One Nation, a national conservative group, placed at least $490,000 in ad reservations across Texas benefiting U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, according to AdImpact.

• TX-18: Democratic congressional candidate and former Houston City Council member Amanda Edwards will hold a press conference Friday morning in Houston about redistricting and the One Big Beautiful Bill. The U.S. Department of Justice named the district as one of four unconstitutional racial gerrymanders in Texas.

• TX-28: Attorneys for U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, have filed a motion to delay his federal bribery trial until March 30, after the 2026 primary.

• SD-9: Texans United for a Conservative Majority PAC endorsed Leigh Wambsganss to fill the seat vacated by acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock.

• SD-22: Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick endorsed state Rep. David Cook, R-Mansfield, in his campaign to succeed retiring state Sen. Brian Birdwell, R-Granbury.

• SPOTTED outside the Texas Public Policy Foundation: state Rep. Helen Kerwin, R-Glen Rose, enjoying a cheeseburger and some lunchtime tunes with Alvin, shoeshiner to the stars and Congress Avenue vibes king. Kerwin is the mother of former TPPF President and CEO Brooke Rollins, now U.S. agriculture secretary in the Trump administration. — Eleanor Klibanoff

• TPPF notified Dallas leadership that it intends to sue the city over 133 ordinances allegedly preempted by the “Death Star” bill. TPPF pulled the list from a memo the city sent to state Rep. Rafael Anchía, D-Dallas, as the Legislature considered the bill in 2023. “TPPF stands ready to defend Texans’ liberty when cities like Dallas refuse to follow the law,” TPPF senior attorney Matthew Chiarizio said in a press release.

• U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, while speaking as chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration: “If we could find a way to make something like [Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz] work in Texas, I would strongly support it.”

• U.S. House Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar of Austin, former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke of El Paso, and state Reps. Gina Hinojosa of Austin and Lauren Ashley Simmons of Houston, will hold a “Fight The Trump Takeover” rally on the south steps of the Capitol at 12:30 p.m. tomorrow.

• Casar, O’Rourke and Hinojosa will reconvene Friday evening with U.S. Reps. Joaquin Castro of San Antonio and Jasmine Crockett of Dallas, Texas House Democratic Leader Gene Wu of Houston and state Rep. James Talarico of Austin for a “The People vs. The Power Grab” rally. Everyone but Casar, Simmons and Wu is considering — or at least entertaining — a statewide run.

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“Texas Republicans, including Gov. Abbott, were reluctant to redraw the state’s congressional maps. Then Trump got involved.” by Owen Dahlkamp of The Texas Tribune

“Feds plan to build nation’s biggest migrant detention center at Fort Bliss” by Colleen Deguzman of The Texas Tribune

HD-98 candidate: “Keller mayor announces law enforcement agreement with ICE” by Kim Roberts of The Texan

“Reveille undergoes successful eye surgery” by Mathias Cubillan of The Battalion

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