State Government

Until this is over, it’ll be impossible to say whether legislative leaders sent their tax and education bills to conference committees or to bomb squads.

The Texas Senate dropped its state property tax, overhauled its overhaul of business taxes, and approved a school finance bill more in line with what the Texas House approved earlier this year. Big differences remain to be worked out in that package, and also in companion legislation that includes some school finance and some new education law. But the Legislature is closer to a deal on school finance now than it was a day, a week, or a year ago. Upgrade the condition of the patient from impossible to merely improbable. That’s an improvement, and previous legislatures have overcome bigger differences.

Officeholders who weren’t in the Pink Building in 1997 are finding out now what George W. Bush found out then: Even when everything appears to be lined up just right, it’s almost impossible to pass a tax bill.

Act surprised if you hear much more from the House this session about limiting corporate and union money in elections. An attempt to dynamite that legislation out of a hostile committee backfired badly enough that 50 of the bill’s 93 sponsors ducked, either voting against the effort or absenting themselves from the House floor during the vote. On the strength of a 95-36 vote, it remains in committee.

The legislative session is reaching a point that’s as reliable as the lunch horn in a factory: That moment when it appears that everything is definitely-for-sure-absolutely-certainly going to fall to pieces. Or not.

You got your budget. You got your school finance/reform bill. You got your tax bill. And then you have everything else. If there’s a notable feature to this legislative session, it’s that those three pieces of legislation have sucked the oxygen out of the room. There are other bills of note — appraisal caps, workers compensation insurance, the water bill, some sunset bills, and so on — but the report card on this Legislature will focus on the three big deals.

The House will vote on a statewide property tax proposal before the Senate gets to it, a vote likely to kill a key provision of the Senate’s school finance package.

Democratic leaders in the House say they’re against gambling as a way to finance public education or to fill holes that might appear in the state budget. They said they’ll oppose it during the current legislative session.

A week after the Texas House passed the largest tax bill it has ever considered — a measure intended to replace some local school property taxes with new state taxes — Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn stunned lawmakers by saying the bill spends three dollars for every two it raises.

Tax bills are difficult to pass, and it never goes smoothly. Gov. Bill Clements signed a tax bill in 1987 that still holds the state record, and he did it over the objections of some of his fellow Republicans. In 1991, the political ambitions of then Ways & Means Chairman James Hury ended on the floor of the House when his fellow Democrats disassembled a multi-billion tax bill and left it to Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. That one finally got passed, and is the second-place finisher on the state’s all-time list.