US HOUSE

The House Ways and Means Committee voted last week to make six years of the former president's tax returns public.

WASHINGTON – Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner went before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee to testify as a witness for a hearing about the power grid failures that happened during last month’s winter storm. The hearing, called by U.S. Rep Lizzie Fletcher (D-Houston), will take a look at the statewide failures during the storm. Yet politically powerful natural gas companies, along with their regulators, have largely escaped the wrath of Gov. At least 57 people died during the winter storm that plunged large swaths of Texas into subfreezing temperatures and overwhelmed the state’s electricity infrastructure, causing massive power outages. That’s because nearly half of the total power generation capacity for the main state electricity grid was offline as weather conditions caused failures in every type of power source: natural gas, coal, wind and nuclear.