Health care

If the Senate Finance Committee can make it to Monday or Tuesday of next week with four or five of the school finance components intact, there’s a good chance Texans will see a new business tax, a cut in school property taxes, teacher pay raises and a bag full of other legislative wonders. But it’s gonna be a long weekend.

So here’s a question: Does the huge budget surplus make it harder or easier to pass the governor’s proposed tax bill? Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn added $3.9 billion to the $4.3 billion that was already in the surplus — and those numbers don’t include about $1 billion that’s already in the state’s Rainy Day Fund.

The party primaries include five congressional races, five in the state Senate, and 53 in the Texas House. In other words, it’s a slow to normal election year.

Every so often, an experienced reporter from somewhere else will get hired into the Capitol press corps and will proceed to surprise and dominate competitors with stories that should have been obvious to the natives.

What do you call the student who finishes last in medical school? A doctor. And what do you call legislation that passes by just one vote? A law, or one step closer to it. 

The formula here is just as it was at the beginning of the session: Failure to get results on school finance and property cuts would be horrible news for Rick Perry, less troubling for David Dewhurst and Tom Craddick, and of very little political consequence to the average member of the Texas Legislature.

It takes two to tango and two to tax, and the Senate isn’t dancing with the House on revenue for school finance. Their bottom line numbers are similar. Both houses started with the idea of lowering local school property taxes by 50 cents, and that sets the size of the project. But their methods of getting to the bottom line are as different as Mars and Venus.

It’s usually best to take your medicine fast, in one ugly gulp, like mom used to say. But House leaders, apparently confident they can pass a major tax bill and an ambitious rewriting of the state’s school finance system, decided to let both measures sit unprotected over a long weekend.

Mention March 2006 to political people in Texas, and you’ll trigger a conversation about the top of the ballot. But March 2006 — the month of the primaries and, in particular, the Republican primaries — is on the minds of a fair number of legislators who want to remain in office after this term.

Can you remember a particular State of the State speech? That’s not meant as a slap at Gov. Rick Perry — we’re just noting the historical significance of the form. What’s useful about these spiels is that they tell you what direction a governor hopes a Legislature will take. It’s where Perry said he wanted a reexamination of some death penalty issues four years ago, for instance. This year, his list was devoid of surprises, but gave listeners a sense of his direction. Some highlights: