April 4th, 2023 – Looming budget politics in the Texas House & the strange case of the Senate re-do on SB 18

[00:00:00] Intro: 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.

[00:00:24] Intro: At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be re. 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. Happy to be joined again today by Josh Blank, research Director for the Texas Politics Project. Josh, how are you? This fine. Uh, Trump trial morning. I’m doing pretty okay.

[00:00:52] Jim Henson: Actually. Trump indicted. That’s Yeah, I was gonna say it’s not Trump

[00:00:54] Josh Blank: arraignment. No, we’re not there yet. I get ahead of ourselves. No.

[00:00:59] Jim Henson: Well, you know, I’m gonna, you know, we have to at least flag that this is happening since it’s, you know, Yeah. Of, of

[00:01:06] Josh Blank: some consequences. I don’t think the trial comes until the trench warfare period is over.

[00:01:09] Josh Blank: Right?

[00:01:10] Jim Henson: Yes. So there’s a lot of tr i I, I went too fast of the alliteration. Um, so today I’m, I’m still feeling tantalizing Trump trial, I’m still alliterating and, and feeling showy after the Taylor Swift experience Saturday night. Um, it’s true.

[00:01:24] Josh Blank: You’ve been impossible,

[00:01:27] Jim Henson: right? Well, even more impossible than usual.

[00:01:30] Jim Henson: Just shake it off, Josh. There we go. Oh, good. The, the pace of the legislative session in Austin here, getting down back, back, down to reality. Right. Okay. Pace of the legislative session in Austin is, is, you know, continues to be pretty brisk with committees. Still the center of most of the action, but floor, you know, floor activity.

[00:01:48] Jim Henson: Really picking up in both chambers as you know, is appropriate for where we are. So, I, I, I thought today, you know, we’d highlight a few things that are going on, mainly the, uh, what’s going on in the house this week, but a couple of other interesting things that have happened this week. Mm-hmm. And as I said at the beginning, it seems kind of impossible not to at least mention the major national political story political story dominating politics in the US Right now I’m getting a lot of international coverage.

[00:02:15] Jim Henson: Yeah. That, and that’s the arraignment of former, of President Trump in New York. Today, we’re recording Tuesday morning and everybody’s, you know, Waiting with baited breath for him to show up, which is supposed to happen this afternoon, and I don’t want to poke at that hornet’s nest anymore for today.

[00:02:31] Jim Henson: Right. Uh, very likely we’ll have the chance to come back to this topic. Um, but we do want a flag that if you’re looking for information on views of Trump in Texas, uh, we did a podcast on this couple of weeks ago and compiled a ton of data in the run up to his rally in wa. Um, at that time. You can find that in the blog section of the Texas Politics Project website, Texas politics.uex.edu.

[00:02:58] Jim Henson: And if you’re more of a DIY type, um, you can use the search engine on our website to find the Donald Trump tag or, or do a manual search and you’ll find hundreds of results going back to

[00:03:11] Josh Blank: 2050. I think I, I just noticed, I think, you know, the other day when I was looking at it, there are, I think 160 plus.

[00:03:19] Josh Blank: Survey results, right. Were depicted in, in that, in that search engine. And

[00:03:23] Jim Henson: that’s, and that’s probably even a little light. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. There’s probably some other, but yeah, there, there’s just, there’s a lot. And I guess I should say hundreds of, so there’s about 160 or you know, something like that in results.

[00:03:33] Jim Henson: But there are then thousands of graphics.

[00:03:35] Josh Blank: Yeah. Those are bro, yeah, those are broken down by every conceivable demographic you might wanna

[00:03:39] Jim Henson: look at. Right. And we pulled highlights out for that blog post, but there’s also just a lot of raw material for you to, to, to go look at if you are so inclined to find it.

[00:03:47] Jim Henson: Use. Or useless. Find it useful. But back in Texas, the, the big legislative event this week, I think in terms of overall impact, uh, is the house budget bill being debated on the floor this Thursday? Uh, bills a thousand pages long. Mm-hmm. Appropriately. Yep. Uh, after all they have to cover two years. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:08] Jim Henson: Um, and more than 380 amendments have been filed, had been filed by the Monday morning deadline, and there’s an amendment packet circulating that’s still not posted on the website, but the circulating. Capital circles the dark nets. Yes. On the, on the, well, you know, the gray nets. Um, we’ll, we’ll link the, uh, the amendment packet, uh, that is in a circulation to the post for this podcast, uh, on the same Texas Politics Project website.

[00:04:33] Jim Henson: So it’ll be a, a blog post for this podcast if you found it elsewhere. And we’ll, we’ll put a link to that packet in there. Um, but this raises the issue of what the spending priorities look like as the rubber meets the road and the legislature and the budget process. We’ll just get the cliche out of the way now.

[00:04:50] Jim Henson: It’s the only bill the legislature has to pass, right? Um, And this bill came outta the appropriations committee on a pretty lopsided but party line vote 23 3. Um, for the biennial budget, a few highlights to set up what we’re gonna talk about in public opinion. So spends about 136.9 billion in general revenue.

[00:05:10] Jim Henson: The budget itself being larger than that, right? Those include federal dollars. Yeah, given federal dollars, other things. Recommends an additional 5 billion for public schools. Somewhat more fu uh, funding for higher education. And that’s a, i, I believe a difference with the Senate version. Uh, about 3 billion to boost mental health services, about three and a half billion for cost of living adjustments for retired teachers.

[00:05:37] Jim Henson: 5.3 billion from the surplus to lower property taxes, and then an additional 12 billion in school property tax cuts. And, you know, you add those two together for the, the bottom line property tax cut total, and then on border security spending about 4.6 billion. Last I saw, identical to what was in the Senate.

[00:05:59] Jim Henson: You know, we’ve talked about this a bit. We’ll talk about it more. Um, now as the legislature was getting underway or, you know, had just gotten underway in our February poll, we asked Texans about their views of spending in several general areas. And, you know, I I looking at what’s in there and what’s been talked about, not to pat ourselves on the back.

[00:06:18] Jim Henson: Too much. We did a pretty good job of covering the waterfront. Mm-hmm. You know, and a couple of things that aren’t being talked about that much. Well, it’s good to have the data on those. So, so Josh gi give us a sense of how, what the results were and how this looked compared to what we found. Yeah,

[00:06:34] Josh Blank: and I think it’s important to sort of explain, you know, what the question kind of looks like here.

[00:06:37] Josh Blank: Essentially we, we give people 12 broad policy, you know, broadish, I would say policy areas like, you know, mental health services, K through Phil, public education, border security, transportation, to kind of give you an idea, and then we ask whether or not, you know, the, the voters think. That the SP is spending too much, too littler about the right amount.

[00:06:56] Josh Blank: And look, we don’t think that people know how much the state is spending on any of these areas in any sort of concrete way. The, the idea of a question like this is to get a sense of what people think about, you know, their perception of the state’s commitment to these areas fiscally, right? Right. Um, and that’s something that people do.

[00:07:12] Josh Blank: You know, people can say, you know, again, we talk about Texas often as a low taxes, low services kind of state. And so ultimately people will have a perception of whether the state is invested in public ed or is invested. Electric infrastructure or water infrastructure or not, they can also say, Hey, I have no

[00:07:27] Jim Henson: idea what I’ve always liked about this.

[00:07:28] Jim Henson: You know, this formulation is, you know, I mean, it’s both the strength and its weakness is that it’s, it’s kind of in that area. It, it captures both. People’s kind of disposition, what, what they sort of have in their head about the current sense, but also gives us some indication of how they might respond to new information about this.

[00:07:50] Josh Blank: Exactly. And so, and, and, and I think that’s the, the most important point here is that, you know, when you see an area where, you know, large majorities of voters and especially large majorities of majority party voters are saying the state is spending too little. That tells you or might explain why the legislature might then wanna kick in some more money so that when they go back around to the other, you know, sort of part of Texas politics, then the two year campaign cycle after the legislative cycle, they can say, And we made historic investments in X, right?

[00:08:17] Josh Blank: Y Z. So what does it look like? Well, you know, we asked about 12 different areas and, and a majority of re registered voters said the state was spending too little in, in five of those 12 areas. So just, just under half those included children in the state’s care. Unsurprisingly, 50% said the state was spending too little.

[00:08:32] Josh Blank: Water infrastructure 51%. Healthcare, 52% electric infrastructure, 56%, and then mental health services was, was 60%. So the highest of, of all of those issues, that was the area where, you know, Texans thought the state should be spending more. You know, the view among Democrats was that there was too little spending in most areas except for border security and the penal system.

[00:08:51] Josh Blank: And that’s, you know, I can think aligns with democratic ideology and on just general democratic views about state commitment to social services in a

[00:08:57] Jim Henson: rough sense. I remember, you know, when you first saw these results, you kind of look at it and go, yeah, that makes sense.

[00:09:01] Josh Blank: Yeah, that makes sense. You want that, you want, we call that internal consistency.

[00:09:04] Josh Blank: Yes. Right. So among Republicans, only one policy area saw a majority that said the state was spending too little. This was border security. I said we, I wanted to give everybody a second to guess. Oh, sorry. I went too fast. Um, and, you know, I’ll never guess what it was. And, and we’ve asked that border security spending in isolation, and I mean, one of the, you know, interesting things just to point out is that as the state has ramped up its border security spending in the last few years, uh, the share of Republicans, you say the state has spending too little, has also increas.

[00:09:30] Josh Blank: Uh, so actually, you know, there’s not a lot of responsiveness on this and, and in a lot of ways, this is why there’s not a lot of debate about this. Yeah. There’s not, there’s no difference in the thousand Senate budgets because you know what? They’re gonna spend it. Right. One of those

[00:09:40] Jim Henson: rare moments where you’re not really hearing a lot about border security because the consensus among the majority party is so firm and it’s a, and as we’ve.

[00:09:48] Jim Henson: Talked about in the podcast before. Yeah. It’s a good issue for Republicans in terms of where Democrats are as a group on border security.

[00:09:56] Josh Blank: Yeah, it’s certain, you know, it’s certainly an issue in which they have a lot of advantages, which we’ve talked about. You know, something that’s kind of important here, and I’ll talk a little bit more about the Spanish areas, but you know, it’s interesting in the, you know, when we used to ask about legislative priorities and prior discussions and, and I would say, you know, this is, some of this was circumstantial.

[00:10:10] Josh Blank: You know, when you think about. 20 11, 20 13 years. Think about sort of shifts in the last decade of Republican opinion on this. The presence of, you know, a, a significant minority, but a significant share of Republicans who, who really emphasize the importance of limiting state spending, keeping governments small as the

[00:10:27] Jim Henson: priority and as, yeah.

[00:10:29] Jim Henson: As a thing unto itself,

[00:10:30] Josh Blank: unto itself. You know, that has really kind of disappeared. Yeah. I mean, there’s not a lot of, uh, you know, fiscal conservatism floating around out there. And so, you know, and just to. Even though, uh, there are very few, you know, again, I think what you find is the plurality position among most Republicans across most spending areas that the state’s spending about the right amount.

[00:10:49] Josh Blank: Yeah. It’s not that there’s necessarily a call to decrease spending dramatically in a lot of areas nor to increase spending dramatically in a lot of areas. There’s just generally kind of a status quo, you know, sense, which is, it’s kind of interesting to me. This is, you know, just fundamentally like the budget does keep going.

[00:11:04] Josh Blank: The state keeps growing, the spending keeps growing in some ways, you know, you can look at some policies and say, government is growing here. But anyway, that’s another podcast maybe.

[00:11:11] Jim Henson: Well, I was just gonna say, I mean, it’s something that’s popped up in a few areas and a, you know, a few different domains.

[00:11:18] Jim Henson: Not just policy areas, but a few different domains. This notion of, you know, what is the accumulated view of the status quo among the party in power and their partisans. Um, at the popular level after a couple of decades of running the show, and I think we probably could string a bunch of stuff together on that.

[00:11:40] Jim Henson: That would be really

[00:11:41] Josh Blank: interesting. Yeah. I, I, I think so. I mean, right now I would say, you know what, what, what you can say is, is that we’re, if in the last, you know, The last part of the last decade, and part is just dating myself kinda when I started looking at this stuff closely. Yeah. But you start thinking about, you know, the Tea Party wave and moving in, you know, there’s been, you know, probably, you know, a relative shift from this focus on, again, limiting state spending to this sort of just, you know, Kind of status, or I say to limiting spending by local governments.

[00:12:09] Josh Blank: I mean, that’s actually where I think the shift kind of happens. You know, that happened again. Well,

[00:12:11] Jim Henson: you could imagine this in like the broad scope section of a history or a textbook. Mm-hmm. Or something, you know, it’s, you know, I think, I think I’m sort of thinking about the notion of like how long you’ve been watching, but Yeah.

[00:12:22] Jim Henson: You know, you think about like the paragraph and the section about the last, you know, about the party shift. Right. You know, it takes a while for you to like shake off. The sense that you’re undoing Right. What came before you. Yeah, that’s right. That makes sense. Right. At least among, you know, in the fa

[00:12:38] part

[00:12:39] Josh Blank: of the distribution.

[00:12:40] Josh Blank: Yeah. There’s lots of waste, fraud and abuse to, to, to stamp out and to cut when you just take power. But once you’ve been in power for a decade Right. Little bit more difficult and that

[00:12:49] Jim Henson: transfers to a bunch of other policy areas. Yeah, right. I think, you know, it’s like, okay. You know, you can only start TA talking about having to really change the status quo for so long when this year implicated in the status

[00:13:00] Josh Blank: quo.

[00:13:00] Josh Blank: Yeah, exactly. So, you know, except for border. So saying that aside, you know, except for border security, you know, children in the state’s care and, and mental health were the only other areas where, not a majority, but a plurality of Republicans said. You know, the state is not spending enough in each of the other nine areas.

[00:13:15] Josh Blank: We looked at, the plurality position was the state is spending enough right. About the right amount. And so, you know, to me, you know, again, we, we kind of, this is sort of one of the themes of, of this podcast, this session. Maybe one of the themes of the session, but you know, we’ll kind of come back to this, I’m sure.

[00:13:28] Josh Blank: But, you know, this creates a lot of space. Again, I think, you know, once you kind of take care of that border security spending and say, we did that at that point, you know, not only is there not, you know, a lot of. Calls for big shifts in spending either way. But also, and I mean, I think we’re acknowledging this in the way we write this question, it’s also just not terribly salient to people, you know?

[00:13:47] Josh Blank: Right. And, and, and, and difficult to understand

[00:13:49] Jim Henson: too. Yeah. And you know, the missing piece here, I think a little bit, not missing, but the. Yeah. The other shoe dropping here is the item when we did ask people about taxation, right. And, you know, the, by far, the widest, you know, the mm-hmm. The item, the, the tax, the estate tax, right.

[00:14:04] Jim Henson: Or the widest reported I impact was the property tax. And that is right now where most of the, you know, it’s not spending, but most of the allocation of this budget surplus, if you think about it that way mm-hmm. Is going right now. Yeah, for

[00:14:18] Josh Blank: sure. Definitely.

[00:14:20] Jim Henson: So, you know, so, so I think. You know, as you look at that, I mean this budget as we’re, you know, the, you know, we’re focused on the house budget, but the Senate budget, you know, there’s gonna be fights on this.

[00:14:31] Jim Henson: There’s gonna be a big fight over the prop. Yeah. What the prop, there’s already a big fight going on, right. Over how they’re gonna execute the property tax. Um, but you know, you look at these numbers, you look at the Republican numbers, but even for that matter where Democrats are to some degree, And you do see a reasonable degree of alignment here, certainly with Republican attitudes, even allowing for the slack that you’re, you know, that you’re talking about.

[00:14:57] Jim Henson: In other words, the space for the legislature to lead rather than follow,

[00:15:00] Josh Blank: perhaps. Yeah, I mean, and I think it’s one of those interesting things, you know, going into the session, there’s so much focus on, you know, what they were gonna do with the budget surplus. You know, I think the politics, you know, very quickly, you know, the public politics very quickly showed that most of that was gonna be focused on property tax reduction.

[00:15:15] Josh Blank: Um, and I think you could say, Again, where, which, which dollar goes where is kind of, you know, sometimes real and sometimes art, but like, you know. Yeah. But the other side of this too is, you know, you gotta just make this point again about, you know, I think public response. You know, if you were to go to any, you know, your, your modal voter, just, and say, you know, hey, the, the house is gonna spend 3.6 billion on x and 4.8 billion on y and, and 10 billion on z.

[00:15:40] Josh Blank: You know, honestly that doesn’t mean anything to most people, right? Because you say to them, Hey, how you know? If you could ask that same, that person, you say, what do you think about this? And say, Hey, by the way, how big is the Texas budget? And you know what? Almost nobody will have any sense of the size of the Texas budget, how much people are spending, whether that’s a lot of money, whether that’s a little, and both in terms of both in terms of the overall budget, but also in terms of the need.

[00:16:01] Josh Blank: Right? You know, I was talking to a group the other week, you know, and I kind of have to say is like, ha, I, you know, I don’t work at the LBJ school and I’m not an economi. Right. You know, is a 3 billion increase in whatever this space is. Is that a lot? Right? Is that something that, like, does that even

[00:16:13] Jim Henson: like are, are you saying, do you know if it’s too much, too little or the right amount?

[00:16:18] Josh Blank: And I, my answer is I have no idea. I don’t know, which is, well, hey listen, that’s the problem with expertise in some ways, right? You know, you have to be honest about these or you should be honest about these things. But I mean, part of it is like, look, you know, is this a lot in terms of. The state’s needs.

[00:16:30] Josh Blank: Does this, does this meet growing needs? Does this meet changes because of inflation? And honestly, I, you know, in a lot of these spaces, I have no idea. And I definitely know how much the budget is, and I know how much these numbers are. So then when you go to someone and you say, you don’t know how much the budget is, you don’t know what they used to be spending on this.

[00:16:47] Josh Blank: It’s just a different ballgame. And so I think, you know, it’s, it’s one of those things at this point, the, the broad takeaway from my perspective though, Yeah, yeah. There was this huge budget surplus, but there wasn’t some big obvious direct clamor for some kind of Right. Clear spending. And to the extent that like property taxes ended up sucking up all of that.

[00:17:06] Josh Blank: I don’t know if that’s following or leading, you know, I mean, a li to your point. Yeah.

[00:17:11] Jim Henson: Yeah. Uh, yeah. The arrows. Yeah. Um, you know, I, I think one other thing before we move on a little bit, I think it’s, in a way, it’s almost a good transition is that, um, You know, two things lurking in that data, and we talked about this at the B at the beginning, and it’s playing out in the legislature, I think in an interesting way, are these infrastructure issues?

[00:17:31] Jim Henson: Yeah. You know, I mean, there was a lot of support in those numbers you read for particularly water infrastructure. Mm-hmm. Um, electric is a thing on, on, in and of itself. Yeah. And on its own. Yeah. I’m gonna set that aside for the moment. That’s a tricky one. But for water and, and to a lesser degree, but still there.

[00:17:47] Jim Henson: Transportation. Mm-hmm. And, you know, there are pretty substantial structural moves. Quietly moving their way through the system, uh, to develop, you know, to, to increase sort of funding for water and transportation infrastructure. And it’s gonna be interesting to watch those and s and can and see if they continue to move and if ultimately some of that money is put there.

[00:18:13] Jim Henson: You know, it’s the kind of thing that I think the, the public is, you know, for all the reasons you were just discussing. Yeah. Unlikely to be highly salent to the public. Really having to jockey for position and doing maybe a little better than I would’ve expected six or eight months ago. Yeah. But you know, we’ve talked about it in here a lot.

[00:18:31] Jim Henson: We began to hear murmurs about this. Mm-hmm. Uh, you know, in the, in the fall and certainly right after the election. And, uh, some of these things are moving forward and I think they are, you know, there are, there are, I think the, the people that are interested in those issues, Doing a pretty good job so far of moving legislation through at about the right level of putting their, he, you know, sticking their heads above the hedges.

[00:18:57] Jim Henson: Yeah.

[00:18:58] Josh Blank: I mean, it strikes me that’s, that’s one of those things where that’s sort of like, let’s, you know, I would broadly almost classify that into, you know, that infrastructure piece. It, it, it fits in the economic development. Yeah, absolutely. You know, in a way that, you know, and for voters, it’s one of those things, you know, I think, you know, it’s impossible.

[00:19:13] Josh Blank: You can’t deny the growth in the state if you live anywhere near any urban center. Bar none. Right? There are issues going on with respect to transportation. There are water issues going on. Yeah. Everywhere in the state right now. And electricity obviously is its own thing, but it’s definitely, you know, it’s more salient than we would expect.

[00:19:29] Josh Blank: But I also don’t think that voters are necessarily calling for big, you know, multi-decade infrastructure investments until there’s a problem. But the problem is, is that when there’s a problem, then actually you start the process and it’s gonna take a decade plus to complete. So that’s too late, right?

[00:19:41] Josh Blank: Cause this requires a little bit more for, you know, forethought and kind of. Oriented thinking on the part of the legislature, honestly. Hey, you know, I don’t know. I watch politics a lot. It’s pretty rare to see legislators of anybody anywhere thinking beyond the next election cycle, right? But there’s a lot of exposure with something like this.

[00:19:59] Josh Blank: So I think on the one hand, you know, you can kind of see that bubbling up down there. You know, especially if you’re Republicans in a more competitive state worrying about, you know, if the trip to the office when it happens takes. An hour and a half. What used to take 20? Like that’s a problem.

[00:20:11] Jim Henson: It’s, and it’s a non, it’s a non glorious issue.

[00:20:13] Jim Henson: It’s a quality of life. You know, we were involved in that research project a couple years ago mm-hmm. In which we talked to a lot of legislators Oh, yeah. Within Texas and, and elsewhere. Mm-hmm. And that was one of the common themes was that, you know, You’re kind of doing the Lord’s work here. Yeah, because everything takes a long time.

[00:20:29] Jim Henson: It’s complicated. There’s no short term political payoff in most cases, and so most people don’t really wanna mess with it. And there are a lot of other cross currents, for example, as we’re seeing right now, not to comment on the virtues of the plan or not, but the implementation of the project Connecting in Austin.

[00:20:45] Jim Henson: Right. Project in Austin. The attempted involvement of the legislature in that right now. Mm-hmm. Et cetera. So, yeah. So, you know, let’s, let’s look at, um, You know, a few other things going on. Mm-hmm. While we still have a little bit of time. Um, and, and, and I guess, you know, we had talked about this as sort of a check-in post budget in terms of, you know, pe this to some of the things that are going on.

[00:21:08] Jim Henson: Right. Um, you know, a couple of observations as expected, Lieutenant Governor Patrick continues to dominate the Senate. Mm-hmm. Um, but there was an interesting. Blip in that. Uh, just yesterday, as we were, again, we’re recording this on Tuesday, and so when the senators were on the floor to pass some bills on Monday, um, you know, about an hour and a half in, they went back to a bill that had passed a very controversial bill that had passed on second reading the previous.

[00:21:36] Jim Henson: The previous week, and most of our re uh, listeners will know this, but just to clear, if you just happen to stumble into this, this, this podcast, and you’re still listening and you’re still listening, you know, second reading is really the, the one that matters of the three times a bill has to be read. Um, and this was SB 14, the, the very controversial bill, um, at least among some people, uh, Authored by Senator Donna Cam, Donna Campbell, that would essentially prohibit most gender affirming medical care in Texas right now.

[00:22:09] Jim Henson: This bill, as I said, had been passed with some debate, uh, last week. Now after the Senate had been in for a while, yesterday there was a motion by Senator Brian Hughes, who is sort of a, you know, one of the major lieutenants of the lieutenant Governor. Yep. Lieutenant Governor’s lieutenant. Mm-hmm. I should have thought about phrasing that differently maybe.

[00:22:27] Jim Henson: But, um, he moved to suspend the rules so they could reconsider the passage ofs P 14. And the point here was to reconsider an amendment that had been added to the bill, um, in that ame in, in the pre, in its initial second reading. Mm-hmm. Uh, that amendment had been worked out with the house author, state representative Tomson, and it’s, it’s interesting to note here, both, uh, Senator Campbell and representatives state representative Oliver are doctors.

[00:22:54] Jim Henson: Mm-hmm. Um, and that amendment would’ve exempted children that were already receiving gender affirming medical treatment, like puberty blockers or hormone, the, or hormone therapy medications. Mm-hmm. It would’ve kind of grand parented them in as an exception. Right. To the prohibitions in the. Now that amendment was originally passed without objection.

[00:23:15] Jim Henson: Uh,

[00:23:16] Josh Blank: full stop. Just yeah,

[00:23:17] Jim Henson: no objection. Right. Well, we’ll, we’ll, and, and Senator Campbell then, you know, having had the rules suspended by the motion of Senator Hughes and, and the quick cooperation and, and a seating of the Lieutenant Governor who was presiding at the time and, uh, the parliamentarian, she now wanted a do-over on that amendment, essentially.

[00:23:40] Jim Henson: Mm-hmm. A couple of Democrats rose to ask her some questions about this. Now, I would note that nobody objected to the motion, which I didn’t quite understand, but I, you know, I’ll have to ask some people about that some more. I think they missed an opportunity, frankly, but, mm-hmm. Um, A couple of Democrats then rose to try to find out from Senator Campbell why she wanted to roll back the amendment.

[00:24:05] Jim Henson: So we’ve got a brief excerpt of an exchange between Senator Campbell and Democratic Senator Jose Menendez. So let’s roll that clip and then we’ll talk about it on the other side. What is the policy decision to remove the amendment today? The actual amendment that I put on 14, or are you talking about the date from December 10th?

[00:24:25] Jim Henson: The, the amendment that would allow. The children who are currently under the care of a doctor to continue to finish their care.

[00:24:33] Josh Blank: The,

[00:24:34] Jim Henson: the amendment was not discussed in committee and there were so many questions that have been brought up since the amendment was put on that. Out of respect for the body.

[00:24:47] Jim Henson: I’m gonna just take it down, ask that it be taken down,

[00:24:54] Jim Henson: but no one objected to your amendment. When we adopted the amendment. So what do you mean by respect when you didn’t vote for the amendment? Uh, no, I I There was no objection. Oh, you, the president said, does, is there objection, without objection. Amendments adopted so no one objected to the amendment. So I don’t understand where we’re lacking respect for the body.

[00:25:12] Jim Henson: I think Well, not, I think, I know there have been so many questions that have come up. There was no discussion regarding the amendment I was going to put on in c. And truly out of respect for everyone, I am gonna ask for the, it just be, uh, removed. I wanna, I wanna withdraw it. Remove it. Okay. Now what Senator Campbell is insane and I think what both Senator Menendez and then in a subsequent exchange, Senator, uh, Nathan Johnson, another Democrat, seemed to be trying to get her to admit.

[00:25:49] Jim Henson: Pretty notably if painfully without any success is that the amendment had been heavily criticized in the intervening days by, you know, the most conservative groups and, and some, you know, opinion leaders of those groups, um, including the state, g o p Chairman, uh, former house back bencher, Matt, Ronald. Um, on Twitter and, and certainly I’m sure in feedback to their, to their office.

[00:26:14] Jim Henson: And, you know, you can find Randi’s, uh, uh, chairman Randi’s tweets if, if you’re so inclined. It had the usual kind of language describing gender affirming treatment as castration and MUA, chemical, mu and mutilation, et child cetera. Child and child abuse. Child abuse, and then later. You know, after this was passed, uh, claim that it wasn’t, you know, anybody bowing to pressure from anyone, they were just doing the right thing, et cetera.

[00:26:40] Jim Henson: Um, It was a very awkward moment though. And, and, and you one that I thought the lieutenant governor, I would say was not enjoying much and I’ll, and I’ll, you know, that’s a judgment call. Sure. Um, you can find, you know, you can find the clip and, and, uh, if you didn’t see it and, you know, ch check me on this.

[00:26:59] Jim Henson: Um, as the parliamentarian walked him through the maneuvers, Lieutenant Governor was very, Let’s say brisk. Yeah. In getting through the sequence of motions to strip the amendment, uh, and, and to also move up the effective date of the bill. Right. That’s part of what that mm-hmm. Some of that. Direction, redirection and misdirection going on.

[00:27:20] Jim Henson: Mm-hmm. Is that the, you know, in stripping off the bill, they al in stripping off the amendment that was being discussed, part of that amendment had also moved up the effective date of the legislation. Right. Um, and, and there was a real effort, I think, to get the whole thing behind them and the bill back on track.

[00:27:36] Jim Henson: Now, I don’t think. Proof positive that, you know, Lieutenant Governor is slipping or something. Right. But, but something had clearly gone wrong there and gone amiss. And it did raise the question of the relationship between what many people perceive as one of the important routes of Lieutenant Governor’s power, which is the fact that, you know, he is ultimately of, you know, compared to the other members of the big three mm-hmm.

[00:28:01] Jim Henson: Lieutenant Governor is. The party activist guy, you know? Yeah. Um, he’s their avatar, if you will. Um, and so it was, it was a very interesting moment. Interesting in terms of this theme we talked about, but also interesting in terms of, you know, the difference between what’s going on in the house and what’s going on in the Senate.

[00:28:23] Jim Henson: Yeah. And their, and their institutional design, of course. But

[00:28:26] Josh Blank: yeah, no, I mean, it’s, it’s just another, you. It’s just another great example. I mean, just imagine, you know, had this happened in the house, how much more difficult it would’ve been? To kind of turn back the clock. Yeah, go back, undo what they did and come out.

[00:28:41] Josh Blank: But it’s also, you know, I mean just as, as an observer of these things, it just in and of itself, things like the institutional dynamics. It’s just a really, you know, again, say what you want about where the pressure came from or who is doing what, or respect for whom. It was a pretty remarkable instance and a really naked one in which.

[00:28:56] Josh Blank: You know, essentially in real time, almost, almost in real time, you could see the control of, you know, the most far right elements or the, even some of the dissident elements of the party essentially coming in and. Tweaking the legislation, and I mean, importantly, not even legislation that the senators had all agreed to, even if by silence, but an amendment that had been agreed on between the senators and an important house member carrying the same bill Yeah.

[00:29:24] Josh Blank: Who had defended the, the amendments. Yeah. Who now is kind of being left out to dry. Right. Yeah.

[00:29:30] Jim Henson: Well, and, and that, and that, you know? Yeah. And, and I think that that really. Yeah, I mean, it, it underlines the degree to which, you know, It underlines a lot of different things. I mean, you know, I don’t want to be overly repetitive here.

[00:29:46] Jim Henson: Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I, I, I think that it was, it was a real moment and look, to be fair, and I, I’m sure that, you know, listeners have been watching this for a long time, will say, Hey, look, you know, it became kind of a joke that, you know, the house would, you know, turn back the clock. Yeah. You know, or hey, backup members.

[00:30:03] Jim Henson: Yeah. Uh, during the Straus. Uh, during, during, so the heyday of the Straus speakership when, you know, there were big fights going on where, you know, Strauss was besiege. You know, one day it would be, you know, Trey Martinez Fisher and the Democrats pushing them on procedure. Yeah. Another day it would be the Tea Party guys.

[00:30:20] Jim Henson: And so look, you know, part of skillful leadership in these chambers. Is being able to, shall we say, take full ex full advantage of the flexibility of the rules. Mm-hmm. And, you know, understanding whe when and where you can stretch them in under what circumstances. But it, you know, this was still, you know, because of the degree to which this had seemed worked out the week before.

[00:30:46] Jim Henson: And the degree to which this hasn’t been happening much in the Senate in particular. Yeah, it was. Yeah. You know, it was an interesting moment. I mean, it’s not a, a political earthquake, but I think, you know, it, it’ll be one of the moments, you know, I’ll remember about this session. Right. Yeah, for sure. Um, and, and you know, in a more practical way, the question now on the issue is you kind of flag Josh, you know, how’s the house gonna respond?

[00:31:06] Jim Henson: Yeah. I mean, uh, as you kind of said, you know, state rep Oliver Sin had been very publicly supportive of the bill with this grandparenting amendment. Um, in, in a pretty public way and in the way of, The rivalries and the tensions that are baked into the House and the Senate, but also the personal piece of this.

[00:31:28] Jim Henson: You know, it’s, it’s gonna be very interesting to see what happens as, as these bills, as this bill moves through on something that, again, pretty obviously some very activated elements of the coalition are paying attention to. And we should flag, you know, there’s very good coverage of this from. Uh, not surprisingly, Lauren Muhi of the Dallas Morning News, who’s been on this beat really per, uh, effectively and consistently for a while now, and also Taylor Goldstein in the Houston Chronicle.

[00:31:56] Jim Henson: And the, uh, Muhi captures the blow by blow very well. The Chronicle did an interesting thing, and I don’t know, it may be different now, but as of yesterday afternoon, they had posted the update on this, on top of the previous story in the Chronicle. How the subtext of what of of which was, well, reasonable minds kind of prevailed, at least in this grandfathering clause.

[00:32:22] Jim Henson: Right. So it’s almost like, you know, they were, you know, it’s like, oh, okay, we, we were giving people the benefit of the doubt and then it kind of didn’t work out. So, you know, I would look at both of those. Yeah. Now, so another interesting thing going on this week that I think, you know, we’ve also talked about in here, and again, this is one of those issues that’s.

[00:32:41] Jim Henson: You know, galactically, earth shaking, but it’s got a lot of attention inside the building and, and inside Austin because of the resources that have gone into this. Mm-hmm. And the long term nature of the policy issue. And that’s of course gambling and gaming. Um, And the two gaming, the two big gaming bills that are out there in the house.

[00:33:00] Jim Henson: The, uh, chairman Leach’s bill on on online sports betting and the big Charlie Garen omnibus bill on casino gambling. Um, both of those moved out of committee with provisions that will require super majorities to pass for proposed constitutional amendments. Sure. And so that was, you know, kind of big news in the community.

[00:33:21] Jim Henson: That’s as far as these bills have gotten. Yeah. Right. After several years of trying and, and many millions invested and, you know, pools built and stuff in the lobby, uh, pools built, trips taken. Right. Um, but over in the Senate, Uh, Lieutenant Governor’s still not on board to circle back to, you know, where the Lieutenant Governor is on things.

[00:33:42] Jim Henson: Mm-hmm. And, um, a lot of talk about this. Of course, I think we even mentioned it last week in passing, kind of in the podcast or maybe the week before. But, you know, the lieutenant governor, you know, has made it clear recently, um, that he’s still not on board, but he did so in a way that again, kind of circles back and helps illustrate.

[00:34:01] Jim Henson: Kind of what the dynamic we’re seeing. Yeah, and the, and again, differences between the house dynamic, the Senate dynamic. Well, we’ll talk about it more on the other side. We’re gonna play an excerpt from, uh, uh, an interview, uh, that the Lieutenant Governor did with conservative radio host, uh, and, and really, you know, guys become one of the master signal relays in the information ecosystem in Republican Texas.

[00:34:26] Jim Henson: And that’s Mark Davis. And this was really the governor saying, I’m not having any of it. So let’s roll the, those clips and what you’re gonna hear, um, before we roll. Just to, you know, to be fair, two, two separate clips that we’ve just combined in the same conversation. I don’t think we’re misrepresenting anything, but I just don’t want you in give just one clip, so let’s roll those.

[00:34:47] Jim Henson: Unless I have 1516 Republicans, meaning it’s a Republican driven bill because we’re in a Republican driven state. Mm-hmm. Led by conservative Republicans. I’m not bringing a bill to the floor. I need to have consensus. By the Republicans. Otherwise it’s a bill that the Democrats are passing. We don’t do that in the Senate.

[00:35:05] Jim Henson: I, you know, says a lot. Um, you know, and, and this is again, not news in terms of the general orientation, right? Uh, Lieutenant Governor made a point of not appointing about appointing only one democratic chair committee chair and saying that would be it. That’s. Yeah. Um, and you know, Senator John Whitmeyer, um, which, you know, and this had a fairly natural expiration date as chairs go, not talking about Senator Whitmeyer personally.

[00:35:31] Jim Henson: And, and you know, so I thought this was interesting in a lot of ways. Before we go on, I wanna just give a hat tip for that clip that was from Coverage by Monica Madden, the capital correspondent for KX a n here in Austin. Uh, she tracked that clip down from the Mark Davis show for a story that she did on KX a over the weekend, and you can find that on, on their website.

[00:35:51] Jim Henson: Um, but, you know, we talked about the, the gambling, how the Lieutenant Governor isn’t into it pretty clearly. And, you know, public opinion is. A little tough for the, for the gambling advocates. Right? Yeah. When

[00:36:03] Josh Blank: we asked about whether gambling laws in Texas should be made more strict, less strict, or just basically left alone, you know, overall, you know, the, the, the energy was a little bit on making it less strict, a plurality, you know, 39% said make it less strict, 25% of the status quo.

[00:36:17] Josh Blank: 20% is one force and make it, make it more. One five, make it more strict. You know, among Republicans, it was pretty similar actually to the statewide numbers overall, you know, I mean, in fact it was almost identical. But when we look at the people who say that they’re extremely conservative, 60% would either leave the status quo or make those laws more strict and similar numbers of people for who you know.

[00:36:37] Josh Blank: Again, we’ve talked, we’ve actually written about this a long time ago in the past, but these numbers actually still kind of come up again when we look at people with strong religious identifications in Texas. Entirely identify with the Republican Party. They hold views similar to the extremely conservative Texans who say Essent.

[00:36:53] Josh Blank: Either leave those laws alone or make them more strict. And so given that, you know, given that, you know, you kind of look at, at those groups who really dominate, especially Republican primaries, you have a, you know, a little bit less than a third who want to see gambling laws loose. And then to read beyond the data here, honestly, and just saying, I’m reading beyond the data.

[00:37:11] Josh Blank: Probably not a central issue for a lot of those people. You know, it’s probably not likely that a lot of very conservative voters who wanna see the voting law or the gambling laws is made less strict. This is probably not more important to them than immigration in the border. It’s not more important than, you know, uh, property tax cuts.

[00:37:25] Josh Blank: And so, you know, in some ways, I think, you know, without some sort of ground swell and a, and again, attitudes that look like. There’s not really much reason for lieutenant Governor to kind of, I don’t know, I say use his own capital to push this issue.

[00:37:37] Jim Henson: Yeah. It’s still a stretch. And I, and I think this is one of those issues where, you know, look, it’s, it’s easy to be, cynical is too strong a word, but I’ll just say cynical.

[00:37:46] Jim Henson: It’s easy to be cynical by, you want be skeptical or cynical about the politics of this and, and decision making by the Lieutenant Governor and other leaders. But I think it is fair if you look at things, you know, if you look at gambling, mm. You look at cannabis Yep. And you look at the way that the Lieutenant Governor is, has, is, you know, is a pretty hard no on, on those, on both of those policy areas.

[00:38:09] Jim Henson: Mm-hmm. Despite a lot of cross currents. You know, I, I do think it’s fair to say that the Lieutenant Governor is, With a lot of complications, a relatively, you know, organic expression of that part of the Republican base. Yeah, I think that’s right. You know, and so, you know, there is a, a bit of his own impulses here that are reinforcing the politics.

[00:38:33] Josh Blank: You know, I think it’s notable going back to when he ran for that position, and I remember the debate with him and Dewhurst, and I wanna say it was Staples and Patterson, right? And I remember when the abortion issue came up and there was a moment where, you know, Patrick basically. Went out on front and said, you know, I’m, I’m down for banning abortion basically in all circumstances.

[00:38:53] Josh Blank: Yeah. And I remember, you know, you look at that, you look at that debate stage and you, and they all kind of, kind of looked at each other and there was a pause for a second and then, you know, it’s like, Me, me too. You know, and I think that’s kind of, you know, and this’s the thing. I mean, this is some issues, especially again, that sort of organic ex, you know, real depths of conservatism in the state that, you know, just, it’s, it’s his home base.

[00:39:15] Josh Blank: Yeah. And I think, you know, and I mean that plus the other piece of, I mean, what’s interesting about the, the clip before that about is, you know, it’s interesting to imagine that, you know, if he. 10 Republican senators and eight Democrats, that’s just a no-go.

[00:39:27] Jim Henson: Yeah. And, and, and, and he’s just not gonna do, you know, he, you know, he has made a pretty strong decision, I think, that he’s sticking with about how he wants the Senate to run and how he thinks it should run.

[00:39:42] Jim Henson: Yeah. And it is, you know, at odds with, you know, what we have thought about traditionally and what people have often trumpeted as mm-hmm. What makes the Texas legislature. Yeah, in terms of compromise and cooperation and everybody’s kind of chummy about it. And, and you know, this is where as a communicator and as somebody who spent, you know, is very good at the public managing his public presentation of self.

[00:40:08] Jim Henson: Mm-hmm. Um, You know, you connect that to sort of the la the previous clip and what was happening there. If you, if so, you go and you watch that longer, you know, the longer debate over the Campbell bill and all of the, you know, the, the shifting that went on and the replay in the kind of, you know, re rebooting of that bill yesterday, the underlying mood of the Senate is just palpable.

[00:40:35] Jim Henson: Mm. What do you mean in that? And what I mean is, You know, both the Democrats that spoke up against that. Yeah. Pretty dispared. Yeah. I mean, and, and not to, and that, I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. No, but you know, you can see them questioning Senator Campbell, you’ve watched a lot of episodes of this.

[00:40:52] Jim Henson: Yes. Knowing that she’s not going to really answer their question in a very direct way, which she does not do. Right. But they also, it, you know, baked in is the knowledge. They’re, they’re not, probably not gonna affect the

[00:41:05] Josh Blank: trajectory of this thing. Well, I mean, I mean, it goes back to, you know, exactly what you said, which was, you know, odd in that scenario.

[00:41:11] Josh Blank: Not to object to the motion at the beginning, even just to kind of have that conversation. Right. But again, and Dan Patrick said it, I don’t know if that’s really what you want to do.

[00:41:22] Jim Henson: And so, you know, I mean all, so these two things, obviously we picked out this, you know, the nice thing about, to me and picking out these two episodes and there’s lots of stuff going on right now.

[00:41:31] Jim Henson: Yeah. We could have picked out a lot of things, but is that it really? I mean, these things I think together mm-hmm. Kind of capture the dynamic between the two chambers. Mm-hmm. You know, we haven’t talked about Dave Felan, but you know, lurking in here is the differences between the way Felan is running the house.

[00:41:48] Jim Henson: Mm-hmm. We’ve talked about the very different nature of his priorities. Right. The bill sponsors on his list of priorities, the priorities, the Lieutenant governor, um, and how that is all playing out. A lot of this is happening, you. More or less as expected. Yeah. That doesn’t mean that we know how things are gonna turn out.

[00:42:08] Jim Henson: There’s a lot of uncertainty in this, but it, it, it’s an interesting week for the pattern to really be settling in as, as again, the, you know, things are getting much more serious and the pace is

[00:42:18] Josh Blank: picking up, you know? Yeah. And hearing you talk about that, it really does encapsulate, you know, this sort. An interesting element between the last session and this session, right, in the sense that the last session was so conservative and so many things were passed, and yet there was still a certain amount of disconnect content.

[00:42:33] Josh Blank: And you can see that in the Republican Party platform here. You can see that in the elevation of Matt Ranaldi as chair of the Republican party and the way that he has approached that job. Yeah. Right. But in some ways, you know, if I were to sort of do a shorthand for like, well, what, you know, you have someone you know, especially like a reporter from Madison.

[00:42:48] Josh Blank: You know, what are they upset about? You know, and they being, you know, sort of Republican voters, especially Republican Prime. And the answer that I would give is that, you know, I think the, what upset, you know, what is, where the upset comes from within the activist corners of the party, is this view that they’ve got a majority in the Senate, super majority as they define it each time.

[00:43:06] Josh Blank: Yeah. They’ve got the lieutenant governor, they’ve got. The governor, they’ve got the speaker of the house, they have a majority of members. Therefore, they should be able to pass everything they want. They should not have to touch anything they don’t want. Now the problem, so one, okay. And I think the lieutenant Governor has taken that on, but the problem is, is kind of, you know, as we were kind of talking, well he gets, he gets to use it as a stick.

[00:43:27] Josh Blank: He gets to use it as a stick. But I think the problem also is, you know, kind of, it kind of actually goes back to somewhat where we start, which is, you know, And it’s something I say to a lot of people too. You know, the legislature’s gonna have about 5,000 bills floating around out there. You know, they’ll pass about a thousand and I’m not talking about, you know, the joint resolutions and stuff like that, and maybe 20 bills or, or their comp 20 bills in their companions might like.

[00:43:51] Josh Blank: Peak public salience a little bit. Yeah. People might be kind of aware that something’s going on. Right. And when you’re talking about, when we’re talking about this issue of like, we should be able to pass everything we want, it’s not about like, what do we want? Like water infrastructure? No, nobody’s, no, that’s not it.

[00:44:05] Josh Blank: It’s like, no, we wanna make sure that there’s no transition related care. We wanna make sure that there’s a, you know, a voucher program, whatever that, whatever that manifests itself as. And some of that’s gonna be leading something that’s following. It depends. But there’s sort of that, that, you know, that, that you take sort of the Campbell piece on, on that bill, and then you have the G O P chair kind of saying, Hey, you guys messed up.

[00:44:26] Josh Blank: You better fix that. And then they quickly go and fix it. In the Senate, the house is kind of left holding the bag saying, you know, wtf. Right. And then you’ve got the Lieutenant governor on the Mark Davis show saying, yeah, look, if I don’t, you know, look, the only bills that are gonna pass are gonna have 16 to 19 Republican votes.

[00:44:42] Josh Blank: Yeah. He said 15 or 16, but yeah. Yeah. Um, you know, it’s like, And that kind of, you know, I mean that is a, you know, again, to say the fact that like, this is Dan Patrick’s home ideologically, but also this is something that he is manifesting and the truth. Whether the house follows suit or not, it actually doesn’t really matter for Dan Patrick, right?

[00:44:58] Josh Blank: If the house doesn’t follow through and all this stuff, then he, he’ll kick him around, which is happy to do, which he’s happy to do. He’s happy to raise money off of he’s ra, he’s happy to get in their business. He’s probably happy to use it as a justification for another term to get done what he, what he hasn’t gone done

[00:45:10] Jim Henson: yet.

[00:45:10] Jim Henson: And then, and if they do pass it and they do have to fold on it, then he claims leadership and yeah. You know,

[00:45:15] Josh Blank: either way. So thank God, thank God he was there, right?

[00:45:18] Jim Henson: So, you know, yes. So I, I think. What really comes out of this is a, you know, is a very, it’s a good setup for what we’re gonna see in the house on Thursday.

[00:45:29] Jim Henson: Mm-hmm. And how that’s gonna be a real, we’re gonna s you know, we’re gonna learn some things, I think, in this budget debate. Yeah. As we see how some of these amendments are dealt with and what they look like and, and, and how that. How that day goes, right? And who, you know, what, what the win loss kind of record looks like on some of those amendments and, and, and what that budget bill looks like as it goes to the Senate.

[00:45:52] Jim Henson: So with that, thanks to Josh for being here, helping gather data for this. Uh, thanks as always to our excellent production team in the Deb studio in the College of Liberal Arts. UT Austin for processing those clips at the last minute and generally giving us excellent production support. Uh, data we talked about can be found as always@texaspolitics.tex.edu.

[00:46:17] Jim Henson: Thank you for listening and we will be back soon with another second reading podcast.

[00:46:27] Outro: The second reading podcast is a production of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.