July 11th, 2017 – Second Reading Podcast

[0:00:00 Introduction] Welcome to the second reading podcast from the University of Texas at Austin. The Republicans were in the Democratic Party because there was only one party chart. Tell people on a regular basis there is still a land of opportunity in America. It’s called Texas.  The problem is these departures from the Constitution. They have become the norm. At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room on

[0:00:33 Jim] Welcome to the second reading podcast. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project here at U. T. And the nominal instructor of this class. Anyway, this is the first of our second summer session podcasts on politics and government in Texas. The purpose of these podcast is the touch on Texas politics in the news, sometimes American politics, who can’t quite help it and do our best to connect it to the topics in the course materials. I’m joined this week by my colleague Dr Josh Blank, is manager of polling and research at the Texas Politics Project. In all around Texas politics Geek. So welcome this week, Josh,

[0:01:09 Josh] Thank you for having me again. I

[0:01:10 Jim] meant geek and the possible way, obviously. So today we’re going to start by talking about a story that you should be seen in the news to the extent that you digesting the news about Texas, and that is the upcoming special session. So on Tuesday, the 18th the Legislature will return for a special session, which is called by the governor per the Constitution. So, as you should know, by now, we’re will know soon, depending on where you are in the course material the Legislature meets every other year for 140 days. If they don’t get the business done in a way that is satisfying to the governor, the governor is empowered by the Texas Constitution to call them back into a 30 day special session in which the governor sets the agenda. That is, the governor tells the Legislature by proclamation what they are supposed to do, and that’s really limits what they’re able to do. They can’t address things that are not on the proclamation. It will be ruled, essentially out of order if somebody tries now. This time it’s been done in a pretty interesting way, Josh, I should I follow these things pretty closely and have for a while. And the governor did something kind of different in the way that he’s called the special session this time,

[0:02:29 Josh] right? Yeah, we had a couple things different, right? I mean, first of all, he’s sort of doing, I guess you know, another version of the two step right, which is to say, he’s calling them back. And the first thing that’s being put on the special session call is just the sunset bill. So what is the Sunset Bill? Basically, every, you know, 12 years approximately. And I guess you can defer to pound agencies. They can changes but statutorily agencies air phased out. And this doesn’t mean that the agency ceases to exist. It just means that it required to requirement. The Legislature reauthorized the agency, basically sit down, decided they doing what we think it should do. Should we change the way it operates? Should we emergent with another agency, or should we just let it quote unquote sunset?

[0:03:05 Jim] And it’s all agencies, boards, etcetera, every. You know, this kind of goes back to the seventies, a good government movement, the idea that if you use, let government grow without being reviewed, it would grow endlessly. So a lot of states created what we call sunset process to review the agent season, Askew say it basically starts with the premise that if the review doesn’t take place and renew the agency, theoretically the agency ceases to exit operated exists. That rarely happens, and you’ll read about that later in the semester. But the sunset is this key first item.

[0:03:39 Josh] The sunset in and of itself is like as a topic that you could just talk about. I mean, this is so sad to say, but it’s a topic that someone could conceivably talk about for hours just because of, like, the way that it actually works and how, how a certain type of a certain type of person, right, exactly like all of you. But basically what ended up happening was this session. The house, you know, for reasons we don’t need to get into, didn’t pass the Sunset bill. Most importantly for the Texas, I guess Board of Medical Examiners.

[0:04:05 Jim] Yeah, that’s exactly right. The board of Medical Examiners offices, overseas medical practice, doctors and right in all kinds of other professionals in the medical profession,

[0:04:14 Josh] right? So pretty important, you know, pretty key, and the Senate could have moved on this, But in a move that was basically politically driven, you could say right. The Senate held hostage the sunset bill because they wanted the house to pass some legislation, namely a bathroom bill, which you’ve probably heard about, um, and some other things. They chose not to do that which basically forced the governor’s hand, either call a special session or just allow doctors to kind of practice medicine willy nilly throughout the state, which, you know, probably unwise. So the governor did some interesting things. So first he said, we’re going to step, we’re gonna deal with sunset first, and then I also have a list of 1919 other issues that I’m gonna then roll out after that. So, first of all, I mean, it’s also kind of interesting about this. Is that you know, at least in recent history, is very uncommon to see that many issues on a special session calendar. If you paid any attention, Legislature at all, they move pretty slowly over 140 day period. So for a 30 day period, the idea that they’re gonna address 20 items most of which are pretty controversial or, like, generate conflict, right? It’s a pretty big ask,

[0:05:19 Jim] right? So the two things that are really notable here are this kind of stutter to step is Josh called it where the governor says, Okay, I’m gonna proclaim this one thing when you guys pass this All then proclaimed the other 19 things so that that delay in order to induce them to pass the sunset bill and clean up after themselves, that happens sometimes with the budget. But the budget is the only thing the Legislature has to do, so that’s a different class of things then. The other thing is the scope, the number of items that he’s putting on their and and the fact that it’s a large number of controversial items. So let’s talk a little bit about what’s on there. So just you mentioned the bathroom bill. Let’s just lay out what’s going on with the bathroom bill for those of you again that if you can not follow the news very much, and it seems to me you’d still have to have heard something about the quote unquote bathroom bill in Texas originally intended as an effort to by conservatives in the state toe limit the ability of transgender people to use the bathroom of their chosen gender. It then became wrapped up in other kinds of messages about public safety, etcetera, and about the ability of local governments to pass ordinances that guaranteed access to transgender people. It’s a big effort in the Legislature by conservatives during the regular session to pass some kind of bill that would both limit transgender people’s access to. We thought a lot more about bathrooms, and we never have before multi use or your multi occupancy occupant right, multi occupancy restroom shower in shower rooms, and also to prohibit localities, essentially the big cities and some school districts to create their own rules around. This is a very controversial subject. During the Legislature, it was essentially killed in the House again, the politics of that. The House put forth a mild bill that the conservative leadership of the Senate, in particular Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, wouldn’t accept. And so we’re now back to that being on the agenda. But it’s on the agenda in a peculiar way. We’re in a specific way anyway. In this special session

[0:07:35 Josh] of the scope of this has really grown and shrunk throughout its life cycle and and sort of on the agenda, right? I mean, you, Abbott, and announcing the bathroom, Bill said, You know, he really or announcing bathrooms being part of the specials Estrin agenda and also specifically how he now said, kind of harken back to something that didn’t pass in the house was like House Bill 28 99 which was actually broadly a bill that would strike all basically anti discrimination ordinances passed by local governments. So, I mean, that’s like the broadest in Stan Shih ation of. This would be like, Let’s just not have any nondiscrimination order. This is at the local level That was a little too big and so kind of moved along. And then I was like, Well, how about we keep local government entities, you know, from past in a laws that create special accommodations for transgender people were extend, you know, nondiscrimination practices to a new group or, you know, and that kind of went on for a little bit. But then the ideas well, maybe we don’t do it with all the government entities. May we just do it school District’s. And so then we were kind of focused on school. District in the House is basically we could move

[0:08:31 Jim] forward. Was the compromise that was really on the table as of the very end of the regular session

[0:08:37 Josh] and the Senate in particular. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick rejected that. And so now he basically wanted the bathrooms. Some, you know, bathroom legislation to be on the specials. Jenna call Special Session calling. The governor put it on there. But he did in such a way so that it was specifically relating Onley to multi occupancy bathrooms, you know, showers or basically changed rooms. And the key here is the distinction between, you know, we’re not talking about the Bills would broadly take on on national discrimination or insists, if you look at the bills have already been filed there, too, in the House, and one basically says, is one thing. 11 key to this is that acknowledges that Congress has a right to pass laws that relate to discrimination. And those still stand because there’s some question some of the earlier bills, whether they would have been in conflict with the federal nondiscrimination laws or anti discrimination laws. So there’s basically the two bills that are in the house right now. Both acknowledge, of those laws exist, right? I got to save the attorney general some money here.

[0:09:28 Jim] This this underlines just how impossible it is to talk about this quickly and says With Rabbit Hole of

[0:09:34 Josh] That’s just a way of saying Hurry up. So then there two bills, one basically says Okay. Local governments, all local government entities, cannot basically pass a bill that, like makes special accommodations for multiple occupancy bathrooms. There’s another bill that’s exactly the same language, essentially, but it only applies to the education code. It only applies to school district, and that’s a good way they’ve done. I mean, what’s why would you pass two bills and well, didn’t pass the first time? It’s probably gonna take a lot of compromise and wrangling if it’s gonna pass the second time. And so they’re laying out a couple different paths forward on this. So that’s one of the things. That’s one thing that’s yes, a Sunset Bathrooms.

[0:10:11 Jim] We will now talk about the other 18 things in identical detail.

[0:10:14 Josh] Yes, definitely not. All right, let’s talk about something. Other things.

[0:10:18 Jim] Okay, so there’s another you know you can kind of group. This is a couple of big groups, one education. We went into the last session with public education on the agenda in both the House and the Senate, but in very different ways. So we’re going to see to continuations of that discussion that did the tooth in the House. They were really interested in revisiting school finance in Texas in the way that public schools are financed trying to accomplish. I think both an increase in overall funding, but also in changing the way that the money is distributed from one disk among districts the so called Robin Hood system. Whereas if you are a district, it takes in a certain amount of revenue beyond the levels the state takes some of that revenue and distributed to other districts. That’s a very complicated system that is

[0:11:08 Josh] obviously politically really unpopular. If you live in one of his property rich districts and your pain, you this huge amount of money and property taxes and you know, like in Austin, somewhere in the neighborhood of you know, some things I don’t know exactly. I know what I think the number is I’m not going to say some. A large percentage of that money is actually going to other districts across state, not surprisingly, unpopular.

[0:11:27 Jim] Yeah, the parents in particular don’t like that. That’s been a very hard system to unpack. Its been in the court several times. The Legislature in the past has been forced by the courts to revisit the issue in 2016 a court handed down decision that said the system was terrible but barely constitutional. Therefore, you know the Legislature wasn’t under the gun, right? There’s a lot of will in the house to work on that. In the Senate, the focus on education was actually not public education directly. It was on trying to create a voucher system again. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick was leader here. The idea there that you would find some way of getting some public money, put it in the hands of parents so that they could pay for private school or some nonpublic school alternative. Nothing happened on either one of those fronts

[0:12:18 Josh] because they’re basically at odds with each other.

[0:12:19 Jim] They’re you know, they’re very much at odds together for reasons that I’m sure will come up later on this

[0:12:23 Josh] in the House is basically express their vehement opposition to the voucher idea,

[0:12:27 Jim] right? So there is on item to create a commission to study and recommend improvements to the current public school finance system. Which is a way, frankly, of the governor saying that something needs to be done about this later. Yeah, you know, whenever you see the creation of a statewide commission, it’s a sign that there’s no consensus on what’s gonna happen, and they’re trying to signal that they’re doing something and then, you know, interesting. The call says direct quote legislation to empower parents of Children with special needs or educational disadvantages to choose an educational provider that is best for their child. Now, if that that seems like gobbledy goop to you, I mean, you have to read into that. What that indicates is that one of the areas where there might possibly be an opening for some kind of a voucher bill, that is a bill that provides money for parents that spend on their own and make decisions that might be public or parochial schools is in the area of special needs kids that

[0:13:29 Josh] although there were the it wasn’t in evidence at the end of the session because that that’s where the Senate ended was How about, you know, how about doing this? Just a very narrow program for especially Children. I think the view from the other side knew that sort of against this and I said the other side, I don’t just mean Democrats. Actually, a lot of rural Republicans is the fact that this is just a gateway, right that concerns

[0:13:50 Jim] you. Choose your folks he met, affords the camel’s nose under the tent,

[0:13:53 Josh] right, and then all of a sudden, you’ll know the next session will be a bigger program and expansion. And once, once it starts, it’s gonna be hard to stop, is what people would argue,

[0:14:02 Jim] right? But you know that said, there is a little bit of I mean, there’s a little bit of consensus on the fact that the state, for various technical reasons, is not providing the level of service for special needs kids that there seems to be a growing consensus that they need to do. You know, I agree with you on that. I don’t think vouchers is going to be seen as the solution to that. But if you’re wondering Why this? Yeah, That’s why this

[0:14:25 Josh] is also part of a larger conversation. Because Texas gone to a lot of trouble earlier at the beginning of the session because they were capping How maney What percentage of students with special needs classes sort of arbitrarily in a way that, you know, seem to run afoul of all kinds of law. Right. But part of that is a reflection that the Texas is actually having trouble servicing these needs. Yes, exactly. So Okay, anyway,

[0:14:46 Jim] All right, so there’s that property taxes we know from polling that we’ve done that. Republicans very much are interested. But so are Democrats. Texans in general. Hey, you know, think property taxes were high and they are

[0:14:58 Josh] They are because we don’t have an income tax.

[0:15:00 Jim] Exactly. So you know, there’s some again an issue where there’s a couple of different approaches out there. We don’t go into it this point, but the House and the Senate are gonna have a hard time reaching consensus on this. Ah, whole slew of things on state preemption of local government. And what do I mean by that? We’ll definitely be back talking about this in future weeks. But try to

[0:15:21 Josh] contain your excitement.

[0:15:22 Jim] The governor has has made it clear that he wants to a search state government over urban policies that are being chosen by local governments. They’re choosing their spots. One thing that people may have heard of is the on ride sharing in 2015 Austin. Is that right? Yeah. 23 2015. Austin. Yeah, I passed an ordinance that resulted in uber and lift leaving Austin. It might even have been early 2016 time flies, but uber and the right sharing companies kind of lobbied up and got, Ah, uniform ride sharing law passed in the last Legislature that essentially undid the Austin ordnances. There’s lots of examples of this, and it’s been it’s been a theme in the Legislature. They’re gonna have several measures, will be looking at that. And then there’s a set of Ah, there’s a set of social what we would call social conservative issues, more limitations on abortion, some attention to end of life issues, that is, you know, people’s rights when they are dying to decide to stop receiving care or the terms of palliative care and another issue that’s in the news. In a couple different ways. Voter fraud,

[0:16:35 Josh] right? So specifically, mail in voter fraud.

[0:16:37 Jim] Yes. So there’s Ah, go.

[0:16:39 Josh] Needless to say, not much to Dio.

[0:16:41 Jim] Yeah, so I think, you know, before we depart from this, probably. Thankfully, for most people, there’s a couple things to notice. Year one. The special session is a time when the governor can assert himself because heat the governor is able to limit the agenda. This governor is doing that, and they’re rumblings out there to that. You know, as you can tell by the level of detail we lapsed into here, you know, there’s some very specific ideas in here, and so the governor is really asserting the executive’s role in the air, attempting to assert the executive’s role in the legislative process. And we’re seeing some push back on that particular in the House with Speaker of the House is kind of looked at this and said, You know, I don’t think we need to do a commission, and we should actually put fixing school finance on the agenda. There are politics late in this, but I mean, at a certain level, you want to note that kind of institutional branches of government.

[0:17:31 Josh] Yeah, we’ll leave. It will be interesting to see play out during the process of the special session. And this course well, this is gonna be going on is the fact that none of these were easy issues and the governor can limit the agenda going to special session. But in a lot of ways, by having such a large agenda, he’s actually opened it up, right? And so, you know, if you’re actually find this really closely and you start to look at the bill filings because once he called, basically, once he called a special session bill started to get filed and everything which I know there’s a lot of bills that don’t seem to address any of us right now. Of course, the chances of those passing are very minimal. But it speaks to the fact that you know they are coequal branches and while the governor conserve, define what the You know what the Legislature can work on during the special session. He can’t tell them how to do it or what to produce. You can only sign it or veto it at the end. And so you know the thing that’s kind of interesting is in some ways is that, you know, by having such a broad agenda and every in in some ways has really opened it up to interpretation and by both the House and the Senate to sort of address that however they feel like and a lot of these issues, they weren’t close to a compromise during the regular session. It just seems mean syndrome. Your point out this morning, How you There’s like a Twitter hashtag 20 for 20. You get all the issues that when we’ve been talking in the during the last course in the first summer session about, you know, what would it would success look like here? Do they have to pass all 20 items? Can they just get a couple key ones? What if they get 10 out of 20 you know, But they’re pushing for 20 out of 20 and I mean, that’s a heavy left.

[0:18:56 Jim] Yeah. I mean, I’d be pretty surprised that they got all 20 but, you know, 10 out of 20 is in a very good hashtag. We

[0:19:02 Josh] should come up with an over under anyway.

[0:19:03 Jim] All right. Okay, so we’ll return to this. We can’t really talk about politics, right? now, on the day that we’re recording this without talking at least a little bit about the big national story. The president’s son and his his meeting in June of last year on Russia with a Russian lawyer and his rolling out of emails suggested that the meeting, at least to some extent, does seem to have been what people thought it was about. It was about, at least with some connection with, You know, something that’s some distance but some connection with Russian government saying we have information that is damaging to Hillary Clinton is gathered by Russian government sources that we would like to offer to you and the president’s son saying That sounds right.

[0:19:49 Josh] Well, I would love that.

[0:19:50 Jim] I would love that, I guess, is the director

[0:19:52 Josh] or something like that. I

[0:19:53 Jim] wish I had a good Donald Trump Jr impersonation, but I don’t really know what he sounds like. That’s been all over the news, you know, in terms all let’s talk about collusion. We pulled on this and you know, the interesting question that we can connect with the class to some degree is that up to this 0.1 of the things that we’ve seen in both national and state level public opinion polls is that while particularly people that incident, foreign policy and in the integrity electoral system, look at this and see it is very alarming out there among the general population. This issue provoked Democrats and Republicans has been processed very much do a partisan lens,

[0:20:33 Josh] right? So before this sort of recent revelation in the last University of Texas Texas Tribune poll in June, we asked Texas voters whether they believe that there was coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia and overall in Texas is relatively split. You know, 39% of people said yes, there was 45% said no. But on partisans, 80% of Republicans said there was no collusion. 74% of Democrats said there was collusion. Now you may say, OK, what? But now this new information has come out. Surely everyone will come to their senses or whatever, right? If you believe that this shows, you know, Concrete Evans of collusion, probably not. I mean, that’s that’s the thing that you need to know about this. So I mean, first of all, looking at like Donald Trump’s approval numbers in Texas just as a first baseline example. Overall, he’s about even 43% approve of his job performance. 51% disapprove. 80% of Republicans in Texas approve of the job he’s doing. 90% of Democrats disapprove, and this effect is so broad in the way that you interpret and understand information in the news. It even gets sort of, you know, tangential. And, you know, I mean, you could decide how related these, you know, things are but other attitudes. So, for example, when we asked about Russia and whether you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Russia, 71% of Democrats that they had an unfavorable opinion of Russia, who I think generally people Republicans and Democrats in Congress would say, is our enemy in a lot of ways, right? Onley. 45% of Republicans in Texas said that they had an unfavorable view of Russia. 40% basically said, Yeah, I don’t know which is kind of inexplicable, given the history sort of of the Republican Party in its position and the history of the US Russia relations and serving the traditional Republican stance on this of but to understand that you have to understand that is being viewed both through the lens of partisanship. Just as you know, I mean, basically, everything is in a lot of ways, but this doesn’t change it. A new piece of information isn’t going all of a sudden a people say, Oh, I guess Russia is bad

[0:22:30 Jim] and it’s partisanship intertwined with frankly taking cues from your leaders from elite opinions. And so you know, you’ve got a president who put in the in the most evenhanded policy terms has advocated a stronger working relationship with Russia. I mean, he will say when pressed, Yes, they may be our adversaries, but we have to work with them. And I think we can have a working relationship and we can work with Vladimir Putin, the president. Russia, etcetera, etcetera. And then, you know that gets transmitted basically, you know, and part, you know, that’s that’s reinforced bipartisanship. But there’s definitely some kind of queuing going

[0:23:14 Josh] on the basics of how this works in the most simple sense that people don’t like internal conflict. So if I voted for Donald Trump or if I liked October, even if it let’s say I’m a Republican and I wasn’t a huge Trump supporter, but now he’s my president. I don’t want to basically deal with feeling like I’m a Republican, identified with Republican Party and not liking the Republican president. Which is why it’s easy to see, you know, 80% plus for approval, right? Even though

[0:23:38 Jim] I’m thinking he’s saying something that doesn’t jibe with some other feeling I have.

[0:23:42 Josh] And similarly, if the president is going out and saying, Hey, we need a better working relationship with Russia, etcetera. So even if you know that’s not really sitting with, you know, you serve your preexisting notions of where you think you’re supposed to be. It’s easier to not have the conflict that the deal with the internal conflict. So that’s why generally you see the stars of attitudes kind of lining up. In a way, it’s called motivated reasoning, so that basically people don’t have to deal with conflicts internally of conflicting attitudes and so gentle people try to align their attitude to supposed to deal with this conflict. So that’s kind of what you’re seeing. You know, one of the things that we’re gonna be watching, you know, kind of going ahead for years, now, I guess, is seems that is basically, you know, how much of the drip, drip, drip of the information eventually is enough for some group of people to say, Yeah, this is too much. But the truth is, it takes a lot. There’s the first that you just need to now,

[0:24:30 Jim] right, because those, you know, the things that are forceful and reinforcing that solution to that conflict are by definition pretty strong. Yeah, right. So on that, try to be aware of your motivated reasoning as you work through your were, and we will talk to you next week about new things in Texas government politics. Enjoy the class and we’ll talk to you soon. Second, Reading Podcast is a production of Texas Politics Project and the Project 2021 Development Studio at the University of Texas at Austin.