05.31.13
Posted in Around The State, Redistricting, Special Session at 9:45 am by wcnews
A special session on redistricting that was supposed to be a quick “rubber stamp” by The Lege of the current “interim” districts and get the state out of court will likely fulfill none of those aims. On Wednesday in San Antonio there was a hearing on the upcoming court case regarding The Lege’s discriminatory maps from 2011. At that meeting it was determined that any new districts approved by The Lege will still have to go through the court.
Today’s redistricting hearing in San Antonio was largely procedural but did have the court wrestling with some key threshold issues.
Indeed, much of the hearing centered the possible legal consequences of the Texas Legislature making the interim maps permanent.
Hispanic and African-American plaintiff groups took strong issue with the State of Texas’ argument that the case would essentially begin anew.
Jose Garza, counsel for the Mexican-American Legislative Caucus, told the three-judge panel that, if the Legislature were adopt the interim maps as permanent, the plaintiffs would be amending their pleadings to include claims based on those maps – and that case law supported the court’s retention of jurisdiction in those circumstances.
And they argued that because the new legislative maps would not really be new maps but rather a variant of the legislatively enacted maps that the court previously considered, the court’s work would essentially pick up where it left off when the interim maps were adopted.
At various points in the hearing, the narrowness of Gov. Perry’s special session call came into question.
Although the state’s lawyer David Mattax said that he could not say whether the call would restrict consideration of alternate maps, lawyers for plaintiff groups – and Circuit Judge Jerry Smith – suggested that it did – and plaintiff groups said that was further evidence that not only were the maps not new, but that Republican leaders had predetermined the outcome – and once again excluded meaningful input from minority groups.
This session won’t be a quickie as was originally thought and the redistricting process in Texas likely won’t end soon either.
Kuff has a few items of interest on the session so far:
- If the Lege slows things down and allows amendments, alternate maps, and public input at other hearings around the state, it’s almost certainly because the Republicans have come to realize that to do otherwise would be to repeat some of the behavior from 2011 that got them cited for discrimination. First Reading discusses how Democrats are setting them up for this (scroll down to the section that begins “Stop. Don’t. Come Back.”), and it’s clear from the questions at the Senate hearing that they’re laying down a paper trail for future litigation. We’ll see if the Republicans can avoid the trap – the Senators appear to be at least somewhat aware of the danger – or if they come under pressure to just get it done and leave all the worrying about the legal stuff to Greg Abbott.
– As Greg notes, if the floor is open for amendments, it is also possible that the Rs might want to tweak the Senate map, which is now acceptable to Sen. Wendy Davis. However, if that happens, it seems likely that they would all have to run for re-election in 2014; Sen. Royce West brought that up in his questioning. If so, that could put a damper on some Senators’ plans for the future, since at least three of them are thinking about running statewide – Hegar and Williams for Comptroller, Dan Patrick for Lite Guv. Hegar and Williams drew four year terms at the start of the session, meaning they could run for something in 2014 without putting their seat at risk if nothing changes, while Patrick drew a two year term and would have to make a choice.
– It’s not clear to me if the longer timetable for redistricting makes it more likely that Rick Perry will add to the call of the session, as Trail Blazers suggests, or less likely. Arguably, since there will be empty days between the committee hearings and the votes, Perry could add other items that could fill in the voids. Against that, the session is 30 days long, and we’ll be well past the halfway point by the time the maps are voted on at the current pace, which is almost two weeks later than originally projected. If the Rs do put more effort into taking public testimony, especially if they hold field hearings around the state, they’ll be hard pressed to do much else while redistricting is on the menu – and remember, Perry has basically said not to ask about anything else until redistricting is done – and they’d have a short horizon for anything else afterward. Not impossible, of course, and Perry can always call a second session if he wants – it’s all about what he wants, after all – it’s just not clear which way is more conducive to an expanded call for anything remotely controversial. As always, we’ll know when he wants us to know.
It looks like, at this point, that the intended purposes of this special session are already out the window, and we have Attorney General Gregg Abbott and Gov. Rick Perry to thank for this.
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Posted in Good Stuff, Take Action, Williamson County at 9:08 am by wcnews
Via WilcoDemocrats.org.
AND
Battleground Texas Free Breakfast
| Date: |
June 1, 2013 |
| Time: |
9:30 AM |
| Location: |
Sun City Social Center Ballroom
2 Texas Drive, Georgetown, Texas |
| Cost: |
Free! But please feel free to bring a donation. |
Battleground Texas Leader Jeremy Bird speaks with Stephen Colbert.
Bird was the wizard behind Obama’s successful 2012 re-election campaign.
This event will be headlined by two top-ranking officials with the Battleground Texas (BGTX) organization: Cliff Walker, Political Director, and Megan Klein, Regional Director for Central Texas. They will speak on the BGTX’s sole mission and purpose of “Turning Texas Blue”.
Texas is the #1 State that the National Democratic Party is focusing on, among a Top Ten List of states that could and should have more Democratic voters turning out than Republican voters. So they are concentrating on getting both known and suspected Democrats, including millions of like-minded minorities, women and seniors, to become Registered Voters ASAP!
There’s more to know and more to get enthused about. But you’ll have to join us on Saturday, June 1 to see and hear it all, right from the lips of our Battleground Texas leaders.
Breakfast will consist of breakfast burritos, pastries, gluten-free pastries, watermelons filled with fruit, coffee and orange juice. Please join us!
Here are some recent links regarding Battleground Texas:
Battleground TX: Smart Data Plus Money Could Turn Texas Blue.
Here’s What It’ll Take To Turn Texas Blue.
Fact, fiction, and a whole lot of spin.
What Must Happen for Texas to Turn Blue.
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05.30.13
Posted in Around The State, Bad Government Republicans, Road Issues, Transportation at 8:17 am by wcnews
The corporate toll road is not doing well, Moody’s downgrades toll road company.
Moody’s Investor Service has downgraded the credit rating of the private company that built and operates the Texas 130 toll road extension, a rating that could continue to drop unless traffic “aggressively” grows on the road in the next two years.
Moody’s issued the rating April 12 after putting the SH 130 Concession Co., a partnership between Spanish-based Cintra and San Antonio’s Zachry American Infrastructure, on review in March.
The toll road, from Seguin north to South Austin, was billed as the nation’s fastest when it opened to drivers in late October, boasting an 85-mph speed limit.
But traffic counts on the road are about half the initial projections, the Moody’s report said, forcing the company to dip into its financial reserves to make loan payments and raising concerns about the possibility of future default.
A downgraded credit rating can indicate a greater risk to bondholders.
The report lists the company outlook as negative, which indicates the possibility of future credit downgrading in the next one to two years, Moody’s communications strategist David Jacobson said.
Moody’s lowered the rating of a senior secured bank loan of $685.7 million from Baa3 to B1, a four-step decline, which Jacobson said is unusual.
And if this road does default Texas taxpayers will be on the hook for it.
TxDOT’s contract with the concession company lays out complex procedures to determine how much TxDOT would pay the concession company to take over the road in the event of a default or for any other reason. The Moody’s report doesn’t mention the possibility of default.
No on say this coming!! We should have just raised the gas tax, it would have been much, much less expensive in the long run. More privatized gains and socialized loses.
[UPDATE]: TxDOT appears to be going all in with taxpayer money, TxDOT May Sweeten Pot to Draw Private Funds to Projects.
In its first meeting after a legislative session in which requests for transportation funding fell billions of dollars short of requests, the Texas Transportation Commission voted Thursday to open the door to allowing private firms to take on a larger role in some road projects.
“We’re trying to stretch our resources as far as possible,” TxDOT Executive Director Phil Wilson said.
The five commissioners voted unanimously to consider amending the agency’s rules to allow for a new kind of public-private partnership for the agency in which TxDOT would share financial risk with private entities on a project and even agree to reimburse them from the state highway fund if needed to ensure they make a profit. TxDOT will accept public comments on the rule change until July 15. Afterward, the commission will consider adopting the proposal.
Currently, toll projects in Texas range from privately developed ones like State Highway 130 south of Austin, where a private entity takes on all the financial risk, to the DFW Connector Project in North Texas, where public entities are on the hook. Wilson described this latest proposal as allowing for projects that fall in between those two extremes.
“This would be more of a blended model,” Wilson said.
This is not surprising. The Texas GOP has been starving transportation funding for more then a decade now, in order to create a “crisis” just like this so they can justify these privatization schemes. I think someone wrote a book about this.
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05.29.13
Posted in Around The State, Money In Politics at 5:06 pm by wcnews
Much, if not all, of what frustrates me about politics is that little, if anything, has been done over the last 30 years that has had a positive impact on my life. And I don’t think I’m alone. Getting beyond that takes knowing why that is the case. And no one does a better job so explaining why then Lawrence Lessig, Can Democrats Get a New Party, Too?
Our problem isn’t the Republicans’ — we’re not too exclusive. It’s the opposite: We are wildly too inclusive. The Democrats are indeed a rainbow coalition, courting every hue of American society. But the leaders of the party believe that at our core, there must be a dark shade of green. For at least 20 years, conventional Democratic wisdom has been that we can do nothing unless we give pride of place to large-dollar funders of Democratic campaigns. This money, most Democrats would concede, may well be evil, but it is a necessary evil. And the trick, we’ve been told again and again, is to pass as much policy as we can, subject to the constraints of raising big money.
This position has never been completely uncontested. Indeed, as Mike Lux describes in his book, The Progressive Revolution, at the very birth of the (first) Clinton Administration, there were some who pressed the president to pursue campaign-finance reform before he tried health-care reform. That advice was rejected, and America got neither.
Instead the Democrats got rich. The Clinton Administration bent over backward to convince Wall Street that its populist rhetoric was just that — rhetoric — and that Democrats could bargain away sane financial regulations as quickly as Republicans. The result: a boom in Wall Street giving. And soon the same strategy was replicated across the big-money spectrum. Everyone understood there are things that Democrats had to say. But everyone who mattered understood that rhetoric notwithstanding, there were things that even Democrats would never do.
The consequence is a pattern of reform, or as we call it in the 21st century, “change,” that is completely predictable. “Change” is stuff that either makes big money happy or that big money doesn’t care to block. Welfare reform (how much do the poor give?), NAFTA (how much did the steel workers give, compared to the corporations supporting NAFTA?), or a “health-care reform” bill that passed only because of a $250 billion gift, as The New Republic estimated it, to big pharma and insurance companies.
[...]
So how do we Democrats ever win anything that we really care about, from climate-change legislation, to real financial reform, to health care designed to actually heal people rather than subsidize drug companies or protect insurance companies? These core Democratic objectives are off the table so long as big money funds campaigns. And any Democrat who tells you otherwise either thinks that you’re a fool or is a fool himself.
You don’t get to heaven by sleeping with the devil. And you don’t get to govern by handing the keys to the republic over to interests who have no actual interest in governing. We need a party that stands for ideas. And first among those ideas must be to banish big money from center stage. A credible and unbendable commitment to changing the way campaigns are funded would not only inspire millions to join the party. It would also, and more importantly, make governing possible again.
There’s no need to rehash the past. Maybe compromise was necessary. Who knows? What’s clear today is that this compromise now gets us nothing. The aim of our party must be more than the regular coronation of democratic royalty. It must instead be to do something real. And nothing real will happen so long as big money funds our campaigns. [Emphasis added]
We have a political system in this country where the two main parties are bankrolled by the same money. And it shows. As Lessig says we will not change until we get the money out, and then we can have a party of the people again.
And here’s how this system has manifested itself, What Do Wealthy Super Citizens Want from Government?
But a new study is just out that does look at the policy preferences of the wealthy, co-authored by Bartels, Benjamin Page, and Jason Seawright. The study relies on a very small sample of wealthy people in the Chicago area—some with net worths in the tens of millions. If the results can be extrapolated nationally, we should all be worried.
The study finds that these wealthy individuals are even greater super citizens than their merely affluent counterparts—with a stunning 40 percent of respondents saying they’ve contacted their U.S. Senator and two-thirds saying they have made campaign contributions.
What do the wealthy want from the political system? That’s hard to say, exactly, but the new study finds that the wealthy are far to the right of the American public when it comes to such issues as regulation, job creation, the deficit, education, taxes, and funding for social safety net programs. The table belows shows some of these differences in more detail. With the exception of infrastructure and scientific research, the public favors more spending on a range of domestic priorities—and by large margins.
Source: Bartels, Page, Seawright study
These findings have profound ramifications in thinking about the health of America’s democracy. Basically, the people with the most money and clout in U.S. society—the kind of people who can get their U.S. Senator on the phone—have a much more constricted vision of what government should be doing than the mass of ordinary voters.
That’s a problem, especially since there’s a lot of evidence coming out of Washington that political leaders are listening closely right now to the wishes of these wealthy super citizens.
This is not the kind of political system our founders envisioned.
Further Reading:
Report from the American Sustainable Business Council, Reverse Citizens United – End Unrestricted Campaign Donations.
Report from the Main Street Alliance, Poll Report: Small Business Owners’ Views on Corporate Tax Reform.
50 Million Americans Are Going Hungry As Congress Considers Gutting Food Stamps.
Will journalists take any steps to defend against attacks on press freedom?
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Posted in 83rd Legislature, Around The State, Bad Government Republicans, Health Care, Right Wing Lies at 10:58 am by wcnews
Remember the canard of Bush years, compassionate conservatism? Well if there ever was such a thing, it is no more in Texas. The original need for the term was for framing purposes because “conservatism” is inherently mean, or compassionless. In Texas we know that compassionate conservatism in an oxymoron. Thankfully no everyone is taking the budget the Texas legislature passed sitting down, Groups blast Texas lawmakers over budget deal.
A group of unions, education groups, disability rights activists, social-justice interfaith groups and health care providers and advocates said Monday that lawmakers at best deserve middling to poor marks for their two-year, $197 billion state budget.
Spokesmen for the Texas Forward coalition denounced the budget package for its tax “giveaways” and for not putting back enough of the $12 billion in spending cuts approved by lawmakers in 2011.
Among the casualties are expanded and full-day prekindergarten programs, remedial instruction for failing students and formula funding of public schools, none of which were funded at pre-recession levels, they said.
“There’s a lot of celebration of mediocrity around this budget,” said Phillip Martin, political director of Progress Texas. The group advocated for Medicaid expansion, election reform, more education funding and an end to what it called Gov. Rick Perry’s “corporate gifts” to political donors through the state’s economic development and cancer research funds.
Martin noted that at least $8 billion of the nearly $12 billion in available state savings would be left unspent under the budget measures reaching the Republican governor’s desk.
There will be an $8 billion rainy-day balance, even if voters this fall approve a constitutional amendment that would trigger use of $2 billion for a water infrastructure fund. Under the budget package, an additional $1.9 billion of rainy day money would be used to reverse a school payment delay and pay for recovery from the 2011 wildfires and last month’s fertilizer plant explosion in West.
Eva DeLuna Castro, senior budget analyst at the center-left think tank the Center for Public Policy Priorities, said lawmakers could have spent billions more to undo last session’s cuts. Instead, she said, they obsessed over holding back most of the rainy day money and were afraid to vote to exceed a constitutional limit on spending growth of non-dedicated state taxes.
“This doesn’t get us back to where we used to be, and we could have gotten there,” she said.
She said lawmakers have budgeted too little for Medicaid by up to $2 billion. Between that and the hoarding of rainy day dollars “it’s like a middle-aged person trying to fit into the clothes they wore in high school,” she said.
Eric Hartman, director of governmental relations for the teacher union AFT Texas, said lawmakers undid $3.4 billion of the $4 billion cut in 2011 from the state’s main school aid program but left “expansion grants” for pre-k programs in the ditch. They put back only $30 million, after cutting $200 million last time, he said.
As EOW has said before it is cruel that a state with so much wealth can continue to let so many suffer unnecessarily. But jus as bad or worse is why they won’t join with business and local governments and try and find a way to expand Medicaid. Their hate for President Barack Obama and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have so overwhelmed them that they can’t find a way to work out a solution to help those in need. Health Officials Decry Texas’ Snubbing Of Medicaid Billions, (click here to listen).
The state of Texas is turning down billions of federal dollars that would have paid for health care coverage for 1.5 million poor Texans.
By refusing to participate in Medicaid expansion, which is part of the Affordable Care Act, the state will leave on the table an estimated $100 billion over the next decade.
Texas’ share of the cost would have been just 7 percent of the total, but for Gov. Rick Perry and the state’s Republican-dominated Legislature, even $1 in the name of “Obamacare” was a dollar too much.
In other words they’re doing it out of spite.
If your country has no national health insurance but your citizens don’t have the stomach to watch the uninsured die on the hospital sidewalk, something’s got to give. So there’s a national expectation that doctors and hospitals will provide these uninsured populations mostly uncompensated care — and so they do. But few in the industry think this is the way to operate.
Tom Banning, chief executive officer of the Texas Academy of Family Physicians, lobbied hard but unsuccessfully for Medicaid expansion. He’s beside himself with frustration.
“These people don’t choose to get sick. When they do, they’re going to access our health care system at the most inefficient and expensive point, which is the emergency room,” Banning says. “And it’s going to cost the taxpayers, and it’s going to cost employers a lot of money to care for them. And we’re going to be forgoing billions of dollars that the feds have set aside for the state to pay for and provide this care.”
This is not about money — if it were, Texas would be taking it. This is about Obamacare. It’s widely believed in Austin that Perry is seriously considering another run for president — this time without the “oops.” His base is Tea Party Republicans across the country. While it might cost $100 billion for the privilege, Perry is going to be able to stand in front of them and say, “I said no to Obama when he tried to bribe my state with health care coverage for the poor.”
And since it’s widely believed that these would-be Medicaid recipients probably don’t vote or, if they do vote, they vote for Democrats, there’s no political price to pay for snubbing them.
Still, there are some Republican legislators who feel bad about not taking the money.
Rep. John Zerwas tried to craft some sort of compromise that never mentioned Medicaid expansion, but he couldn’t get it out of committee — because for Texas Republicans, the very words “health care” now carry the stink of Obamacare.
Zerwas points to “the political realities of having to run for office again in two years, and how much explaining would I have to do as a candidate around a vote that could very easily be framed as a supporter of promoting Obamacare.”
Texas Republicans aren’t worried about the reaction from the left for voting down Medicaid expansion; they’re worried they might get a primary challenge from a Tea Party candidate if the words “health care” pass their lips on the floor of the Legislature. That is, if they’re not already a Tea Party candidate, which many are.
For at least the next two years and probably longer, Medicaid expansion in Texas is dead. What this all means is that more than a million Texans who might have received health care coverage will remain one serious illness or one bad accident away from bankruptcy. And an estimated $100 billion that would have been spent buying health care in Texas will now go somewhere else.
Because of ideology there can be no compromise on an issue that almost everyone, except for those on the extreme right, agree should happen. It certainly seems that compassionless conservatism and spite will keep government in Texas cruel for the foreseeable future.
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05.28.13
Posted in Around The State, Redistricting, Special Session, The Lege at 10:22 am by wcnews
Yesterday was the last day of the 83rd regular session, Sine Die! While the only thing they have to get done did get done, the budget, many things did not. As Kuff points out, Wrapping up the rest of the regular session.
The things that did not get done in regulation time are redistricting, about which we know what happened; transportation funding, which just sort of quietly slipped off the radar once Perry stuck a shiv into a bill that would have raised vehicle registration fees; and all of the wingnut wish list items like abortion and gun rights and what have you. This as I’ve said before is simply a matter of what Rick Perry wants to do. There’s plenty of speculation about what Perry may do and what may or may not be good politics for him to do. All I know is we’ll know when he tells us. Rick Perry does what he thinks is best for Rick Perry, and that’s all there is to it.
The worst kept secret of the last week was that there was going to be a special session of the Texas Legislature called as soon as the regular session ended. Perry orders special session on redistricting.
In a statement announcing the special session, Perry praised the Legislature for its work to put in place a $2 billion plan for water infrastructure, cut business taxes and create a new mega university in South Texas.
“However, there is still work to be done on behalf of the citizens of Texas,” he said.
Perry placed only redistricting before lawmakers initially, but he was peppered with requests to add a list of conservative issues and could do so. Only Perry can call lawmakers into special session, and he sets the agenda.
“I expect the governor to add more topics to the call” as lawmakers make progress on redistricting, which is the subject of a Thursday hearing by a special Senate committee, said Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. He has asked Perry to add issues including anti-abortion and pro-gun measures to the agenda.
Perry specifically assigned lawmakers the task of making permanent a set of interim redistricting maps drawn by a three-judge panel in San Antonio.
To get up to speed on what the redistricting issues are there’s no better place to go then to TxRedistricting and this, Texas redistricting tip sheet. And he has a press round up on redistricting too.
The Senate Select Committee on Redistricting will hold a hearing on four bills at 9 AM on Monday, which will include public testimony. The current maps were drawn by the courts and the public never had a chance to comment on them. Obviously, Perry and Abbott believe that the current membership, elected under these maps, will be quick to ratify them.
But Dem disagree. They may also be making the calculation that the longer the redistricting process takes, the less time there will be for the governor to add items to the special session. The laundry list of items the wing nuts wants taken up in a special session, at least for now, Perry won’t be add until redistricting gets done. Which is another reason for dragging the process out. That’s if you trust Rick Perry to stick by that.
There’s still questions of how the Senate will run during a special session.
The key question in redistricting is whether the 2/3rds rule will apply in the Senate; if it does, then the 12 Democrats can block intentionally discriminatory maps from coming to the floor if they stick together.
Initially, Dewhurst told reporters that the 2/3rds rule would not be in effect for a special session. During tonight’s floor discussion, Senator Kirk Watson attempted to determine if that was indeed true.
Watson asked specifically about “blocker bills,” which are meaningless, silly bills passed out of committee quickly to occupy the top spot on the calendar and thus force Senators to suspend the rules to bring up any other bills out of order, which requires 2/3rds of the Senators to vote for the suspension.
Dewhurst claimed that there would not be blocker bills and that there hadn’t for 10 years; Watson countered with actual historical examples of blocker bills in previous special sessions.
If there is no blocker bill, then there is no need for the 2/3rds rule to be used to bring a bill (such as redistricting) up for a floor vote.
Having a blocker bill is purely at the discretion of the Lt. Gov. Even if the entire Senate wanted to put one on the calendar, Dewhurst could remove it. And even if he did let a “blocker bill” come up, he could remove it later anyways.
WIthout a blocker bill, legislation is considered in the order it comes out of committee. Dewhurst indicated tonight that there will be no blocker bill. If that is the case, there will be no 2/3rds rule and a simple majority could pass a redistricting plan.
And as Burka wrote yesterday about Perry, Dewhurst, Abbott and a special session.
There is a missing person in this report, and that is Rick Perry. No one, perhaps including the governor himself, knows what he is going to do. Perry has fashioned the modern Texas Republican party and changed Texas politics forever by driving the state GOP to the far right. The betting around the Capitol is that he won’t run for a fourth term as governor, but I didn’t think he would run again in 2010. There is also the possibility that he will run for president, but he would have no chance to win. Maybe he doesn’t care; his goal may be to show that he is still a formidable politician and one who might have been a serious contender in 2012, had it not been for the limitations imposed by his back surgery.
Perry’s immediate future, however, will include a decision of whether to call a special session of the Legislature. Greg Abbott wants a session on redistricting, but it is hard to see what advantage Republicans can gain. They are already facing a ruling that the interim maps represent intentional discrimination; at some point Abbott is going to have to come to grips with that finding. If, as David Dewhurst wants, the special session agenda will be a smorgasboard of uberconservative social issues, that could turn ugly for Republicans. They are on the wrong side of a lot of the social issues, especially gay marriage. The world is going in one direction, and the Texas Republican party is going in another. I think Rick Perry is smart enough to figure that a special session driven by social issues is a non-starter these days. On that point, we’ll know soon enough.
Perry had to call a special on redistricting to take the issue off the table in case he does run again, and against Abbott. Whether he needs to bring up the wing nut laundry list as well we will just have to wait and see. We should assume that the GOP House leadership, aka Straus’ team, still doesn’t want anything to do with the wing nut laundry list.
And Democrats, for their part, should just make sure to highlight how the so-called “conservatives” are again wasting taxpayer money for their own partisan political gain. None of the issues that are likely to be taken up in this special session will have any positive impact on the lives of poor, working, and middle class Texans.
Further Reading:
From the Legislative Reference Library of Texas, What’s Next? Post-Regular Session FAQs.
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Posted in Around The State, Commentary at 8:24 am by wcnews
The Texas Progressive Alliance hopes their legislators get to go home soon as we bring you this week’s roundup.
Off the Kuff doesn’t profess to know whether Rick Perry will run for Governor again or not, but he does know that Greg Abbott would not be any improvement over him in the Governor’s mansion.
Williamson County does it again! WCNews at Eye on Williamson posts on the latest outrage from the GOP in Williamson County, Religious test for constable applicants in Williamson County .
A Dick decided to run for mayor of Houston. Like THAT’s newsworthy. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs decided to blog about it anyway.
Darth Politico is back with some Memorial Day musings about how we treat our veterans and that not all those who die because of war are killed in combat.
DosCentavos celebrates the death (for now) of the latest Republican attack on the poor– drug testing for TANF beneficiaries. He does support some sort of test for Lege members.
====================
And here are some more posts of interest from Texas blogs.
Hair Balls listens to Steve Hotze’s anti-Obamacare song so you don’t have to.
Brewed And Never Battered thanks everyone who helped pass the craft beer bills this session.
Open The Taps explains what all that craft beer legislation will do for you.
Juanita already has a reason to look forward to 2016.
Sara Inés Calderón offers her perspective on Battleground Texas.
Austin Contrarian reassures his neighbors that Austin isn’t as big as the Census may have you believe.
Jason Stanford explains how the Legislature screwed you this time around.
Better Texas Blog laments that the Lege still doesn’t account for growth in its budget.
BOR updates us on the redistricting effort in the city of Austin.
Texpatriate applauds the Lilly Ledbetter equal pay bill.
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05.27.13
Posted in Around The Nation, Elections at 2:45 pm by wcnews
It’s likely most citizens of the United State of America know that Voting is not a right.
Is it time, at long last, for the citizens of the United States to enjoy the constitutional right to vote for the people who govern them?
Phrased in that way, the question may come as a shock. The U.S. has waged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan justified, at least in rhetoric, by the claim that people deserve the right to vote for their leaders. Most of us assume that the right to vote has long been enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
Not according to the Supreme Court. In Bush v. Gore (2000), the Court ruled that “[t]he individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.” That’s right. Under federal law, according to the Supreme Court, if you are a citizen of the United States, you have a right to own a firearm that might conceivably be used in overthrowing the government. But you have no right to wield a vote that might be used to change the government by peaceful means.
FairVote, a nonprofit organization that leads the fight for electoral reform in the U.S., points out:
The right to vote is the foundation of any democracy. Yet most Americans do not realize that we do not have a constitutionally protected right to vote. While there are amendments to the U.S. Constitution that prohibit discrimination based on race (15th), sex (19th) and age (26th), no affirmative right to vote exists.
And that’s just the beginning. While the Voting Rights Act eliminated overt disenfranchisement based on racial discrimination, state governments retain many tools that state politicians can use to disfranchise citizens, not only in state and local elections but also in federal elections. Among these tools are onerous voter registration requirements, like the photo ID laws being pushed by Republicans in many states to disenfranchise low-income Democratic voters. Then there are laws that make forfeiture of voting rights for certain classes of convicted criminals permanent, even after they have served their time and rejoined society with otherwise full rights. This form of disenfranchisement falls disproportionately on the white, black and Latino poor, not on white-collar criminals in the social elite. According to Bryan Stevenson, a professor of law at NYU, in another decade more citizens of Alabama may be disenfranchised by law than before the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965.
The good news is there’s a bill filed to fix this problem, Congressmen Propose The Mother Of All Voting Rights Protections.
The brief amendment would stipulate that “every citizen of the United States, who is of legal voting age, shall have the fundamental right to vote in any public election held in the jurisdiction in which the citizen resides.” It would also give Congress “the power to enforce and implement this article by appropriate legislation.”
After investigating the issue, Pocan said he and Ellison decided this type of amendment was the best way to combat measures to restrict voting access.
“Essentially, what it would do is it would put the burden on any of these states that try to make laws that are more restrictive that they would have to prove that they’re not disenfranchising a voter. Rather than, currently, where a voter has to prove they’ve somehow been wronged by a state measure,” said Pocan.
As Michael Lind stated in the Salon aticle:
Who could oppose such a simple and straightforward amendment, guaranteeing a sacred right that most Americans assume is already in the Constitution? The Republican right could, and probably will.
I’ve mentioned this issue, that there is no right to vote in the US Constitution to several people and they a left speechless. It’s time to change the Constitution on the right to vote. It’s harder to take away a right, then it is to just discriminate against someone.
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Posted in 83rd Legislature, Around The State, The Lege at 11:12 am by wcnews
Today is the last day, day 140 of the 83 Regular Session of the Texas Legislature, Sine Die! But Texans will likely be subjected to at least one special session before the 84th convenes. Over the weekend legislators finished up legislations needed to avoid a special session by passing a budget, needed water legislation, and tax cuts. Al the things Gov. Perry said they needed to accomplish to avoid a special session. Lawmakers get busy during the closing hours of legislative session.
The major components of a state spending plan fell into place Sunday as $2 billion in state water funding won legislative approval and the House signed off on a Senate-passed $197 billion budget to run state government for the next two years.
The flurry of votes cemented a carefully negotiated budget compromise that appeared in doubt just days earlier and completed lawmakers’ most fundamental task as they headed into the last day of work before adjourning Monday.
Whether the state’s citizens-legislators go home after that, however, remained in question. A special session that could keep them in Austin for up to 30 more days remained a strong possibility as lawmakers face legislative overtime to deal with redistricting and other potential issues.
Working through the second day of a weekend session, House and Senate members plowed through a host of remaining issues — both big and small — as they neared the end of a 140-day biennial session that saw the introduction of more than 8,000 bills, most of which fell by the wayside.
With his goals accomplished it appears that any immediate special session would focus on redistricting, from BOR Legislature Looks Like It’s Coming Back Tuesday For Special on Redistricting.
To paraphrase Don Corleone: “Just when you think you’re out, they pull you back in . . .”
Wayne Slater from the Dallas Morning News has tweeted that two well-placed sources say that a special session on Texas redistricting will start Tuesday, immediately after sine die.
And Kuff has much more on what the session might entail, Don’t count your victories too soon.
While we appear to have avoided the need for a special session on the budget and other major priorities, the buzz now is that there will be a special session on redistricting. If that’s all it’s about, then there’s nothing to worry about. But special sessions are about what Rick Perry wants, and to a lesser degree what the people who have Rick Perry’s ear want. One of those people is David Dewhurst, who needs as much of a boost to his wingnut credentials as he can muster, and he’s urging Perry to call a special on all the wingnut business that went unfinished.
[...]
Dewhurst almost certainly feels like he needs a special session to score some wingnut victories to help him win his next primary, especially after his loss to Ted Cruz. of course, just because Dewhurst is asking doesn’t mean Perry will answer. He has his own stuff to deal with, and he’ll do whatever he thinks is best for himself, as he always does. But it’s hard to see how calling a wingnut special hurts Perry, especially if he is running for something, in 2014 or 2016. Despite progress made in this past week, there’s still a lot of unfinished real business, and nay failures there definitely opens the window for a special. If that happens, then all bets are off. I remain very concerned about this. Burka has more about Dewhurst.
Unfortunately what winds up being on the call for a “redistricting” special session may have more to do with Perry’s future then anything else, Special session may offer glimpse of future.
We might glimpse Perry’s own as-yet-unannounced political plans in his decision on the agenda, which he controls along with the decision whether to call lawmakers back at all.
“If Governor Perry is still considering running for either reelection in 2014 or for president in 2016, it would be especially advantageous for him to include abortion-related legislation in his call,” said Rice University political scientist Mark P. Jones.
Abortion bills that didn’t pass in the regular session “would significantly reduce the number of abortions that occur in Texas in the near term, a reduction that would be celebrated by pro-life groups in Texas as well as in other states such as Iowa and South Carolina,” he said.
Jones said Perry could help Dewhurst in an expected 2014 primary challenge by including abortion, welfare-applicant drugtesting and college concealed-carry legislation.
But Perry may want to carefully pick his topics. Not all Republicans are enamored of all the most conservative issues, and an ugly, unsuccessful session isn’t necessarily a résumé-booster.
Which means none of this has little to do with anything that matters to most poor, working and middle class Texans. Just that narrow minority of people that show up and vote in the Texas GOP primary. While 62 House wing nuts are a calling for Gov. Perry to add GOP platform items to the special session call the majority, 88, are not.
The GOP wants to blame the Democrats for this legislation failing to pass in the regular session, but that’s just not the case. The GOP has shown in the past that they’re willing to change the rules to suit them, (see redistricting and voter ID in the 82nd legislature). Mostly these issues didn’t come up because the House leadership didn’t want them to, and that’s the main frustration of those 62 who signed that letter. Maybe the House leadership will change it’s mind in a special. We’ll have to wait and see once the session is called, and then what is put on the agenda by Gov. Perry. But it’s unlikely the needs of Texans will be put at the forefront.
Further Reading:
Burka’s take, Sine Die for the 83rd Legislature.
HChron, Special session imminent for state Legislature.
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Posted in 83rd Legislature, Around The State, Money In Politics, The Lege at 9:58 am by wcnews
That’s what Texas Senator Kel Seliger (R-Amarillo) said after Texas Gov. Rick Perry vetoed SB 346, aka the “dark money” bill, on Saturday. As Kuff says it was not a surprise.
Perry and Sullivan are of course shedding crocodile tears – people don’t intimidate Sullivan, people are intimidated by him and the millions of dollars he has at his disposal from anonymous donors. You can see from Noel Freeman’s comment in my earlier post that there were issues with this bill that would have caused problems for organizations that don’t cause the kind of trouble that Sullivan’s do, and perhaps because of that the veto is for the best. Let’s just be clear on the prevarication in Perry’s and Sullivan’s words, and let’s hope someone tries again with a better bill in the next session.
This bill was more a fight amongst the funders of the GOP primaries in Texas. So, for the most part, had little to do with Democrats, just GOP infighting. More from the Texas Tribune, Perry Vetoes “Dark Money” Bill.
Gov. Rick Perry has vetoed a divisive measure that would have forced some tax-exempt, politically active nonprofits to disclose their donors. That effectively kills the measure for this session; lawmakers stripped a similar amendment from an Ethics Commission reform bill on Friday.
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The bill’s author, Sen. Kel Seliger, R-Amarillo, said Perry’s veto was “embarrassing,” and added that there “doesn’t seem to be a real strong groundswell” for a veto override, though he didn’t rule it out.
“This is a sad day for integrity and transparency in Texas,” Seliger said. “Gov. Perry’s veto of SB 346 legalizes money laundering in Texas elections. The governor’s veto is ironic since money laundering is illegal in other endeavors.”
House lawmakers passed Senate Bill 346, a “dark money” bill that would’ve applied to nonprofits falling under 501(c)(4) of the tax code, earlier this month. They did it in a hurry, leaving in a provision many of them disliked that exempted labor unions in an effort to deny the upper chamber its request to revisit senators’ original vote to pass it.
The measure has faced ardent opposition from far-right activists like Michael Quinn Sullivan, whose conservative group Texans for Fiscal Responsibility is a 501(c)(4). He has argued that SB 346 is an unconstitutional attempt to harass protected donors.
“Texas Gov. Rick Perry today saved Texans from the threat of harassment and intimidation simply by virtue of their contributing to non-profit entities that speak out politically,” Sullivan said in a statement. “The governor’s veto of SB 346 sends a welcome message, that the Lone Star State won’t tolerate infringements on clear constitutional rights or chilling limitations on political speech.”
Supporters of the legislation “will be subject to threats and intimidation donors to Tea Party groups, home-school organizations, right-to-life advocates and civil rights causes,” Sullivan wrote in an op-ed published in The Dallas Morning News on Wednesday.
But advocates say that if such nonprofit groups are going to play on the political field, they should be subject to the same rules as other campaign donors. In the 2012 election cycle, groups that used the 501(c)(4) designation spent more than $300 million to influence elections, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
“Certain groups keep scorecards and continuously bombard the internet. All that’s fine, it’s what this process is about,” state Rep. Charlie Geren, R-Fort Worth, said during House debate on the measure. “The problem occurs when these groups wade deep into the political process … and use a loophole that keeps their donors secret.”
Transparency and ethics reform were pretty much left alone as well, Lawmaker Transparency Bills Got Little Traction.
Lawmakers talked a big game about improving transparency this session, but when push came to shove, they did next to nothing to advance it.
Key proposals never even got close, like bills to strengthen reporting of lawmakers’ financial interests, prevent the quick revolving door that sends former legislators into the lobby, and stop the practice of allowing elected officials to draw down both their state salary and their pension.
Others got within spitting distance. As of Friday morning, a reform bill for the Texas Ethics Commission still carried amendments the House passed by wide margins to put lawmakers’ financial disclosure forms online, to require groups to report spending on a speaker’s race and to force lawmakers to disclose their contracts with government entities.
But House and Senate negotiators stripped those off in conference committee — even while they added provisions to keep more information, like their home addresses, private.
“Behind closed doors, the conferees mounted a strategic assault on transparency,” said Craig McDonald, director of the left-leaning money-in-politics group Texans for Public Justice. “The stage was set to make significant progress on ethics and open government reform. The true nature of the politicians reared its head at the last minute.”
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A couple of smaller-scale ethics advances are hanging to the omnibus Ethics Commission bill awaiting Perry’s signature, including a provision to require railroad commissioners to resign if they run for another office and another that would force those who post political ads online to disclose who’s paying for them. Lawmakers who become lobbyists would also have to wait two years before donating their leftover cash to sitting members by way of campaign contributions.
Lawmakers have also passed a separate measure that would call for an interim study — a common maneuver to kick controversial reform measures down the road — on the state’s ethics laws and reporting requirements.
While lawmakers took some steps forward this session, “the Legislature still has miles to go to end the ethics abuses,” said Tom “Smitty” Smith, the Texas director for the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen.
At the end of the day, McDonald said, “politicians can’t be trusted to clean up politics.”
As has always been the case, it’s extremely unlikely that this will change as long as the legislature regulates themselves.
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