eye-to-eye in a high school auditorium in the aftermath of one of the state’s worst gun violence tragedies.....

It got even more heated as Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin, standing onstage behind Abbott, shouted at O’Rourke, “Sir, you’re out of line,” later calling him a “sick son of a (expletive).“

It was yet another public display of the hostility that has been brewing in Texas politics for the past six years, as Democrats make gains in the Texas Legislature and battles for statewide office, while the Republicans in power push further and more aggressively right on guns, abortion and gay rights.

Just in the last two years, Republicans in the Legislature have changed rules in the Texas Senate to squelch out already outnumbered Democratic resistance and wielded redistricting as a partisan tool to end careers of Democratic lawmakers......

That’s not the case this time. O’Rourke hammered Abbott earlier this year for the failures of the power grid during the 2021 winter storms that killed more than 700 people and left millions without electricity. O’Rourke went so far as to accuse Abbott of essentially accepting bribes from oil and gas company executives to assure he wouldn’t regulate them.

Now one of Abbott’s biggest donors is suing O’Rourke for libel and defamation. Kelcy Warren, chairman of the board at the gas pipeline company Energy Transfer Partners, filed suit against O’Rourke in San Saba County seeking more than $1 million in damages in a case filed in March.