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AUSTIN – The Texas Tribune reports that a bill banning Texas K-12 students from using cellphones in school is headed to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk, with local school districts set to decide how the new rule will be applied.

House Bill 1481, introduced by Rep. Caroline Fairly of Amarillo, seeks to restrict the use of “personal wireless communication devices” in K-12 schools. The Texas Senate passed it unanimously on Sunday. It also received overwhelming support in the House, which voted 136-10 to approve it in April.

Under the bill, students will not be allowed to use their cellphones during the school day. School districts will decide where students can store their phones, such as secure pouches, lockers, charging stations or backpacks. The policy also requires schools to have disciplinary actions in place for students who break the rules, including the possibility of confiscating their phones. Students who need their phones for medical or safety reasons will be allowed to keep them.

If signed by the governor, the bill will become law on Sept. 1. Texas would join several other states that already enforce similar policies, including California, Florida, Minnesota, Indiana, Ohio, Arkansas, Louisiana, Virginia and South Carolina. Another 26 states have proposed bans, and some Texas school districts have already put the policy in place.

Supporters of the ban argue that cellphones are a major distraction in the classroom and can hurt students’ mental health. Research supports this, indicating that excessive phone use can interfere with students’ ability to focus and engage in class.

Fairly, the only Gen Z member of the Texas House, said she understands firsthand the negative impact of social media on students.

“When you see what is being pushed on social media and the distraction it causes in the classroom, there is a need for our government to support our educators,” she told The Texas Tribune in March.

Another common argument in favor of the bill is the potential to reduce bullying. According to Pew Research, 44% of K-12 parents who support the ban cite a decrease in cyberbullying as a major reason.

Critics worry that banning phones could make it harder for parents to communicate with their children during the school day. Others are concerned about student safety, arguing that in an emergency, students should be able to access their phones to call for help.

AUSTIN – The Texas Tribune reports that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appears unlikely to gain new powers to prosecute election crimes after the House and Senate failed Saturday to reach a deadline to work out their differences on how much leeway to grant the state’s top legal office in such cases.

That development in the waning days of the regular 2025 legislative session ending Monday comes two years after the House voted to impeach Paxton on misconduct allegations that included bribery and abuse of office. The Senate later acquitted Paxton.

House Bill 5138 was filed by state Rep. Matt Shaheen, a Republican from North Texas. The Senate passed a version that would have given the attorney general’s office the power to unilaterally prosecute local election crimes when a county fails to do so. The House had previously agreed to grant Paxton’s office more powers to prosecute such cases, but only after local prosecutors considered the case.

Shaheen filed the bill after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, found Paxton’s office does not have authority to independently prosecute criminal election cases in trial courts without the request of a local prosecutor.

Paxton later targeted three of the Republican judges who reached that decision when they were up for reelection, leading a successful campaign to oust them during the 2024 GOP primary. The legislation would have explicitly granted Paxton the authority he sought in the court case.

Paxton is running for U.S. Senate against Republican incumbent John Cornyn, creating an opening for a new state attorney general to take office in 2027.

Under the Senate’s version, local law enforcement would be required to send a report to the attorney general’s office if it believes there is probable cause to suspect that an election crime has been committed. The attorney general’s office would then have the authority to prosecute. Local prosecutors and law enforcement would be required to turn over any information they have about election crime investigations to the attorney general’s office.

Under the House’s version of the bill, law enforcement agencies would be required to notify the attorney general’s office when reporting a potential election crime to local prosecutors. The attorney general could investigate only if the local prosecutor took no action on those reports for six months. And under the bill, local prosecutors could challenge the attorney general’s assertion of jurisdiction to investigate.

A conference committee failed to reach an agreement by midnight Saturday, effectively killing the bill. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott could call a special session on the issue if he chooses.

Paxton has made targeting election-related crimes a priority since he took office in 2015. He has pursued more than 300 investigations of suspected crimes by voters but has successfully convicted only a handful.

Republican lawmakers filed similar legislation in 2023 to give him the authority to step into local investigations, but those bills failed to pass. That was the same regular session in which the House impeached Paxton.

Some voting rights advocates have said giving the Texas attorney general more power over local law enforcement offices is unconstitutional. They warned that the bill seemed aimed at increasing election prosecutions, and potentially intimidating voters and local election officials.

DALLAS – The Dallas Morning News reports that Gateway Church founder Robert Morris, in a new court filing written by his attorneys, publicly responded to Cindy Clemishire’s sexual abuse allegations and said he had a “highly inappropriate relationship” with her. “While Morris is certainly deserving of the victim’s punches, Morris is tired of being the punching bag of Gateway’s current leadership as it tries to play its game of blame-shifting,” his lawyer, Bill Mateja, told The Dallas Morning News. Attorneys for Morris filed documents Friday in Tarrant County District Court in the ongoing litigation between Morris and Gateway over Morris’ demand for millions in retirement pay from the church. The filings include a statement Morris was supposedly going to issue from the pulpit in 2011 admitting to “inappropriate behavior” with Clemishire.

Morris, 63, resigned from Gateway Church last June, several days after Clemishire, 55, publicly accused him of sexually abusing her in the 1980s from ages 12 to 17. “Pastor Morris does not dispute that he had a highly inappropriate relationship with CC [Clemishire] in the 1980’s,” the Friday filing says. “Ostensibly, Gateway forced out Pastor Morris because he was not ‘transparent’ with Gateway’s leadership about his relationship with Ms. Cindy Clemishire (CC),” according to the filing. It then alleges that Gateway’s leadership “knew the facts” of Morris’ actions with Clemishire. “Our filings demonstrate that Morris was fully transparent with Gateway’s leadership — full stop,” Mateja said. Gateway removed four of its elders in November following an investigation by Haynes Boone, a law firm the church hired to investigate the Clemishire abuse allegations and past Gateway leadership’s response.

AUSTIN – The Texas Tribune reports that long-awaited pay raises for Texas judges are stuck in a legislative limbo as the clock winds down and lawmakers battle over the future of their own retirement plans.

Senate Bill 293 would give judges their first raise in over a decade, increasing base pay 25% to $175,000 a year from $140,000, addressing what both chambers and parties have deemed an emergency in the state.

But now they are at odds over a change the House made to the bill that would keep lawmakers’ retirement plans flat, while the Senate wants to see their pensions increase alongside judicial pay.

Despite several hurried meetings Saturday among representatives and senators involved in this issue, they did not put forward a report harmonizing the disagreement by the midnight deadline, narrowing the chances that raises are approved before the session ends Monday.

While lawmakers earn just $7,200 a year for their part-time legislative service, those who serve more than eight years are eligible for a pension when they turn 60 (or when they turn 50 if they’ve served 12 years.) Rather than basing that payout on their meager legislative salary, it’s tied to the base salary for a district judge, a benefit that allows some of the longest-standing lawmakers to earn annual retirement payments of $140,000 a year.

The House amendment said these pensions would remain tied to the current judicial salary of $140,000, rather than increasing their retirement benefits alongside judicial pay.

“I do not believe, speaking for me, that this is the right way to consider increases to our legislative retirement,” said bill sponsor Rep. Jeff Leach, a Plano Republican.

The Senate disagreed. On Friday night, less than 72 hours before the end of an unusually smooth legislative session, Sen. José Menéndez, a San Antonio Democrat, called a point of order, saying the legislative pension amendment was not germane to the bill and should be removed.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick upheld Menéndez’s challenge, a shocking procedural development for the upper chamber. While bills sometimes fall victim to a point of order in the House, senators rarely bring these procedural challenges.

When the House gaveled in on Saturday afternoon, it became clear members had no intention of backing down on their amendment as the Senate had requested. House Speaker Dustin Burrows said under House rules they were “not authorized” to remove just one amendment, and there is “certainly no rule or precedent” that allows the Senate to amend House amendments.

“To your knowledge has anything like this ever been done before?,” Rep. Joe Moody, an El Paso Democrat asked.

“Not to my knowledge, no,” Burrows responded, noting that the traditional way these sorts of disputes are resolved is in conference committee, where a group of members from both chambers negotiate the final disagreements over a bill.

Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, a Democrat from Austin, told The Texas Tribune on Saturday that the senators felt Leach and bill author Sen. Joan Huffman had agreed to the decoupling without the full support and knowledge of the chambers. She said they “have to get to a yes” on this, but she is “pro-public servant” and wants public officials to be appropriately compensated.

Lawmakers often try to plan their legislative tenure based on these pension timelines — eight years of service gets you vested in the retirement system, and they earn more each additional year they serve. Some are worried that removing the judicial pay connection will make it harder to argue for an increase to the pension program going forward.

Meanwhile, judges are panicking about their pay raises. Judges earn less in Texas than almost any other state, and this 25% raise will still leave them far behind where they would be in the private sector.

“Most law students … going into the first year at a law firm are making more than the starting salary of our judges,” Leach said Saturday.

There are still paths to pay raises for judges, but it would likely require the Senate adopting the House version, or both chambers suspending the rules, which takes a three-fifths vote in the Senate and a two-thirds vote in the House

Lawmakers said they’ve been deluged with calls from judges urging them to resolve this snag, with some judges telling them they’d only stayed on the bench because of the promise of raises on the horizon. On Saturday, Supreme Court of Texas Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock sent a letter to all lawmakers, proposing amended language that kicks the can to next session.

“At this critical juncture, if either legislative chamber insists on its favored solution to the legislator-pension question, I fear we will end the session without any increase in judicial pay,” Blacklock wrote. “If that happens, it is not the judges themselves but our Texas justice system — which should be the envy of the world — that will suffer most, along with the thousands of Texans who seek justice in our courts every day.”

AUSTIN – The Austin American-Statesman reports that a Republican-backed bill aimed at restricting minors’ access to public library books was derailed in the Texas Senate in a rare victory for the chamber’s Democratic minority. House Bill 3225 would have made books that “describe, depict or portray” sexual conduct off-limits to underage library visitors. To comply, city and county libraries would have been required to verify the ages of patrons checking out adult books. Parents could opt their children out of the restrictions under the measure, which passed the state House along a mostly party-line vote May 10. The bill was on the upper chamber’s intent calendar, a list of items that are eligible for a floor vote. Hours before a Senate deadline to pass bills on Wednesday night, Texas Republican Party Chair Abraham George called the library proposal a top priority and said it “must pass.”

The bill, however, never came to the Senate floor after a procedural snafu gave Democrats a rare window to block the bill, according to several senators and staff members. Understanding the bill’s collapse requires understanding how Lt. Gov. Patrick, as the Senate’s president, can bend the rules of time and the Texas Constitution in his and his chamber’s favor. Texas’ founders established that all legislation must be read on “three several days,” meaning lawmakers must introduce a bill one day, then vote on it twice over two different legislative days before it can pass. In legislative language, “several” means “separate or distinct from one another,” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The Senate can only bypass that provision with the assent of four-fifths of the members, as per the chamber’s Rule 16.04. That would require all 20 Republicans and five Democrats to sign on.

AUSTIN – The Austin American-Statesman reports two proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution which were a major part of GOP-priority bail reform legislation are dead after the state House declined to pass them by a Wednesday deadline. Senate Joint Resolution 1 and SJR 87 were part of the bail reform package authored by Houston Republican Sen. Joan Huffman and backed by Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and a bipartisan majority of the state Senate. Neither resolution, however, garnered the constitutionally required 100-vote supermajority to advance from the House to a November statewide referendum despite attempts by supporters to rally additional votes.

SJR 1 — called “Jocelyn’s Law” after 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray, whose body was found last year in a Houston bayou after allegedly being bound, sexually assaulted and strangled to death by two men believed to be in the U.S. illegally — would have kept defendants charged with a felony who are in the U.S. without legal authorization in jail until trial. It died with an 87-39 third-reading vote Wednesday. SJR 87 would have required judges to automatically deny bail to suspects accused of nine specific serious crimes — including murder, capital murder, aggravated sexual assault and human trafficking — if the person had been previously convicted of, or is out on bond for, one of those offenses. The resolution died Tuesday with a 97-40 vote, just three supporters short of making it on this fall’s statewide ballot. The measure was not reconsidered despite indications lawmakers hoped to bring it back for another vote. Supporters of the legislation, including House sponsor Rep. John Smithee, R-Amarillo, framed the bills as a matter of life and death, citing homicides allegedly committed by defendants who were already out on bail for a different charge.

BURKE – The Angelina County Sheriff’s Office said one man has died after he ran into the path of a Kenworth truck on U.S. Highway 59 in Burke on Friday.

The sheriff’s office said Nathaniel Jared Yinger, 40 of Westminster, MD, apparently left the road at around 1 p.m. in a yellow Honda Fit which got stuck in the median to the left of US Highway 59 northbound, just south of Stringer Road.

According to a press release from Angelina County Sheriff Tom Selman, evidence indicated that “Yinger knowingly exited the median on foot where his car was stuck and ran into the inside northbound traffic lane directly in the path of a Kenworth truck tractor/semi-trailer combination transporting a load of passenger cars.”

When Texas Department of Public Safety troopers and sheriff’s office deputies arrived, Yinger’s body was found on the highway. They began investigating and Justice of the Peace Precinct Four for Diboll, Judge Rodney Cheshire, arrived to pronounce Yinger dead.

The troopers and deputies are currently investigating what might have caused Yinger to go out onto the highway. The Kenworth truck was inspected, no violations were found and the sheriff’s office said no charges are expected in this case.