Senate Goes Off Script with Partisan Unity
in Vote to Punish Cities that Defund Police

Capitol Inside
April 13, 2021

Eleven Texas Senate Democrats knocked the steam out of the Republicans' attempt to derail the police defunding movement on Tuesday when they voted with the majority party for a bill that would give the state a weapon for retaliation against cities that reduce local law enforcement spending.

The Senate approved the measure on a 28-2 vote after Democrats portrayed it as a thinly-veiled bid to beef up the GOP advertising for the 2022 campaigns by creating the appearance that the Republicans are helping the police when they're simply endorsing the status quo.

“This sends a message to the citizens that we are going to back the blue,” GOP State Senator Joan Huffman of Houston during the debate on the floor as the sponsor of Senate Bill 23. “That’s what this bill intends to do.”

Huffman was on message with the appraisal in a state where every lawmaker for the GOP signed a Back the Blue pledge that Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick hatched shortly before the November general election as a public relations ploy.

Instead of pushing for better pay, benefits and conditions for police, Patrick and his GOP allies in the Senate are only vowing to protect law enforcement officers from having funding reduced. But police groups are supporting SB 23 despite the low bar of expectations in the plan.

House Republicans - like their Senate counterparts - haven't proposed to boost police salaries or health insurance during the current regular session that ends on May 31. But the Republicans in the lower chamber might have a shot to get a vote against police defunding on their resumes with House Bill 1900.

With Republican State Rep. Craig Goldman of Fort Worth as the lead sponsor, HB 1900 was sent to the Calendars Committee on Tuesday. The Goldman measure cleared the State Affairs Committee a week ago on a partisan vote of 10-3. The State Affairs Committee also endorsed a separate but similar police defunding measure in a 9-2 partisan vote for House Bill 1950.

State Rep. Briscoe Cain - a Deer Park Republican who chairs the Elections Committee - is the lead sponsor on HB 1950.

Abbott and the Republicans are pinning the police defunding plans on an Austin City Council vote last summer on a police reform plan that cut traditional spending in favor of more novel techniques for public safety. That is the GOP's only actual example of police defunding in Texas. But the governor said earlier this year that the Back the Blue legislation was necessary to prevent Texas cities from becoming magnets for radical liberals like those in Portland, Seattle and Minneapolis.

Back the Blue had been a spinoff of the attempts by Abbott, Patrick and other Republicans to blame the leftist Antifa movement for violence at social justice protests in Texas last spring.