April 20th, 2022 – Second Reading Podcast

[00:00:00] Narrator: 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. So I 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. Raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room.

[00:00:34] Jim Henson: And welcome back to the second reading podcast. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin. I’m very glad to be joined this week again, uh, by Ross Ramsey, executive editor of the Texas Tribune.

Uh, welcome Ross. How are you doing?

[00:00:51] Ross Ramsey: How are you, sir?

[00:00:52] Jim Henson: Uh, you know, I’m I’m well, it’s kind of nice to, I’ve been saying this the last few weeks and it’s, I should be settled in now, but I’m still really happy to be back in the studio rather than online and with our great crew here and back on campus. So.

Exactly. Uh, I appreciate you being here, uh, knowing that you are preparing to move, um, among other things, uh, move houses, I should say. Um, but I, you know, I, I wanted to check in on the range of issues that you focused on in. Uh, as I count them, your last four columns over the last week, which is, you know, if we, you know, I guess a technically eight days given the rhythm of publication, but just to run down the topics you’ve done, you, you talked about public ed and an analysis of kind of the issue terrain and what Texas leaders seem to be paying attention to.

Right. You wrote about broadband and, um, the ongoing conversation and the, the, the pace of the efforts to bring high speed internet to areas of the state without it, uh, you wrote about abortion. And then this morning you wrote a piece on redistricting talking about the implications of. Gerrymandering. I want to set the abortion column aside for just a moment.

I mean, many would argue that it fits just perfectly in this, but, and I think it does, but as I look at the columns on public ed on broadband, on redistricting, I see you focusing on, you know, the fundamentals of the state’s infrastru. Um, and, and again, I don’t want to sell abortion short as part of the state’s health infrastructure, but it is a little bit different than the structural nature of these other issues.

Now, am I imagining things? Is this just the random play of searching for. Column topics that are, you know, that are current or are you mulling the fundamentals here?

[00:02:58] Ross Ramsey: Well, this is part of a bigger, um, sort of series of columns I’ve been writing. Um, you know, I’m retiring at the end of the month. And I thought, you know, sat down with an editor here who, you know, and talked about, you know, what do we want to do with the last call and decided to sort of take on a, you know, a long series of columns on if you were going to.

Go at government and sort of move the big pieces first and stop moving the little pieces. What would you move around? And the part that you sort of isolated here is a section on infrastructure grant. You know, it’s a, it’s a it’s, like I said, as part of the series that, you know, includes a lot of the big things government does.

Um, but this, uh, last series or this, these last most recent columns with the exception of abortion are really about infrastructure. The idea here is really, if you set, um, you can’t really do this, but if you set politics aside, what we’re governed to be working on, and by the way, how are they doing? And that’s sort of the general idea.

And then you go topic by topic and say, well, what about broadband and how are we doing there? And what’s going on over here with, um, school finance and schools and education in general. And what, you know, if the legislature was only doing one or two or three things, what would they be? And how are they doing with that sort of the

general thing?

All right. Well, I, I want to unpack a few of those things and, and, and, you know, it’s funny you say, you know, what, w you know, how can we talk about this separate from politics? And I think you. In each of these columns, it’s almost as if it’s almost impossible to do that to some degree, impossible is a strong word.

It’s a, but it’s a matter, I guess, of, of pride of place. So tell me, let’s start with education and, and so, so tell me, as you looked and you picked education as part of this, tell me what you saw.

Well, you see two things going on. You know, one of them is in the, you know, and then, you know, I know it’s a, sort of a false split, but you know, it’s a useful.

And the political world, the conversation about education is not really about education. It’s about critical race theory, and what’s in books in libraries and things that are subjects for campaigning and subjects for the, for stumping, the politicians out on the trail, talking about, you know, we need to rein in these teachers or we need to rein in these professors, or we need to.

No do this or liquid they’re teaching your children. It’s all that kind of stuff. And it’s, and it’s sort of political and culturally oriented. And it’s designed, you know, as it, as it is appropriate, I guess, in a political campaign to stir voters and to get them to look at issues that a particular politician is working on.

And, um, has some advantage or feels that he or she has some advantage over. But if you look at schools and you say what’s really going on in schools, what should we be talking about? Or what else might we be talking about? If we weren’t in campaigns, you know, you’ve got this giant, you know, the sort of the glaring problem is this giant, uh, learning gap that occurred during the pandemic.

When we sent all the kids home for a bit, you know, depending on the school district two or three, or sometimes even for some that. And the kids were falling behind and it’s really evident in the test scores. If you look at, you know, how the test scores were going in 2019 and how they’re going now, um, the kids have fallen off this, this, uh, pandemic streak of virtual learning left a real mark on these kids.

And if you think about, you know, you can’t look at education and say, you know, it’s working most of the time, it didn’t work for this contingent of children and this COVID. You know, you need to catch them up. You need to do some things to bring them to the levels they would have been had. They been in class and you need to do it while they’re still in school.

So you need to act pretty quickly. Uh, teachers are jumping up and down, back to this, um, superintendents are jumping up and down about this. It’s not a particular. Spicy political issue, but it’s a real issue. And one of the main things that government does. So that’s, that was how I did that split. I looked at it and said, know what else might they be?

Might they be looking at, I didn’t get to other things like, you know, we’ve got a teacher shortage problem going on. That’s I think going to be evident this summer, when we find out how many teachers are really dissatisfied enough to quit and how many people were coming into the program. And then we figured out how do we open the schools for five and a half million kids?

Um, without all the teachers that we spoke to.

[00:07:36] Jim Henson: You know, it’s interesting how you, as you lay that out, I mean, in some ways, and we get to play the old guys now. I mean, the, the focus on content is, is not new. That is the coat, the focus on curriculum, and it’s not new from both sides. This has been kind of a frontline.

Periodically in education, you know, thinking back, you know, you may remember where to locate this in time, a little better than I do, but it seems to me somewhere between eight and 12 years ago, there was a lot of action at the state board of education on the content of textbooks that, you know, had a lot of, it was sort of cult that the cultural overtones and the cultural politics that you’re talking about right now.

[00:08:24] Ross Ramsey: The Confederates and you know, how, how do we present the civil war? How do we keep that as free? Now it’s much more about race and how do we present that history. If we present that history at all and it’s become, you know, it’s, it’s it’s to some extent, you know, I guess it was then, but, but now it is certainly a national issue.

As much as it is a stage. This conversation is not bound

[00:08:45] Jim Henson: by the text. Yeah. And now it’s, you know, it’s, it’s got the extra element of, you know, gender, gender, and sexual identity that had, that have been plugged into this. You know, I want to move on from education in a minute, but I mean, it, it seems to me and I don’t, I think this is kind of implied in what you’re saying, but if we put this into the trajectory of education politics over the last two to three legislative sessions, You know, and I wonder if you agree with this.

I mean, it feels to me like what this is pointing to is something of a missed opportunity because as we go into the next legislative session, unless things really shift dramatically, the state is going to be a wash in. You know, between federal money and the, and this came up, comes up in the broadband column that you did that you know, much of the broadband money is going to be is going to be sourced federally, but we don’t know the specifics, but in terms of education, the state is going to be a wash in money.

We took, uh, some initial steps that in the 2019 session, two. Put some more money into, into public education and to start thinking about tinkering with the formulas, this is of course, linked to property taxes, but it looks to me that, you know, we’re headed towards a missed opportunity as a result of the current focus that you’re talking about.

And the pivot to these sort of more, you know, what you’re thinking of is as more campaign oriented issues. I guess what I’m wondering is, is it going to, you know, is it going to be a little more deeply rooted than that? By the time we get to the.

[00:10:24] Ross Ramsey: Well, I think, you know, I’m reelection determines what the next legislature is going to do.

You can tell in January and February of a legislative year, which is every two years, what happened in the elections in November the, in the November, a couple of months before, um, and people campaign on them, all of these things. And then they go to Austin or they go to Washington and they feel like they need to fulfill their promises and they feel like they need to mend whatever.

You know, slides, voters founded, you know, a great example of this was the Republicans in Texas got something of a review in the 2018 elections. They didn’t lose, they lost some seats in the legislature. They didn’t lose any statewide seats, but a lot of those races were close in ways they hadn’t been close in agents and everybody kind of got a wake up call there and they came in to the 2019 legislative session.

Uh, the 2017 legislative session was a big fight among other things about the so-called bathroom. Bill was, you know, where transgender people use, which restrooms transgender people were allowed to use in public buildings. And it was a big nasty culture, war fight. They came back, someone admonished in the 2018 election.

And in 2019 said, okay, we’re not going to do anything but meat and potatoes stuff. And then as you said, a minute ago, they worked on school. They tried to change the formula. Some that it’s harder for property taxes to go up as fast as they have been. They didn’t actually cut taxes or get tax relief, but, you know, tax rates are going down.

Uh, appraisals are going up, taxes are going up, but they took a swing at now. They’re coming in and they’ve got, you know, according to Glen acre, the state controller, 12 to $13 billion in the state’s rainy day fund, the economic stabilization fund. It’s a kind of savings. And another 12 or $13 billion.

That’s going to be in surplus. And that’s his estimate now, and it keeps getting bigger. And like you say, they’re going to walk into the next session was something like 25 billion, extra dollars. What are they going to do with it? Are they going to do some kind of a moonshot for education or they going to do some kind of a moonshot of property taxes that dealt model money and.

It had a really sort of, um, said what they want to do with it yet. They’ve got a lot of possibilities that they don’t ordinarily have.

[00:12:40] Jim Henson: Well, and as you say, I mean, the tone of the campaign and the outcome of the election has a way of, of shaping that. And, and so we’ll have to see now I’m going to use you mentioning, uh, the comptroller Glen Hagar is a good transition to broadband broadband feels to me a little bit more like.

Your traditional infrastructure issue in Texas and, and not one quite as fraught as, as education, but a little more like say transportation and water. And that, you know, there are a lot of stakeholders in, in these kind of old school infrastructure and call it non-social infrastructure issues. Um, And they, they percolate and take a long time to get all the stakeholders together to make a move.

And it seems like we’re, we’re in that area with broadband. Does that sound right to you? I mean, we had a big bill last time. We’ve got the federal bill. You wrote about this on the column and it seems like that is getting close.

[00:13:41] Ross Ramsey: You know, if you, uh, you know, this, if you went to a legislator in Texas three sessions ago, which would’ve been six years ago and said, Hey, what do you think about expanding broad camp broadband, making it available with more people and making it affordable to people who might have it at the curb, can’t afford to get it into the house.

They would have said, why are we paying? Why is the state paying for people to get Netflix? Um, the pandemic came along. Made it very clear that, you know, one of the, one of the arguments that had been made was really serious, which is this isn’t about Netflix. This is about telemedicine. It’s about education.

It’s about work. It’s about how we live now. And if you don’t have broadband access, high speed lobbying access, you’re not going to be able to participate in all of the things that you should be able to participate in as a Texan. It’s now infrastructure and not move kind of a luxury to necessity. They bought that.

I mean, during the pandemic that convinced, you know, virtually everybody in the legislature and you’re right, it’s not as much political event as it is, you know, there are politics in it, but it’s more vendor politics and provider politics than it is, you know, politics about whether or not we should do broadband.

Yes. Money is the thing it’s really expensive. And, and the federal infrastructure bill has a bunch of money and the it’s 42 and a half billion dollars nationally for. And they told the states, you need to map house by house property by property. Where are you doing? Don’t have broadband and then send that in.

And based on those maps, the FCC and others will allocate this 42 and a half billion dollars. So like the wild guess right now is Texas. We’ll get between one and $4 billion out of the federal thing to expand access to broadband where it’s not available. And to expand or to make it more affordable, you know, subsidize it to some extent in places where people have access to it, but, but it’s beyond their means.

And, um, they’re working on it. It’s actually one of those places where you can look at government and say government’s doing or what it’s supposed to be doing. They’re concentrating on it. They’re getting to work on it. The problem is that it’s a very slow process, you know, and a lot of that’s kind of built into your question.

It’s a lot of vendors it’s like. Different technologies. It’s a lot of, uh, it’s

[00:16:01] Jim Henson: a lot of, yeah, there’s a, yeah, there’s a, yeah, there’s a lot of big, big corporate players involved in this. I mean, although there’s a, in terms of the, the, the, the counting votes part of this it’s occurring to me, there is something about this.

That’s a little bit like education in. You know, there are ways you can align this because of where the underserved populations are. There are there’s potential here for building rural, urban coalitions that I think is always helpful in the legislature. Um, given the way things are organized, that kind of points us towards redistricting.

But I want to ask you one more political thing about the broadband piece. Um, you know, your column has something that I, I find a li it’s almost like a little bit of an Easter egg that. Depends on your, you know, like your engagement with this and how you watch the politics. I find this atrocity of the control of the comptroller’s office to this very interesting, not only in policy, but certainly in political terms.

Am I over reading that?

[00:17:00] Ross Ramsey: I don’t think so. You know, the legislature putting it over there, I think to get it a little bit out of legislative reach and also, you know, we just had this big mess. Electricity and the PUC and public utility regulators in Texas in February of 2021. And they’re still working that out on the electric generation side.

And in another world, you might hand all of these issues to the public utility commission and you might hand it to. Those regulators. They said exactly. You guys worry about electricity and we’ll let somebody else worry about this. The other thing is that it is a pile of money and the controller is also the state treasurer.

And, you know, that’s a, that’s a reasonable place to send the federal money and have them write the checks. Uh, it’s interesting. If you do these projects, you don’t distribute the money necessarily to the locals you distributed. Locally and to vendors and things. And sometimes it’ll go through cities and sometimes their counties, but it all starts at the state and they decided to put it in the controller’s office instead of.

You know, we’re we’re telephones have traditionally been regulated or in the governor’s office where, you know, other states are doing the infrastructure spending and things like that straight through their governor’s

[00:18:19] Jim Henson: office. And in fact, the governor had, you know, in the midst of the process of producing the legislation that we’ve seen in the discussion.

The governor had appointed a broadband commission. And when the dust cleared, I find it very authority, very interesting that the authority or a lot of latitude, shall we say wound up in the comptroller’s office. I don’t want to be gauche, but, um, I mean, I do want to be go, she, I don’t know. I don’t know why I’m acting this way with you of all people.

Um, you know, To be gauche. Um, the controller is one of the 800 pound gorillas waiting in the wings in terms of the next era of political change in the state, in, in electoral politics statewide, is he not?

[00:19:02] Ross Ramsey: He is. Um, I think he’s, you know, I mean, controllers are always positioned. It’s one of those offices that’s positioned to move up.

There’s two state offices that are involved basically in. Uh, one of them is the controller because that’s where all the money goes through. And, you know, they, all the state employees are paid out in there. All the money comes into the treasury. It’s where taxes are collected. They’re in every kind of deal.

And the people that work over there are aware pretty much of everything going on in government. The other place is kind of like that as the attorney general office, because that’s where all the, all the rules and regulations and lawsuits and all of that kind of stuff goes through. So they’re really in the loop and over time controllers and attorneys, general fact.

Have been, you know, that those are two of the seed beds for that’s where governors come from. And that’s where Lieutenant governors come from sometimes senators and things like that. Glen Hagar’s positioned really well right now. He said, he’s, you know, uh, the conservatives in the party like him, the moderates in the party, like him, the Democrats don’t hate him.

Uh, he’s been running a pretty, you know, nice, uh, op you know, I guess if you’re looking at the future of, you’re saying, you know, who’s going to be. Potentially on the ballot in 2024 or 26 or 28 beggars kind of at the top of your list. He’s one of those names. Uh, Greg Abbott’s already at the top. They have, Patrick’s a Lieutenant governor, uh, probably aging out pretty soon.

The attorney general is in legal trouble. Um, Hagar’s of the, uh, guy to watch.

[00:20:38] Jim Henson: Uh, and I think in terms of, you know, as we move a little into the political realm, now, you know, th this is in many ways, the parent of all, you know, structural institutional quote, unquote problems in the state, certainly, you know, not the first time we’ve talked about it, you know, publicly or privately, or the first time you’ve written about it.

Um, you do a good, you know, a really helpful column. I think there’s a, there’s a lot of public service in that column in terms of, uh, sorting. You know, uh, a take on how many competitive seats there are, et cetera, et cetera, but I’ll let people read that in the column itself and we’re going to run out of time.

So I do want to say. It’s perpetually in argument that redistricting has a negative effect on the responsiveness, on the system on party competition. It’s cetera. You know, I don’t think we need to rehash all of that per se, but I do want to ask you, you know, in terms of historical perspective, is there something this time that’s worse than before or not, or is it just business as usual?

You know, in other words, how do we place this redistricting, uh, the results of this redistricting round? In historical context. And how does it help us explain where we are at this moment in the state?

[00:21:55] Ross Ramsey: This was my four-three district. Um, and so every 10 years you see this and actually I’m old enough to have seen the Democrats do it.

And guess what? You know, they’re just as bad. Um, the people in power draw seats for the people in power, and they’ve gotten more and more efficient at it. And the law has changed through mostly through Supreme court interpretation. That make it easier to draw maps that have districts that are solidified institutionalized party control.

So in this Texas map, they’d drawn, you know, a number of seats for Republicans. I think it’s 84 and 66 for Democrats. And with very few exceptions, the seats drawn for one party or the other are not contestable by the other party. And they’ve gotten really, really refined it this 10 years ago. And certainly 20 years ago you would look at a map and you would say, well, this map, you know, has 150 house seats on it.

And 120 of them are pre-determined. And isn’t that outrageous that only 30 of these seats are competitive in November because you’d have about 36. Where, you know, given the winds of the day and the issues and the personalities on the ballot, 30 seats could go to the Republicans or the Democrats. Now you’re down to five in the house.

Um, so I guess the real difference is that, you know, even the appearance of some choice is largely gone. And the other thing that’s going on is Texas, you know, because of the way the primaries work here, the primary is way before the general election, ours are super early during the war. And the people that are picking, which Republican in which Democrats ascend to November are the most Republican Republicans and the most democratic Democrats, they’re the fire-breathing partisans.

And so we get a turnout of 17, I think it was 17 and a half percent. Last month of all registered voters showed up to vote. And those people pick candidates that because of the way the maps are. Are basically going into office, uh, they’ll finish it, uh, next month with the ROS. But again, that’s a party crew and it’s the very partisan people on the turnout properly, you know, histories, a guide going to be lower.

So this has the effect over time of, you know, more and more people don’t participate in the part of the election where the candidates are actually chosen. Then it goes to the politicians drawing the. Much greater control of who is going to get into the state legislature and into the states congressional

[00:24:27] Jim Henson: delegation.

Yeah. I mean, I th there’s an odd paradox at work here, I think, and I, you know, I could be wrong about this, but it. You know, it’s interesting that the re you know, the party, you know, Republican party was clearly in control of redistricting this time. No surprise there. Um, but in making a less ambitious play this time than they did, uh, in 2010, when they drew those maps and protect the, ultimately protecting more Democrats, it’s almost as if the response to the political system being more.

Somewhat more competitive, you know, in not as competitive as a lot of frankly Democrats say it is, but certainly more competitive, um, actually has worked to mute the democratic opposition, you know, through incumbent protection in that, you know, and I think that we’re going to see that we’re seeing that play out in the, in the numbers that you’re talking about.

[00:25:27] Ross Ramsey: I think what the Republicans saw in the mid decade redistricting in the first decade of the century and in the 2010 review. Is that the maps that were drawing overreached a little bit and in fact, decade over a decade. So you brought that up in 2010 and over the five election cycles until the next census, they would do a little bit worse each time.

And they drew the maps this time. We’ll see how it goes, but they drew these maps, you know, I mean, apparently openly saying we’re trying to draw persistent maps that won’t erode, and maybe we won’t start the decade with the super majority, but we won’t end the decade. Chewing our fingernails, like we did.

[00:26:06] Jim Henson: Right. Well, um, you know, I, I’m hoping to have chairman hunter on, um, and to talk to him about that. I have, I’ve had some offline conversations with him that were, you know, and not to give anything up. They weren’t in confidence and he didn’t say anything out of line, but I think he had a really striking experience with redistricting, um, in, in the last session.

I want to close that Ross, we we’ve talked. Uh, I’m going to keep my promise, not to make this a send off in the face of your impending, retirement and, and departure from the Tribune. But I, you know, you sent me up though, you know, I, I would feel remissed. I have to ask you then to step back and ask about your perspective as we talk about all of these fundamental issues.

And again, you know, you sent me up by just saying, this is your four-three three district Dean. It’d be malpractice for me to. Do something like this, you know, you’re obviously taking kind of a, you know, court vision view of where we are and we’ve talked, you know, we’ve talked a lot, you know, in working on, on polling about the rising, wrong track judgments about the path the state is on, um, about the increasingly sour mood of Texans.

And some of that obviously has. Some more recent correlates given what the last couple of years have looked like. Um, but I’m still, uh, you know, I want to ask you the right track, wrong track question. You know, you’ve been looking at the fundamentals, you know, as you step back from this a little bit, do you see this as a short-term fluctuation or do you, do you think something more fundamental is going on here and, and, you know, what’s your sense of the prospects?

[00:27:52] Ross Ramsey: I think, you know, I would say generally wrong track. And I would say, you know, oftentimes the people in politics and this is across parties. And, you know, I just think that people that get elected are often more focused right now on the political issues that move those small groups of voters in primaries than they are on the real sort of outlook.

And. Position and needs of the state and that if you stand back and say, what are our biggest problems and what are we doing about them? Um, if you walk into work, you know, as a governor and say, how does Texas become the best public school system in the country instead of, you know, saying whatever it is you’re saying on the campaign trail, then you get a different kind of governance, you know, there’s, uh, you know, whenever I get pessimistic, The way things are going, you know, it’s also true that whenever there’s a big problem that presents itself, when you know, there’s a really big issue that overwhelms the politics, politicians listen to the public that wants them to fix things.

You know, you see it on a national level when you get something back in a nine 11, uh, when everybody stops barking at each other and starts working the problem. Um, one of my favorite analogies for this is in the movie, Apollo 13. When the astronauts are in space, you’ve seen this movie when the astronauts are in space and they get a problem.

And you know, for a second there, everybody at NASA is running around like a chicken with your head, fall off. And the main guy says, people settled down work. The problem. And legislators tend to do that. Um, when there’s a big urgent need and voters are looking to them for leadership, they’re not very good at.

Sort of on their own. And we’re on one of those periods where the voters aren’t honestly, aren’t particularly paying attention, 82 and a half percent of us didn’t vote in primaries and the people who are paying attention, aren’t talking about the big stuff. So the politicians are talking about the big stuff and we’re getting, we have some big problems that really need to be solved.

And that was really the impetus for. The series of columns here at the end of my ride, you know, I started with one about Fred Rogers and about Apollo 13 back in early March, and then just been writing about these problems and that’s, that’s really the design of it. And that’s kind of how I.

[00:30:13] Jim Henson: I’m going to think of that is I’m, I’m S I’m trying to, uh, you know, I’m not going to characterize that position, but I’m going to think about it and I’ll get back to you on, on how I, how I should characterize that.

I was going to say guardedly optimistic, but I’m not sure. I really, I’m not sure that’s quite right either, but I liked the way you laid that out. Uh, Ross Ramsey, thanks for being here today and all the times that you’ve been here before. And, uh, I hope, you know, after you to. Well-deserved post retirement IADs.

If you’re in a direction to come back, we can have you back. And if not, then I’ll drill ya over beers. All right. Thanks again to Ross Ramsey. Thanks to our excellent production team in the audio studio in the liberal arts development studio at UT Austin. Thanks for listening. And remember, you can find lots more data writing a material on Texas politics at the Texas politics project website.

Www. Texas politics thought U texas.edu. Uh, I’m Jim Henson, and we’ll be back soon with another second reading podcast. Thanks for listening.

The second reading podcast is a production of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin. .