Health care

Remember the cartoons where the sheepdog and the coyote would meet at the time clock every morning, say hello, ask about the families, punch in, harass each other all day, then greet each other pleasantly as they punched out for the evening?

You get the feeling that this legislative session is just like the last one, run in reverse. Instead of starting with a whimper and closing with a bang, it started with a bang. It shows no signs of ending with one.

If you’re not under pressure, the House is sort of an interesting Petri dish right now.

Coming soon to a House near you: The first real look at how this bunch votes on tough issues.

The Texas Senate approved a $182.2 billion budget that includes over $10 billion in federal stimulus money, avoids across-the-board cuts in state agencies, and leaves the state’s $9.1 billion Rainy Day Fund untouched.

Our bracket says Pitt will win the NCAA men’s basketball championship. That doesn’t mean it’ll happen. And if it does happen, we won’t be able to claim (honestly, anyway) that we knew it was gonna happen. We’ll just have guessed right. [eds. note: After this was written, Pitt lost to Villanova, failed to make the Final Four, ruined our bracket, and painfully proved our point about predicting the future.]

That noise you hear in the Senate and the House isn’t just partisan barking — it’s the early signal that, in two years, those lawmakers will be drawing political maps and spilling political blood.

The new speaker’s first bit of danger is out of the way, with House members on their way home for a long weekend to mull their committee assignments and to consider the difference between what they hoped for and what they got.

The conversation in the halls is mostly about House committee assignments and who’ll get what. The underlying political tension is between Democrats who think Speaker Joe Straus should reward them for making up 80 percent of the vote that put him in the corner office, and Republicans who think he needs to consolidate power within his own party in the closely divided chamber to have any chance of hanging on to the controls.

The House has its rules in place after a long day of warbling and negotiating, and the one that sticks out is the rule that lets the House depose a speaker with only 76 votes — a simple majority. The speaker no longer has the power to ignore privileged motions, including motions to “vacate the chair.” And an effort to raise the bar — to require 90 votes, or 100, to unseat a speaker fell short. It’s 76: If it were a rear-view mirror on the Speaker’s dais, it’d have words on it: “Warning! Hostile representatives in mirror are closer than they appear.”