Pressing deadlines, unfinished business: Where the Legislature stands on abortion, water, property tax and more

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Less than three weeks remain in the Legislature’s 140-day session, and while Gov. Greg Abbott has secured passage of his top priority — school vouchers — nearly every other top issue remains unfinished.

Making their way through the legislative gauntlet — and soon facing end-of-session deadlines — are measures to lower property taxes, tighten the state’s bail laws, dedicate money for water projects and clarify when doctors can perform life-saving abortions. Also unresolved is the final makeup of the state’s more than $330 billion two-year budget, along with a nearly $8 billion package to boost public school funding.

And there are a raft of social conservative priorities endorsed by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick hanging in the balance, including bills that would infuse more religion into public schools and give school boards and parents more say over which books can be put on school library shelves.

The closest big deadline is Thursday: the last day for House lawmakers to give tentative approval to most bills that began in the lower chamber. Senate bills have another 12 days after that to reach the House floor, which means, in practice, they must advance out of their assigned House committees by May 24. That will be the next key hurdle for several items atop the to-do lists of GOP state leaders, from restrictions on personal injury verdicts to abortion.

Still, even after blowing a must-pass deadline, legislation can be revived by being grafted onto a related bill, or via other forms of parliamentary wizardry.

“The Legislature, even with its rules and the politics and everything else — the first thing you learn is, never say never,” said Ken Armbrister, who served as chief legislative aide to former Gov. Rick Perry after a 24-year career serving in both chambers. “I've seen things that were obviously just dead as a doornail miraculously come to life in the last few days of the session.”

Patrick and his GOP counterpart across the Capitol rotunda, House Speaker Dustin Burrows of Lubbock, have both projected confidence they are on track to meet upcoming deadlines. They have each touted productive meetings throughout the session, such as a recent dinner at which, Patrick said, the two Republicans “went through both chambers’ priority bills” and “set forth a plan.”

House lawmakers are spending this week churning through a backlogged floor agenda filled with hundreds of lesser-known House bills — ensuring that, once Thursday’s midnight deadline passes, Senate bills will have to be the vehicle for most of the biggest remaining priorities.

June 2 is the final day of the session, though Abbott could call lawmakers back for an overtime session if they fail to pass any of his top priorities — or if Patrick forces his hand by blocking must-pass legislation.

As the Legislature hits the homestretch, here are some major unsettled issues to be decided in the next couple of weeks.

Priorities of hardline and social conservatives

Session after session, Patrick has used his agenda-setting power to establish which social conservative issues get top billing, marking his priorities with the telltale sign of a low bill number.

A leading figure on the Christian right, Patrick called on lawmakers this year to allow time for prayer in public schools and require classrooms to display the Ten Commandments — part of a sustained push among conservative Christians to infuse their religion into classrooms and the broader public sphere. Both bills advanced out of their respective House committees this month.

The bill requiring schools to provide prayer time, Senate Bill 11, was one of numerous conservative priorities that had piled up in recent weeks in the House State Affairs Committee, a panel chaired by one of the chamber’s more moderate Republicans, Rep. Ken King of Canadian.

Along with SB 11, King’s committee last week advanced two more Patrick-promoted bills: one that would bar local governments from helping Texans travel out of state to receive abortions and another to defund public libraries where drag queens are allowed to read to children, known as drag time story hour.

Some key social conservative bills remain parked in State Affairs, including identical proposals from both chambers to restrict the use of bathrooms by transgender people in public spaces — a redux of the so-called bathroom bill championed by Patrick in 2017. More than 80 House lawmakers, a majority of the 150-member body, have signed onto their chamber’s version.

King also has declined to move a Senate measure that aims to restrict the flow of abortion pills into Texas by establishing a $100,000 penalty for anyone who “manufactures, distributes, mails, prescribes or provides” abortion-inducing drugs. The bill says its provisions could not be challenged as unconstitutional in state court, a provision legal experts said likely runs afoul of the Constitution itself.

Also facing next week’s committee deadline are Senate bills that would extend to K-12 schools the state’s existing ban on diversity, equity and inclusion programs in higher education; and give school boards and parents more say over which books can be put on school library shelves. Both bills have been heard before the House Public Education Committee and have until the May 24 deadline to be voted out.

Priorities with bipartisan support

Between partisan skirmishing, lawmakers from both parties will spend the next few weeks trying to hash out final details of legislation they all largely support, including property tax cuts, water infrastructure and teacher pay raises. Despite the bipartisan backing, these issues are among the most expensive and momentous of the session, signaled by their multibillion-dollar pricetags and Abbott’s move to fast-track them this year by tagging them as emergency items.

Lawmakers appear to have sidestepped the problems that delayed or killed some of these same widely supported issues when the Legislature last convened in 2023. House and Senate leaders announced last week they had reached a deal on a package of bills to lower property taxes for homeowners and businesses — two years after the chambers spent months at an impasse over how to distribute tax relief.

This year’s agreement includes Patrick’s priority of boosting the state's homestead exemption from $100,000 to $140,000, which means lowering the amount of a home's value that can be taxed to pay for public schools.

Lawmakers are also planning to sharply increase the amount of a business' inventory that is exempt from taxation, a priority of House leaders. And they are set to raise the homestead exemption even higher, to $200,000, for older Texans and those with disabilities.

The Legislature’s approval of school vouchers last month also appeared to clear the way for a $7.7 billion public education spending plan, two years after schools missed out on a similar amount that Abbott had made conditional on the passage of a failed voucher bill.

But first, the chambers will have to square their different ideas for how the money should be spent. House GOP leaders — who moved the voucher and school funding bills in tandem and pitched them as the “Texas two-step plan” — want to give schools more base funding for each student, an amount that has remained untouched since 2019. Forty percent of the money would pay for across-the-board raises for school staff, excluding administrators.

Senate Republicans want school districts to use the money strictly for teacher pay, with higher raises set aside for more experienced instructors working in smaller districts.

House Democrats, noting that the school funding package cleared the House alongside the voucher bill in mid-April, recently started blasting Senate lawmakers for the finance bill’s lack of movement since it reached the upper chamber. Rep. Gene Wu, a Houston Democrat who chairs the House Democratic Caucus, distributed a memo to members this week in which he characterized the finance package, House Bill 2, as “languishing” in the Senate “without so much as a committee hearing.”

Sen. Brandon Creighton, a Conroe Republican who chairs the Senate Education Committee, said last week that leaders from both chambers were making “meaningful progress on reconciling differences” through nearly a week of negotiating.

“This is an unprecedented opportunity that deserves thoughtful, strategic consideration — not rushed decisions or halfway measures,” Creighton said in a statement posted on social media. “Settling for less than the strongest, most effective package would be a disservice to the magnitude of what’s possible.”

On Tuesday evening, Creighton announced several details from his new draft of HB 2, which he scheduled for a committee hearing Thursday morning. The bill would provide across-the-board raises for teachers in their third year of teaching and again in the fifth year, Creighton said.

Senate lawmakers follow a far more flexible deadline calendar than their House counterparts: they have until May 28, five days before the end of session, to pass all House and Senate bills. After that, both chambers have a series of 11th hour deadlines for conference committees — each made up of five House members and five senators — to settle differences between the versions of bills approved by the full House and Senate.

Bipartisan majorities in each chamber are looking to beat the deadline crunch on a measure that would ask voters to approve spending $1 billion a year for the next decade to shore up the state’s water crisis. The dedicated funding would be baked into the Texas Constitution and go toward creating new water supply and patching up water infrastructure, along with conservation programs and flood mitigation. Senate lawmakers have sought to steer more of the money to new water supply projects, while House lawmakers have proposed giving state water officials more flexibility.

For the numerous Senate bills recently advanced by a House committee, the next step is to be scheduled for a floor vote, a power bestowed on the agenda-setting House Calendars Committee. Among the bills now vying to reach the full chamber is another bipartisan priority: Senate Bill 31, which aims to clarify when a doctor can legally provide an abortion under the state's near-total ban.

Texas law allows for the procedure when the patient is facing a life-threatening condition caused or exacerbated by pregnancy. The bill comes amid a string of reports of women dying or nearly dying after being denied medically necessary abortions by doctors who were confused by the law or too fearful of the strict penalties to intervene.

Bills that could trigger a special session

Looming beyond the end-of-session deadlines is the possibility that, if any of his priorities fail to pass, Abbott could order lawmakers to remain in Austin or return at a later date for a special session.

That power to schedule 30-day overtime rounds is reserved for the governor, who also decides which topics lawmakers are allowed to consider. But Patrick, using his own power as the Senate’s presiding officer, has threatened numerous times over the years to force a special session by killing must-pass legislation, in one case making good on the threat.

He has promised to do so again this year if the Legislature gavels out without banning products that contain tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the psychoactive element in marijuana that is derived from hemp. Patrick and Sen. Charles Perry, the Lubbock Republican carrying the THC ban, say the hemp industry has exploited a loophole in a 2019 law that was intended to boost Texas agriculture by allowing the commercialization of hemp containing trace amounts of non-intoxicating delta-9 THC.

While hemp products are not allowed to contain more than a 0.3% concentration of delta-9 THC — anything higher is classified as marijuana — lawmakers did not set the same threshold for other hemp derivatives, inadvertently setting off a booming market that Patrick argues is dangerously marketing to minors and cannot be regulated.

In lieu of a total ban, the hemp industry has sought tighter regulations, such as age restrictions and child-resistant packaging, which were among the provisions included in a revamped version of the THC bill advanced by King’s House State Affairs panel two weeks ago. King, who is carrying the bill in the House, proposed a framework that would allow retailers to continue selling edibles and drinks while banning vapes and permitting only low-dose smokable hemp flower. The restrictions would be much stiffer than current regulations, but they fall well short of the total ban sought by Patrick.

Patrick also has promised to force overtime if lawmakers fail to tighten the state’s bail laws by authorizing judges to deny bail for a wider range of criminal charges. It’s unclear if Patrick would even need to force Abbott’s hand in that case, with the governor naming the issue an emergency item for three sessions running and, in recent weeks, pivoting to adopt bail as his top priority now that he has signed school vouchers into law.

Prior bail measures have stalled in the House, thwarted by Democrats who ran out the clock or denied Republicans the two-thirds support needed from both chambers to put a constitutional amendment before voters. The Texas Constitution guarantees most defendants the right to pretrial release, except in limited circumstances such as those charged with capital murder.

Abbott added a new layer to ongoing bail negotiations when he said judges should be required to withhold bail for certain violent offenses, rather than having the discretion to do so. Despite the more stringent approach, the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee this week advanced a new bail package that included Abbott’s demand to automatically deny bail for certain cases.

Democratic negotiators moderated that provision by requiring the state to prove that a defendant is either a flight or public safety risk, instead of placing the burden on defendants to show they are not a danger and would appear in court.

The movement in the House suggests top negotiators from both parties are closing in on Abbott’s long-sought bail package deal that could muster the 100 votes needed in the House. The measure needs support from at least 12 House Democrats to pass if all 88 Republicans are on board.

Armbrister, a conservative Democrat who spent four years in the House and two decades in the Senate, said legislation commonly takes multiple tries to pass — including top priorities of the governor.

“The system is set up to kill stuff, not to pass stuff. That’s just the reality of it,” he said. “Something that's not on the tip of everybody's tongue, or it's a new idea of doing things — it could take a couple of sessions.”

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