Texas Session Shaping Up as Graveyard
for Theme Proposals as Patrick Tradition

Capitol Inside
May 5, 2021

The Texas regular session has the potential to be the least productive in modern history with a partial state budget and a bandaid for an unreliable power grid as the only significant potential achievements that are designed to help the state as a whole.

The Republicans' controversial voting restrictions in House Bill 6 took a major step on Tuesday when the Calendars Committee set a date for the measure's debut on the floor with a potential vote on Thursday. A similar plan in Senate Bill 7 landed in the Calendars Committee today as an apparent insurance measure. The appearance of movement could be an illusion, however, in light of the massive opposition the so-called election integrity bill has attracted from major corporations that are based in Texas and beyond.

The Senate could put a fight on an unlicensed carry gun bill to rest with a vote to send legislation to Governor Greg Abbott without alterations that would force it to a conference committee. But a long list of other hot-button items in the conservative agenda that Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has been steering could be doomed for a biennial burial in the House.

The Patrick priorities took an unexpected hit on Tuesday when the House Public Education Committee appeared to kill a Senate bill that would ban transgender girl athletes from participating in high school sports in Texas. State Rep. Harold Dutton - a Houston Democrat who chairs the education panel - declared that the bill failed to receive a sufficient number of votes to send it to the full House for a vote. The proposal's advocates that are pushing several other bills that target the LGBTQ community could attempt to revive the stalled Senate measure in an amendment to other bills that are still alive.

The biennial Patrick carousel of conservative theme measures is running perilously low on time with pet proposals like the Star Spangled Banner Protection Act and bills that deal with religious freedom and political censorship on social media stuck in House committees for weeks.

The Texas GOP's highly-vaunted ban on local lobbying has been parked in the House State Affairs Committee for more than two weeks as a measure that never appeared to have a chance from the outset of the session.

The State Affairs Committee in the House has a hearing set for Thursday on the Senate's plan to refurbish the Texas electric grid with weatherization requirements for private companies that are tied into it. GOP State Rep. Chris Paddie of Marshall could use the hearing on Senate Bill 3 as a vehicle for the consolidation of several single-shot bills that he'd sponsored as the State Affairs Committee chairman. The House committee could simply drop its plan on top of the Senate proposal and let legislative lawyers and analysts piece together a coherent plan.

The 87th Legislature put on a clinic in procrastination for almost three months with the coronavirus pandemic as an incentive to stay at home until more people were vaccinated across the state. A monumental winter storm wiped out a full week in February and consumed the rest of the month and more as lawmakers who were angry and indignant scrambled to find out what caused the electricity grid to fail for several days in a weather event that claimed hundreds of lives across the state.

more to come ...