In the News
Houstonians will decide on Tuesday who to elect as the next city controller, which isn't an easy thing to do. The controller is the city's financial watchdog, an independent elected official who keeps an eye on the city's cash flow. But voting for a controller can be tricky — how do you know if an incumbent is doing a good job, and how do you know if a challenger would do it better?
To the average ear, the controller might sound like a talking Excel spreadsheet, but there's a lot more going on.
AUSTIN (KXAN) — A House divided down the middle took steps forward Thursday to formalize the impeachment inquiry process and make the ongoing congressional investigation open to the public.
The resolution was approved with a vote of 232 to 196. All of the Texas Democrats voted for the resolution. All of the Republicans voted no.
Impeachment in Washington
House Democrats have been meeting for weeks behind closed doors to investigate complaints that President Donald Trump pressured the Ukrainian president by withholding military aid unless Ukraine investigated former Vice President Joe Biden.
Republicans like U.S. Congressman Will Hurt said they think Democrats aren't being as open as they should be.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. House took a formal step Thursday toward impeaching President Donald Trump as the chamber passed a measure that lays down the rules going forward in the current fact-finding phase.
House members approved a resolution along mostly party lines Thursday morning that called for the "next, public-facing phase" of the impeachment proceedings. While a number of Texas Democratic members have long called for impeachment, the holdouts came forward last month to support an inquiry upon the revelation of the president's phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Texas Republicans are in large part steadfastly opposed. A small handful of Republicans outside of the Texas delegation crossed party lines on the vote.
The 2018 midterm elections gave the United States a staggering 116th Congress, important in part for the number of women who assumed office and for the diversity among those women.
The first openly gay member of the Senate. The first two Muslim women elected to Congress. The first two Native American congresswomen. The youngest woman elected to Congress.
The firsts go on, and this attractive book, "The Women of the 116th Congress: Portraits of Power" by The New York Times, documents all of them – including U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso.
Escobar took office in January 2019, becoming one of the first Latinas elected to Congress from Texas, alongside Democrat Sylvia Garcia from Houston.
Stablecoins are Securities Act of 2019
The bill plans to regulate stablecoins under the Securities Act of 1933. The draft bill by Sylvia Garcia, named ‘‘Stablecoins are Securities Act of 2019" is believed to be geared towards certain factors.
Among such factors, the bill provides clarity in areas that lack regulatory guidance.
WASHINGTON — Six hours after lawmakers began grilling Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on his cryptocurrency plans, House members from both sides of the aisle expressed dissatisfaction with the lengthy testimony.
Zuckerberg took questions from the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday, three months after David Marcus, Facebook's cryptocurrency chief, failed in his testimony to give politicians confidence that the company would wait for a regulatory structure before launching its libra project.
The committee's top Republican, Rep. Patrick McHenry, didn't see much advanced by Zuckerberg.
"Frankly, I'm not sure that we've learned anything new here," the lawmaker from North Carolina said as the Facebook CEO wrapped up his testimony.
WASHINGTON – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told lawmakers that the company would pull out of the Libra Association in the event the consortium launched its proposed cryptocurrency without all needed regulatory approvals.
In a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee Wednesday, Zuckerberg fielded pointed questions on a variety of controversial issues around the social network, from election meddling to housing discrimination to deepfakes. But Libra, the proposed price-stable cryptocurrency Facebook conceived and set up the association to run, was the foremost item on the agenda
And many of the CEO's answers to lawmakers' questions underscored Facebook's official position is that it no longer controls the project.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Facebook Inc CEO Mark Zuckerberg conceded on Wednesday that the company's planned digital currency Libra was a "risky project," but sought to reassure skeptical U.S. lawmakers that it could lower the cost of electronic payments and open up the global financial system to more people.
Sporting a suit and tie, Zuckerberg also fended off aggressive questions on election interference, free speech, hate groups and fake news from members of the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee.
Representative Maxine Waters, the panel's fiery Democratic chair, quizzed Zuckerberg on Facebook's steps to combat misinformation and voter suppression ahead of the November 2020 U.S. presidential election. She also suggested policymakers should consider breaking up Facebook.
Facebook's crypto-project initiative ‘Libra' has been confronting various hindrances before an actual take-off, talk of the town across the globe as some G7 finance ministers and the central bank governors showed some sort of scepticism on this project but reinstating the project is the most buzzing topic even within the U.S. region. The recent trend is that, in the house of representatives for Texas's 29th congressional district, Sylvia Garcia, announced a draft bill to the House Financial Services Committee on Oct. 18. The draft bill, called the ‘‘Stablecoins are Securities Act of 2019," seeks to regulate stablecoins under the Securities Act of 1933.
This entails "amending statutory definitions of the term security" to include the term "managed stablecoins."
On Tuesday, Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas) proposed a draft bill that may include stablecoins into the scope of the Securities Act of 1933. "It is the sense of Congress that— (1) digital assets, known as managed stablecoins, are investment contracts and therefore are securities within the meaning given the term in section 2(a) of the Securities Act of 1933; and (2) because issuers of managed stablecoins nevertheless maintain that managed stablecoins are not securities, it is appropriate for Congress to provide clarity by amending statutory definitions of the term security to include managed stablecoins," the bill states.