An end to a weird legislative session, and the beginning of an uncertain political cycle

By Ross Ramsey, The Texas Tribune

May 31, 2021

The strangest regular session in the modern history of the Texas Legislature is ending, but the pandemic shadow that darkened these proceedings isn’t finished with the state’s government and politics.

Texas might be moving from a weird legislative session into a strange political cycle.

Because of the pandemic, the Legislature’s work isn’t done. And because that work isn’t done, the issues and the political fortunes that will be in play in the 2022 election year are uncertain.

COVID-19 delayed last year’s census. Because those numbers won’t be ready for four months, lawmakers didn’t have the data needed to draw new political districts for the state’s 38 U.S. House seats, 31 state Senate and 150 state House spots, and the 15 seats on the State Board of Education.

The mapmaking that would have taken place over the last five months is still ahead. Delayed maps could well mean delayed political primaries in 2022. Shifts of that sort can be disruptive, giving challengers and political nobodies time to catch up with established politicians.

It happened in 2012, when primaries were pushed from March to May as a result of redistricting litigation. That year’s U.S. Senate campaign frontrunner was Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst; Ted Cruz, who’d never been on a ballot, was the leader of a field of candidates who, unlike Dewhurst, had never run for statewide office in Texas. Cruz was running for second, vying not for an outright win in the Republican primary, but for the chance to face Dewhurst alone in a runoff. And the delay in the elections not only pushed that primary back — it pushed the runoff into July.

Cruz finished the first leg 12.5 percentage points behind Dewhurst, about as far behind as he had been in University of Texas/Texas Tribune polls in October 2011 and February 2012. When the July runoff came around, the extended campaigns had Dewhurst on his heels. Cruz had time to flip the results, turning that 12-point deficit into an almost 14-percentage-point victory, by raising his profile and the balance in his campaign account.

Maybe nothing like that will happen in 2022. It’s unlikely in a high-profile, statewide race. But it’s certainly possible, and it’s especially dangerous to lesser-known incumbents in races lower on the ballot. Many of those races will be in newly drawn political districts — already destabilizing for incumbents — and newcomers with money, or with the time that a delay can provide, or both, could benefit.

Redistricting is the culprit this time, too.

Timing isn’t everything. Issues that remain unsettled after this regular session will play in next year’s elections, too. That’s why Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was pressing so hard at the end as three of his pet projects fell short in the House. It’s why current and former Republican officeholders started declaring their candidacies at the end of the session — because of perceived weaknesses of the people in top jobs now.

Former state Sen. Don Huffines of Dallas plans to challenge Gov. Greg Abbott in the GOP primary, and contends the governor isn’t conservative enough. Land Commissioner George P. Bush is mounting a challenge to Attorney General Ken Paxton, contending he isn’t ethical enough.

In a political environment like this one, incumbents want trophies they can show voters, and in this case, that means trophies that are important to conservative Republican voters, like legislation allowing most adults to carry handguns without permits or licenses, outlawing abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, tightening voting laws after a national election that many conservatives — despite the available evidence — believe was crooked.

And don’t forget the oldest motive in politics — winning the public’s attention. The state budget is the most important piece of legislation in any session, and also one of the least sexy. Political campaigns, and reputations, are more often built on flashy, easy-to-digest ideas, like alcoholic drinks to go, or on usually complicated or boring issues that have the public’s attention, like the state’s response to electrical outages during a February winter storm.

When state lawmakers come back for a special session, those are the kinds of issues that could resurface. Redistricting will be at the top — you have to have maps to have elections — but these are politicians, and they’ll be months closer to elections and even more sensitive than they are now to what voters want.

The strange pandemic legislative session is almost over, but state politics will be feeling the effects for some time.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/31/texas-legislature-2022/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

A conservative Texas legislative session, with more — maybe — to come

By Ross Ramsey, The Texas Tribune

May 27, 2021

You knew the state’s liberals were going to hate this session of the Texas Legislature.

Republicans still hold every single statewide office in Texas, having maintained a perfect streak through elections stretching back to 1996. They still have majorities in both the House and the Senate.

Because 2020 was a census year, this set of lawmakers is the one that will use those numbers to draw new political maps. Unless they’re inept — and history says they are not, at least when it comes to redistricting — those maps will favor Republicans wherever possible.

And if you know that, you know the 2022 Republican primaries, with a ballot that includes most of the statewide posts and all of the U.S. House and legislative seats, will be fiercely competitive.

And that brings the logic back to May 2021, the ending days of a legislative session.

It began with big issues like a pandemic, a continuing debate over how elections are conducted and — after a February storm and power outages killed dozens of Texans — serious questions about the reliability of the state’s electrical grid.

It’s ending with some of that, but also with legislation — some finished, some close to finished — that allows adults to carry handguns without licenses or permits, that outlaws abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, that restricts the number of voting places in the parts of the state where voters of color make up larger shares of the electorate and where Democrats do best in elections, that requires the national anthem be played at government-sponsored events and that would outlaw abortion in Texas if the Supreme Court reverses its rulings in Roe v. Wade and other cases.

That’s not enough for some top Republicans. Now, at the end, some of the state’s conservatives hate this session, too. The Texas House hit its deadline for passing Senate bills on Tuesday, and some of the lieutenant governor’s pet issues died when time ran out. The next morning, Dan Patrick, via Twitter, asked the governor to call a special session for June to resurrect some of the Senate bills that didn’t make it.

But even without the bills he cited — dictating which school sports teams transgender kids can join, barring local governments from hiring lobbyists, regulating social media company’s ability to silence users — this legislation has logged a number of successes for the most conservative voters in the state.

Patrick’s push for more echoes his reaction of four years ago, when the Legislature reached the end of its regular session without a win for the “bathroom bill” — a Patrick-promoted proposal to keep transgender Texans from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity. When it became evident that legislation wasn’t going to pass in the regular session, the Patrick-led Senate forced a special session by taking no action on other must-pass legislation. Gov. Greg Abbott called a special election. The must-pass bills passed, the bathroom bill didn’t, and that was that.

Even so, there’s a chance that Abbott will add some of Patrick’s wish list to the special session agenda this year, and that Patrick won’t even have to kill must-pass legislation to get there. Lawmakers will be back this fall, after detailed census data is available, to redraw the state’s political maps. And Abbott has already promised to tack another issue on that agenda, saying he’ll include lawmakers in the decisions on what to do with $16 billion in federal pandemic relief money.

It’s easy enough to add other issues, as Abbott proved in 2017. And there can be some political benefits, too. The issues on the plate in 2017 remained on voters’ minds in 2018, when Abbott, Patrick and most of the rest of the statewide officials won their current terms. Those elections were closer than the Republicans had hoped, but they survived.

The 2020 elections went the GOP's way, diminishing their fear of Democrats as most of the Republicans seek reelection or promotion in 2022. But their concerns that other Republicans might sneak up on them in next year’s party primary have made them attentive to the conservative voters making the most noise in the GOP right now.

Those voters want action on the issues they deem important, and they’ve been getting it in this regular legislative session. Maybe there’s more to come.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/27/texas-legislature-conservative-special-session/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Priority bills imperiled as end-of-session tensions rise between Texas House and Senate

By James Barragán, Jolie McCullough and Shannon Najmabadi, The Texas Tribune

May 20, 2021

"Priority bills imperiled as end-of-session tensions rise between Texas House and Senate" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

With time dwindling on the legislative session, the Texas House is breaking until Sunday, in an attempt to send the Senate a clear message: Pass our priority bills or see your own legislation die slowly in our chamber.

House lawmakers expressed frustration Thursday that some of their priority legislation had not moved in the upper chamber, including a package of health care and criminal justice reform bills pushed by House Speaker Dade Phelan.

“If the [Texas] Senate wants to kill or sit on important bills sent over by the House, they can expect the same in return. Starting today,” Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, tweeted Thursday morning. “As a wise House colleague once said, ‘The Senate can respect us. Or expect us.’”

The House is approaching tight deadlines, starting Sunday, for moving forward Senate bills. But in a surprise move, the House recessed Thursday despite having already set its agenda, or calendar, for both Friday and Saturday. Bills that were scheduled for those days will be picked up when the House reconvenes Sunday afternoon, but by recessing early with less than two weeks left in the session, House lawmakers have placed many of the Senate’s remaining bills in danger of not passing.

The deadline to set Senate bills on the House daily calendar is 10 p.m. Sunday. All Senate bills, except those on what's known as the "local and consent calendar" — reserved for bills that aren't expected to generate debate — must receive initial approval from the House by the end of Tuesday.

Several of the Senate’s priority bills still need the House’s approval, including the upper chamber’s push to ban local governments from using tax dollars for lobbyists, a bill that would restrict transgender student athletes to playing on school sports teams based on their biological sex instead of their gender identity, and one that would require any professional sports team with contracts with the state government to play the national anthem before the start of a game.

Leach is the author of House Bill 1340, which was included in Phelan’s criminal justice reform package and easily passed the House. The bill, which would restrict when people who don't kill anyone can get the death penalty because of their involvement in a crime, did not get a hearing in the Senate Criminal Jurisprudence Committee’s last scheduled meeting Thursday, essentially tanking the legislation.

On the House floor Thursday, Leach also mentioned House Bill 275 by Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, which would revise the state's "junk science" law to allow courts to overturn a sentence. It failed to pass in the Senate Criminal Justice Committee on Tuesday. It had passed the House 144-1.

Moody, who serves as speaker pro tem and is a Phelan ally, and Leach both made the motion to recess until Sunday. The two are co-chairs of the House Criminal Justice Reform Caucus.

Phelan declined to comment. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who presides over the Senate, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Senate also gutted House Bill 20, the chamber’s major bill on bail practices, and replaced it with the exact language from the Senate’s significantly different bail proposal that stalled in the House. That bill is now awaiting a full hearing in the Senate and, if passed in its current version, would require negotiations between the two chambers to reconcile their differences.

Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, who leads the Senate Criminal Jurisprudence Committee, is the bill’s author in that chamber. On Thursday, Leach postponed the House hearing of Huffman’s Senate Bill 766 until Sunday.

In a statement, Huffman said the Senate is working hard to pass House bills and her committee would meet again after the chamber adjourns Thursday.

“The Senate continues to work to pass legislation that implements good public policy, has the votes to pass the Senate, and has the support of leadership,” she said in a statement. “The Senate Committee on Jurisprudence met this morning and will reconvene after session to hear and pass many House bills. The fact is - we are working hard to pass good legislation for our state, and that includes House bills. While Sine Die seems very close, we have almost a week to continue to pass House bills, and I can assure you that we will.”

The House also effectively killed Senate Bill 343 by Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, who leads that chamber’s Health and Human Services Committee. On Thursday, Kolkhorst unveiled changes to one of the House’s priority health care bills that would let mothers on Medicaid keep their health coverage for a year after giving birth.

Originally, House Bill 133 by Rep. Toni Rose, D-Dallas, would have extended coverage from the current two months to a year, which follows a top recommendation of the state’s maternal mortality and morbidity committee. But Kolkhorst’s amendments cut that time to six months.

“I’m very disappointed to see that the bill would be changed from 12 months to six months, because the No. 1 recommendation from ACOG, which is the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, was to extend Medicaid postpartum for a full 12 months,” said state Rep. Shawn Thierry, a Houston Democrat and joint author of the measure. “All of our data shows that there has been an increase in maternal mortalities and morbidities up to 12 months. So to stop it at six months, I feel is not really going to address the problem or improve our health outcomes for moms.”

The modified bill also adds provisions from Senate Bill 1149, which overwhelmingly passed the Senate but was not heard by the full House. That bill aims to move Medicaid case management for children and pregnant women to a managed care program. Under the bill, a state program called Healthy Texas Women would also be provided through managed care organizations.

State Rep. Senfronia Thompson, the Houston Democrat who first questioned postponing consideration of Senate bills from the House floor on Thursday, is the lead author of the Texas George Floyd Act.

Although the sweeping, omnibus House Bill 88 never moved out of a House committee, the two chambers each passed three provisions from it. But as the Senate bills — which are more narrowly focused with police union support — have moved through the House, the House measures were not heard in the Senate’s Jurisprudence Committee, which had its last scheduled meeting Thursday.

The House’s move to recess until Sunday places a lot of power over Senate bills in the hands of Calendars Committee Chair Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock. Burrows and the 11-member committee decide what bills will be placed on the House calendar for the few remaining days in session when Senate bills can receive approval from the House.

That committee includes Moody and Rose, whose priority legislation has been killed or significantly altered in the Senate.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/20/texas-bills-house-senate-tensions/.

The Texas Legislature starts its biennial race against the clock

By Ross Ramsey, The Texas Tribune

April 19, 2021

This legislative session began quietly in January, during the state’s worst peak of cases, hospitalizations and deaths from the coronavirus. With just six weeks left of the 140-day regular session, and the pandemic down to a pre-surge level, the pace is quickening.

Legislators are still working on the big problems that were apparent at the beginning — pandemic, voting and election laws, policing and the state budget among them. And they’ve added the disastrous electrical outages during a five-day February freeze that killed more than 200 Texans.

Their list of big and not-so-big things that still need doing is long and varied. The Texas Senate has been racing through Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s priority legislation in the last few days, but the obstacle course known as the Texas House is still ahead.

The state budget is on track, but what looked like a belt-tightening budget back in January has changed considerably, as the economy improved and federal COVID-19 relief came pouring in. Lawmakers started this adventure hoping to protect the improvements they made to public education two years ago; now they’re trying to figure out the best way to use almost $18 billion in federal funds directed to public and higher education. That’s on top of $16.7 billion in federal COVID-19 funds intended for the state itself.

Schools want that money to catch students up on “learning loss” that has resulted from a year of classes disrupted by virtual, half-virtual and face-to-face classes. Many of them hope to get it in time to help with summer school.

And lawmakers want to handle problems like that themselves, instead of leaving them to the governor and the executive branch. Before their time in Austin runs out, they’re looking at legislation that would require a governor to get lawmakers to Austin if emergency executive orders need to run longer than 30 days. They’re talking separately about small panels of legislators who would need to be consulted before the state spends any federal relief funds during times when the Legislature is not in session.

Both the House and Senate have passed legislation they hope will prevent the kinds of regulatory and market failures that caused the outages during the hard freeze that swept Texas in February. But they’re not the same, and that needs work.

The legislative wishes still ungranted — everything from casinos to unlicensed handgun carry to police reform — are formidable. That’s a regular feature of the last weeks of a session, but it’s made harder by the slow start and the difficulty of conducting a very social process — legislating — during a dangerous and highly contagious pandemic.

Those constraints show in the work lawmakers aren’t doing as much as in the work they’ll complete before they leave.

An easy example: The House passed a bill delaying reviews of a dozen and a half state agencies for two years. Those “sunset reviews” are periodic examinations; technically, agencies go out of existence — the sun sets on them — if legislators don’t review them and set new deadlines. It would be a must-do job, except that legislators can postpone the work by extending the deadlines to the end of the next legislative session.

Among the agencies that were supposed to get reviewed this year and now might not: the Department of Agriculture, the Commission on Jail Standards, the Office of State-Federal Relations, the Department of Licensing and Regulation, the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, the Texas Racing Commission, and the Parks and Wildlife Department.

That means, in turn, that issues that might have been attached to those bills — gambling issues to the Racing Commission, for example — have one less road to consideration.

Sunset bills are magnets for special interests working to change or protect the agencies that most affect their industries or businesses. They can become time-consuming feeding frenzies. If House Bill 1600 passes, lawmakers won’t have to worry about all of that until 2023, giving them some breathing room in a session that’s almost two-thirds complete.

They don’t have to worry about redistricting, either, which would normally have been one of the biggest chores of this session. The pandemic-delayed U.S. census means the numbers used to draw political maps in Texas won’t be available until Sept. 30. The mapmaking has to wait until after that.

Some things won’t. The governor has said he’ll keep lawmakers in town until they’ve made winter electric outages much more unlikely. The state has to have a budget. Voters have demanded and legislators have promised much more.

This is the final sprint. The must-dos have a way of getting done. As for the rest, wait and see.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/04/19/texas-legislature-deadlines/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Analysis: Is the Texas Capitol a government building or a petri dish?

                    By Ross Ramsey

                    January 18, 2021

      The Texas Capitol, where lawmakers gather every two years to pass laws, write budgets and argue politics, has a new function in 2021: It’s the incidental scene of a large public health experiment, a human-scale science fair exhibition of intense social interaction during a pandemic.

      It’s going as you might expect.

      State Rep. Joe Deshotel, D-Beaumont, ended the first week of the Texas Legislature’s 2021 session with a positive COVID-19 test. He let the colleagues who’ve been in close quarters know that he’s feeling fine, but also flagged them on his infection.

      And maybe infections of their own. State Rep. Michelle Beckley, D-Carrollton, sits directly in front of Deshotel on the House floor, close enough for discomfort in times like these. She was wary enough of the coronavirus to stay home on the first day of the session, but attended Wednesday and Thursday, and now, in the wake of Deshotel’s news, is tweeting that she’ll self-quarantine for 10 days.

      Only 19 weeks left until this regular session is over.

      The Texas House isn’t requiring members to be tested before they enter the House Chamber — the floor, they call it — for business. The company line, offered by House Speaker Dade Phelan and by state Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi, as he led the debate over new House rules, is that until tests are available in the state’s schoolhouses or courthouses, they shouldn’t be required in the Texas House.

      Good rhetoric, dubious policy.

      Parts of this are like any workplace, with executives — officeholders — in their own offices and staff members often sharing an attached common space. In ordinary times, visitors — constituents, lobbyists, food delivery services — are in and out of the offices.

      During a legislative session, the Capitol is a bustling place, with different House and Senate committees in session, hearing from dozens of witnesses in front of sometimes-overstuffed rooms of spectators. The cafeteria is a busy oasis for the political and legislative animals who gather to eat, talk, laugh, holler, shake hands, hug and share information.

      It’s built for a kind of transmission, for the movement of ideas and arguments and debate. And it is very fertile ground for a contagious virus like the one that has ravaged the world for the last year.

      State officials are trying to be careful, without looking too paranoid or seeming to care more about their own health than they care about yours. With those things in mind, it’s natural that their precautions are full of holes.

      While the public comes through a ground-level door to get into the Capitol — a visit preceded by a quick COVID-19 test in a tent outside — most of the people who work in the building park in an underground garage and can skip that public health speed bump.

      “Testing for COVID-19 is left to the discretion of each House member and individual,” Phelan wrote in a Friday memo to members. Testing, he noted, is available in a legislative office building near the Capitol or at the entrance where the public is tested.

      The standard for getting into the Senate is higher, at least with regard to the coronavirus. Anyone entering that chamber has to have been tested first. When we get to the part of the session when House members begin visiting the Senate — and vice versa — the difference in testing protocols could get interesting.

      Most of the people who work in the Capitol don’t work in the chambers. They’re in offices and cubbyholes throughout the building, some taking tests, some not, a few of them vaccinated, most of them not, all of them prepared for the long, long hours of work that make up a 140-day regular session of the Texas Legislature.

      That works pretty well when you’re not in the middle of a pandemic. They can’t shut it down and do the things a government is supposed to do. It’s hard to keep people out and still pretend to be representing constituents who are unseen and unheard. And it’s difficult to argue that schools and businesses should stay open if they close their own building, or to get the vaccinations or treatments that aren’t widely available to everyone else.

      They’re stuck — just like the Texans they represent.

                    "Analysis: Is the Texas Capitol a government building or a petri dish?" was first published at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/01/18/texas-legislature-coronavirus/ by The Texas Tribune. The Texas Tribune is proud to celebrate 10 years of exceptional journalism for an exceptional state.