Governor Has Speaker as Scapegoat
on Vouchers with Border as Fallback
Capitol Inside
September 27, 2023
Governor Greg Abbott may be setting Speaker Dade Phelan up to take the blame for the failure of a school vouchers bill in a special session that could get under way on or around October 9 at a Capitol where the Texas House Republicans are historically divided after a failed bid to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Abbott said on Wednesday that he plans to add border security to the fall agenda - a move that could give him a victory to tout if the school choice plan fails again in the House where it died in regular session when the Republicans were more united than they'd been in 20 years of GOP rule.
But the Republican governor appears to be taking a page from the playbook he used in a special session in 2017 when he put a controversial bathroom security bill on the agenda when he had no realistic chance of passing it in the House.
Abbott is gambling now that he will come ahead in the upcoming special session as long as he calls. But Abbott vowed to summon lawmakers back to Austin for a fight on vouchers as his signature issue this year along with the border. While a Senate vote for vouchers is a foregone conclusion in Abbott's mind, Phelan will be a convenient whipping post if school choice bombs in the Legislature's lower chamber like it did earlier this year in a vote on a state budget amendment.
House Democrats teamed with the chamber's more moderate Republicans to tack a vouchers funding ban on a two-year appropriations bill as an amendment that had a dozen GOP colleagues on board on an initial vote and 24 in the final tally. House leaders made some effort to try to pass a watered-down school choice measure late in the regular session when they passed it out of a hastily-called Public Education Committee before it stalled on the floor.
Abbott toured the state with pep talks and photo ops at private schools that would benefit financially from his plan. But Abbott failed to move the needle on vouchers in the House. The governor is hoping to use the threat of primary challenges as a weapon to tame the resistance - predominantly from rural representatives - after failing to find a way to do so in the spring.
But Abbott would be targeting House Republicans that could face a more imposing threat from Attorney General Ken Paxton with a revenge campaign that he sees as a reckoning in the making with Donald Trump and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick as his two biggest weapons. All but one of the original Republican vouchers foes - State Rep. Travis Clardy of Nacogdoches - voted for Paxton's impeachment when it cleared the House in May with support from 60 GOP members and 61 Democrats.
With a three-headed monster lurking on the House GOP horizon, the value of Abbott's own revenge plans may seem diluted. Phelan is trying in the meantime to keep his base of support from unraveling with attempts to assure GOP members who voted for the AG's impeachment that the storm will blow over and all will be fine. That's his only option - however - after vowing to protect to the members and putting them in jeopardy instead with an impeachment bid with a secret ambush strategy that backfired in the Senate in ways House leaders have steadfastly refused to accept.
The inclusion of border security is a safety valve that's designed to give the governor a fallback victory in the event of failure on a school choice plan that could be dramatically harder to pass in the House in the impeachment's wake in any shape or form than it had been before.
The state has been state billons of dollars on massive military buildup at the Rio Grande - complete with a floating string of saws, coiled razor wire, tanks, helicopters, Humvees and other novel expenses for which there's been no public accountability. Abbott forces from the Department of Public Safety and the Texas National Guard have forced migrants to go out of their way to get into Texas. They've arrested migrants for trespassing and other minor infractions.
But the most telling statistic about Operation Lone Star hasn't ever changed. The state hasn't forced a single migrant to go back to Mexico since it started patrolling the Rio Grande. Abbott's claims on the state deterring migrants are misleading. The state's border security effort has been a major inconvenience for the people who are flooding into the country at the most.
The count of migrants who haven't made it into Texas eventually has been locked in at zero with no signs of changing. But Abbott assumes that the Republicans in the House will all vote for a border security infusion in the upcoming special session no matter how divided they may be on school vouchers.
more to come ... |
