Sneha Dey, Texas Tribune

State Sen. Charles Schwertner was arrested early Tuesday morning on suspicion of driving while intoxicated, according to Travis County sheriff’s office records.

Schwertner, a Georgetown Republican, was booked into the Travis County jail at 2:12 a.m. and charged with driving while intoxicated. Records showed Schwertner was in Travis County sheriff’s custody most of Tuesday morning, but had received a personal recognizance bond and was released from jail shortly after noon. He is an orthopedic surgeon by trade.

As he left the Travis County jail after noon, Schwertner told reporters: “I’m deeply sorry, apologetic to my citizens and my family. I made a mistake.”

Schwertner’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Texas Tribune. His attorney, Perry Minton, did not respond to a request from the Tribune but told the Austin American-Statesman, which first reported news of Schwertner's arrest on Twitter: “I met with Senator Schwertner very early this morning directly after his unfortunate arrest. He was certainly humble and embarrassed by his circumstances but he was clear-eyed, sober and making good sense. Because of this, we’ll be interested in the discovery once it becomes available.”

Schwertner was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving early Tuesday morning. Credit: Austin Police Department

A day after the arrest, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who leads the Senate, castigated Schwertner for his actions.

"There is zero excuse for driving under the influence and putting lives in danger, in particular by a member of the legislature whose conduct should be held to a higher standard," he said in a statement. "I will await the final outcome of this issue in court before making any further statement on the matter."

Schwertner was arrested around 12:45 a.m., when an Austin police officer saw the black Cadillac that Schwertner was driving “swerving to the right and the left and split the two lanes repeatedly,” according to an affidavit of probable cause. The officer followed the car and saw it continue to swerve between lanes, the affidavit said. The officer stopped the car and the driver identified himself as Schwertner.

The officer said Schwertner had “bloodshot, glassy, watery eyes, was confused, and had slurred speech patterns.” The officer also said Schwertner had “a strong odor of alcoholic beverage on his breath.”

The officer described Schwertner as “polite, sleepy, cooperative” in the report. Schwertner refused a breath test, and he was not given a blood test to measure his blood alcohol concentration. Schwertner has no previous DWI convictions, according to the affidavit.

Schwertner, who leads the Senate’s Business and Commerce Committee, was expected at the Capitol at 11 a.m. Tuesday when the Senate reconvened for the week. The Business and Commerce Committee also had a scheduled hearing to discuss proposed changes by the state’s Public Utilities Commission to the energy market’s design that stemmed from failures that led to millions of people losing power across the state during the 2021 winter freeze. Schwertner, who has served in the Senate since 2013, has expressed dissatisfaction with those changes.

Schwertner missed the Senate’s scheduled meeting and the Business and Commerce Committee’s meeting. Sen. Phil King, a Weatherford Republican who is serving his first term in the Senate, took the helm of the committee as the group’s vice chair.

“The chair, as you know, is not going to be able to be with us today,” said King, who previously served in the House.

Schwertner, 52, has faced other scandals in the past. In 2018, he was accused of sending sexually explicit photos of his genitals to a graduate student at the University of Texas. He denied the allegations, saying that someone else sent the messages using his LinkedIn account and another privacy phone messaging app that belongs to him.

A university investigation, which described the senator as uncooperative, did not clear Schwertner of wrongdoing but said it could not prove Schwertner sent the texts.

After the sexual harassment allegation, Schwertner voluntarily gave up his chairmanship of the Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee to work on other issues in the Legislature and spend more time with his family. Patrick followed the investigation closely.

In 2016, after Austin voters approved stricter requirements for drivers that prompted Uber and Lyft to leave town, Schwertner spearheaded Senate legislation designed to create statewide regulations that would allow the companies to return to the city. The bill aimed to ensure the companies had the same rules in every city in Texas. When he argued for the bill in the Legislature, he said ride-hailing companies provided transportation to people who otherwise “are getting in vehicles and driving drunk.”

Other state lawmakers have faced drunken driving charges in recent years. Former state Rep. Dan Huberty, a Houston Republican, was arrested on a charge of driving while intoxicated in April 2021. He decided to retire later that year.

In 2017, state Rep. Victoria Neave Criado, a Dallas Democrat, was arrested on a charge of driving while intoxicated. She remains in the Legislature.

Such arrests have also been used as political attacks. In 2013, Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, a Democrat, was arrested for and pleaded guilty to drunken driving. Then-Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, demanded her resignation and threatened to use his line-item veto power to cut funding to the office’s Public Accountability Office if she did not resign. When Lehmberg did not resign, Perry defunded the unit. He was later indicted in relation to the move but was cleared of charges.

Nov. 27, 2022

The city of Houston is under a boil water notice due to a Sunday morning power outage at its East Water Purification Plant. According to Houston Public Works, its water system serves 2.2 million customers.

Residents of the fourth largest city in the country should boil all water used for food preparation, drinking bathing or brushing teeth for three minutes, and avoid using water from refrigerators or ice makers. Those who cannot boil water are advised to use bottled water.

Houston ISD has closed all schools, offices and facilities on Monday in response to the boil water notice.

The boil water notice is expected to be lifted Tuesday morning, after the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality reviews the city's water samples, according to Houston Public Works spokesperson Erin Jones.

During the outage at 10:30 a.m. Sunday, water pressure at the plant briefly dropped below required minimum levels. Water pressure in the entire system is currently back above minimum levels for safety, Jones said.

Low pressure hurts water quality and be a threat to public health. A reduction or loss of pressure in a water distribution system can result in backflow, when water flows in the wrong direction, allowing contaminants to enter drinking water.

A boil water notice was issued out of an abundance of caution and to comply with regulatory standards, according to Houston Water Director Yvonne Williams Forrest.

"Our system maintained pressure. We never lost pressure fully," Forrest told KHOU. "So there was never an opportunity for anything to enter our system. They just fell below the regulatory requirements."

Gov. Greg Abbott directed state emergency resources to the city to help, and said he has been in contact with Mayor Sylvester Turner.

"We’re currently working to fulfill the city’s request for help with rapid turnaround of water sample results,” Abbott said in a statement.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/11/27/houston-boil-water/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

By Sneha Dey, The Texas Tribune

A committee charged with producing a “patriotic” telling of Texas history approved a 15-page pamphlet last month that will now be distributed to new Texas drivers.

The advisory committee — named the 1836 Project after the year Texas gained its independence from Mexico — was created last year with the passing of House Bill 2497. The legislation required the committee to tell a story of “a legacy of economic prosperity” and the “abundant opportunities for businesses and families, among other requirements.”

“We must never forget why Texas became so exceptional in the first place,” Gov. Greg Abbott said when he signed the bill. Abbott, along with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan, later selected a nine-member, largely conservative group to head the 1836 Project.

The creation of the committee was largely a conservative backlash to The New York Times’ publication of “The 1619 Project,” which was named after the year enslaved people first arrived on American soil and aimed to center slavery in conversations about U.S. history. The pamphlet, which will be distributed at driver’s license offices, comes at a time when the state is increasingly trying to regulate how race, sexuality and history are taught in public schools.

The Texas Tribune reviewed the 1836 Project committee’s final pamphlet and asked historians to comment on how accurately and thoroughly the document chronicles the state’s history.

The historians acknowledged that the committee had a difficult assignment; Donald Frazier, the chair of the subcommittee in charge of drafting the pamphlet, called squeezing the entirety of the state’s history into little more than a dozen pages a “herculean task.”

But the historians also noted that condensing the state’s history and painting it in a mostly celebratory light came at a cost. The pamphlet, they said, fails to fully hold institutions accountable for slavery and other forms of oppression and shortchanged Indigenous Texans, Tejanos, Black Texans and women.

The pamphlet engages with contemporary research — like literature about the lasting impact of the Confederacy — but also tries to fulfill state lawmakers’ wish to promote “patriotic education” and avoid disturbing Texas’ myths, said Raúl A. Ramos, a history professor at the University of Houston.

“The traditional mythic version of Texas history, it’s about the heroes of the Alamo having pure intentions of liberty and freedom in the abstract rather than the liberty to conquer Indigenous and Mexican lands and freedom to own enslaved people,” Ramos said. “It’s that abstract idea that is attractive and powerful and [that’s what] people gravitate towards, and I think that’s what people associate with patriotism.”

Below is a look at how the Project 1836 advisory committee’s pamphlet discusses four areas of Texas’ history — early settlements, the oil and cotton industries, the Alamo and slavery — and the historians’ notes on what the document’s authors chose to play up, play down or omit.

Early settlements

Trinidad Gonzalez, a history professor at South Texas College, said the pamphlet aggrandizes Manifest Destiny, the belief that American settlers had the God-given right to expand across North America. It’s an idea about early settlements that was driven by 19th century nationalism and exceptionalism.

In the opening paragraph, the pamphlet says the land of Texas seemed like “an inhospitable zone to many,” but Americans “with fortitude and nerve” saw the opportunities and made the region productive.

“It wasn’t just the Americans who thought it was boundless opportunities. [The pamphlet’s authors] are trying to create the simplified Manifest Destiny story that fits this older myth of white Americans coming in and basically building Texas,” Gonzalez said. “And when you do that, then you silence everybody else that participated in the history of Texas.”

Historians told the Tribune that the pamphlet glosses over the Indigenous, Spanish and Mexican populations that resided before, saying Texas was “nearly depopulated” before American settlers migrated to the land.

However, the Indigenous population significantly outnumbered American settlers in 1836, Gonzalez said. The stretch of land from the Rio Grande Valley to Laredo was also once one of the most economically successful Spanish settlements, he added.

Emilio Zamora, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, called the pamphlet’s interpretation of early settlements in Texas “very unsettling.”

The document “speaks very negatively about the Mexicans and the colonial settlers that preceded them,” Zamora said.

Oil, not cotton

When it comes to the state’s economy, the pamphlet zeros in on the oil industry. The discovery of oil “ushered in a period of remarkable transformation,” the pamphlet says. It characterizes the wildcatter and oil derrick as “Texas icons.”

Nowadays, West Texas’ Permian Basin is the nation’s most productive oil region. The Permian produces more than 5 million barrels of the nation’s daily output of 11.6 million barrels of oil per day.

But before oil, there was cotton. Texas still leads the nation in cotton production. Cotton continues to be the state’s largest agricultural export and is responsible for thousands of jobs across sectors, such as ginning companies, warehouses and oil mill processing plants.

The 1836 Project pamphlet mentions oil five times. It never mentions cotton.

The pamphlet highlights Houston’s title as “energy capital of the world,” but cotton used to be so essential to the city that it would celebrate the crop with festivals, naming a symbolic leader for the carnival King Nottoc (“cotton” spelled backwards).

The pamphlet “ignores the reality that cotton production and poverty long characterized much of the Texas economy after the Civil War and through 1940. Instead it glamorizes the oil industry,” said Walter Buenger, a history professor at UT-Austin.

Buenger said that the state’s dependence on cotton made Texas one of the poorest states in the country.

The cotton market had globalized and become increasingly competitive, but the state delayed mechanizing cotton production to continue offering low-skilled jobs that had low returns. It resulted in an unequal distribution of income: While a handful of cotton traders got “fabulously wealthy,” most Texans struggled to survive, Buenger said.

“Through 1940, Texas was, for the most part, very poor. And they were poor because they were wrapped up in this cotton production business,” Buenger explained.

The Alamo

The Alamo, the Spanish mission founded in the 18th century in what is now San Antonio, has long been enshrined as “the cradle of Texas liberty.” The men who died as Mexican troops laid siege on the Alamo are often remembered as heroic martyrs who valued liberty over their lives.

“Only Texas could turn defeat into a legend — and a song, and a tourist attraction, and a major motion picture,” author Rosemary Kent famously said of the Alamo.

But the 1836 Project pamphlet does not dwell on the Alamo. Of the document’s 4,517 words, just 87 are spent on the siege.

Gene Preuss, an associate professor of history at the University of Houston-Downtown, called that a notable move away from traditionalist history in a state where the Alamo has often been at the center of Texas politics and history.

“There really isn’t much discussion of the Alamo in the pamphlet,” he said. “And I find that interesting because a lot of traditional histories would focus on the Alamo.”

In fitting the Battle of the Alamo into one abridged paragraph, the pamphlet’s authors appear to acknowledge the recent efforts to reexamine the historic event.

“For a long time, Texas history has been taught from one perspective,” Preuss said. “I think [the pamphlet] does enough to open some cracks, which I as a professor can open further for my students so that when they come into class, they don’t say things like ‘I didn’t know [Black Texans] participated in the Texas revolution’ [or] ‘I didn’t know Tejanos were on the side of Texians and died at the Alamo.’”

But the pamphlet also avoids going into that reexamination. It doesn’t mention, for instance, the issues brought up in the book “Forget the Alamo,” which was published last year and prompted the lieutenant governor to push for the cancellation of an event featuring the title at the Bullock Texas State History Museum. The book highlights how the defense of slavery played a key role in the conflict with Mexico and questions the garrison defenders’ military strategy.

Slavery

When the 1836 Project committee was established, Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of “The 1619 Project,” feared that the 1836 Project was another attempt to veil the nation’s history of slavery.

“When it comes to slavery, some people have never wanted open debate and honesty. They seek to bury and prohibit instead,” Hannah-Jones said on Twitter.

The pamphlet does mention slavery, acknowledging that it became an economic engine for the state. Republican lawmakers also required that the document mention how on June 19, 1865, the date that became the basis for Juneteenth, Union soldiers in Galveston announced the liberation of all enslaved people.

“We wanted to reemphasize and make dang true that everybody understands that slavery was a bad thing and Texas participated,” Frazier, the chair of the subcommittee in charge of drafting the pamphlet, said at the August committee meeting.

But many of the historians the Tribune spoke with said the pamphlet doesn’t go far enough, noting that it omits how central defending slavery was in the Texas war of secession from Mexico and the Civil War. They say it airbrushes gruesome accounts of how enslaved people were treated.

“Slavery is mentioned only as a complication that delayed annexation by the United States. The pamphlet never names any enslaved individuals, nor does it describe their fight for freedom,” historians Leah LaGrone and Michael Phillips wrote in a Texas Monthly column.

Ramos, the history professor at the University of Houston, said the pamphlet’s treatment of slavery is an example of how the document takes a passive, ambiguous approach to inequity and oppression that doesn’t hold Americans who participated in institutions accountable.

The pamphlet, he said, is a document birthed out of a political process and should be read as such.

“Sometimes people interpret history as being political, as being a way people might signal their politics,” Ramos said. “But it’s also political in that way that is part of how we view ourselves as people, as a community, and how we continue to either build community or divide community.”

Disclosure: Bullock Texas State History Museum, Texas Monthly, The New York Times, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Houston and the University of Houston-Downtown have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/09/26/texas-1836-project-pamphlet/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan said the state Legislature will not pass meaningful gun safety legislation during its next session but signaled an openness to creating limited exceptions to the state’s abortion ban.

Families of the Uvalde school shooting victims, along with House and Senate Democrats, have repeatedly called for a special session to raise the minimum age to buy a firearm from 18 to 21.

“We at the House obviously want to be respectful and do all we can to be certain this never happens again,” Phelan said at the 2022 Texas Tribune Festival on Friday. “I think there’s a reason why the governor has not called a special session, and quite frankly, it’s because the votes aren’t there. The votes aren’t there to change that particular section of the law.”

Phelan, a Republican who represents Beaumont in Southeast Texas, said he would vote against increasing the minimum age.

Gov. Greg Abbott has previously said that increasing the minimum age to buy assault-style weapons is “unconstitutional,” pointing to a federal judge’s ruling that struck down a Texas law limited adults under 21 from carrying handguns. U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, the GOP former governor of Florida, raised the legal purchasing age in his state after the Parkland school shooting.

In a wide-ranging discussion with Texas Tribune CEO Evan Smith, Phelan said the House might revise the law that criminalizes abortion. Phelan said he has heard from House members who are concerned the law has no exceptions for rape or incest.

Physicians have also told Phelan the ban has complicated medical care for ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages, he said. Treatments for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies are still legal under the state’s abortion ban, but confusion has led some providers to delay or deny care for patients in Texas. Phelan said he was unclear about how the House would vote on adding exceptions to the abortion ban.

Phelan supports reducing taxes in the next session, but he said Texas has been hit by inflation and that the cost of doing business in the state will increase. He opposes school vouchers, which let parents use public money for private school education.

At the Friday panel, the House speaker reflected on the last legislative session. Phelan said passing a balanced budget that prioritized education was one of his biggest wins.

“We were able to pass a balanced budget with low population growth, low inflation, and, quite frankly, fully committing to our promise in 2019 of increasing education — public education and higher education,” he said.

The House speaker affirmed his support for a new law passed under his leadership targeting transgender student athletes, saying the state should intervene when it came to LGBTQ children.

“What two consenting adults do in their private matters is none of my business. … Now you’re talking about children. It’s a different story,” Phelan said Friday. “You didn’t see bills, I think, at any point last session dealing with adults and what they do in their private lives.”

More than 3,000 Texans — including four police chiefs, two county sheriffs, two constables and two county commissioners — have been members of the Oath Keepers, a far-right extremist group that played a prominent role in the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, according to an analysis of leaked membership rolls.

The Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism published a report Tuesday after reviewing more than 38,000 names on a massive cache of documents from the Oath Keepers that was leaked to transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets and released last year. The documents included chat logs, emails and membership rolls from 2020 and 2021. It’s unclear when the membership lists were last updated.

The ADL’s report analyzed where the members lived and worked and found that Texas had more people listed in the Oath Keepers’ membership rolls than any other state. Texas is the country’s second-most populous state.

Texas also had the most people who were either elected officials, law enforcement officers, military members or first responders, the report found. Of the Texas signups, 33 were law enforcement officers, 10 were members of the military, eight were elected officials and seven were first responders. No federal officials were listed in the membership documents.

At least six law enforcement officers who have been affiliated with the far-right group at some point are currently at the helm of their departments: Howe Police Department Chief Carl Hudman; Tom Bean Police Department Chief Timothy Green; Idalou Police Department Chief Eric Williams; Amarillo ISD Police Department Chief Paul Bourquin; Nueces County Sheriff John Chris Hooper; and Clay County Sheriff Jeff Lyde.

Other people in the Oath Keepers’ membership rolls who currently serve as elected officials in Texas include Ellis County Commissioner Paul D. Perry; Galveston County Commissioner Joseph Thomas Giusti; Collin County Constable Joe Wright; and Faulkey Gully Municipal Utility District board member Mark H. Syzman. Syzman is also a retired U.S. Army Military Police Master Sergeant.

The Oath Keepers asks its members to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” The group, fueled by baseless conspiracy theories, claims that the government poses a threat to civil liberties. In reality, former Oath Keepers spokesperson Jason Van Tatenhove — who has since left the group and speaks publicly about its dangers — has said the group is actually “selling the revolution.”

On Jan. 6, 2021, the Oath Keepers descended on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to lead the siege challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election. At least 26 members of the group have since been arrested in connection with the attack.

With the exception of Hood County Constable John D. Shirley and Steven Glenn, an alderman in the North Texas town of Quitman, none of the Texans named by the ADL responded to calls or emails from The Texas Tribune seeking comment Wednesday.

Glenn, who was sworn in as alderman in November 2020 and is seeking reelection this year, said in an email statement that he was with members of the Oath Keepers during a hurricane in Houston helping deliver supplies to residents hit by the floods. He said he has “zero idea of any of (the Oath Keepers’) involvements” since then.

“Shortly after that, I saw exactly what the founder was all about. I cut ties with them immediately,” Glenn wrote in a statement to the Tribune.

Shirley said he publicly resigned from the group in November 2020. Shirley was a member for more than a decade and served as the Oath Keepers’ Texas chapter president, national peace officer liaison and on the group’s board of directors. In February 2020, Shirley submitted a letter to Hood Country Today defending the organization’s mission.

The Oath Keepers’ membership list does not reflect the extent of the members’ involvement in the group. The ADL report said that some may have been introduced to a watered-down version of the group’s mission and many have since left the group. Hundreds tried to cancel their memberships after the Jan. 6 riot, BuzzFeed News reported. But the ADL also points out that the Oath Keepers have always been vocal about its extremist far-right views since its inception in 2009.

“Even for those who claimed to have left the organization when it began to employ more aggressive tactics in 2014, it is important to remember that the Oath Keepers have espoused extremism since their founding, and this fact was not enough to deter these individuals from signing up,” the report notes.

The fringe group has focused on recruiting current and former military, police and first responders. The ADL report says that in written comments provided to the Oath Keepers, some people who joined the group offered to use their positions of power to aid the Oath Keepers in a variety of ways. One member of the Idalou Police Department, outside of Lubbock, said he would use his position to introduce other law enforcement officers to the Oath Keepers’ ideology through presentations, according to the report.

The ADL report does not identify the person or their position in the department. Williams, the Idalou police chief, told PBS Newshour that it had been over a decade since he had been a member or had interaction with the Oath Keepers. Williams denounced the riot of Jan. 6 as “terrible in every way.”

The city of Idalou declined to comment on whether the police department has policies regarding staff’s membership in extremist groups.

Wright, the constable in Collin County, signed up for the organization before he took office for the first time. The ADL noted that he shared his government position during sign up: “Constable elect for Collin County Pct. 4 Constable’s office. Currently a Collin County deputy sheriff.”

When the Oath Keepers’ documents were first leaked in October 2021, Wright told USA Today that he didn’t know much about the group when he joined.

“To be honest, I felt pressured to join it in this county for political support,” Wright said at the time. “The Oath Keepers, if you didn’t support them, you were going to get bad reviews.”

Wright said he did not support the group and had not engaged since.

“I’m not into radical. I’m into doing my job,” he said.

Lyde, the sheriff of Clay County, was also identified as a former member of the Oath Keepers last November. He was indicted by a Clay County grand jury that same month for two charges of official oppression, according to court documents filed last year. Lyde is also facing questions about why he left the Department of Public Safety over a decade ago, in part, for submitting false information on performance reviews.

Hooper, the sheriff of Nueces County, was reported to be a former member of the Oath Keepers last November. He told the Corpus Christi Caller Times that he had not been a member since 2009 and had distanced himself from the organization.

Members of the Oath Keepers listed in the documents also included Texans in other occupations. An attorney with a law firm based in East Texas told the group that he “may be able to assist in legal matters,” the report said.

The ADL did not identify the attorney and declined to share the names of individual law enforcement officers or military personnel identified through their analysis, citing concerns that the report could be used to dox rank-and-file personnel.

Among those arrested in connection with the attack on the Capitol Jan. 6 is Oath Keepers founder and leader Stewart Rhodes, a Texan who was arrested in January and is accused of conspiring to oppose the transfer of presidential power by force.

More than 70 Texans have been charged for their roles in the Jan. 6 insurrection, according to a USA Today database. They include Guy Reffitt who was sentenced to 7 1/4 years in prison last month after prosecutors said he “lit the match” for the riot.

North Texas has been a focal area for the investigation into the riot, with more than a dozen area residents having been charged in the federal investigation into the attack, including Kellye SoRelle, a lawyer for Oath Keepers based in Granbury.

The full program is now LIVE for the 2022 Texas Tribune Festival, happening Sept. 22-24 in Austin. Explore the schedule of 100+ mind-expanding conversations coming to TribFest, including the inside track on the 2022 elections and the 2023 legislative session, the state of public and higher ed at this stage in the pandemic, why Texas suburbs are booming, why broadband access matters, the legacy of slavery, what really happened in Uvalde and so much more. See the program.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/09/07/texas-oath-keepers-adl/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.