Health care

Lt. Gov.-elect David Dewhurst waited until the Senate had voted on its rules—maintaining the powers of the Lite Guv—but not for his inauguration to name committees and their memberships. Unlike his predecessor, who led a Senate with a one-vote Republican majority, Dewhurst fronts a Senate with a 19-12 GOP advantage, and he tilted the table strongly in their favor. Democrats will chair six of the 15 committees in the Senate, but only one of those panels—Veterans Affairs and Military Installations—will have a Democratic majority. The major committees will have solid GOP majorities: Finance, 10-5; Business and Commerce, 6-3; Education, which gets school finance, 6-3; and Health and Human Services, where budget cuts could be focused, 6-3. State Affairs, which typically gets a range of major legislation, also has a 6-3 Republican majority.

Full Story 

No matter what you thought you heard during the election season, in the session starting on Tuesday, everything will be a sideshow to the main act: The state budget.

Full Story 

Some Texas Democrats, stung by the results of last month's elections and left with only a short list of candidates who might make a strong statewide ticket four years from now, are circling the party headquarters in a bid to replace Molly Beth Malcolm as chairwoman of the party.

Full Story 

Democrat Tony Sanchez has spent enough money trying to become governor of Texas that he's made the contest a national news item. In the latest financial reports, Sanchez reported spending $26.2 million, a three-month bender that brings his overall total to $57.5 million. Republican Rick Perry spent a measly $10.5 million during the past three months–that's under $120,000 a day, for crying out loud–bringing his total to date to $17.2 million. The national news? Spending in the Texas governor's race has already topped $75 million, putting the contest here on the scale of the California gubernatorial contests that hold most of the records.

Full Story 

With state agencies filing budget requests for the next Legislature, all attention is on the growing demands on state spending. The Austin American-Statesman led the pack, reporting that the differences between available money and spending needs has swollen dramatically, to $7 billion and beyond.

Full Story 

Several Senate races are tight, or at least loud and vicious and interesting to watch. And if the political winds blow in a particular direction in the primaries and again in the general election, a handful of conservative Republicans could take seats in the upper chamber and quickly change the philosophical compass there. A group that includes Gary Polland of Houston, Tommy Williams of The Woodlands, Craig Estes of Wichita Falls, Bob Deuell of Greenville, Ed Harrison of Waxahachie and John Shields of San Antonio is knocking hard on the door. That's a collection that would make the Senate a great deal more conservative than it is now. Deuell's race is in November, against Sen. David Cain, D-Dallas; the five others are in primaries that are likely–because of the way the districts are drawn–to determine who'll win in November. Those districts all lean to the GOP.

Full Story 

State candidates from the bottom of the ballot to the top are talking about the budget mess they expect to confront a year from now. But the budget people who actually work on this stuff are still sorting through the numbers, attempting to get a picture of the train wreck the candidates fear.

Full Story 

The United States Department of Justice ducked behind the hedgerow, telling the federal judges in charge of Texas redistricting matters that the Bush Administration won't have anything to say about the state's maps for the Texas House of Representatives until the end of November.

Full Story 

The year-old campaign of A.R. "Tony" Sanchez Jr. is finally going public with a two-day flyaround that will start in Laredo and make stops in Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and Houston. That two-day announcement will be followed by a series of regional bus tours in different parts of Texas. The first will be held in South Texas, with stops including Corpus Christi and Brownsville.

Full Story 

If you want to know why Carole Keeton Rylander showed up with an incomplete political map for the Texas Senate at the last Legislative Redistricting Board meeting, it helps to know that the map was, at one time, complete. But it was full of pairings and duets that West Texas Republicans couldn't stand, and so the comptroller decided to come in with a map for only 27 of the 31 Senate districts.

Full Story 

Maybe this will turn out to be a case where the outlanders were caught telling scary stories around the campfire, but there sure are a lot of Democrats talking about challenging U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm. The list of names is growing even as Gramm says he has no intention of stepping down.

Full Story 

Nobody predicted Gov. Rick Perry would set a record by vetoing 82 bills at the end of the session, but neither should anyone be completely surprised. The tension between the governor and the Legislature has been unrelenting since the November elections. If nothing else, they leave the governor's mark on a session where he had previously had little impact.

Full Story 

The dramatic peak of the 77th legislative session came several weeks ago, when the House was trying to redistrict itself and the Senate was trying not to self-immolate on the hate crimes bill and its own redistricting maps. The end of the session, by contrast, seems as gentle as a receding tide.

Full Story 

Remember the burning map that used to open the TV show Bonanza? That might as well have been the plans for new political districts in Texas. At our deadline, it was impossible to say with any hope of certitude whether legislative redistricting plans were alive or dead. They weren't moving, but they had time to move if lawmakers found a compromise, and if they hurried.

Full Story 

The powers of state officeholders ebb and flow with the calendar. The end of the legislative session is when the governor's powers peak, when the comptroller has one last moment of leverage, when budgeteers' prospects are in bloom and when the lieutenant governor and the speaker of the House bring their full powers over the legislative agenda to bear. If you see legislative supplicants standing in line to plead for something, chances are the line will lead to one of those people.

Full Story 

Three weeks from the date at the top of this edition, the Legislature will gavel to a close and go home. That'll be a relief, to be sure, but the 21 days that lead up to Sine Die will be hectic and the issues that have dominated the conversations in the Pink Building since January are finally coming to a head.

Full Story 

You're not supposed to predict the future in our business, but what the heck: You have not seen a redistricting plan this year that will actually be used to elect legislators next year.

Full Story 

The state is cut into 150 pieces for purposes of electing members of the Texas House. It's chopped into 15 chunks for purposes of electing members to the State Board of Education. The head of the House Redistricting Committee, Rep. Delwin Jones, R-Lubbock, thinks those numbers should sync up. He says he'll draw the SBOE maps to exactly include ten House districts each.

Full Story 

If you've been thinking nothing much was going on during this session of the Legislature, you've got loads of company. But take a look at the calendar and get ready for a very fast month.

Full Story 

Lawmakers will get ready for the Easter break by kicking the budget out of the House and lining up for copies of the redistricting "working" maps they've been promised by the two chairmen in charge of political cartography. Even without redistricting, the remaining seven weeks of the session will be kinda hairy. Still on the list of things to do: The House-Senate conference on the budget, teacher health insurance, Medicaid funding, campaign finance reform, major water and air bills, a number of Sunset bills affecting major agencies, a handful of controversial criminal justice bills, transportation bills and any number of things we've left off. There's a stack of stuff to do and not much time to do it. But the focus isn't on that stuff: It's on the maps.

Full Story