Sarah Eckhardt Wants to Return the Texas Comptroller to the Bob Bullock Era 

The Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts is an idiosyncratic statewide office—a result of the state constitution’s intentionally decentralized executive branch. It’s part budget analyst, part tax collector, part financial auditor, and, increasingly so, part administrator of a grab bag of conservative policies that Republicans have enacted in recent years—from an anti-ESG investing law to, most recently and consequentially, the state’s private school voucher program. 

The office has long been seen as a backwater and a waystation for ambitious politicians seeking higher office. But when wielded in the proper way—as an engine of good, clean, efficient government—as Bob Bullock did during his 16-year tenure in that office last century, it can be a powerful post. In the seemingly everlasting era of Republican one-party rule, however, it has devolved into a more overtly part...