Health care

Piece number one fell into place Monday, when Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn announced the state’s financial fortunes have improved over two years ago and the ugly budget fight that ensued then might be avoided this time around. Budgeteers, nervous about Strayhorn’s steady political attacks on Gov. Rick Perry, were braced for worse news. Instead, her numbers were within a hair’s breadth of their own predictions about state income.

State District Judge John Dietz, ruling on the heels of closing arguments, said the state’s system of funding public schools is unconstitutional and ordered the Legislature to fix it within a year. His detailed ruling won’t be out for a couple of weeks, but if you do a quick calculation of what he said so far, it’s easy to argue that the state will have to spend another $3 billion or so each year on public education. That’s in addition to any money that would be used lowering local property taxes. (Click here for a copy of Dietz’s bench ruling.)

Political journalists are often called fight promoters — people who’ll try to start a contest where there isn’t one — but the state’s senior senator and the governor are making the job easy. They’re even giving us facts to play with, and starting the fights without much prompting from the likes of us.

The U.S. Bureau of the Census prefaced the Republican Party’s national convention with a bummer of a report that says, among other things, that Texas has the highest percentage of uninsured people of any state and that the median income here dropped during the first years of this decade.

Rep. Jim Dunnam, D-Waco, is in a pretty safe district for a Democrat, as these things go. In the last election against his current opponent, Jeffrey Hibbs, Dunnam pulled 60.2 percent of the vote. And with the exception of Tony Sanchez Jr., who lost by a little in this House district while losing by a lot statewide, the Democrats running for statewide office in Dunnam’s district swept in 2002.

State auditors say managers of the Children’s Health Insurance Program let about $20 million slip away in the form of “unnecessary or excessive payments to Clarendon National Insurance Co.,” the company that had a provider contract for CHIP. The payments, the auditors wrote, “constitute an abuse of the commission’s fiduciary responsibility to oversee and manage” the contract. CHIP is administered by the Health and Human Services Commission, which is in the midst of a massive reorganization and an investigation of lapses in protective services for adults and children.

Political parties always have shadow groups that more or less parallel their interests. Labor lines up with Democrats, mostly. Manufacturers line up with Republicans, for some of the same reasons, most of the time. That’s just an example.

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and House Speaker Tom Craddick were correct six weeks ago, and now the state has been treated to a live-action demonstration: The Texas Legislature is nowhere near a consensus on how to fix — or even whether to fix — school finance. Gov. Rick Perry’s ambitious gamble fell flat when lawmakers decided the rewards weren’t worth the risks.

Texas lawmakers returned to Austin for school finance, met as two large groups and then promptly adjourned for a week. That stifles legislative mischief while committees meet to talk about taxes and education and nothing else is going on. And it serves to get them out of the way of the nastiest comptroller-governor squabble since Mark White and Bob Bullock formed their mutual admiration society in the mid-1980s.

Take a look at the clock: The next available date for a regular constitutional amendment in Texas is in November. Tax appraisal notices go out in late spring — May or so — and people pay their property taxes — or their mortgage companies pay and then send out escrow notices — in December and January. Most cities and counties and school districts set their property tax rates in mid- to late-summer. And then the cycle starts all over again.