State Government

One way to attract attention: Start chattering about the governor’s inclination to break his 82-bill veto record. That’s the signal watchers in the press and lobby are getting from Gov. Rick Perry, and it has bred a mini-industry of speculation about what might be and might not be on the chopping block. We’ve heard talk — thoroughly unsubstantiated and mentioned here only to illustrate the point about speculation — that Perry might whack the legislation fixing problems and making adjustments to the state’s new business tax. So-called “special items” for colleges and universities in the state budget — that’s where they make appropriations for specific projects and programs outside the regular operations of the schools — are on the gossip channel. And the governor has yet to sign a watered-down highway bill that went to him after he vetoed a stronger version in the final days of the session.

A lawyer we know was out drinking with a lobster the other night and saw a group of the House’s anti-Tom Craddick rebels sitting at a big table having a good time. Nothing wrong with that, he said, except that he was guessing Craddick was sitting next to a telephone somewhere, writing notes in his tiny scrawl on a legal pad, talking to people, working.

Gov. Rick Perry’s agenda was DOA this session, caught in the swivet over HPV vaccines.

He’s still the lead gorilla, but House Speaker Tom Craddick is no longer a 900-pounder. More like 300. And the adage about 900-pound gorillas sleeping “wherever they want to” applies here, too. A 300-pounder has to pick his way through the band, lest one of his 250-pound colleagues turn into an open rival.

The strongest tool in the box for House minorities — and here we’re talking about political minorities — is the rulebook.

It’s hard to explain just how things in the Senate got the way they are, but you can mark the beginning. Last Spring, senators figured out how to maneuver around Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst while they were passing a new business tax bill and approving legislation to replace local property tax money in public schools with state money.

The House kicked out its budget early Friday morning after 18 hours of debate; the Senate Finance Committee planned to send its version to the printers a few hours later. Put the Senate plan in play the week after the Easter break, and the conference committee that really writes the budget will get started.

Rick Perry and George W. Bush are the only recent governors to stay in office long enough to name every member of every board and commission — every appointed official. It takes six straight years in office to go all the way through the batting order, and when a governor is done, it all belongs, for better or for worse, to that governor.

The call for a mandated vaccine against HPV in pre-teen girls might get the opposite result. A House committee voted this week to make it against the law to mandate the shots. The only company with a government-approved vaccination said it’d stop its 50-state lobbying effort on the drug. The issue leapt from Texas to national news and talk shows and all that in a matter of days and — more importantly — stayed there. And Gov. Rick Perry’s power to issue executive orders found a tall speed bump in an Austin courtroom, when a state district judge said —in an unrelated case — that a state agency isn’t required to follow Perry’s orders.

It’s usually true that the Lege is a slow-moving machine, but not always. Look at the moves to jump around constitutional constraints on increased state spending: Mired two weeks ago, coupled with a tax break for elderly homeowners one week ago, and now out of the Senate, out of the House Appropriations Committee and on its way to a floor vote next week.