Abbott Gets Shot to Show Who's Boss
with Call on THC Ban that Goes to Desk
Capitol Inside
May 27, 2025
Texas lawmakers sent a THC prohibition to Governor Greg Abbott on Tuesday with a Senate bill that will put him in position to be the executioner or savior for a highly successful industry that's operated legally without any significant problems since he and his GOP allies in Austin created it six years ago.
A pair of high-ranking Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick priority bills with public school mandates on prayer and communism instruction made the trip to Abbott's desk today as well along with legislation to clarify the Texas abortion ban's language on emergency care to save a pregnant mother's life.
The Republican governor came up empty on a constitutional amendment designed to tighten Texas bail laws when the House fell three votes short of the supermajority that it needed on Tuesday to advance the proposal to voters for a statewide election. House leaders to throw in the towel on a separate but related Senate proposal that would have required the denial of bail for migrants who are charged with violent crimes. After being postponed several times during the past week due to an apparent lack of Democratic support, SJR 1 appeared to be dead when it was put off again until Wednesday despite a midnight deadline tonight on Senate bills and joint resolutions.
Sponsored by GOP State Senator Joan Huffman of Houston and rookie Republican State Rep. Mitch Little of Lewisville in the House, Senate Joint Resolution 87 fizzled on a vote of 97-40 with all of the lower chamber's Republicans supporting the plan along with 10 Democrats. Eight Democratic representatives sealed the fate when they were missing in action for the vote with unexcused absences.
Abbott will be expected to sign the school prayer decree in Senate Bill 11, a communism study requirement in Senate Bill 24 and the abortion definition fix in Senate Bill 24. But the governor faces a highly risky call on the cannabis ban that Patrick championed and scared the House into passing in Senate Bill 3 last week when it gutted the regulatory proposal that GOP Speaker Dustin Burrows and fellow House leaders had been backing before they relinquished the leadership on the issue to Patrick in a stunning overnight turnabout.
The governor may take into consideration how the extreme action in SB 3 might affect the future of the GOP in a state where an ever-rising majority of Republican voters support the legalization of marijuana for recreational use by adults in the most recent polls on the Texas electorate.
Abbott may contemplate how he and GOP lawmakers will explain votes that cause more than 10,000 small businesses that were built from the ground up to shut down in a state where 53,000 fellow Texans will be out of work if he signs SB 3.
The governor, who relies more heavily on polling than any politician in Texas history, could be setting himself and Republican lawmakers for a potential backlash of monstrous magnitude by swimming against an ever-rising tide in a return to a status quo that was in place before the covid pandemic.
Abbott may take into account that the small businesses he would be killing with a stamp of approval for SB 3 all have rapidly-growing customer bases that would be stripped of the right to purchase products on which they've come to rely for a myriad of mental and physical health benefits. Polling on the Lone Star State leaves little doubt that a high percentage of the people who purchase gummies and other products at hemp dispensaries are Republicans who want the freedom to purchase products that have been for sale here legally for a half-dozen years.
The most fundamental question that Abbott might want to deliberate would be whether GOP lawmakers are as amazingly unaware of the potential fallout from the unprecedented shuttering of a booming new industry as they were in 2019 when they completely failed to anticipate the consequences of votes for a hemp bill that gave birth to it.
Abbott in the final analysis may consider the effect of a ban on hemp if he runs for president at some point after being mentioned as a possible contender increasingly in recent months. The governor could decide that a THC prohibition has the potential to be an unshakable albatross in a national race in a country where higher percentages of voters favor legalization than those who are Texas residents.
The prevailing sentiment at the Capitol this week seems to be that Abbott will sign SB 3 for the same basic that almost all of the House Republicans abandoned the leadership regulations plan so they could give Patrick the ban he's been demanding with threats and pressure tactics.
But the cannabis ban that advocates pitched on themes from 1930s marijuana propaganda films gives Abbott a golden opportunity to show who's boss at a Capitol where Patrick has controlled the entire agenda wielding power at a level never witnessed before in Austin. Or Abbott can follow the lead of the House leadership team and dodge a monumental confrontation with Patrick by signing SB 3.
more to come ...
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