Christopher Hooks

2 weeks ago | texasmonthly.com | Christopher Hooks

On Monday morning, we at Texas Monthly launched this year’s version of our traditional review of the Texas legislative session. We wrote that the Legislature in 2025 had become cripplingly polarized and beholden to outside influence and the wills of a few political strongmen. On Monday night, The New York Times reported that the Legislature, at the behest of the White House, could gear up for a round of mid-decade redistricting, possibly as early as July.

2 weeks ago | texasmonthly.com | Allegra Hobbs |Christopher Hooks |Forrest Wilder |Robert Downen

A GOP chief of staff damned Representative Brian Harrison with the faintest possible praise when he told us that the Midlothian Republican would be “good for Congress.” There’s a certain type of lawmaker—like Democratic Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett and Republican Congressman Jake Ellzey—who turns a short, unproductive Texas House stint into a ticket to D.C. In the state legislature, being useless is cause for embarrassment. In Congress, it can be the foundation of a lengthy career.

2 weeks ago | texasmonthly.com | Robert Downen |Allegra Hobbs |Christopher Hooks |Forrest Wilder

Our practice of naming the Ten Best and Ten Worst legislators every session is a tradition that connects us to our founding year, 1973, and to reporter and Capitol fixture Paul Burka, who kept the franchise going for nearly four decades and who died in 2022. As we set out to make the lists in recent years, however, it became common to hear legislative insiders describe each successive session as the worst they’d worked.

2 weeks ago | texasmonthly.com | Christopher Hooks

When Texas Monthly began cataloging the state’s Best and Worst Legislators 52 years ago, power manifested behind closed doors at the Capitol, in boardrooms, and in private associations, such as the Petroleum Club of Midland. This January, at 5 a.m. on the first day of the Eighty-Ninth Legislature, you could find it in a church parking lot off the Katy Freeway in Houston.

1 month ago | newrepublic.com | Christopher Hooks

Go West, young man, and grow up with the country. There is nothing for you in the East. The irascible New York newspaper editor Horace Greeley said that around 1833, of course, except that he probably didn’t. It is appropriate that this famous epigraph of America’s romantic nineteenth century seems to have been stitched together after the fact, an imagined quote about the future from an imagined past. Who cares. It’s a good line, and it was a romantic time. Hegemony is boring.