Above: State Representative Erin Zwiener, district 45, holds her daughter, Lark, 3, at a meeting between Senator Elizabeth Warren and Democratic members of the Texas Legislature.
In November, state Representative Erin Zwiener, a third-term Democratic legislator representing the 45th district of the state House of Representatives, issued a call for campaign finance reform in response to the part 1 of “The School Board Backers,” a Texas Observer series that reveals how a network of partisan PACs and consultants supported dozens of ultraconservative candidates that took over some Texas school boards and then forced hard-right policy turns.
The Texas Observer’s special investigative correspondent Steven Monacelli collected hundreds of reports, some of them handwritten, that he analyzed as part of that series, supported through a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
