This Week in Texas: HPD changes, vouchers, and CenterPoint on the hot seat

Tom Abrahams Image
Saturday, August 3, 2024
This Week in Texas: HPD changes, vouchers, and CenterPoint on the hot seat
ABC13's This Week in Texas delves into the HPD changes with Mayor John Whitmire naming a new police chief, President Biden and VP Harris' visit to pay tribute to the late Sheila Jackson Lee, and more.

This Week in Texas, Mayor John Whitmire hired a new police chief. That chief steps into the fallout from a probe into thousands of criminal cases that went uninvestigated.

Also, The Lone Star State played host to President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and a host of other political dignitaries as they paid respect to Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, who died last month from pancreatic cancer.

For Harris, it was her third trip to Texas in a month as she now sits poised as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.

President Biden was in Houston and in Austin where he spoke at the LBJ library and laid out a new policy initiative aimed at what he called an extreme Supreme Court.

"We can and must strengthen the guardrails of our democracy," Biden said. "We must remind ourselves who we are. We are the United States of America."

ABC13 got a breakdown of the week's big developments with ABC News political director Rick Klein.

"You know we're now less than a hundred days out," Klein said. "And I almost think that nothing has happened until now really matters. It's reset and essentially a tied race."

Also this week, Texas Democrats rallied around Senate candidate Colin Allred as they seek to defeat two-term Republican Senator Ted Cruz.

And a new survey indicated a majority of Texans support using public money to fund private education.

ABC13 also spoke with Rice University's Mark Jones about the findings in the latest episode of This Week in Texas.

Missed an episode? Catch up on previous episodes of This Week in Texas here.

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