The Storm in the East

If he didn’t have his hands full already, state Rep. Tommy Merritt, R-Longview, got hit with an ad campaign from a conservative third-party group called Americans for Job Security, blasting a proposal he made that would have broadened sales taxes in Texas (while cutting local school property taxes around the state). The ads don’t mention the property tax cut, but say the higher sales taxes would “mean fewer jobs around here.”

The judges who approved the Legislature’s new congressional map acted like health inspectors who don’t like the food in a particular restaurant but still find the kitchen clear of cockroaches and other violations of the health code. The results are a matter of taste; the restaurant’s legal.

In the last presidential election, George W. Bush easily beat the field, at least in Texas. He got 3,799,639 votes while Al Gore was pulling in 2,433,746 votes here. That’s a difference of 1,365,893 – quite a safety buffer when it came to tallying the state’s 32 electoral votes (the state will have two more electoral votes in 2004, because of the two congressional seats added after the last census; state’s get a vote for each person they elect to Congress).

Picture a room with no windows, with three judges and courtroom staff assembled in one corner, 30 attorneys (yes, really) seated and passing notes around a couple of large tables, a couple of dozen reporters squirming on hard wooden pews on one side in the back, and an assembly of officeholders, political hacks and all manner of aides seated on the other side in the back. At the door, a bailiff has been stationed to make sure nobody comes in unless one of the seats is emptied.

Federal judges apparently like theme weeks as much as network television executives do.

Robby Cook III, one of several conservative Democrats living in GOP-targeted statehouse districts, was on the verge of a party switch when he decided late last week not to run for reelection. The Eagle Lake farmer, who’s been a House member since 1997, is clearly conflicted about his partisan affiliations at the moment. He says he’s out of sync with his own party’s liberals, but also didn’t like what the GOP’s congressional redistricting maps do to rural Texas.

Bill Ratliff, a Republican engineer who upset a Democratic incumbent 15 years ago and then became a moderate voice as his party took over the Legislature, is leaving the Senate in the middle of his term to return to Mount Pleasant, his family, and political retirement.

Some of the state’s school finance mechanics are looking — again — at splitting the property tax rolls to put business property taxes into a state fund for all schools while leaving residential property tax revenues in control of local school districts.

At the end of March, the state’s prepaid tuition plan was $226 million in the hole, primarily because the money invested by parents was doing the same thing everybody’s 401k has been doing. And with the Legislature’s decision this year to deregulate tuition, it’ll be that much harder for the fund’s investments to keep up with the cost of higher education in Texas.

The prospect of a special legislative session in an election year is making some Texas lawmakers nervous, especially because the subject — school finance — is a hazardous political substance. On the surface, special committees and other experts are studying complete revisions of the state’s current school finance mechanism, involving everything from studies on how much it takes to educate an average student to a particular level, to a diagnosis of what’s wrong with the current tax system, to whatever else can be attached to the school finance question. A full remodeling would require some new state taxes to replace the local property taxes causing much of the outcry. And a growing number of school districts are signing onto the latest legal challenge to the Texas school system, which could go to court next summer if lawmakers haven’t applied enough patches by then.