Nate Sheets is the most qualified guy for Ag Commissioner. He built Nature Nate’s, runs a working cattle ranch, and farm and cattle groups back him. Polls have lowballed the top Texas Republican three elections running. Early voting starts Oct. 19. abc13.com/post/week-texas-ag…

Enjoyed another recording of This Week in Texas on ABC13 with Tom Abrahams. We talked about the lack of statewide debates, the DPS voter registration backlog, and the fight over the Harris County budget. If you changed your address online through DPS in the past year, check your registration at VoteTexas.gov before the October 5 deadline. Watch Saturday on ABC13 or stream it. #ThisWeekInTexas #ABC13

Bob Hebert meant a lot to me. He was one of a kind. Calm under pressure, always showed up, and did the right thing for the right reasons. He cared about Fort Bend County and every one of his neighbors in it. For 16 years as county judge, through Ike, Harvey and the Brazos floods, he led well when it mattered most. I was privileged to serve as Republican county chair while he was in office. Last Thursday the county renamed its Emergency Operations Center the Robert E. "Bob" Hebert Emergency Operations Center. He pushed for that building because he knew a growing county would need it, and his name belongs on it. At the ceremony, his daughter Shelley shared a lesson he taught at home, where he even ran the family through fire drills: "When people need help, you show up." That was Bob. To Shelley and the whole Hebert family, thank you for sharing him with Fort Bend for so long. I'll miss him. communityimpact.com/sugar-la…

New This Week in Texas: gas prices, the Senate race after the GOP convention, and a social media post that has Republicans denouncing one of their own. Shea Jordan Smith and I break it down on @abc13houston. abc13.com/post/week-texas-fu…

Spent a couple of days this week in Georgetown filming interviews with some of the people who make this city run and manage it for the people who live and work there. It was one of the more energizing stretches I've had in a while. Mayor Josh Schroeder, Williamson County Judge Steven Snell, City Manager David Morgan, Economic Development Director Cameron Goodman, and Electric Utility General Manager Daniel Bethapudi all sat down with us, along with two companies that chose to build in Georgetown: Compal and Pegatron. Georgetown has been the fastest-growing city in America three years running, adding nearly 46,000 residents since 2020, and after two days of interviews it's obvious why: the people running the city and the people running its power grid are equally serious about the details. This is the pilot for something I want to do in cities and counties across Texas, building the case companies actually need to hear when they're deciding where to land in this state, on camera, from the people who actually do the work. Aidan Evans and Declan Shearman at DSE Media put together a great shoot, camera setups, audio, moving between the council dais and a full auditorium without missing a beat, and watching them work was its own kind of impressive. More to come when this one is ready to share!

This week's episode of This Week in Texas airs tomorrow, and it's a good one! Recorded it yesterday with Tom Abrahams and Angel Carroll while I was still in Dallas for the Republican Midterm Convention, and we got into where Republican messaging and strategy is heading into November. Labor Day is behind us now, and that means campaign season is officially on! Early voting runs October 19 through October 30, and Election Day is November 3. The race is on. @abc13houston

I turned 18 three days after September 11, 2001. I became a legal adult, eligible to vote and to serve, in the same week terrorists carried out the deadliest attack on American soil in the nation's history. That morning I woke up to find my parents glued to the television in our living room. The first plane had already hit the World Trade Center. By the time I got to campus at Northwood University in Cedar Hill, Texas, the second plane had hit too. They canceled classes and wheeled TVs into every classroom instead, and we all just sat there and watched as more attacks and planes went down. Everyone was in shock, and the whole campus went quiet in a way I'd never heard before, all you could hear were whispers and crying. At least one of my classmates had a family member on one of those planes. I remember how much that broke something in all of us, watching people try to murder Americans for being Americans. That week is where my view of this country actually took shape: what it means to protect it, and exactly what it's worth to the people who call it home. This country has given my family and all Americans every opportunity we've ever had, and I decided then that I owed it something in return. I ended up putting on the uniform twice, ready to go wherever I was needed, and I would do it again tomorrow. There is no greater country on earth, and no greater honor than defending it. 2,977 people were killed that day: 2,750 in New York, 184 at the Pentagon, 40 in Pennsylvania. Rick Rescorla, Morgan Stanley's head of security, spent that morning leading nearly 2,700 employees out of the South Tower, calming people with a bullhorn, then went back in and never came out. Twenty-five years on, 341 FDNY firefighters, paramedics, and support staff have died from illnesses tied to what they breathed in at Ground Zero, nearly equal to the 343 firefighters who died that day. That toll is still climbing, among people who ran toward the towers instead of away from them. We patrol the world so other people do not have to live through a morning like that one. We protect peace, and when it comes down to it, we put the people who threaten it in the ground. Never forget.

Day one in Dallas for the first Midterm Convention the RNC has ever held, and Texas showed out. This thing came together fast, but you'd never know it from how well it was run, and the turnout matched the effort. Trump won Texas by nearly 14 points in 2024, and getting those same voters fired up again is what decides whether Republicans break the historic trend of the president's party losing ground in the midterms. Ran into my friend Mayes Middleton, our nominee for Texas Attorney General. The people are fired up. Keep it going to November and Republicans win up and down the ticket.

At the Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas the next couple days, the first one the RNC has ever held between presidential cycles. Glad to be here. Excited to catch up with old friends and make some new ones in a room this fired up about where the country's headed. See y'all out there.

Two hundred and fifty years. The United States has outlasted empires, survived two world wars, buried dictatorships, and still runs the same basic constitutional architecture the founders designed. That is not a common outcome for democratic republics. The Declaration of Independence is worth reading slowly heading into the Fourth. The line that tends to get quoted is about self-evident truths and unalienable rights. But the sentence before it matters just as much: governments are instituted to secure those rights, and they derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Political authority flows upward from the people. In 1776, that was a genuinely radical claim. It still is in most of the world. The founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to it. Many of them paid. What they built was a constitutional system with separated powers, written limits on government authority, and an independent judiciary designed to outlast any individual, any faction, and any moment of popular passion. It has. What that system produced over 250 years is extraordinary. It built the most productive economy in human history. It generated scientific and medical advances that have saved hundreds of millions of lives. It maintained a military that turned the tide in two world wars and has since upheld the security architecture that allowed democracies to flourish. It protected religious liberty across every faith, allowing people to worship, organize, and serve their communities without asking permission from the state. And it produced a civil society that fills the space between government and the individual: churches, charities, schools, and civic organizations that have quietly served communities for generations. None of this was inevitable, and every generation has had to choose it again. I think about this especially through the friendships I have built with people from countries that live with authoritarian power on their borders and in their history. They know, at a level most Americans never have to consider, what the alternative looks like. The American security commitments that can feel abstract in Washington are very concrete to the people who depend on them. And the freedoms Americans sometimes take for granted - to build a business, speak your mind, worship as you believe, and pass something to your children - are the reason many of those people chose to come here. They saw what America offered and made a decision with their lives. America at 250 is imperfect, as it has always been. Every era has had its failures, its arguments, its moments when the distance between the founding ideals and lived reality was painfully visible. But the founding idea holds: every human being has dignity and rights that no government has the authority to erase. That idea is why people still cross oceans and risk everything to get here, and why, at 250, the American experiment is still being watched by the rest of the world.

250 years of American independence, celebrated at one of the most beautiful and unique buildings in Texas. Two hundred and fifty years ago, our founders declared that our rights come from God, not from government, and they built this nation on that idea. No country in history has done more to advance freedom, protect religious liberty, or give ordinary people the chance to build something extraordinary. Americans have bled for that on every continent. People from every nation on earth vote with their lives to get here. That is proof of what we have built. Saturday night the BAPS community gathered to celebrate America's 250th birthday at the Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Stafford. There was a prayer for peace and unity, a grand lighting of the mandir in red, white, and blue, and hundreds of people who genuinely love this country. The BAPS community has been in Texas for many decades. They are Americans, and they celebrate like it. Some friends from Fort Bend County joined me: Judge Ed Krenek of the 400th Judicial District Court, Justice of the Peace Tricia Krenek, Shawn McDonald running for District Attorney, Ken Mathews running for County Commissioner Precinct 4, Tony Aranda running for County Commissioner Precinct 2, and Asha Reddi running for District Judge of the 240th. Good people and good conversations all around. The BAPS community does far more than maintain a beautiful mandir. They run disaster relief operations, host health fairs, and organize food drives, doing it all quietly and consistently. Fort Bend County is better for it. I've visited many times, but walking through it never gets old. The mandir was built over 28 months using 33,000 pieces of Italian marble and Turkish limestone, assembled without a single piece of iron or steel. 2,400 artisans hand-carved every piece in India, shipped them to Stafford in 150 containers, and fitted them together like a giant 3D puzzle. The design follows the Shilpa Shastras, ancient Hindu texts that lay out the principles of sacred architecture. The project drew 1.3 million volunteer hours, including students who gave up their summers to work in the Texas heat to see it finished. Grateful to my friends at BAPS for the tour and a memorable Saturday night. @BAPS_PubAffairs

Back at the Texas Capitol today for the Natural Resources Committee hearing on data centers. Always great to see Chairman @CodyHarrisTX leading well in the Texas House and to catch up with friends on the committee. This is an important issue for Texas and it goes well beyond the economy. Data centers have made real advances in how they consume resources. They are becoming more efficient with electricity and many now recirculate water to reduce demand on Texas infrastructure. They also bring substantial property tax value to the jurisdictions where they locate, which helps lower the tax burden for homeowners across those communities. As Governor @GregAbbott_TX and the Legislature take this up in the coming session, my hope is that they find the right balance. Texas wants to remain one of the most attractive places in the world for data center investment. At the same time, the impact on everyday Texans and on our grid and water supply deserves serious consideration. Those two things are not in conflict if the policy is done right. Texas has always found a way to grow and protect what makes it great at the same time. This is another opportunity to do exactly that.

On This Week in Texas, we discussed two stories that matter to Fort Bend County and to Texas. On KP George: Judge Perez-Jaramillo gave George the statutory maximum of 10 years, probated. He'll serve 180 days in the Fort Bend County Jail, not prison, followed by five years of community supervision. He filed an appeal immediately, so the clock on that sentence doesn't start for a year or more. The conviction remains in place. It will be hard on his family, and that's worth acknowledging. But elected officials swear an oath to the people they serve. When they violate that oath, they don't just break a law, they break public trust and threaten the integrity of the institution they were chosen to represent. That demands accountability. Fort Bend County got a conviction and is watching the rest of the process play out. Daniel Wong is serving as county judge and moving the county forward. On the Collier ballot access lawsuit: I've read the complaint. The primary runoff shortened the signature collection window from 113 days to 30 days. That 75% reduction is a fair point to raise. But Collier knew Texas ballot access law before he decided to run as an independent. The rules didn't change on him after he filed. This is the same First Amendment argument the same law firm tried in 2019 and couldn't prove in federal court. The signature requirements exist to prevent an overloaded ballot that creates voter confusion and undermines the process. If Texans want the timing fixed for independent candidates in runoff cycles, the answer is the legislature. That is a legislative problem with a legislative solution. I'm not a fan of asking federal courts to rewrite what legislators deliberately built. abc13.com/post/week-texas-kp…

Great week with the K-MidSouth Nexus business delegation from Korea. Executives from across industries spent time in Dallas, Austin, and Houston and got a real feel for what Texas is about. Always good to do this alongside my longtime friend former Consul General Jung, who served Houston well during his time here. Korea and Texas have a long track record together. Samsung, Hyundai, LG, and others helped build that foundation and the companies coming now are building on top of it. The relationship runs deep and it keeps growing. Closed out the trip with a night at Daikin Park with the Astros. Big thank you to Heejun Yoon and the Houston Astros for showing this group what Houston hospitality looks like. Hard to beat that as a last impression of Texas.

Joined Angel Carroll and Tom Abrahams on This Week in Texas to talk through Houston's $7.5 billion budget and a new TSU survey on ballot integrity and voter access. On the budget: balance it. Houstonians are cutting spending as inflation drives up their own costs, and the city has to do the same. The shortfalls are significant, and infrastructure maintenance and repair is not a question that gets easier by waiting. If the city is going to add fees for trash pickup, there needs to be an actual plan to fix the trash problem first. Raising other taxes to cover all spending is not the answer. Use an axe on spending cuts and a scalpel for any increases. On the survey: Texas voters deserve election integrity and straightforward ballot access. Both parties put their thumb on one side of that balance, but a healthy democracy requires both. Texas and Georgia both passed sweeping election reforms aimed at strengthening integrity while keeping voting accessible. Democrats argued those bills would disenfranchise voters and put unreasonable burdens on participation. Turnout has gone up in both states since those bills passed. The damage to election confidence comes from extreme rhetoric, not from the voting process itself. abc13.com/post/week-texas-ci…

Dallas and Houston are hosting more FIFA World Cup matches than any other state this summer. Billions of eyes on Texas. Delegations, investors, and business leaders from every corner of the world landing here and seeing firsthand what we have built. Texas just needs to be Texas. The hospitality, the opportunity, the business climate all speak for themselves when people actually experience it. Great work by the Texas Economic Development Corporation on this video. Watch it, share it, and help tell the Texas story to the world. Come for the games. Stay for Texas. youtube.com/watch?v=pxVKw-GR…