Tag Archives: Texas Legislature

local news, State news

Stand firm, Sen. Seliger

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Oh, I do hope a certain state senator reads this blog, as I intend to encourage him to stand firm against a blatantly reckless piece of legislation.

Republican Kel Seliger of Amarillo, a longtime friend of mine, is digging in against a bill that would, if approved, allow any Texan to pack heat even without a permit.

It’s a bit complicated. Texas Senate rules require 18 votes to consider a bill for a floor debate. That means all Republicans need to endorse the legislation. Seliger is balking.

The Texas Tribune reported: On Friday afternoon, one key GOP senator, Sen. Kel Seliger of Amarillo, suggested he may not be immediately supportive of the proposal. He told The Texas Tribune that his office was still researching the issue and he tends to support “just about all” bills related to gun rights, but the “system that we have now works.” He said it was too early to say whether he would block the bill from coming to the floor or vote against it if it made it to the floor.

Texas constitutional carry lacks the votes in Senate, Dan Patrick says | The Texas Tribune

The system “we have now” requires anyone who takes a brief course on firearm safety and operation and then passes a background check can carry a handgun concealed on his or her person. Yeah, the current system works well. What the Legislature is considering — and which the House already has approved — is a bill to allow anyone to carry a gun.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who presides over the Senate, said the legislative body lacks the votes to approve the bill, but added that he intends to work to ensure that it makes the grade. That disappoints me, given that in 2017 he expressed concern about the notion of putting guns in the hands of every Texan who wants to carry one.

In a way, though, Seliger’s apparent resistance doesn’t surprise me. Nor would it surprise me if Patrick punishes Seliger in some fashion if the senator digs in for the length of the legislative session. The two men aren’t fond of each other as it is. Hey, I’ll just have to stand with my friend on this one.

Uncategorized

‘No’ on ‘constitutional carry’

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

They’re calling it “constitutional carry” legislation.

I will call it foolishness that carries some dire peril for many Texans.

The Texas House of Representatives has voted along partisan lines for a bill that will allow any Texas resident to carry a handgun around with them even without a permit issued by the state. Yep, the House – led by its Republican Party majority – wants to liberalize (if you’ll excuse that verb) the state’s concealed-carry law to enable anyone to pack heat on their person.

House Bill 1927 passed on an 84-56 vote and now goes to the Texas Senate, where it might meet some needed resistance, particularly from Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the Senate’s presiding officer and a politician who has expressed serious reservations about the bill.

I can’t believe I am going to say this, but I concur with Lt. Gov. Patrick’s squeamishness.

Texas’ concealed carry law has proven to be nothing close to the monster that many of us thought it would be when the 1995 Legislature enacted it. I opposed it then but grew to accept it over time. I feared an outbreak of road-rage violence involving those who were licensed to carry weapons. That hasn’t happened. For which I am glad and grateful.

Now this new law might be on the horizon. Texas does not require stringent knowledge of firearms to issue a concealed carry permit. Applicants need to take a brief course on firearm safety and pass a proficiency test with the firearm while of course clearing the necessary background check to ensure they lack a criminal record.

Why in the word, then, do legislators feel the need to allow everyone who lives here to pack heat without so much as a rudimentary test to acquire a permit?

As the Texas Tribune reports: Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick … has previously expressed hesitation over the measure, saying in 2017 … that “with all the police violence today we have in our state … law enforcement does not like the idea of anyone being able to walk down the street with a gun and they don’t know if they have a permit or not.”

I hope Patrick hasn’t swilled the gun-toting Kool-Aid and become a convert to the cause championed by gun-rights activists. Indeed, he ought to heed law enforcement officials who oppose this nutty notion. Newly hired Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia was among those speaking against the legislation, along with members of the clergy and veterans.

https://www.texastribune.org/2021/04/15/texas-constitutional-carry/

Texas has more than enough guns out there already. We already have a concealed-carry law that seems to work well enough.

The U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment guarantees our right to “keep and bear arms.” The state’s provisions requiring Texans to take a test to demonstrate that they know how to handle a firearm ought to be enough to help keep these weapons out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have them.

NOTE: A version of this blog was published originally on KETR.org.

local news, State news

Summer might be as nasty as winter

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By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Goodness, I wasn’t ready to hear about this predicament from the folks who manage our electric grid.

Our summer might be as miserable as the winter we endured in North Texas and throughout the rest of the state. That is, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas — our electrical grid managers — might suffer more power outages on the scale of what occurred when the snow and ice ravaged us.

Hmm. How “reliable” is that? Not very.

The Texas Tribune reports: “This summer, I am as worried right now [about the grid] as I was coming into this winter,” said Curt Morgan, CEO of Vistra Corp., an Irving-based power company. “Sounds like I’m the boy that cries wolf, but I’m not. I’ve seen this stuff repeat itself. We can have the same event happen if we don’t fix this.”

More from the Tribune: As state lawmakers continue debating how to improve the grid after February’s storm nearly caused its collapse, on Tuesday Texans were asked to conserve electricity because the supply of power could barely keep up with demand. A significant chunk of the grid’s power plants were offline due to maintenance this week, some a result of damage from the winter storm.

ERCOT messed up royally in February with the way it shut down power supply while temperatures hovered at zero or below. Millions of us lost power and water. It’s not as though Texas is a total stranger to this kind of winter savagery. Still, power plants froze; they weren’t properly winterized. Natural gas lines were rendered inoperable.

Texas could face ERCOT power crisis, blackouts during extreme summer heat | The Texas Tribune

The Texas Legislature is meeting at this moment seeking to strengthen the grid. Its regular session ends on May 31. Legislators will need to return in special session if they don’t have a grid repair strategy on the books. They had better prepare for a long and tiring summer of work on our behalf if they can’t get it done when they gavel the regular session adjourned.

It looks as though whatever the Legislature comes with must include a plan to deal with our long, hot summer.

ERCOT’s warning about potential power outages brought about expressions of anger across the state, the Tribune reported: The warning triggered a torrent of outrage from residents and political leaders across the state who questioned why the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the grid, allowed it to come so close to emergency conditions on a relatively mild spring day. “I appreciate the increased effort toward transparency, but wow this is nervewracking to see in April,” state Rep. Erin Zwiener, D-Driftwood, tweeted Tuesday.

C’mon, ERCOT. None of us wants to see a repeat while we are sweltering of what happened when we were freezing.

local news, political news, State news

Rep. Slaton makes early impact

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Oh, brother.

I commented earlier on this blog about my respect for Texas state Sen. Kel Seliger, the Amarillo Republican whom Texas Monthly has identified as one of seven legislators to watch during the current Texas Legislature.

Well, TM also has ID’d a bold, brash and bodacious freshman lawmaker, a young man I know only casually, but who is — shall we say — also worth watching for an entirely different set of reasons.

State Rep. Bryan Slaton is another Republican. He hails from Royse City, just a bit east-southeast of where I now live. TM calls him The Fearless Freshman. Why? He is unafraid to make a name for himself for reasons that run quite counter to my own political world view.

Slaton got elected this past year, defeating longtime fellow conservative state Rep. Dan Flynn. I was aghast that he would run “to the right” of Flynn, but he did.

What does the young man do when he arrives in Austin for the start of the Legislature? He pitches a bill that would criminalize the act of a woman obtaining an abortion; she would, in Flynn’s eyes, be guilty of “murder” and would be subject to the state’s death penalty if she is tried and convicted of murder.

Texas Monthly wrote this about Slaton: A principled hard-right conservative and Gen Xer, Slaton is stepping into the void left by former representative Jonathan Stickland, a Bedford Republican who made his reputation as a troublemaker and thorn in the side of his party’s establishment. Slaton says he is focused on advancing social-conservative priorities, including eliminating abortion (by passing a law declaring the Roe v. Wade unconstitutional) and protecting historical monuments (by requiring a two-thirds vote to remove one of, say, a Confederate general, from a state university). 

Seven Texas Lawmakers to Watch – Texas Monthly

He also seems to believe that Texas can secede — again! — from the United States of America. Hasn’t anyone told him (a) that secession is illegal and (b) that the first time Texas did it in 1861, it didn’t work out well for Texas — or for the rest of the Confederate States of America?

My only visit with Slaton was over the phone. We had a cordial conversation. I was working on a story I wrote for KETR-FM, the public radio station affiliated with Texas A&M University-Commerce. I hope to be able to talk to him in the future as needs arise.

However, I must be candid. If he flies off the rails and starts yapping about secession, or protecting monuments honoring Confederate traitors or sentencing women in trouble to the death chamber, well … it could get ugly. In a big hurry.

local news

Seliger makes a key TM list

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Ya gotta hand it to Andrea Zelinski, a writer for Texas Monthly.

She does her homework. Texas Monthly has published a story listing seven Texas legislators to watch in the current session that is set to adjourn at the end of May. One of them is a senator I happen to know pretty well: Republican Kel Seliger of Amarillo.

Zelinski has labeled Seliger “The Swing Vote,” a guy who could tip the balance in either direction on key legislation. And why is that the case? Seliger is a “maverick” in the Senate because, according to Zelinski, he adheres to traditional conservative Republican values. You know, things like local government control at the expense of overreaching state interference.

Amazing, yes? I believe it is.

Seliger served as Amarillo mayor for a decade before being elected to the Senate in 2004. He learned Legislature-speak quickly and became fluent in the jargon that lawmakers use when talking to each other. He also developed plenty of alliances across the aisle, you know, making friends with Democrats. He once told he one of his best friends in the Senate was McAllen Democrat Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, with whom he has worked closely.

Seliger also has crossed swords with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a darling of the TEA Party/Freedom Caucus movement. Seliger spouted off during the 2019 Legislature about one of Patrick’s key aides. So what did Patrick do? He stripped Seliger of his Higher Education Committee chairmanship and removed him from the Education Committee.

Seven Texas Lawmakers to Watch – Texas Monthly

That hasn’t stopped Seliger from exerting his influence among his Senate peers, who I gathered over the years have developed a firm respect for his legislative integrity.

Zelinski writes in TM: Seliger once again might be a crucial swing vote, particularly on policing issues. The 31-member Senate has 18 Republicans, and new Senate rules require bills to receive 18 votes to reach the floor. Both Patrick and Abbott are bent on punishing Austin for reducing funding for its police department, with the governor suggesting that the state freeze property tax revenues of cities that shrink their police budgets. Though Seliger says Austin’s budget reduction in 2020 was “absolutely terrible,” the former mayor adamantly opposes Abbott’s bid to have the state dictate policy in areas traditionally considered the province of city and county governments, calling it “almost Soviet.” “If Greg Abbott wants to be the mayor of Austin, he can do it in a heartbeat and he’d be a very good one,” Seliger told me. “Do we [the Lege] need to go set the speed limit on Austin’s streets? And do we need to determine where stop signs go on Austin’s streets? No, we don’t. That’s what they elect [city officials] for.” 

My goodness, Sen. Seliger is out of control!

That’s OK with me.

State news

Texas joins Jim Crow cabal of states … sad

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Texas aims to join a cabal of states aiming to roll back voting opportunities under the guise of protecting the electoral system against the phony allegation of widespread voter fraud.

President Biden has labeled the effort signed into law in Georgia as “Jim Crow in the 21st century.” He could hurl the same epithet over this way in Texas.

Senate Bill 7 seeks to prohibit drive-through voting, seeks to limit the number of polling places, seeks to prohibit officials from asking voters fill out applications to vote by mail — even if they qualify.

What is going on here? I think I know. We have a Republican-led legislative effort aimed at retaining GOP power in state government for as long as they can despite the seemingly inexorable shift in the demographic makeup in Texas, which is becoming what has been called a “majority minority” state.

Quite soon, ethnic and racial minorities will comprise a majority of the state’s voting population. Those voters — big surprise! — tend to vote more Democratic than Republican. Thus, we are witnessing this effort to head off the shift in power.

The Texas Tribune reports:

SB 7, which was offered under the banner of “election integrity,” sailed out of the Republican-dominated Senate State Affairs Committee on a party-line vote and now heads to the full Senate. The bill is a significant piece in a broader legislative effort by Texas Republicans this year to enact sweeping changes to elections in the state that would scale up already restrictive election rules.

In presenting the bill to the committee on Friday, Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes described the legislation as an effort to strike a balance between “maintaining fair and honest elections with the opportunity to exercise one’s right to vote.”

But the bill was met with a chorus of opposition. Advocates for people with disabilities and voting rights tagged the proof of disability requirement as harmful and potentially unlawful. The bill was also widely panned as detrimental to local efforts that would widen access to voting, particularly extended early voting hours and drive-thru voting offered in Harris County in November.

Texas Republicans’ bill to tighten voting rules gets Senate committee OK | The Texas Tribune

This is an insidious trend that bodes grim news for the future of the state if it is allowed to continue.

local news, State news

Reapportionment: Here we go again

(By Michael Schumacher)

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The late Teel Bivins was a Republican state senator from Amarillo, Texas, who served in the Legislature from 1989 until 2004, when he got a job as U.S. ambassador to Sweden.

Bivins told me once that he hated the task of redrawing congressional and legislative district lines. He then offered a quip that I never thought to ask what he meant by it. Reapportionment, he said, was a way to “give Republicans a chance to eat their young.”

I scratched me noggin at the time, not quite understanding what Bivins meant by that. He did say he detested the task that fell to legislators to do the job, although he never offered an alternative. Indeed, the Texas Legislature has balked repeatedly on any effort to amend the way it redraws those boundaries.

I happen to like the idea of letting non-politicians do it. The governor, the lieutenant governor and the House speaker could select a non-partisan commission to do the task every 10 years after they take the census.

The Legislature, though, is going to start the task once more soon. The census will be finalized in about a month and the Legislature will have divide the state into roughly  38 congressional districts; Texas is expected to gain two seats, given its population growth. They all have to be of roughly the same population, which I figure will be about 700,000 people. The Legislature also will redraw its 31 Senate and 150 House seats. That’s where it gets tricky, because the state doesn’t expand the number of legislators, but must spread the population more or less equally among them.

Republicans control the Legislature. I am dead certain that the GOP pols who run the show in Austin are going to be driven to achieve one goal: to keep their power.

The state is changing before our eyes. Yes, it’s still Republican red, but its redness isn’t nearly as vivid as it has been in recent election cycles. Donald Trump won the state in 2020 by less than 6 percent; he defeated Hillary Clinton by 9 points in 2016; Mitt Romney won by a margin of 16  points in 2012; John McCain won it by roughly 11 percent in 2008.

Texas is turning slowly but inexorably into a more “purple” state.

All of this tells me that Teel Bivins’s quip about Republicans “eating their young” makes even less sense now than when he uttered it. However, the changing political demographics of this state tells me the need for reapportionment reform is more critical than ever.

State news

Foolishness too often dominates Legislature

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

A proposal to make abortion a capital crime in Texas — allowing the state to administer a potential death sentence for a woman who terminates a pregnancy — brings to mind some of the idiocy that too often permeates the state’s legislative process.

State Rep. Bryan Slaton, a Royse City Republican, has pitched the legislative “remedy” to abortion. It shouldn’t, if reason holds up, have a chance in hell of being enacted and then signed into law.

Abortion happens to be legal in this country and for the Legislature to waste a moment of valuable time on this bill is, well, a disgrace.

So is this horrendous talk of secession, which once again has entered the public debate. Texas cannot legally secede from the Union. Period. End of discussion. Yet some Texas Republicans — starting with the party chairman, Allen West — think it’s OK to give Texans a vote on that matter.

Ridiculous.

Texas needs to devote its energy to issues that matter. We need to maintain our roads and highways. And, oh yes, we also have that energy issue to discuss and repair.

Texans went without power in February during that ice and snow storm. Some of us are still without potable water. The state has to fix the way it manages its electrical grid to avoid a repeat of what transpired during the Storm of 2021.

Still, the Legislature every other year spends too much valuable time dawdling and discussing matters that have no prayer of becoming law. I get that we don’t pay our legislators much money when they meet in Austin every odd-numbered year, but for crying out loud, I just wish they would take all the time they have available working for the general public good.

State news, Uncategorized

Welcome back, DST

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The grumbling has begun.

About what? Oh, the annual switch from Standard Time to Daylight Saving Time. We’re going to make the change on Sunday, “springing forward” to DST just as we do every year. We “fall back” to Standard Time in the autumn of the year.

If only the complaining would stop.

I might be the only American around who has no particular problem with this time-change deal. It doesn’t bother me.

Folks gripe about it every year, right? They bitch about losing that hour of sleep at night. Then they moan that their bodies cannot adjust to the time change. Please, man.

If the Texas Legislature can get through its more important matters, such as finding solutions to our state’s power grid problem, perhaps it will try once again to decide how to repair this time-change thing … as if it needs repair.

The 2019 Legislature came within a whisker of putting a time-change issue on the ballot. It ran out of time. The thought was to let Texas voters decide (a) whether to go to Standard Time all year long, (b) go to Daylight Saving Time all year or (c) keep it as it is.

My choice, if I had been given the chance to vote, would be to switch to a year-long DST regimen. Why? I like the extended daylight in the evening. I cannot explain precisely why that is the case. It just is … you know?

Absent that choice, I generally do not complain out loud about the time change. I won’t do it this spring. I don’t plan on doing so when we switch back again in the fall to Standard Time.

local news, State news

Legislature’s storm response agenda takes shape

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The 181 men and women who serve in the Texas Legislature are talking at least about how they intend to repair the state’s electrical infrastructure.

One hundred fifty of them serve in the House of Representatives; 31 serve in the Senate. I wish them all the best, not because I care about their political standing. I want them to take measures that keep our lights on and the heat flowing the next time our temperatures plunge to zero or below.

House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, has unveiled the House’s legislative agenda that deals with the infrastructure. It’s not long on specifics just yet, given that many of the measures haven’t been filed as legislative proposals.

One of them, House Bill 10, seeks to overhaul the structure of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, like requiring that all of ERCOT’s board members live in the state. You’ll recall what happened to us a month ago, with the state freezing and ERCOT decision makers living far away.

House Bill 11, according to the Texas Tribune, is a bit more complicated. The Tribune reports: Some other ideas could prove challenging. House Bill 11, for instance, would order the PUC to require power generators to implement measures to avoid service outages during extreme weather events, including winter storms and heat waves. But retroactively equipping power plants and the state’s energy system to withstand cold temperatures is likely to be difficult and costly, energy experts have said. Building energy infrastructure that from the start is designed to perform in winter conditions is easier and cheaper, they have said.

Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan lays out seven bills after power outage | The Texas Tribune

Ah, yes. Winterization could be “difficult and costly.” Do ya think?

I want the Legislature to do what it must do to avoid the near calamity that could have befallen our energy grid. ERCOT said it was just minutes away from the grid imploding on itself during the coldest portion of the winter storm.

Many communities throughout the state were left to deal with the power outages and the failure of water systems. It hasn’t been pretty. Princeton, where my wife and I live, managed to get through the mess and mayhem in fairly short order. But … we did not appreciate living in a frigid house even for the short period of time our city was dark.

The Legislature needs to spend no time considering, for instance, foolishness such as requiring the playing the “Star Spangled Banner” at public events. Not while we have valuable heating and cooling infrastructure that needs the state’s immediate attention.