House Speaker Pete Laney has a handful of problems he didn't have just a week ago, ranging from the decisions of a dozen committee chairmen not to seek reelection, to the decision by a prominent Republican House member to endorse Laney's nemesis, Rep. Tom Craddick, R-Midland.

Republicans think they'll be able to put as many as 90 people in the Texas House next year and as many as 19 in the Texas Senate because of the new maps drawn by a panel of three federal judges. That's a ground shift, and a big one, and it potentially carries the biggest prize in redistricting: The ability to draw the maps that will actually be used to elect members of Congress and the Texas Legislature for the rest of the decade.

The U.S. Department of Justice–that same bunch that said a couple of weeks ago that they wouldn't be ready to say anything about the Texas House until the end of the month, uncorked a letter at midmonth that might change everything. Or, it might not.

The United States Department of Justice ducked behind the hedgerow, telling the federal judges in charge of Texas redistricting matters that the Bush Administration won't have anything to say about the state's maps for the Texas House of Representatives until the end of November.

No, Virginia, there is no national sales tax, but politicians are politicians and tax holidays are popular gimmicks. Some of the politicos in Washington, DC, are talking about a national sales tax holiday that would hit right in the middle of the Christmas buying season. The idea is that the federal government would reimburse the states that have a pre-Christmas sales tax holiday. It's been the subject of conversation both in the national and state capitals, but the proposal is fraught with the sorts of pesky details that could easily sink it.

A magazine ad for Land Commissioner David Dewhurst features a boast about his efforts to defend the Homeland, along with a photo of a German Air Force officer in front of an American flag.

Sometimes a baseball pitcher will throw one on the outside of the plate to lure a batter closer, then follow it with a fast inside pitch to send the batter sprawling. If you've been watching Austin District Judge Paul Davis handle congressional redistricting plans, you can probably identify with that batter.

State District Judge Paul Davis is halfway done. He's drawn a congressional redistricting map that is now the starting point for other judges on the state and federal levels, and he'll begin hearings right away on maps for state Senate and House elections. That congressional map is the first with anything like an official seal of approval on it. The Legislature didn't pass a plan and the Legislative Redistricting Board didn't have jurisdiction on congressional plans. If it doesn't run into another judge with a crayon, Davis' map could actually be used to elect the next congressional delegation from Texas.

Politics came to a halt in Texas on Sept. 11 but while the play has since picked up, the landscape has changed. Until at least next spring, money is likely to be tight, messages will be difficult to craft and voters are less likely to be interested in state politics than they have been in recent years. Political tactics and strategy are changing and politicians are testing the new ground.

The suicide hijackings in New York City, Washington, D.C., and in rural Pennsylvania put an abrupt stop to what had been a suddenly busy political season in Texas. What seemed important on Monday was no longer worth attention by mid-morning on Tuesday.

There's nothing like the rare availability of a U.S. Senate seat to prove that few people in elected office are really happy with the offices they already occupy. After U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm announced that he will serve until the end of this term and then leave office, Texas turned into a political Field of Dreams. For the first 48 hours, every politico in Texas was on the phone, either checking to see about support for a promotion, or taking calls from friends who wanted support for a promotion.

The year-old campaign of A.R. "Tony" Sanchez Jr. is finally going public with a two-day flyaround that will start in Laredo and make stops in Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and Houston. That two-day announcement will be followed by a series of regional bus tours in different parts of Texas. The first will be held in South Texas, with stops including Corpus Christi and Brownsville.

The Tony Sanchez Jr. campaign has its first casualty. The not-yet-declared Democratic gubernatorial candidate hired a veteran migrant political worker—Robin Rorapaugh—as his campaign manager earlier this year. But Rorapaugh, who started here before moving to Florida to work on campaigns there, is heading back to the Sunshine State.

Underneath the talk about how things are going for the new management in Washington, D.C., there is serious turbulence in the new management that was left behind in Austin. And the "Under New Management" sign that figuratively hangs over the Texas Capitol will remain in place for almost two more years.

Message Slip Number One: Sen. David Sibley, the only Republican candidate for lieutenant governor with any legislative experience, dropped out of the race. He said, essentially, that his heart wasn't in it, but the way he said it was to point out that campaigning for a Senate seat is kind of fun, and campaigning for statewide office isn't the same. The Waco lawyer hasn't announced his next step, but he's got lots of options: Get out of office and get rich as a lawyer/lobbyist with close ties to the top executives in Washington, D.C. (Crawford, Texas, happens to be in Sibley's district, and he and President George W. Bush are friends), and Austin (after some initial jousting, Sibley and Gov. Rick Perry worked out an alliance that still holds). Sibley could run for reelection. He's been mentioned as a possible justice for the Texas Supreme Court, which has suddenly become a launch pad for statewide campaigns and federal appointments. He's been mentioned as a federal judicial appointee, and in fact, took the test for such a position before withdrawing his name so he could run for Lite Guv. Sibley's announcement leaves former Supreme Court Justice Greg Abbott and Land Commissioner David Dewhurst on the GOP side, and former Comptroller John Sharp and former U.S. Selective Service Director Gil Coronado on the Democratic side.

Maybe this will turn out to be a case where the outlanders were caught telling scary stories around the campfire, but there sure are a lot of Democrats talking about challenging U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm. The list of names is growing even as Gramm says he has no intention of stepping down.

The upcoming school finance study could be a two-parter, with a special panel looking at everything except taxes and then and only then messing with taxes, and only if they must. That, according to Lt. Gov. Bill Ratliff, would separate the thicket of school funding formulas from the bramble of state taxes. Both are hairy problems, and they are interwoven, but Ratliff says he and House Speaker Pete Laney lean toward starting an interim study on school finance with taxes removed.

Nobody predicted Gov. Rick Perry would set a record by vetoing 82 bills at the end of the session, but neither should anyone be completely surprised. The tension between the governor and the Legislature has been unrelenting since the November elections. If nothing else, they leave the governor's mark on a session where he had previously had little impact.

After an arduous and grueling ten-day campaign (we're joking, but only a little), Lt. Gov. Bill Ratliff dropped out of the 2002 race for the job he already holds. Ratliff jumped into the race on the last Saturday of the session, surrounded by family and bolstered by the presence of nearly a dozen senators. Less than two weeks later, he was standing in front of a bank of cameras and reporters to say that he wasn't willing to make the compromises necessary in a successful statewide campaign.

Eight days isn't much of a cooling off period, but the Legislative Redistricting Board will convene on Wednesday to start up to 60 days of work drawing political boundaries for the 2002 races for Texas House and Texas Senate. That start date puts the deadline for the LRB in the first week of August.

The dramatic peak of the 77th legislative session came several weeks ago, when the House was trying to redistrict itself and the Senate was trying not to self-immolate on the hate crimes bill and its own redistricting maps. The end of the session, by contrast, seems as gentle as a receding tide.

The powers of state officeholders ebb and flow with the calendar. The end of the legislative session is when the governor's powers peak, when the comptroller has one last moment of leverage, when budgeteers' prospects are in bloom and when the lieutenant governor and the speaker of the House bring their full powers over the legislative agenda to bear. If you see legislative supplicants standing in line to plead for something, chances are the line will lead to one of those people.

Three weeks from the date at the top of this edition, the Legislature will gavel to a close and go home. That'll be a relief, to be sure, but the 21 days that lead up to Sine Die will be hectic and the issues that have dominated the conversations in the Pink Building since January are finally coming to a head.

You're not supposed to predict the future in our business, but what the heck: You have not seen a redistricting plan this year that will actually be used to elect legislators next year.

If you've been thinking nothing much was going on during this session of the Legislature, you've got loads of company. But take a look at the calendar and get ready for a very fast month.

Lawmakers will get ready for the Easter break by kicking the budget out of the House and lining up for copies of the redistricting "working" maps they've been promised by the two chairmen in charge of political cartography. Even without redistricting, the remaining seven weeks of the session will be kinda hairy. Still on the list of things to do: The House-Senate conference on the budget, teacher health insurance, Medicaid funding, campaign finance reform, major water and air bills, a number of Sunset bills affecting major agencies, a handful of controversial criminal justice bills, transportation bills and any number of things we've left off. There's a stack of stuff to do and not much time to do it. But the focus isn't on that stuff: It's on the maps.

They say they're not having a political fight, but if Lt. Gov. Bill Ratliff and Comptroller Carole Keeton Rylander were having a political fight, chances are it would look a lot like this.

The rural areas are in worse shape than they were expecting. The suburbs are in better shape than they were expecting. The urban areas are in both better and worse shape—maybe it's just disturbingly different than they expected. There is not a GOP primary for governor on the horizon.

When Rep. Delwin Jones, R-Lubbock, went to the front microphone in the House to talk about redistricting numbers the other day, you could have heard a pin drop. The chairman of the Redistricting Committee had nothing dramatic to say; he was keeping members up to date on the U.S. Census Bureau's plan to deliver numbers any day. He said it'd take several days to load the data into the computers so that the political cartographers can get to work. He finished; everyone exhaled.

When Bill Ratliff sits down to talk to the members of his exploratory committee after the end of the legislative session, they'll tell him a number of things they could tell him today.

Explain this to your daddy: The State of Texas has $5.2 billion more money to spend over the next two years than it had during the last two years. There is probably enough money available for the state to continue to do the things it already does, even when you factor in inflation and other increases.

Budget writers have known for months—since they first saw the numbers—that Medicaid and various other insurance and health care programs were going to stink up the next budget and stain the current one. And they even had a fair idea about the size of the odors and the spots. They've been hearing about drug prices and premiums and caseloads for the better part of the last year. The numbers are big and even alarming, but the problem has been on the radar for a while.

Some of the same people who voted to constitutionally limit state borrowing four years ago have found a way to issue hundreds of millions of dollars in new state highway bonds without counting the new debt against that constitutional cap. Each of the three different types of bonds spelled out in current highway funding proposals would punch a skylight into the legal debt ceiling designed to brake the heavy borrowing that began during the prison-building boom of the 1990s.

The presidential election lasted too long. Then there was a new governor to swear in and a race in the Senate to name a new lieutenant governor and a mini-diaspora to Washington, D.C. Senate committees were named, then House committees, and everyone paused for the inauguration. Gov. Rick Perry will come back and make a State of the State speech this week and then, at last, this contraption will finally be rolling. It's been a weird beginning to what could be a weird year.

The Texas Legislature is back for a politically interesting and potentially fractious session, but the folks directly involved in the 77th session began with a focus on other things.

Things do pile up when you're away from your desk for a holiday. All that happened during our 17th annual year-end break was the swearing in of a new president and of a new governor of Texas, the election and swearing in of a new lieutenant governor*, a major shakeup (and 24 hours later, an amendment to the shakeup) of Senate committees, and the release of U.S. Census numbers that give Texas two more seats in Congress after the 2002 elections. Oh, yeah, there's a new estimate on how much money will be available for the next two-year budget. And a mess of people changed jobs.