Texas Monthly Includes Our Local Senator on Worst Legislator List

Texas Monthly magazine has come out with its regular end-of-session list of best and worst state politicians, and Fayette County’s state senator Lois Kolkhorst was included in the list of Worst Legislators of 2023.

Here’s what the magazine said about her:

Sen. Lois Kolkhorst R-Brenham

Ambitious Republican senators have to work hard to get out of Dan Patrick’s shadow. Kolkhorst skillfully built up her profile this year by crusading against three of the session’s biggest scapegoats: foreign nationals, vaccines, and renewable energy. She is likely “your next lieutenant governor,” one lobbyist said, “the most craven person in the building but also probably the smartest.”

Kolkhorst’s most highprofile bill this session would have prohibited folks from certain countries—China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia— from purchasing real estate in Texas. The bill would have punished innocent people: dual citizens and legal residents who have no connection to the totalitarian governments in the countries of their birth.

A Capitol insider said that “she didn’t know what [her bill] did.” Midsession, in what seemed like nothing more than a publicity stunt, Kolkhorst invited a group mostly made up of Uyghur Muslims, a persecuted minority group in China, to her committee to give testimony on Chinese tyranny. The irony was that Kolkhorst’s bill, as originally written, would have banned Uyghur refugees from buying a home in Arlington.

As chair of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, she tried to weaken vaccine mandates, using her committee to air scaremongering testimony about the dangers of getting immunized. And she offered some of the session’s most punitive bills against renewable power providers, subjecting them to fines and regulation other power producers don’t face, warning that Texas didn’t know “the environmental impacts, long-term,” of wind and solar generation.