Texas Democrats having their convention but GOP is stealing the show

Texas Democrats are holding their biennial convention in Corpus Christi today and tomorrow but some Republicans are stealing the show.

In a strongly-worded letter state Rep. Burt Solomons of Carrolton just sent to his Republican colleague Leo Berman of Tyler, he starts out by telling Berman "You are a liar."

Solomons tells Berman he is "profoundly disappointed in the manner in which you disparage legislators and have chosen to grossly distort the facts regarding illegal immigration reform in the Texas Legislature."

Berman - who earlier this week declared his candidacy for speaker of the House because in his view the current leader Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, is not conservative enough and made deals with most House Democrats to get elected - is best known for his bills targeting illegal immigrants in Texas.

In the 2007 and 2009 session Berman's proposals were killed in the House State Affairs Committee. Solomons has chaired the panel since last year but in the 2007 session, Rep. David Swinford, R-Dumas, chaired it. Swinford said publicly that he killed about two-dozen bills Berman and other legislators filed after consulting with Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott.

Like Swinford, Abbott has said that even if the Legislature had passed Berman's bills they would not have survived court challenges and the state would have had to spend more than $20 million defending them, like California did in the aftermath of Proposition 187 in the mid-1990s. One of Berman's bills would have denied basic public services to illegal immigrants like public education and the other would have denied U.S. citizenship to any American-born child whose parents were here illegally.

The other headline-grabbing development is the news that some people close to Gov. Rick Perry, including his former chief of staff, spent more than a half-million dollars trying to get a Green Party candidate on the Texas ballot. The idea behind, according to the Dallas Morning News, which broke the story, is that the Green Party candidate would take away votes from Democratic candidate Bill White. In the most recent opinion poll White, the former mayor of Houston, and Perry are tied at 43 percent.

The Democratic convention just started so there could be a few more surprising developlemnts - but from Republicans