Juvenile detention, imported shrimp, forever chemicals among hundreds of bills cut off by House deadline

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House lawmakers cheered, jumped to their feet and embraced as the clock struck midnight on a critical legislative deadline, delegating hundreds of House bills to the shredder early Friday after a marathon week of votes.

The cutoff came after lawmakers spent nearly 14 hours working their way through an agenda of more than 400 bills on Thursday, the last day the House could grant preliminary approval to most legislation filed by its own members. The GOP-controlled chamber made it through more than 200 of those bills before running out of time, finishing the night with the Senate companion to House Bill 5430 — a proposal that would prevent political candidates from filing to appear on a primary ballot for multiple political parties.

All remaining House bills in the queue were considered dead — though any measure can come back to life by getting tacked onto a related, breathing bill before the end of session. Others could see new life in the form of their identical twin Senate bills, which have another 12 days to reach the House floor.

As midnight approached, the mood on the House floor turned frantic and somewhat cathartic. Legislative staff members filed in to pack the gallery and witness the ends of much of their labor. Activity on the floor grew increasingly rowdy, as lawmakers tried to decline giving up time for questions, bill layouts were interjected by calls of “Vote!” and Speaker Dustin Burrows moved bills along at a breakneck clip. Noisy chatter on the floor, normally silenced for order, only swelled.

Among the roughly 200 proposals that landed in the scrap pile were: a bill addressing unconstitutional conditions at Texas’ juvenile detention centers; a pair of measures related to imported shrimp; legislation to keep toxic “forever chemicals” out of farmland; and a Republican priority, billed as an “anti-squatters” plan, that tenants’ advocates say would accelerate evictions.

A number of measures made it through before the midnight deadline, including a bill that would expand a 2021 law limiting who is eligible for release from jail on cashless personal bonds. Lawmakers also advanced a proposed repeal of Texas’ defunct ban on gay sex, which was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 but has remained on the books, unenforced. And they approved a bill that would require Texas prison officials to install air conditioning across the state's prison facilities by the end of 2032.

A conservative priority to hold vaccine manufacturers liable for injuries caused by their vaccines also passed, after lawmakers took 10 minutes to lightly tease the measure’s sponsor, Rep. Shelley Luther, R-Tom Bean, for her first bill, and despite a technical challenge raised by Democratic Rep. Vikki Goodwin, D-Austin.

The approved bills are expected to receive final, largely ceremonial votes Friday, after which they will head to the Senate for consideration.

Though Luther's vaccine bill was among the wins for hardline conservatives, some in the chamber's rightmost faction left the floor feeling that too much Republican legislation was left on the table. Earlier in the week, Republicans from that faction tried to prevent Burrows from adjourning for the day so they could continue passing bills. And on Wednesday, Rep. Andy Hopper, a freshman Republican from Decatur who has been critical of the speaker, tried unsuccessfully to postpone all bills to which Thursday’s deadline didn’t apply.

Hopper told the Tribune he confronted leadership and urged them to triage accordingly — and yet, he noted, the House worked until 3 p.m. Thursday granting final passage to bills that could have waited until Friday.

“None of that work had to be done by midnight,” Hopper said, noting that only two of the six Republican Party of Texas priority bills on the agenda survived. “This is an orchestrated process. They get exactly what they want out of it. There is nothing left up to chance. This is why we need to reform the Texas House.”

With Thursday’s deadline in the rearview mirror, House lawmakers are expected to turn their attention to the pileup of major Senate bills making their way through committees on the way to the floor. The House has until May 24 to advance Senate bills out of committee, and until May 27 to consider them on the floor.

Those include social conservative priorities like providing time for prayer in public schools, requiring classrooms to display the Ten Commandments, restricting the use of bathrooms by transgender people in public spaces and banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs in K-12 schools.

A number of bipartisan priorities must also still make their way through the House, such as property tax cuts, water infrastructure and teacher pay raises.

Even before the midnight deadline, House GOP leaders got the ball rolling on one of the biggest remaining items: a package that would stiffen the state’s bail laws to keep more defendants behind bars while awaiting trial for violent charges. The legislation was scheduled to reach the House floor Monday, teeing up a vote on a long-running priority of Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick that has repeatedly stalled in the lower chamber in recent sessions.

Thursday culminated a four-day slog of voting, debating and parliamentary maneuvering that saw House members churn through hundreds of bills from morning until late in the evening.

The chamber’s Republican majority, after a one-day break for Mother’s Day on Sunday, spent the week racing to beat the bill-passing deadline, while Democrats tried to run out the clock by prolonging debates, challenging bills based on technicalities and rolling out any other tactics that might slow the chamber’s progress on legislation they objected to but didn’t have the votes to defeat.

The grind had been getting to members.

“Not very well,” Rep. John Smithee, R-Amarillo and chair of the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee, said Monday night when asked how he was holding up. “Eh,” replied Rep. Tom Oliverson, R-Cypress, with a shrug to the same inquiry.

It was turning the debates spikier, leading Rep. Senfronia Thompson, the dean and widely recognized “conscience” of the House, to urge her colleagues to set their frustrations aside and be professional in their disagreements.

“We tell each other off, but we do it in an adult-like manner,” the Houston Democrat said in a floor speech that brought the buzzing chamber to a standstill late Tuesday. “I’m going to ask you tonight: All of those little bitty wee wee feelings that you’ve been having — bury them. Dismiss them. Roll your sleeves back up. And let’s get to work on solving the people’s problems.”

The House stood in applause. Then promptly returned to the arena.

Every minute spent debating a proposal, litigating a technical challenge or hazing a freshman member on their first bill meant a precious minute less to tear through the agenda.

“I know we are killing bills as we speak,” Smithee said at the top of a five-minute closing statement on House Bill 75, a priority of Abbott’s, about an hour into debate. Rep. Todd Hunter interjected to lightheartedly shoo him along.

“The coastal delegation saw you get up to the mic for almost an hour of titillating lawyer discussion,” the Corpus Christi Republican said. “Does this bill have anything to do with (the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association)? Does it have anything to do with oysters or shrimp? As (a piece of) coastal advice, you might want to move passage.”

Democrats felt the clocking ticking, too — literally, for Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, who wore a heavy-looking wall clock around his neck all day. “It’s actually pretty light,” he said to the contrary. “But time weighs on us all.”

“All my bills are dead,” he said much later in the night while jokingly asking members of the press to tag Flavor Flav, the American rapper whose signature look involves a clock around his neck, on photos they posted of him to social media.

In the end, it was Moody who brought the night to a close. Appearing at the microphone members use to raise parliamentary objections, he propped his fake clock on the lectern and, just after midnight, gleefully noted the House was out of time.

“Mr. Speaker, if I could turn back time, if I could find a way — but I haven’t been able to find one,” Moody said, before raising a “point of order” to kill the last bill of the night on the grounds that it had blown its deadline.

“Mr. Moody,” Burrows responded, “your point of order is well taken and sustained.”

Renzo Downey contributed to this report.

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