Does tapping the Rainy Day Fund have 90 House votes to move on to the Senate — and how much will the process of getting there damage the even bigger task for lawmakers of setting the next biennium's budget?

Texas House Appropriations committee approves use of 3.2 billion of rainy day fund for 2011 budget.

House Appropriations Chairman Jim Pitts, R-Waxahachie, thought he had a deal with Gov. Rick Perry and his staff to tap the Rainy Day Fund to close the current biennium shortfall. But with no public support from the governor's office, Pitts adjourned his hearing. 

No time to follow every twist and turn of the Texas Legislature? We've made it easier for you with our weekly recaps of the action under the dome.

State Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, is concerned about budget cuts to a program that discounts utility bills for the elderly and those with low incomes.

We're liveblogging the House Appropriations Committee hearing, where lawmakers are expected to consider whether to tap into the state's Rainy Day Fund. 

Many Texas lawmakers have forsworn taxes, but they also promised to educate kids, to build roads, to care for the needy and to do what government is expected to do. It’s the adult version of those mathematical story problems that made sixth grade so much fun.

Approaches to budget cutting have divided lawmakers and their constituents, but as Erika Aguilar of KUT News reports, tension is brewing between two other worried groups: small and large businesses.

State Sen. Robert Deuell, R-Greenville, would rather raise taxes a little bit than make the cuts lawmakers are considering now, he told the Tribune this evening.

A dozen protestors from disability rights group ADAPT gathered at Gov. Rick Perry's office this afternoon to block the entrances. Organizers say they wont leave until Perry pledges to oppose cuts to community services.

At this morning's TribLive conversation about health care, state Rep. John Zerwas, R-Simonton, took a more aggressive position than most of his fellow Republicans on the subject of whether to tap the Rainy Day Fund and how much should be tapped.

At last Wednesday's TribLive conversation, first-term House members Stefani Carter, R-Dallas, Cindy Burkett, R-Mesquite, and Rodney Anderson, R-Grand Prairie, talked about whether the Legislature should dip into the Rainy Day Fund to reduce the size of the projected budget shortfall.

The best of our best content from Feb. 14 to 18, 2011.

Texas, like many other states, is proposing billions of dollars in cuts to help close a budget gap. But as Ben Philpott of KUT News and the Tribune reports, one thing Texas has that nobody else does is $9 billion in a piggy bank called the Rainy Day Fund — and lawmakers are divided over whether to crack it open.

Gov. Rick Perry told lawmakers Tuesday he is against tapping the state's $9.4 billion Rainy Day Fund to close the budget shortfall: “That approach would not only postpone tough, necessary decisions." 

The chairman of the House Public Education Committee on whether the Rainy Day Fund should be used, in part or in whole, to reduce the size of the budget shortfall.

More money is not the answer to our current woes. Just as anyone managing a household budget knows, when a family’s expenses grow beyond its income, the solution is to cut back — particularly if its spending habits resemble the state's.

We need a balanced approach that uses our reserves and adds revenue. And we have to start by casting aside wishful thinking; we are writing the 2012-13 budget, with higher costs and increased enrollment in education and health care services — not some past budget.