With the 82nd Legislative Session in only its second week, Texas lawmakers have already filed more than 900 bills, potential laws addressing hundreds of subjects ranging from abortion and immigration to health care and wrongful imprisonment. This application aims to help Texans make sense of the legislative process, tracking proposed pieces of legislation as they move through the Texas House and Senate.
Search: Texas Legislature Bills
Posted in
State Government
Uncut: Perry’s Inauguration Speech
Full, unedited video of Gov. Rick Perry’s Tuesday inauguration speech.
Posted in
State Government
TribBlog: Sparking an Apology
They’re sorry, folks. Spark Energy says it’s sincerely sorry for causing such a literal roar at this morning’s inauguration ceremony.
Posted in
Public Education
Who’s on Texas Monthly’s Power List?
An early look at the 25 people the magazine deems the most powerful in Texas.
Posted in
Economy
TribBlog: Scrounging for Cash
The Legislative Budget Board has begun distributing (to legislators — not to the public) its recommendations for how to save money and raise money to help balance the 2012-13 state budget. They plan to distribute copies of the budget itself (again, to lawmakers only) later tonight, and all of the documents will be available online to the public tomorrow morning. The details are still coming in, but here are some of the headlines from the LBB’s Government Effectiveness and Efficiency Recommendations.
Posted in
Economy
TribBlog: Are Tax Holidays Over?
The Legislature’s starting budget will apparently include proposals to cancel popular back-to-school sales tax holidays, cut discounts for retailers who remit sales taxes early, allow sales of liquor on Sundays to increase revenue from taxes on alcohol, cut the state’s subsidy of dependent insurance premiums for state employees and lower the tax breaks for energy companies that take on certain high-cost gas drilling projects, sources say.
Posted inState Government
TribBlog: Grin and Beer It
As the inauguration parties kick off with a big party for lawmakers sponsored by the beer lobby, we looked into just how much Texans love their brewsky.
Posted in
Health care
TribBlog: Bills Get Social
HJR 51 hasn’t had a committee hearing, and was only filed Jan. 4, but it already has 111 Facebook friends and hundreds of Twitter followers. As lawmakers scramble in the coming months to push their legislation through the Lege, expect more and more bills to get their own social media presence.
Posted in
State Government
On the Records: Inaugural Word Clouds
Texans heard from two familiar pols today: Gov. Rick Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. We turned their prepared remarks into word clouds to help visualize the tone and rhetoric of their inaugural speeches at the Capitol.
Posted inState Government
The Midday Brief: Jan. 18, 2011
Your afternoon reading: inauguration coverage, corporate sponsorship and conservatives on spending cuts
