On Saturday there was a by-election in Houston to fill the Congressional seat in the 18th, a safely Democratic district that once belonged to President Matt Santos. Thanks to first Texas Republican intransigence, and then a failure of any candidate to garner 50% of the vote in a jungle general, this seat had been vacant for about 11 months. This weekend’s runoff election involved two Democratic candidates, with the winner seated yesterday. That makes the House currently 218-214 Republican, with 3 open seats: Governor Sherrill’s old seat (to be filled in April), MTG’s old seat (to be filled in March), and a seemingly safe Republican seat (under the old map, not the post-Proposition 50 map) in the extreme NE corner of California (to be filled in August).

Today the latest, brief, government shutdown ended, a day later than originally expected. While Trump had endorsed the compromise passed last week by the Senate and urged its swift enactment, it took Speaker Johnson an extra day to get his ducks in a row. The bill passed, 217-214, which looks deceptively like the Republicans’ current House margin. However looks are a little misleading here: 21 Democrats, mostly moderates (e.g., the retiring Jared Golden) and appropriators (e.g., the retiring Steny Hoyer), supported the bill while 21 Republicans, mostly Freedom Caucus types (e.g., Biggs, Boebert, and Massie), opposed the bill. Now the hard work begins, of trying to negotiate a compromise on DHS funding in a post-Minneapolis world in which the Democratic base is increasingly supportive of the previously radical position of defunding ICE.

Returning to Saturday, there was a very interesting election result out of Texas, in a by-election for a State Senate seat in Tarrant County. Tarrant, home to Fort Worth, is a rare example of a county that is both urban and staunchly Republican. In 2022, this State Senate seat went 60-40 to the Republican incumbent. That incumbent resigned in 2025 to become the Acting Comptroller in Texas, so there was a by-election in November which attracted 2 Republican and 1 Democratic candidates. The 2 Republicans together outpolled the Democrat, 52.6 – 47.4; however, neither Republican garnered a majority, so a runoff was scheduled for this past weekend. In that runoff, the Democrat won 57.2 – 42.8, despite reportedly being out-spent 7 to 1 and despite Trump having thrice posted on social media in support of the Republican. I keep seeing reporting that Trump won this State Senate district by 17 points in 2024, so roughly 58-41, although I have not been able to verify that myself; Tarrant County as a whole went to Trump but by a much smaller margin. Quite a result for the Democrats.

Finally, today a federal lawsuit (AAUP vs. DHS) was filed, asserting that Trump’s Gold Card immigration visa program is illegal. What I didn’t realize until the reading the lawsuit is that the way the Trump administration has implemented his Gold Card concept is by “treating a payment to [the] Commerce Department as evidence of statutory eligibility for EB-1 [extraordinary ability] and EB-2 [exceptional ability] visas, and expediting consideration of applications from individuals who make the payment.” As such, plaintiffs argue that “the Gold Card program overrides Congress’s choices—both as to who qualifies for employment-based immigration and how and under what conditions agencies may collect revenue… [and] does so at the expense of qualified EB-1 and EB-2 applicants, who are effectively crowded out of limited annual visa allotments as visas are steered to Gold Card recipients.”