Texas AG Ken Paxton’s Impeachment Trial Begins
The highly anticipated impeachment trial of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is set to get underway in the Texas Senate this Tuesday, September 5. It will be a formal airing of corruption allegations that could lead Republican lawmakers to oust one of their own in America’s largest red state. Paxton stands accused of abusing his power and bribery to help real estate investor Nate Paul with his legal troubles. Paul gave Paxton a 25-thousand-dollar campaign donation in 2018. Associated Press reporter Paul Weber says it was late May when the Republican-controlled Texas House voted 121-to-23 in favor of impeaching Paxton. “It was really an extraordinary moment in Texas, where you have a Republican-controlled chamber voting to impeach one of the state’s top Republican leaders. The jury in the impeachment trial is going to be in the state senate, which is controlled by Republicans and contains a lot of his allies. And that includes his wife, state senator Angela Paxton.” The Texas senate already voted that Paxton’s wife, Angela Paxton, will not be allowed to vote in the impeachment trial of her husband.
Louisiana Receives Failing Grade in Infrastructure
Even as students have returned to the classroom in Louisiana, the state itself is receiving a failing grade [“F”] for its infrastructure. That’s the conclusion of a new report from CNBC.
That’s similar to a recent report card from the Louisiana section of the American Society of Civil Engineers, which gave Louisiana’s infrastructure a D+ grade in 2017. The ranking examines public and private physical structures which include roads, railways, bridges, tunnels, water supplies, sewers, electrical grids, internet connectivity and broadband access. The D+ grade also came with a warning: Louisiana’s infrastructure needs immediate attention. In the years since, the same civil engineers’ society has reached the very same conclusion. Kirk Lowery, the president of the Louisiana section of the American Society of Civil Engineers, tells Louisiana public broadcasting that it all boils down to 2 factors: old infrastructure and lack of funding. In 2010, Louisiana faced a 10-billion-dollar backlog in road projects alone. But Lowery explains, “From research that's going on right now, from the people that are working on the report card, they're hearing that it's probably today around 18 billion dollars of backlog for roads, not bridges, just roads. If it keeps increasing, that monetary number keeps increasing. That's not a very good sign that it's getting better.”
Much of the funding for Louisiana's infrastructure comes primarily from a 20-cent gasoline tax. But every 16-cents of that tax, or 80 percent, pays for the maintenance, operation and some expansion of the roads, and totals about 650-million dollars a year. That was sustainable when the gas tax was enacted in 1990. But it does not account for inflation costs.
