Category: Newsletters

Every Friday morning, I join the Cardle & Woolley Show on 1370 Talk Radio in Austin to announce the week’s Winners & Losers. Lots of ups and downs this week, but here’s who made the list:

WINNER: President Donald Trump – Texas Majority Doesn’t Doubt Him
Seconds after, President Donald Trump announced he was putting his reciprocal tariffs on a 90-day pause, the Dow quickly soared to 40,000 points, the S&P index went up by more than 9%, and the sun began to break through the clouds. When he clarified that he was adding 145% tariffs on China, the clouds returned as the market trended down again.

Almost 65% of Americans are in the stock market, most because they have to be, since companies rarely offer pensions anymore. Pundits have been saying for weeks that Wall Street doesn’t like uncertainty. Nobody does, but uncertainty is one of Trump’s strategic negotiating tools—and it seems to be working. The White House reports there are dozens of countries at the table and Trump and his team are negotiating new deals now while increasing the pressure on China. Even with the whiplash trading, the week is still a win for the President because he has changed the conversation about trade, not only in America, but across the world. Inflation is also down and his “big beautiful budget bill” passed the U.S. House this week.

For the record, the pollsters over at the University of Texas Politics Project found that here in Texas, the President’s GOP base —the conservative majority —are steadfast in their belief in him. The survey, which was conducted in late February, found that 68% of Texans, including 48% of Republicans, thought Trump’s new tariffs would increase prices. But if you dig into those numbers, you can see that over two-thirds of Texas Republicans believe the president is right, and tariffs will help the U.S. economy in the long run.

President Trump also had several legal wins this week. The Supreme Court allowed Trump to use the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged criminals, he got a green-light on his firing of 16,000 probationary workers, and a federal judge said this morning that illegals must register with the government.

WINNER: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Insists on Competent Elections
Sometimes it’s the little things. Gov. Greg Abbott has been the target of threats from the Democrats who run the U.S. House and the Texas Democrat Party, both of whom whined that he delayed in calling a special election to replace former U.S. Congressman and Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, who died on March 5. Democrats charged that Abbott didn’t call the election in order to bolster the Republican majority in the House, which is now at five.

But, as Abbott points out, it is never a good idea to rush for an election in Harris County — the poster child for election incompetence. Among Harris County’s elections’ golden hits are the time they decided, during COVID-19, that it would be OK to keep the polls open all night and allow drive-through voting. Poll workers would simply walk out to the car and hand out ballots. Forget those silly ideas about secret ballots, or prohibitions against consulting with others about how you should vote. It was the worst idea since Texas’ old drive-in margarita stands.

In 2022, Harris County provided more examples of chronic ineptitude. They had voting machines that didn’t work, they failed to have voters registered, resulting in thousands more people voting than were registered, voters had to wait in long lines and then, they ran out of ballots. If that wasn’t enough, after the polls finally closed, it took them more than 24 hours to count the votes.

Abbott called the Special Election for Congressional District 18 this week, to be held Nov. 4. Democrats will have a vacant seat in the U.S. House until then, but that’s on Harris County. Sen. Paul Bettencourt has spent years passing election integrity laws to get Harris County on track. It is time that county election officials follow his lead.

WINNER: A-F Grades for Texas Schools

When former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush began public school reforms in Florida back in the 2000s, he frequently said that nothing had made a bigger difference in getting parents and communities engaged in education than giving the schools a grade — A-F — just like students get, based on how the school performs. Schools where students could read and do math got a better grade than schools where most children were failing to learn basic skills. Passing an A-F accountability ranking made sense to Texas conservative lawmakers back then, but efforts to get it passed were thwarted year after year by Texas teacher unions, which insisted that it wasn’t fair to hold a school accountable for performance. The unions said that students who got poor grades would be traumatized and predicted that all the wealthy schools would get good grades and all the poor schools would get bad grades.

Democrats and the teachers unions aggressively fought the A-F legislation over several sessions, but it finally passed in 2017 and the first A-F accountability rankings were released in 2018. Everybody, especially parents, loved them, and guess what? All the A-rated schools weren’t in wealthy districts and all the failing schools weren’t in poor districts.

In deep blue Democrat districts throughout the state, when a local school got an A, everyone showed up for the photo op, including lawmakers who’d fought tooth and nail against A-F.

However, a new day had not dawned. After COVID-19, the accountability rankings were dropped for a while, because schools were in such disarray. Then, as the Texas Education Agency (TEA) prepared to release the latest list, over 100 Texas school districts took them to Court to stop it. But this week a judge at the 15th Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the TEA and the A-F grades for schools should be coming out in the next couple weeks. If this report card is anything like what we saw in 2018, there will be surprises. Take a look. They will be posted here.

WINNER: University of Austin Wants Smart Kids

The very smart and always innovative people at the newly established University of Austin came up with a novel idea this week — they will automatically admit any student who scores 1460+ on the SAT, 33+ on the ACT, or 105+ on the CLT. Students will not get extra points if they write an essay explaining how a minuscule amount of indigenous DNA or their racial or gender identity gives them special insight into how the world works. They also won’t be able to cut the line by reporting how they spent their summer tracking threatened bird life at the shore or joining two dozen extra-curricular clubs their senior year.

If you open the UATX website, the words “DARE TO THINK” booms across the home page. In making their announcement on merit-based admissions, university officials said, “We care about two things: Intelligence and courage.”

UATX leaders called the current college admissions system “broken,” saying it rewards manipulation, not merit and too often comes down to identity group and connections. They don’t care about any of that. They just want to recruit smart kids.

LOSER: Men in Women’s Sports
There are a surprising number of people who advocate allowing men to participate in women’s sports, who frequently insist that men who think they are women represent only an infinitesimal percentage of the population. That may be true, but their impact on sports is not insignificant.

A United Nations report last year found that as of March, 2024, over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions lost more than 800 medals in 29 different sports. That was a year ago. Now it feels like we are seeing it every day. Just this week there was the inspiring fencer who refused to compete against a man and the disc golfer who followed her lead and walked off the course rather than play against a man. In England, the two finalists in the Ultimate Pool Women’s Pro-Series were men. Many female athletes, including tennis great Marina Navratilova, are outspoken in the fight to keep men out of women’s sports, but South Carolina Women’s Basketball Coach Dawn Staley, an icon in women’s sports, is not among them. Staley insists that men who say they are women should be allowed to compete in women’s games.

It’s petty on my part, but I admit Staley’s position was one reason I cheered on Sunday night when UConn walloped South Carolina in the national championship game.

LOSER: Democrats in Texas
The Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee announced this week that they will target U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz, R-Texas, who represents McAllen and Hidalgo County, in next year’s mid-term elections. De La Cruz defeated her Democrat opponent by 15 points last year, but Democrats seem to believe De La Cruz will be easier to beat without Trump on the ballot. De La Cruz supports Trump’s immigration policies — which remain enormously popular in South Texas. Meanwhile, almost every Democrat in the U.S. House this week voted against the SAVE Act, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, which will require voters show proof of citizenship before they can register. More than 80% of Americans support the requirement. With that record, what do Democrats think they can run on that will defeat De La Cruz?

WINNER: Nick Saban Nominated for Sports Emmy
Well, maybe he’s a winner. Nick Saban stunned the sports world when it was announced this week that he has been nominated for a Sports Emmy for his work on College Game Day after only a year on the show. Saban seemed to easily make the leap from coach to commentator, and College Game Day had its best year ever with Saban in the mix. Will keep you posted on the award.

LOSER: Buying College Sports
The Wall Street Journal published a story this week in which a financial analyst asserts that even though Florida defeated University of Houston on Monday to claim the NCAA national basketball championship title, if the teams were for sale, Florida’s value would be about $121 million, about a third as much as Duke is worth ($370 million). The fact that UofH beat Duke to get into the championship game is not a factor, either.

The analyst, Ryan Brewer, a finance professor at Indiana University, says he came up with his numbers by studying revenues and cash flows and making a financial projection about the team’s sustainability. He insists it’s no different than analyzing any other business. According to his data, UofH is valued at $81 million, far less than several Texas teams including the University of Texas, which didn’t make the tournament this year. Brewer puts UT’s valuation at $153 million. Texas Tech is at $102 million and Texas A&M is at $95 million. Brewer doesn’t explain why his list of women’s team valuations has national champion UConn at the top at $95 million and South Carolina, last year’s national champion, in the number two spot with $86 million.

What is very concerning about this analysis is the glib discussion of selling college athletic teams. This is a terrible idea. The current monetization of college sports, including new NIL rules, the transfer portal and the increasing domination of rich schools over poorer ones is not sustainable. It will funnel all the revenue to a few schools and dramatically narrow the field of competition to the universities that can afford to buy the best players. Because football and men’s basketball bring in more than 90% of the sports funding for universities, the impact will result in no funding for other sports like soccer and tennis and certainly women’s sports.

Happily, the Masters Tournament will be on this weekend, and we’ll undoubtedly have lots of glorious shots from the magnificent Augusta Golf Course to take our minds off the turbulent week.

Have a great weekend!

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.

Sign up to receive this in your inbox every week at www.texaspolicy.com/9thandCongress.

Follow me on X @sylvester1630 and follow my podcast, the Sherry Sylvester Show on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Every Friday morning, I join the Cardle & Woolley Show on 1370 Talk Radio in Austin to announce the week’s Winners & Losers. With less than 60 days to go in the Legislative Session and two Texas teams in the Final Four tournaments this weekend, the already-hectic pace is approaching light speed. Here’s who made the list:

Winner: Texas Parents, Texas Kids

Every step on the road to Education Savings Accounts for Texas is a big win for parental rights and Texas students. The Texas Senate passed Education Savings Accounts early in the session and the Texas House Education Committee passed the bill out this week, so it’s on to the House floor for a full vote. If you know anyone who is still weighing the facts, give them this checklist put together by TPPF.

Loser: The Tesla Takedown

Progressives may be gloating that they managed to defeat Elon Musk’s candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court this week, but in terms of swaying public opinion their way, the whole notion of torching perfectly good cars is just not selling with the American people. Last weekend’s national demonstrations against Tesla dealerships drew hundreds, not even thousands, in a country of nearly 375 million people. In terms of pressing priorities, making Elon Musk a tiny bit less rich is just not high on the list of normal people.

Sure, there are reports that Tesla sales have plummeted since Musk took over DOGE and started cutting spending for the Trump administration, but that doesn’t mean anything either. Teslas were always a virtue-signaling luxury item that primarily appealed to progressive tastes. It wouldn’t take many self-righteous lefties to cause sales to dip.

Compare that to the way Americans toppled Bud Light from the top of the beer charts. Folks simply decided to buy a beer that didn’t have a man pretending to be a woman in the commercials. No marches were needed.

The tepid Tesla Takedown is one more sign that what used to be called the “protest movement,” is over in this country. The anti-Israel, pro-Hamas marches that have been happening since Israel was attacked in 2023 have had no impact on American support for Israel, which remains at almost 80%. Instead, the demonstrations have provided a wake-up call to anti-Semitism on American campuses.

Progressives hold protest marches all the time, because they don’t seem to know what else to do. They are gatherings of the same frequently misinformed people who apparently do not work and don’t have anything better to do. They can’t even be bothered to come up with an original chant. How many times do we have to hear “Hey hey, ho ho INSERT WHAT YOU DON’T LIKE HERE, Has Got to Go.” Note to the left: Nobody is paying attention.

Winner: Ted Cruz on Trump’s Third Term

There’s no way to know if President Trump is serious when he says he is considering a third term, but Texas Sen. Ted Cruz minced no words last week when asked about it, telling NBC News: “The 22nd Amendment is clear and unequivocal.”

America went through one of its darkest and most stagnant periods in recent history under former President Joe Biden and Trump’s engagement with the country, his high energy and focus are such a stark contrast that it is easy for some to say that they never want him to leave. But when asked, almost 70 percent of Americans believe, like Cruz, that the Constitution has served us well on this and we should stick with it. Here’s the 22^nd Amendment:

“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”

Loser: Cory Booker and Everyone Who Had to Listen to Him

U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, D-New Jersey, used to be a kind of good guy. When I lived in New Jersey decades ago, he was elected mayor of Newark at least in part because he supported school choice. But Mayor Booker is not the same guy as Sen. Booker, who decided on Monday that it was time for his “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” moment, so he decided to break the U.S. Senate’s filibuster record. Sen. Booker wasn’t fighting for any principle or policy—he just wanted to prove that he could talk for 25 hours straight.

In yet another sign of how bad things are in the Democrat party, Booker is now seen by some as the leading contender for the Democrat presidential nomination in 2028 as a result of the stunt. Go figure.

Winner: Tilman Fertitta

President Trump nominated Houstonian Tilman Fertitta to be his ambassador to Italy, and his confirmation hearing in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington, D.C., this week was a hit. Introduced by both Texas U.S. senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, Fertitta is expected to be easily confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Fertitta, who owns the Houston Rockets, has a lot to celebrate this week. He chairs the Board of Regents at the University of Houston, which made it to the Final Four and is playing for the national championship this weekend.

Loser: Equality Texas Anti-DEI Poll

Equality Texas, the group that is fighting to let men play women’s sports and put drag shows for kids in public libraries, among other things, released an astonishing poll this week.

According to its data, 52% of LGBTQ students surveyed at Texas colleges and universities said they considered leaving whatever Texas institution they attended after Texas’ anti-DEI law passed in 2023. Even worse, according to Equality Texas, 78% said they’d considered leaving the Lone Star State entirely.

Equality Texas reports that it only surveyed 23 students and they provided no information on how that 23 was selected. So let’s do the math: 78% of 23 means that 18 of the 1.6 million Texas college students are thinking of leaving Texas because of DEI. What about faculty? There have been frequent warnings that Texas DEI law will drive away potential faculty members. However, the Equality Texas survey reached out to 21 faculty and staff members and found that 25% of them said they had “considered” leaving Texas—so that’s 5.25 people.

Winner: Men’s Final Four in San Antonio

The University of Houston is the only Texas team that made it all the way to the NCAA Men’s Final Four in San Antonio. The Cougars play Duke at 8 p.m. Saturday. For many fans, the fact that all four No. 1 seeds—Florida and Auburn are the other two teams—made it to the Final Four is one more sign that dramatic changes in college sports have pushed many schools out of the real competition. More than a few people wonder if the NIL, the portal and big money schools getting all the good players has resulted in an NCAA tournament with few upsets and no Cinderella teams. If you have not read TPPF board member Cody Campbell’s cutting-edge analysis on the current threats to college sports, read it here now.

UPDATE! The University of Houston defeated Duke in the Final Four game last night. After being down by 9 points with 3 minutes to go, they pulled off what the Houston Chronicle called “a comeback for the ages.” They will play Florida for the national championship on Monday. 

Winner: Texas Women in the Final Four

The Longhorns will play in the NCAA Women’s Final Four in Tampa on Friday night going up against their nemesis, South Carolina, at 6 p.m. The Longhorns beat another Texas team, TCU to get the ticket to Tampa. Texas famously ended South Carolina’s 57 game winning streak in February, but the Gamecocks got a revenge win over Texas in the SEC Championship tournament last month. The University of Connecticut and UCLA are also playing on Friday.

The women’s championship game is on Sunday night and the men’s game is on Monday. Let’s root for both Texas teams to come home with trophies.

Have a great weekend!

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.

Sign up to receive this in your inbox every week at www.texaspolicy.com/9thandCongress.

Follow me on X @sylvester1630 and follow my podcast, the Sherry Sylvester Show on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Every Friday morning, I join the Cardle & Woolley Show on 1370 Talk Radio in Austin to announce the week’s Winners & Losers. With Women’s History Month coming to a close and March Madness trickling down to the Elite Eight, here’s who made the list:

Winner: Trump’s Women’s History Month Speech at the White House

It would have been easy to miss President Donald Trump’s White House speech on Women’s History Month this week where he joked that if whoever said he didn’t like strong women (it was Mark Cuban) was right, he is in real trouble, because he is surrounded by them. As he pointed out the women on his team—including Susie Wiles, the first woman to serve as White House Chief of Staff—along with the dozens of Republican women leaders around the country, he demonstrated what a fool Cuban was, without ever saying his name.

Mainstream coverage of the event was mostly snide, as it always is when Trump directly challenges what is a given in the left-wing narrative—that he is sexist. I am sure lefty pundits are studying his comments right now, trying to find something they can use to demonstrate that he hates women. Perhaps they will distort his jocular comment that he knows women are superior to men: “I’ve known it all my life, I don’t like it, but I know it.” They also may belittle the fact that he said he had ended the Democrats’ “war on women” and called his edict proclaiming that there are only two genders in America one of his major accomplishments. He said “no matter how many surgeries you have or chemicals you inject, if you’re born with male DNA in your body, you can never become a woman.”

Trump noted that Democrats simply do not understand how important this issue is to real women. The reason he was finally able to break through with the women’s vote is that those who fought for women’s rights over the years—from establishing Title IX to reforming rape laws—are offended by the notion that some man can simply declare himself to be a woman and land a spot on the volleyball team, or whatever. Trump joked that he hopes Democrats continue to fail to get it. Me too.

Loser: National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service

Before Democrat strategist James Carville said “it’s the economy, stupid,” he described the established Democrat party as the “Volvo driving, white wine drinking, National Public Radio crowd.” That was over 30 years ago and even Carville knew back then that elitist public media sources did not reflect the American people—which wouldn’t be a problem if they were a private company, but public broadcasting is taxpayer funded. The heads of NPR and PBS appeared before a Congressional committee this week and if you are wondering why we are even discussing this, the budget Congress passed the other day includes over $500 million for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which passes the funding along to NPR and PBS.

The fight isn’t really about money; it’s about progressives wanting an official broadcasting tool to misinform the country. NPR persistently reported that any discussion about the origin of COVID-19 was racist, that President Trump colluded with Russia to win in 2016, and that Hunter Biden’s laptop was not an actual news story.

Katherine Maher, the head of NPR, told members of Congress that she’d “never seen any instance of political bias at NPR.” What is so pathetic about that statement is that it is probably true. She just doesn’t see it.

I talk with reporters all the time, from mainstream media outlets in Texas and, like Maher, they honestly don’t see the bias in what they report and what they choose not to report, even in the words they choose to adopt. If you call an Education Savings Account a “voucher” or a man who says he’s a woman “her,” or a pregnant mom a “birthing person,” you have taken a position before you even begin the report. To hand one side of a debate the right to define the terms is journalistic malpractice.

To see how this works in real time, note that CNN’s report on the hearing mocked the congressional members who said the public broadcasting outlets were biased. Similarly, Politico reported that the hearing was an attack on freedom of the press. We don’t know the political make-up of CNN’s or Politico’s reporters, but the 87 writers at NPR are all registered Democrats. There are no Republicans.

Congress should claw back the millions in the new budget. We don’t need a line item for state-funded media. Anyone who is worried about Downton Abbey or Big Bird should know that all the good shows will be picked up in a week by Netflix and Amazon.

One more thing in case you missed it. Texas Congressman Brendan Gill, from Flower Mound, stole the show with his questions to the NPR head, Maher, as she repeatedly denied having said things she’d actually tweeted. For example during the BLM riots she tweeted “it’s hard to be mad” about the damage to businesses because private property is part of “a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property.” Maher claimed she didn’t say it, but Gill had the receipts.

Loser: Military Leaders Text Chain on Signal

Conservatives should stop pulling punches on the leaked text chain that inadvertently included a reporter in classified conversations with high ranking military officials. It was stupid beyond belief. There is no excuse. Stop shrugging it off and saying “mistakes happen.” Stop whining about all the security breaches on the left and the fact that mainstream media is treating the story as if it were bigger than Watergate. You can expect that—when you do something so absolutely dumb.

Trump is being gracious, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea if he expressed a little anger. We lived through four years of incompetence in the White House. Conservatives promised to fix that, and this was a big fail.

That said, it is important to remember that if there was a security breach, it came from the reporter, Jeffrey Goldberg, who was accidentally included on the text chain. If anyone’s life was put in danger or America’s strategic position in the world was compromised, that’s on him. He had the information, he had lots of options including working with the principals on the call. Instead, he ran to the newsroom to put the story out and undoubtedly assumes he’s at the front of the line for a Pulitzer.

Winner: Marco Rubio Pulls Hamas-niks’ Visas

Homeland Security arrested another student who was working with Hamas during the recent campus protests—Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national and doctoral student at Tufts University in Boston. This follows the arrest of Mahmoud Kalil at Columbia University who was arrested last week. The idea that the protesters were not collaborating with Hamas last year is outlandish—even at the University of Texas where the protests were quickly contained, law enforcement officials found Palestinian propaganda supporting the genocide of Jews. Hamas is still holding an American hostage and they killed several Americans along with Israelis, so it is very reasonable to disqualify their allies from holding a guest visa to be in the country. Secretary of State Rubio said it succinctly:

“We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.”

Winner: Making Texas Healthy Again

Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, is the author of Senate Bill 25 that would increase the number of hours that Texas public school children spend in physical education classes, a first step toward getting healthier. Sen. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston, has proposed Senate Bill 379, which will prohibit the use of federal food supplement funding administered by the state for junk food—soda, chips and cookies.

In a statement that harkens back to the tobacco companies of yesteryear, when they insisted that smoking doesn’t cause cancer, the American Beverage Association said this week that “soda is not driving obesity in America.”

Actually, sugary soda is a major contributing factor to the fatness that is killing too many Americans. U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, a Texan and former TPPF CEO, noted this week that soda is the No. 1 item purchased with food stamps.

You can understand that the beverage producers would be against this—they call it the “government food police,” but some advocates for poor people are also fighting it, saying it will be difficult for grocery stores to figure out what is covered.

Uh, no, it won’t. They already sort that out all the time. It seems like they may oppose the healthy agenda just because it is being pushed by President Trump and conservative lawmakers who want to make Texans healthy again.

Loser: U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett Sets Hair on Fire

It was a big week for the Dallas congresswoman who helped ramp up the attacks of vandalism on Tesla dealerships by saying that Elon Musk should be taken down. Attorney General Pam Bondi told her to tone it down. Then she mocked the bans on boys playing girls sports, an issue that has the support of 80% of Americans including a majority in her party, insisting it’s not a problem and saying “find the poor little trans child that is ruining your life.”

But then she made fun of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, calling him “Governor ‘Hot Wheels.’” Even the uber-hateful women on The View were outraged, telling Crockett she should never mock people’s disabilities.

Crockett ignored all that, insisting she didn’t say it, even though it’s very clear that she did. The Dallas Morning News also criticized the local congresswoman, but to keep it balanced, they concluded that the whole “Hot Wheels” situation was actually Trump’s fault.

Gov. Abbott was gracious, calling it just one more disaster by Democrats. Crockett is clearly trying to topple Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and take over the comedy relief spot for progressive Democrats, but she didn’t get any closer to that goal this week.

Winner: Texas Senate Passes Bill on the Horrors of Communism

One of Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s priorities this session is Senate Bill 24, which will require that Texas public school students be educated on the horrors of communism. A number of important bills passed the Texas Senate this week and the Texas House is putting together a calendar for next week, but this bill resonated with me because I recently testified before the Senate Education Committee on a panel with Dr. Carrie Butler, a professor on sabbatical from Stephen F. Austin University who told the senators that very few of her students knew the difference between communism and capitalism.

This ignorance among younger people is at the root of the demonstrations we have been seeing on college campuses across the country. It makes sense that Texas require public school students to learn about the crimes against humanity perpetrated by communist regimes.

March Madness Update – Tech

Texas Tech’s Red Raiders provided what may be the most exciting March Madness game so far when they made an amazing comeback against Arkansas last night. They were behind most of the game and at one point trailed by 16 points, but they took the Razorbacks into overtime and won with a buzzer beater at the finish. They are moving onto the Elite Eight.

All the other Texas teams that made it through last week are still in Sweet Sixteen match-ups. The University of Houston plays Purdue tonight. On the women’s bracket, the University of Texas plays Tennessee tomorrow and TCU will play Notre Dame.

That’s a wrap. Have a great weekend!

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.

Sign up to receive this in your inbox every week at www.texaspolicy.com/9thandCongress.

Follow me on X @sylvester1630 and follow my podcast, the Sherry Sylvester Show on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Every Friday morning I join the Cardle & Woolley Show on 1370 Talk Radio in Austin to announce the week’s Winners & Losers. With Texas just past the halfway mark of the 140-day legislative session and March Madness officially begun, here’s who made the list:

Winner: SpaceX Rescue of Astronauts

President Donald Trump gave us a glimpse of what the future could look like when he got his buddy, Elon Musk, to rev up a SpaceX rocket and go get the two American astronauts who were stranded on the International Space Station. Astronauts have been American heroes since Alan Shepherd took that first 15-minute Mercury flight and Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. We love them! Apollo 13 was nominated for nine Oscars.

Stuck here on the home planet, many of us looked at the sky and wondered how we had gotten to a place where we were seeing the same sad shots every day—Suni Williams’ zero-gravity flying hair and Butch Wilcox’s game face were a daily reminder that some things just weren’t right on Planet Earth.

Musk said he reached out to former President Joe Biden months ago and offered to go get the astronauts, but Biden reportedly declined, reluctant to give such a high profile job to a big Trump supporter. It’s not clear if that’s absolutely true, but it sounds like Biden.

Unfortunately for the country, the rescue didn’t get much coverage in the legacy media. Space flights are one of the things that usually transcend media bias. They always have great visuals from the blast off to the splash down. There wasn’t a total blackout on the rescue, but it didn’t merit a big story because it challenged the current lefty narrative that Musk is Darth Vader bent on destroying America on behalf of the Empire.

But for those who got to see it, it was inspiring. Of course, the official Democrat position is that the astronauts were not actually stranded and a private company going to pick them up was no big deal. You can read all about that here.

Loser: Judge Who Tried to Stop the Deportation of Tren de Aragua

After President Trump ordered the immediate deportation of Venezuelan gang members on Saturday, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued an injunction ordering Trump to bring them back, prompting the Babylon Bee to release a spoof saying a federal judge had ordered Trump to return the astronauts to the space station.

Boasberg’s action also moved Charlamagne tha God—who is not a Trumper or a conservative—to ask, “Why are they raising hell about a gang being deported?

For just that moment in time, Charlamagne was speaking for most Americans who continue to be puzzled about whose side progressives are on. They want to keep violent gang members in the country, they want to keep the war going in Russia, despite the fact that a half-million people have been killed, and they want to burn down Tesla dealerships, after years of telling us that gas-fueled automobiles are evil. (In case you missed it, the New York Times has a great story about depressed liberals who believe they must now get rid of their Teslas.)

Trump and the courts are in a stand-off, but the gang members are in El Salvador.

Winner: Trump Decision to Eliminate the Dept. of Education

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick were in Washington on Thursday to applaud President Trump’s signing of a new Executive Order to disband the Department of Education. With its demise, control of public schools and universities will return to the states free of the massive regulations and reporting requirements of one of the most unproductive and annoying federal agencies.

Education bureaucrats are apoplectic, but it’s not clear how they can make a case. The Department of Education’s own numbers reveal that reading scores fell to a new low last year and math scores remain stagnant.

States already largely control their school systems, but the Dept. of Education has used tactics like “Dear Colleague” letters over the years to threaten schools to comply with the favorite ideological policies of teachers unions, who demanded that former President Jimmy Carter establish the agency in the first place.

In 2015, President Barack Obama sent a letter to every public school system in the country threatening to withdraw federal funds if they did not allow boys who think they are girls to use girls’ restrooms. Biden copied that strategy during his administration, insisting that he had single-handedly changed Title IX to include people who believe they are the opposite of their actual sex. Again, he threatened withdrawal of federal funds if the school districts didn’t comply, including allowing boys to play in girls’ sports.

The Department of Education also maintains the current monopoly accreditation system in higher education that most often forces colleges and universities to implement DEI policies on their campuses or risk losing low-income (Pell Grants) funding for their students.

If this sounds a bit like an extortion ring, that’s because it is. Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon are absolutely right to shut it down.

Loser: Greenpeace

In case we needed another sign that the Green New Deal is officially dead, this week a North Dakota jury ordered Greenpeace to pay Texas-based Energy Transfer almost $700 million as a result of their efforts to block the Dakota Access Pipeline. The jury found the environmental protest group was guilty of trespassing and destroying private property as well as publishing lies about the pipeline. Greenpeace will appeal, of course, but this is an important victory in the left’s on-going war against fossil fuel.

Winner: Texas Senate

The Texas Senate is moving at its usual warp speed, passing out dozens of bills this week which will now make their way to the Texas House. There’s too many to list, but a couple of my favorites are the bill to ban Drag Queen Story Hour in public libraries, which is long overdue for final passage along with legislation to remove inappropriate books from school libraries. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has taken the lead in stopping THC stores from selling products that contain several times more THC than actual marijuana sold on the street. THC sales were initially allowed in Texas only to provide medicinal doses and the Lieutenant Governor wants to crack down on the thousands of stores that have gone rogue and are selling massive doses with few guardrails to prevent sales to children.

Winner: Texas DEI Ban is Copied by California

Texas passed the strongest anti-DEI ban in the country in 2023, forcing state colleges and universities to close their DEI offices, end mandatory DEI training, and eliminate the requirement that all applicants for teaching or administrative positions be required to sign a so-called “diversity statement” asserting their allegiance to DEI and outlining how they would implement DEI programs should they be hired.

On Thursday, the University of California system announced that they would eliminate the diversity statement requirement at their 10 campuses too, just like Texas did.

Recall that California is the same state that launched a boycott against Texas and other states because they didn’t like our policies prohibiting children from undergoing puberty blockers or unnecessary surgeries or allowing boys who think they are girls to participate in girls’ sports. The boycott stipulated that no California sports team could travel to Texas or any state with similar laws to compete in any sports—Final Four, Big 10 Championship, whatever. They finally realized the boycott didn’t work when more states passed laws like Texas after the boycott began.

California’s change of heart on diversity statements was not a sudden realization that students should not be divided on the basis of race, gender and sexual preference. Instead, it was prompted by President Trump’s promise to withdraw federal funding to universities that continue DEI programs. Texas provided the model and showed California the first step. That’s why we’re the winner.

Winner: Finland is Happiest Country in the World Again

After an extensive poll by Gallup, Finland has once again been found to be the happiest country in the world. This is the eighth time they’ve come in the top spot. For some reason, the cold, dark countries dominate the happiness competition. Denmark is No. 2 again this year, Iceland is No. 3 and Sweden is No. 4. The Netherlands and Norway are also in the top 10. The only countries with decent weather on the top of the list are Costa Rica and Israel. The United States has fallen to No. 24, just under the United Kingdom, which is No. 23. The report from Gallup includes findings that suggest happiness may be linked to kindness and generosity, so perhaps cold isn’t the only factor. If we all try harder to be kind and generous, perhaps we can raise our happiness competition score. USA! USA!

March Madness Begins with Three Texas Wins

All three Texas men’s teams that played in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament last night were victorious. Texas A&M beat Yale, the University of Houston beat SIU Edwardsville and Texas Tech defeated UNC at Wilmington. All three will play their second round games on Saturday. Baylor plays tonight.

The Women’s NCAA Tournament starts today. Stephen F. Austin plays Notre Dame and TCU takes on the New Jersey school, Fairleigh-Dickinson. The women from the University of Texas, a number one seed, will play William & Mary in the first round tomorrow night.

Have a great weekend!

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.

Sign up to receive this in your inbox every week at www.texaspolicy.com/9thandCongress.

Follow me on X @sylvester1630 and follow my podcast, the Sherry Sylvester Show on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Every Friday morning I join the Cardle & Woolley Show on 1370 Talk Radio in Austin to announce the week’s Winners & Losers. March and the President blew in like a lion. Here’s who made the list:

Winner: Trump’s First Speech to Congress

One thing that was clear from President Donald Trump’s first speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday is that the president understands the American people—and the Democrats don’t. In fact, after the speech was over and the smoke cleared, it looks increasingly like the Democrats don’t even like the American people.

The pageantry of a presidential speech to a joint session of Congress is great fun. When the words, “Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States,” boom through the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives and our television sets, it’s a bit of a rush for most red-blooded Americans—except, apparently, for the current Democrat members of Congress, who could not be bothered to drag themselves out of their seats to demonstrate the customary respect for the commander-in-chief.

Predictably, Trump used his speech to review the greatest hits of his first 44 days in office—but before he could even get started, he was interrupted by Texas Congressman Al Green, D-Houston, who heckled him with such ferocity that he had to be thrown out.

Following Green’s lead, Democrats proceeded to ignore the guests Trump invited to the speech including:

• Payton McNabb, whose high school athletic career ended when she suffered a traumatic brain injury after a boy playing on a girls’ volleyball team spiked a ball at her head in a volleyball match in 2022.
• Stephanie Diller, the widow of a New York City police officer killed during a traffic stop last March. The suspect in her husband’s case had prior arrests and was out on bail.
• January Littlejohn who sued the local school board for allowing her 13-year-old daughter to present herself at school as a boy without her consent.

The Democrats’ facial expressions varied from blank stares to contempt as Trump told the stories of his guests. Either the Dems didn’t believe the stories were true or they didn’t care.

They refused to stand to acknowledge Mark Foley, who had been imprisoned in Russia for over three years before Trump conducted a prisoner exchange for his release.

When the families of Laken Riley and Jocelyn Nungaray were introduced, Democrats again did not rise for the grieving mothers whose daughters were both killed by illegal aliens last year.

Trump said when he began his speech that there was nothing he could do that would make the Democrats smile, clap or applaud and he went on to prove he was right. When he introduced D.J. Daniel, a 13 year old battling brain cancer who dreams of being a police officer, there were few dry eyes in the house, except for the Democrats who did not join in the standing ovation for D.J., but remained glued to their seats.

Trump made D.J. an honorary Secret Service agent, delighting him, his family and the entire country. It was an enormously kind and lovely gesture on the part of the president—and politically, it was brilliant.

Trump’s speech was a triumph because he made it clear he is on the side of ordinary Americans. The Democrats went to great pains to make it clear they are not.

Loser: Democrats Go Pro-War

If you just watch news reports, you will miss what Trump has been saying about the war in Ukraine since his inauguration—that his primary concern is the huge death toll. An estimated half million people have been killed in that war—2,000 a week. The president has repeatedly called the loss of life “senseless.”

It seems few could disagree, but the Democrats did not applaud the president even when he says he wanted to end the war and bring peace.

In fact, the only point in the speech where the Democrats applauded was when Trump charged that many Democrats wouldn’t care if the war continued for 5 more years—at which point, most notably, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, clapped.

It is hard to imagine such an avalanche of bad political calculations—malpractice doesn’t begin to describe it. Dressing in pink—the girly, girl Barbie color—to send a message of support for women, just days after killing the very popular ban on men in women’s sports. And then there was the auction paddle props with childish messages that were asking to be mocked on social media.

Still, clapping to continue the Ukraine war gets my vote for the worst thing progressives did all week. Some on their side knew they blew it, but everything they tried to do to fix it as the week rolled on just made it worse.

Winner: Gavin Newsom Says Men Playing in Women’s Sports is “deeply unfair.”

On his new podcast, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a likely Democratic presidential candidate, said it was “easy to call out the unfairness” of men and boys playing in women’s and girls’ sports. But we will see how easy it will be for him. The Human Rights Campaign, the powerful transgender rights organization, slammed him immediately and other progressives soon followed.

Newsom was quick to add the dishonest talking point that, even though it’s unfair, compassion and grace are needed for transgender kids because they are at a higher risk for suicide than their non-gender confused peers. Compassion and grace are always a good idea, particularly now in the season of Lent, but children afflicted with gender dysphoria also need our help to get counseling, the only effective treatment for the mental health issues that are virtually always part of a gender confusion diagnosis. Those include bi-polar disorder, depression, PTSD and substance abuse, all of which is why they are at risk of suicide—not the stigma of being transgender.

Winner: BlackRock Distances Itself from ESG

In 2021, Texas led the fight against so-called ESG—Environmental, Social Governance policies—when lawmakers passed legislation barring state pensions and endowments from investing in companies that boycott fossil fuels. BlackRock was at the top of the offenders list. This week, BlackRock announced they are on a new path and the company that gave us “woke capitalism” has now pretty much declared it dead. According to news reports, when BlackRock dropped out of the national climate change group, Net Zero Asset Managers, the organization more or less collapsed.

When Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick made Senate Bill 21 a priority in 2021, the blowback against him and the Texas Senate was enormous, but, as usual, they were way ahead of the curve. If you haven’t looked at the Lieutenant Governor’s priorities for this legislative session, here’s the list.

Loser: Democrats Blocking the Ban on Men in Women’s Sports

Perhaps it’s not fair to hit the Democrats twice on this—since they failed to stand up during the President’s speech when he introduced a young woman who sustained a traumatic brain injury when competing against a male. But it needs to be underscored that Democrats really do intend to die on the hill of so-called transgenderism.

On Monday, Senate Democrats blocked legislation to ban boys playing in girls’ sports. 51 Republicans voted to bring the bill to the floor but they needed 60 to end the filibuster. And 43 Democrats and two independents voted against it. A New York Times poll in January found that 79% of respondents (and Gavin Newsom) said biological males who identify as women should not be allowed to participate in girls and women’s sports. That includes 67% of Democrats polled. Who are they representing?

Winner: Texas Wins the Governor’s Cup… again

It’s not really news that Texas has won the Governor’s Cup from Site Selection Magazine again. This is the 21^st time the Texas has scored number one in attracting new and expanded business facility projects. The state has won the award every year for the past 13 years. Texas has added over three hundred more corporate headquarters over the last decade, prompting Gov. Greg Abbott to call the Lone Star State “the headquarters of headquarters.”

Winner: Texas A&M’s Drag Show Ban

What was really great about Texas A&M’s Board of Regents resolution last week to ban drag shows on campus was that they rightly stated that drag shows denigrate women. The Aggies’ Queer Empowerment Council is outraged of course and national groups are making noise about free speech, but the question that should be asked is: Would a blackface performance be allowed on campus? As I wrote a couple of years ago, drag is blackface targeting women.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History describes blackface as “…comedic performances of ‘blackness’ by whites in exaggerated costumes and make-up. Blackface cannot be separated fully from the racial derision and stereotyping at its core. By distorting the features and culture of African Americans—including their looks, language, dance, deportment, and character—white Americans were able to codify whiteness across class and geopolitical lines as its antithesis.”

If you change blackness to women, you have a precise definition of drag—”comedic performances of women by men in exaggerated costumes and make-up…distorting their features, their looks, language, dance, deportment and character.”

Blackface also perpetuated the most violent racism in America by pushing racial stereotypes that black men were stupid with enormous sexual appetites. If you have ever seen a drag show, you know they present the exact same stereotypes about women. The Texas A&M Board of Regents is exactly right to shut them down.

Loser: Oscar Winning Fans of the “Sex Worker Community”

Last week, after the movie “Anora,” which I and millions of Americans have not seen, won the Oscar for best picture, the actress who played a stripper turned prostitute in the film used her award-getting moment in the sun to proclaim her support for the “sex worker community.” Later, the film’s producer said that sex work should be decriminalized. So far, there has been no outcry from any feminists on the left about glorifying the danger, abuse and degradation of women that is a byproduct of prostitution. Movies are movies, and there’s always been a lot of them about prostitutes, but at a time when the human trafficking of women and girls is an epidemic in America, we should not use films about prostitution as a platform to suggest it is simply another career choice for women.

Loser: Maxine Waters Suggests Musk Rigged the Election

Speaking of antics, after 2020, so-called “election denial” became a big attack line for Democrats and their allies in the media. Anyone who questioned any of the data following the 2020 election was treated as if they were a flat earther. Now comes U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California, first screaming that Elon Musk should “go back to wherever he came from” —tough words for a legal American immigrant. Then she charged that somehow Musk may have been involved in rigging the outcome of the 2024 election. Sounds like election denial.

Winner: Schools Revive Shop Classes

A report in the Wall Street Journal this week detailed that schools across the country are bringing back shop classes in order to teach students all kinds of mechanical and building skills in preparation for blue collar jobs in the workforce. Reviving shop classes, like virtually all innovation in education, is done at the state and local level, which is why Trump and new Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, were right this week to move forward with the plan to abolish the Department of Education, which played a role in getting rid of shop classes in the first place.

As the Wall Street Journal points out, shop classes were shut down in the late 1980’s when reports indicated that reading skills in our schools were low. Thirty years later, those scores are still low—and we need to fix that. But we can also bring back shop classes!

Winner: Texas Longhorns Lose Coin-Toss But Still No. 1

The Texas Women’s Basketball team is still ranked No. 1, after decimating Florida last Sunday, 72 to 46. They lost the coin-toss to South Carolina for the top seed in the SEC Tournament and they play Ole Miss this afternoon at 5 p.m. in the opening round. Hook ‘em.

Have a great weekend.

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.

Sign up to receive this in your inbox every week at www.texaspolicy.com/9thandCongress.

Follow me on X @sylvester1630 and follow my podcast, the Sherry Sylvester Show on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.