Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick presides over the state of Texas State Senate.

The Speaker of the House, of course, presides over the lower house of the state legislature,

and that's the House of Representatives.

The governor, of course, presides or sits atop the executive branch.

And then you've got the judicial branch.

In the state of Texas, we have a state Supreme Court, which handles the civil matters,

and we have the Court of Criminal Appeals, which handles the criminal matters.

Unlike at the United States federal level, we actually have two separate courts that are the courts of last resort, the highest courts in the state of Texas.

So the Texas state Supreme Court does not hear as broad a jurisdiction as the U.S. Supreme Court does because it only handles

the civil cases, non-criminal. So that would be tort and contract and property and the like.

We have a court of criminal appeals, which handles death penalty and other criminal matters.

But back to the legislature. we have two branches, two houses of the legislature.

The lower house, the House, the Upper House, the State Senate.

And just like the federal legislative branches, the lower house has two-year terms.

The upper house the Senate serves six-year terms.

And you remember, if you grew up in Texas from Texas history in seventh grade,

you remember that our state legislature meets every two years for 150 days.

We are in the middle of that right now.

You're not hearing a lot about it.

And the reason is, even though we managed to dislodge drunk day as Speaker of the House,

he was replaced with the power of the Democrats, even though

they're in the majority, in the minority, with only 62 of the 76 votes it takes to get to a

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