Three weeks before Sen. Ted Cruz embarked on his ill-fated Cancun trip to escape the aftermath of Texas’s devastating winter storm, the elite K-12 Houston private school attended by his two daughters emailed a Covid warning to parents about international travel.

The bottom line: St. John’s School students who travel internationally must quarantine for 7 to 10 days upon their return. And they won’t be able to even learn online while in isolation.

The rules, pegged to CDC guidelines, were sent Jan. 30 in reaction to a controversy that gripped the school after its winter break, when the 11th and 12th grade classes had to promptly quarantine because students attended holiday parties that led to multiple Covid-positive infections.

A divide had formed between the parents and students who followed the safety guidelines and those who flouted them — a microcosm of the broader societal conflict that plays out daily across the nation.

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ordered that an attorney who filed a long-shot lawsuit over the 2020 election results must face a grievance committee, finding the attorney “has not sufficiently allayed the court’s concerns regarding potential bad faith.”

Attorney Erick Kaardal filed the lawsuit in December on behalf of several Republican state lawmakers and groups, targeting then-Vice President Mike Pence, the Electoral College and other institutions and leaders in an apparent attempt to block President Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 election. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of the District of Columbia in early January rejected the lawsuit, and suggested it was an act of “gamesmanship or symbolic political gesture.”
Boasberg said in a four-page opinion issued Friday that Kaardal, special counsel for the Thomas More Society’s Amistad Project and an attorney with the Minneapolis-based firm Mohrman, Kaardal & Erickson, had not adequately addressed concerns about “the flimsiness of the underlying basis for the suit.”

Kaardal and his attorneys with the firm Eccleston and Wolf did not immediately return a request for comment.
The judge said a declaration Kaardal filed with the court “spends most of its time supporting the suit’s theory on the unconstitutionality of the federal and state statutes at issue,” but “neither acknowledges nor addresses a significant criticism” from Boasberg’s previous opinion about the complaint maintaining it was not a voter fraud lawsuit but going on to alleging instances of fraud that had already been debunked.

State Rep. Gary Gates is under fire from his constituents for leaving House District 28 on Wednesday as much of Fort Bend County struggled without water and power.

After losing power Tuesday, Gates left his home via his private jet Wednesday night and traveled to Orlando, Fla., sparking outrage among many who believe the freshman lawmaker should have remained in his district.

“It really would have been nice to have a state representative helping on the ground, working at a warming center, packing food, etc. rather than immediately (flying) off on a private plane when the going got tough,” said Brian Walz, one of Gates’ constituents. “My neighbors didn’t get to do that when her pipe burst.”