With less than 40 days to go, attention turns to the House Calendars Committee as the gatekeeper that determines which bills make it to the House floor for consideration by the entire chamber. Right now, the members of the House Calendars Committee are critical to deciding whether the 87th Legislature will be about addressing the failure of Texas’s electrical market and reducing racial disparity in policing, or bullying LGBTQ children and restricting the right to vote.
As of the time of this writing, a pernicious assault on renewable energy is underway. SB 3 and SB 1278 have passed the Senate and sit in the House State Affairs Committee, and the House companion to SB 1278—HB 4466 by Rep. Phil King—has already had a hearing. These bills contain a provision that instructs the Public Utility Commission to guess at an amount for what it costs when the wind does not blow, assign that “cost” to renewable generators, and further subsidize the oil and gas industry, which had even more generation trip offline during the blackout than renewable generation.
As for the George Floyd Act, HB 88 appears to be dead in committee. Parts of HB 88 were broken up and filed in other legislation. Three of those six bills have reached the Calendars Committee, however, two of those three bills are ideas that pre-date George Floyd, and are more accurately categorized as criminal justice reform bills, generally. HB 829 is the only bill that would create a progressive disciplinary matrix for police misconduct, but does not change the techniques officers use when making an arrest, nor other duties and powers of a police officer. Those bills that affect citizens’ interactions with law enforcement are stuck in committee.
After saying he’s “done talking about bashing on the gay community” and that “it’s competely unacceptable” in 2019, Speaker Phelan’s Texas House is on the verge of doing just that to school age children. HB 1399 by Rep. Matt Krause would prohibit doctors from performing medical treatments for gender transitioning, reassignment, and dysphoria. In other words, teenagers currently taking hormone therapies would lose access instantly on September 1, 2021. HB 1399 passed out of the House Committee on Public Health on a 6-4 party line vote.
The right to vote is the most important right preservative of all other rights. Accordingly, the biggest effort of all is erecting barriers to the ballot box. Seventy bills have advanced out of committee. While not all seventy are bad, currently, any one of those seventy could be dramatically amended on the House floor. The bills touch and effect every aspect of the election process from registration to how counted votes are reported. With so many bills containing numerous provisions, our action alerts are focused on the four alarm fires. The Texas Election Reform Coalition has put out two one pagers on SB 7 and HB 6. Additionally, our one pager is written to be flexible enough to respond to the ever changing provisions. Finally, we have testified against some of the most concerning bills that directly affect our membership.
Last Thursday, the Texas House passed it’s version of the budget bill, SB 1. Usually budget day becomes budget night, and can go into the wee hours of Friday morning. However, this budget night wrapped up quicker than any in recent memory ending well before midnight. Most of the political amendments were pulled down, and the political deals made to get those amendment authors’ to stand down will become clear in the weeks ahead.
The most remarkable moment of the debate came on Amendment 54 by Rep. Coleman, which would have authorized the Governor’s Office to negotiate with the federal government on how to draw down federal funds for medicaid available under the Affordable Care Act. A stand alone bill—HB 3871 by Rep. Julie Johnson—would do the same thing, but has not received a hearing in committee. HB 3871 has 76 co-authors, and several lobbyists confirmed the votes existed for Amendment 54 as of Wednesday night. However, when the record vote was taken on the House floor, eight of the nine Republican co-authors voted against the amendment, which failed 68-80. To save the reader the trouble of counting it up, the 8 Republicans were Representatives Allison, Bailes, Clardy, Huberty, Kacal, Lambert, Raney, and Stephenson.
Over in the Senate, new life was breathed into the legislation that would permit the unlicensed carry of firearms. The Lt. Governor created a new committee, the Senate Committee on Constitutional Issues. The Senate suspended the Constitutional rule that no bill may be filed after the first sixty days—a vote threshold which requires the acquiescence of Democrats—and filed SB 2224 by Senator Charles Schwertner, chair of the Committee on Constitutional Issues, which would allow for the unlicensed carry of firearms with provisions that differ from HB 1927.