Tag Archives: Texas Legislature

political news, State news

House shines with glimmer of hope

There’s the slightest glimmer of hope coming from the Texas State Capitol Building after the House of Representatives selected a new speaker of the lower legislative chamber.

Rep. Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, will take the gavel and lead the House for the next legislative session that began this week.

Why the hope? Well, Burrows is an ally of Rep, Dade Phelan of Beaumont, who angered the MAGA crowd with his handling of (a) the impeachment trial of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and (b) key legislative initiatives favored by Gov. Greg Abbott.

That suggests to me that Burrows might be more, um, moderate than the right-wingers of his Republican Party would prefer. Burrows, for example, is not slamming the door on selecting legislative Democrats to chair House committees. He said in December he prefers for the entire House to decide on those chairmanships, not just the speaker. Hmm, that sounds a tiny bit promising.

Burrows does favor Abbott’s school voucher notion, so he won’t scuttle that initiative.

Back to the chairmanship matter. It’s important to realize that the Legislature does contain members of both major parties. And that they represent Texans of all political stripes, principles and beliefs. I am one Texan who does not want to see the Legislature do the bidding of those who favor issues to which I am fundamentally opposed.

Besides, any legislator who can incur the wrath of super right-wing lobbyist Michael Quinn Sullivan — which Burrows has done — is OK in my book.,

education news

Abbott to renew fight against public education

Gov. Greg Abbott is sharpening his long knives in the upcoming legislative fight against public education.

I will watch with intense interest at how his fellow Republicans, elected to their rural legislative districts, deal with the governor’s efforts to gut and dismember the institutions that long ago became the heart and soul of these lawmakers’ communities.

GOP lawmakers resisted the idea of peeling public money away from public schools and sending them to private schools. The effort failed in the 2023 Texas Legislature. The successful blockage cost House Speaker Dade Phelan his chance of returning as speaker.

I learned long ago, when I first moved to Texas in 1984, that rural districts breathe life into communities that otherwise might wither and die were it not for the strength of their independent school districts. Many of those districts produce dedicated legislators who vow to fight for them in the halls of power in Austin; and most of those legislators these days are Republicans.

Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick want to mess with that political chemistry by vowing to siphon money for public schools and allow parents to redeem vouchers they can use to pay for their children’s private education.

Well, I can say without equivocation that from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods and from Texoma to the Valley that rural communities that depend on the strength of their public school systems are going to fight for their very lives.

Will it matter in the end? Probably — and tragically — not … as long as the Republicans in the Legislature remain wedded to the MAGA view that public education is not worth saving.

Baloney …

local news, political news, State news

Abortion to ‘challenge’ Texas Legislature?

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The headline atop the front page of the Dallas Morning News screamed out that the new Texas Legislature faces many “challenges” as it prepares to get to work on our behalf for the next five months.

One of them surely is going to be abortion and whether legislators are intent on banning all abortive procedures, all of ’em, making women, spouses and docs criminals.

Newly sworn in Rep. Brent Money, R-Greenville, says categorically that Texas must ban all abortion, citing what he said is “God’s creation” being sacred to merit legislation by mere mortal human beings. He appeared this morning on WFAA-TV’s “Inside Politics” program.

I will disagree with the gentleman. He doesn’t seem to take into account what happens to a child who is born with debilitating deformities. Who cannot care for herself or himself. Whose birth puts Mama’s health — and life — in jeopardy.

I offer those caveats as a pro-life Texas resident myself. I consider myself pro-life, however, I do not believe in legislating from afar whether a woman can take command of her own body or whether she must surrender her reproductive rights because some lawmaker in Austin forces her to do so.

Rep. Money is taking the seat once held by another right-wing extremist, Bryan Slaton, who was drummed out of the House because he got a female legislative staffer drunk as a skunk before having sex with her.

I am going out on a limb here, but I do not believe most Texans adhere to Money’s view that we need to ban all abortion, period.

There in could lie Texas lawmakers’ huge “challenge” as they prepare to convene their next session this week.

May the force of common sense and compassion be with all of them.

education news, State news

School vouchers: bad deal!

Gov. Greg Abbott keeps spitting in the faces of what should be his most ardent constituency, the rural Republicans who vote overwhelmingly to keep the GOP governor in office.

That’s right. He continues to push for his school voucher plan that would take money from public school districts and give Texans the choice of sending their children to private schools.

Why is that such a spitter? Because rural Republican legislators have been arguing against the school voucher plan because of the negative impact it would have on public school systems that are the heart and soul of so many rural communities.

Public schools so often in Texas are the center of social life in many towns. GOP legislators know it better than anyone, which is why they have been battling with the governor over his desire to rob the school systems of money they need.

Abbott said that pro-voucher legislative candidates fared well in the March primary this month. He said the state is “two votes away” from making the voucher plan law. He is urging Republicans to put his plan over the top in the Texas House by electing just two more pro-voucher Republicans.

According to the Texas Tribune: “We are now at 74 votes in favor of school choice in the state of Texas. Which is good, but 74 does not equal 76,” Abbott said, referring to the number of votes he needs to pass the bill into law. “We need two more votes.”

Greg Abbott says Texas close to passing vouchers | The Texas Tribune

He tried to get the measure enacted through four special legislative sessions after the 2023 Legislature adjourned this past May. He failed every time.

This effort disgusts me, as a taxpaying Texas resident who sent his own children through public schools. They received fine educations, earned their college degrees and have become productive members of this great state’s population.

Therefore, I am going to root against the effort to put Gov. Abbott’s notion over the top.

environmental news, State news

Yes on DST!

My man cave wall calendar caught my eye this morning as I was getting my day started.

It told me that on March 10 we return to Daylight Saving Time. My first reaction? Why can’t we just make it a permanent feature of our calendar? No need to switch to Standard Time in the fall and then back to DST in the spring.

We go through this drill every year. We switch back and forth and every … single … year we hear the same gripes from those who bitch about their body clocks needing adjustment. How they cannot get used to the extra hour of daylight in the evening or having to “fall back” in the autumn.

Personally, I never have had a problem with switching to Daylight Time and then back to Standard Time. However, if we’re going to keep bitching about doing it, my own preference would be to keep the Daylight Saving Time as a permanent fixture.

I like the extended daylight in the late spring and summer months. As for the fall and winter months, well … I wouldn’t care. It gets darker earlier in that time of the year.

The Texas Legislature a couple of sessions ago toyed with the idea of asking Texans what they preferred. The proposed resolution would have placed three issues on the ballot: Keep it as it is; permanent DST; or permanent Standard Time. I was prepared to vote for permanent Daylight Saving Time … but then the Legislature couldn’t get its crap together in time to put the issue on the ballot.

Maybe the 2025 Legislature can get organized early enough when it convenes in January to enable us to decide what we want to do. I know that’s a big ask, given the nature of our Legislature and the idiocy that seems to govern the legislative flow at times.

I’ll hope for the best. Meantime, I am going to enjoy Daylight Saving Time when it arrives in a couple of weeks.

local news

GOP state lawmakers stand on principle

Texas Republican legislators’ rebellion against Gov. Greg Abbott’s effort to siphon money from public education and hand it to private schools deserves another notice from this blog.

I already have spoken kindly about rural Republicans’ efforts to block the initiative, citing their belief in the strength that public education brings to their communities. The effort is so united and unbreakable through four special legislative sessions that Abbott appears to have given up on the fight for the time being.

The legislators answer to the voters, not to the political leadership in Austin. For their loyalty to the votes who send them to office, I applaud them.

Their resistance against political leadership reminds me of a struggle that occurred in Washington in the mid-1990s. It involved a West Texas congressman, Republican Larry Combest of Lubbock and his refusal to back the Freedom to Farm legislation pushed by newly installed House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Combest told Gingrich he opposed the agriculture overhaul effort because the farmers and ranchers who voted him into office opposed it. He would side with the South Plains and High Plains voters who expressed their opposition. One of the effects of the legislation would be to reduce the farm and ranch subsidies that went to those who worked the land.

I applauded Combest vociferously at the time while I worked for the Amarillo Globe-News as editorial page editor. I spoke with considerable passion about the guts Combest displayed in resisting Gingrich. It would cost Combest a coveted chairmanship of the House Agriculture Committee. Gingrich coaxed a retired Republican from Oregon, Bob Smith, to run again for the House and gave him the chairman’s gavel.

Combest eventually asked me to back off on my criticism of Gingrich. “I have to work with these guys,” Combest said. I don’t recall my precise answer, but I believe I said something like, “Too bad, Larry. I’m going to stay on it.”

Combest displayed plenty of backbone then. Texas rural GOP legislators are showing plenty of the same thing now.

Stand tall!

local news, State news

Politics of revenge: unbecoming and ugly

Two of Texas’s top politicians are seeking to exact revenge against members of their own political party and frankly, it is unbecoming of both of them to seek to get back at their fellow Republicans.

Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton have launched their revenge strategies seeking to defeat pols who voted against school vouchers and voted in favor of an impeachment initiative.

Abbott wants so badly to rob the public education till to benefit private schools that he’s targeting GOP lawmakers in the House who opposed the notion; most of the Republicans opposing the notion represent rural school districts where public schools are the centerpiece, the lifeblood of their communities

Paxton avoided being kicked out of office after the House impeached him on allegations that he’s a vengeful crook who did sweet deals to benefit a leading political ally. The Senate tossed the articles of impeachment aside.

These two MAGA Republicans are singing off the hymnal offered by Donald Trump, who has vowed to be “your retribution” in 2024.

It’s disgusting, man.

Abbott’s striking is more repugnant to me, given that he is attacking lawmakers who are listening to their constituents and following their wishes rather than heeding the demands of the governor. I am not excusing Paxton for an instant, though. I long have believed that Paxton is a disgrace to the legal profession and to the AG’s office.

But … here we are, on the eve of an election year. Two statewide politicians are vowing to engage in local elections and try to persuade legislators’ constituents that these Republicans should be defeated. Why? Because they aren’t doing governor’s and the AG’s bidding.

Disgraceful.

local news, medical news, State news

Rewrite this cruel abortion law!

Have we become so wedded in Texas to the notion of following a hidebound ideology that we cannot consider the human impact from policies that come out of our Legislature?

Don’t answer that. I know the answer. I believe it is yes.

Kate Cox is now the official poster woman for a policy that needs a serious revisiting when the next Legislature convenes in January 2025. Cox is the Dallas woman who was pregnant with a child who was doomed to die days if not hours after being born. Cox needed an abortion. Why? Because doctors told her that giving birth could harm her reproductive future, that she might be unable to get pregnant again.

Cox could obtain that abortion in Texas because of a cruel law that makes the procedure illegal, except when a pregnancy endangers the mother’s life. No other exceptions are allowed. Cox got kicked around. A lower court granted her permission; the Texas Supreme Court nixed that ruling. Then it issued a permanent ruling that disallowed Cox’s desire to end her pregnancy.

She went out of state to receive the procedure.

This is an insane law. It needs to be rewritten to allow for the type of exception that Cox faced.

The so-called “pro-life” movement is heralding the SCOTEX decision. This movement has nothing to do with being pro-life. It is instead a “pro-birth” movement that put Kate Cox’s parental future in dire peril.

The Texas law — one of the nation’s most restrictive — makes abortion illegal after six weeks of pregnancy. Hell, many women don’t even know they’re pregnant so soon after conception! That didn’t matter to the numbskulls who forced this bill onto the books.

To worsen matters, they wrote a law that punishes doctors who perform an abortion with criminal penalties. And, of course, they didn’t allow for the type of circumstance that Kate Cox faced were she to give birth to a baby who had zero chance of survival.

Think for a moment about the heartbreak that awaited Cox and her husband and their family.

The next Texas Legislature has the power to improve a bad law by broadening the exceptions allowed for ending a pregnancy. If our legislators have a beating heart, they will act to lessen the chance of other women being trapped in the vise that could have delivered permanent reproductive damage to Kate Cox.

medical news, State news

They’re ignoring the ‘bosses’

To whom or what are our Texas legislators listening when it comes to abortion?

They do not heed the views of the bosses who elect them to public office. That’s for damn sure!

They have enacted an anti-abortion law that makes the practice of ending a pregnancy an illegal act. Meanwhile, a Dallas woman who faces possible permanent fertility damage if she is forced to give birth to a girl who is doomed to die is being kicked around like the political football she has become.

What is so damn troubling is that our lawmakers are ignoring the will of the people who put them into office. Texans, by a significant majority, favor women retaining the right to control their bodies and they oppose (mostly male) legislators making decisions they have no business making.

This is a representative democracy, last time I checked. Therefore, the people who represent the masses need to heed the will of their employers. That would be people such as the women in this state who are trapped by a law that bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, with damn near zero exceptions.

Kate Cox, the Dallas woman I mentioned, faces the heartache of giving birth to a baby who will die and, moreover, she well might be unable to give birth to another child in the future.

This is utter insanity.

local news, medical news

‘Pro-birth’ policy must go

Kate Cox well might be forced to do something no sane human being should insist she do: give birth to a baby who is doomed to die.

The Dallas resident is trying to end a pregnancy she knows will end tragically. Her unborn daughter cannot live outside her mother’s womb for more than a few days. However, the abomination of a Texas law is requiring her to give birth because the law doesn’t cover the health of the infant as an exemption to its restrictions on abortion.

One court ruled in Cox’s favor. The Texas Supreme Court overruled the lower court and issued a temporary hold on the ruling.

The so-called “pro-life” movement has shown itself to be a “pro-birth” movement intent on making women who know their child will not survive go through the agony of giving birth only to watch their child die.

Here’s an idea for Gov. Greg Abbott to consider: Call a special session but instead of seeking to force private school vouchers on us, he should call legislators back to amend the law that well could force Kate Cox and other women to endure a needless heartache.