Thursday Roundup: England Switches Parties

You may have heard — since the news is everywhere — but State Representative Kirk England, a Republican from District 106 in Grand Prairie, has decided to join the Democratic Party.

Gromer Jeffers has it that plenty of Party People will be lined up with England at his presser today, and if you want some research on What It All Means, the Lone Star Project has plenty for you.

So Fred Hill is retiring, Delisi is retiring, and now Kirk England is switching parties. This is not the kind of trouble I would have necessarily expected the Texas GOP to have, but it is the trouble in their road regardless. True, England's district is not the kind of Republican district that will expel him like some foreign body for switching parties, but this is a big deal.

This is also a big deal, and unexpected: it isn't often that someone investigates the State Department for corruption. But in a world with the Iraq War and massive reconstruction projects with no oversight, things can go awry, and they have. The investigation centers around fraud and waste investigations and whether the State Department inspector general has been on the obstruction train.

In some other national news, a member of Bush's cabinet is bailing out to run for the Senate. Ag Secretary Mike Johanns will resign and is likely to run for Chuck Hagel's Nebraska Senate seat. I bet the confirmation hearing won't be terribly contentious. I wonder how Nebraska will react to the demonstrable change between a maverick to a guy from Bush's cabinet.

Also in the Senate, Jim Webb's idea for minimum rest rotations for combat troops was steaming along until John Warner, for some reason, went negative on the idea. As both Senators are from Virginia, it could lead to some uncomfortable state events, I guess. The race to 60 votes is either a short ride in a fast machine, or a seemingly interminable crawl that never gets to fruition.

In case you're starved for news on the border fence, you'll like today's last item: the pilot section of the touted "virtual" fence at the border, which was supposed to be up and running three months ago, still isn't working. Chertoff was on damage control and he swears DHS won't pay them anymore until the pilot section is fully functional, and that's good, since a majority of the $20,000,000 contract has been paid out to Boeing, the contractor on the project.