State Government

Cops, firefighters, crime reporters, habitual criminals and the guys who drive the Roach Coaches to sell sandwiches, donuts, coffee and sodas at crime scenes have all seen things like this before. So have the veterans of maximum-security day care centers. Somebody’s holed up in a building making demands. They swear they won’t quit until they get what they want. They have hostages and say they’ll hold the hostages indefinitely in pursuit of their goal. Nothing is changing from day to day.

Texas Democrats are considering a challenge to the redistricting plans put in place for the state House and state Senate two years ago. If they sued, they would be seeking a revision based on this summer’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a Georgia redistricting case. Some Democrats say the logic of that ruling, applied to Texas, could add as many as three Democratic seats to the state Senate and as many as 12 to the state House. Numbers like that, if they proved to be more than fantasy, would move both chambers of the Legislature to near parity between Democrats and Republicans.

Ignore the minutiae for a moment and the congressional redistricting tangle has only two apparent dramatic points. Will 21 senators allow the issue to come up for consideration? And if they do, will the courts approve the plan that then passes through the Legislature?

Gov. Rick Perry officially opened the call of the special session, confining it at the beginning to the subject of congressional redistricting. He can add more at will. Republicans want to redraw the congressional lines because only 15 of the 32 members of the Texas delegation are theirs. It’s the last holdout for Democrats, and the GOP wants to break it down. The current districts could accomplish that. But to win, they’ll have to squeeze out Democratic incumbents the voters continue to support.

The budget approved by the Legislature last month doesn’t balance, and Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn says she won’t certify it. This, ladies and germs, is a first. In all the years that the Texas Constitution has called for a balanced budget, the Legislature has spent less than it had.

The conventional wisdom among legislators and lobbyists is that congressional redistricting will be a “second” issue in a summer special session, since politicians don’t want to look like they’re spending taxpayer money for a purely political purpose. It’s not a baseless theory–some of the smart people have been talking about it right along with the rest of us.

Will there be a special session other than the one on school finance? And will it really start on June 30? And will the subject be government reorganization? The budget? Franchise taxes? The 10 percent rule for college admissions? And is congressional redistricting the only reason to come back, with whatever else just thrown in to provide a cover story for what voters might see as a political session?

Fifty-five Texas Democrats went on legislative strike this week, leaving the state for four days to kill a congressional redistricting plan they couldn’t kill by staying on the job.

The 20-week legislative session is down to its final three weeks. The big legislation with the hard edges and the sharp corners—even the emergency insurance bill—is still pending. The House has only a few more days before its rules block consideration of any legislation that hasn’t already been through the Senate.

Now that he’s been briefed, Gov. Rick Perry isn’t sufficiently impressed with Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst’s school finance plan to push it during the regular session. Perry has been putting off the school finance issue since early in the session—he said then that legislative leaders weren’t experienced enough to pull it off. Now that Dewhurst is gathering Senate support for a fairly specific plan, Perry says there’s not enough time to deal with it during the regular session.