Slowly and Painfully, House Passes $337 Billion Budget

The Texas House spent over hours debating but mostly just standing around amendments during a marathon proceeding to pass its biennial budget Ultimately the House voted - to adopt a billion budget early Friday morning The bill shepherded by House Appropriations Chairman Greg Bonnen featured several big-ticket items At the top is billion to cover the ballooning cost of previously enacted property tax relief and finance a new round of cuts The budget also puts billion toward citizens instruction which includes a modest but long-overdue bump in the per-student allotment and billion earmarked for school vouchers Legislators are also maintaining full funding for Governor Greg Abbott s margin prevention project Operation Lone Star with another billion for the next two years despite the fact that frontier crossings are precipitously low and President Trump is back in the White House Nineteen Republicans comprising the hard-right bloc voted against the budget contending that it enabled too much bloated administration spending and not enough property tax cuts Seven Democrats opposed it over the funding for private school vouchers While there are several minor differences the House budget has largely aligned with the one that the Senate unanimously passed on March The two chambers will now iron out the differences in conference committee The debate kicked off with Chairman Bonnen filing a motion to move nearly of the almost amendments to Article XI which is essentially the budgetary graveyard The move effectively killed several conservative amendments including over a dozen of Representative Brian Harrison s bills with the same copy-and-paste anti-DEI language As usual Harrison took to the floor to complain but the motion overwhelmingly passed - This preliminary move seemed to suggest a quicker hearing without much debate perhaps even letting legislators out before sundown Note During eight of the last legislative sessions the budget hearing ended after midnight Legislators only voted on amendments adopting but there were several points of order the parliamentary challenges to proposed provision known lovingly in the Lege as POOs that dragged the floor proceedings into the a m hour Only a small portion of the filed amendments definitely made it to the floor for debate which often erupted as flashpoints between painfully long periods of procedural negotiation The first amendment adopted filed by Representative Mary Gonz lez an El Paso Democrat totally wiped out funding for the Texas Lottery Commission and the Economic Rise and Tourism Fund in the Governor s Office The maneuver successfully took down conservative amendments that planned to siphon funds from these pools of money Democratic state Representative Erin Zwiener first tested Gonz lez s tactic with a POO directed against Representative Mitch Little whose amendment sought to raise salaries for employees of the Office of the Attorney General Little s amendment and a insufficient others including ironically one of Zwiener s also fell to the same trap Representative Ana-Mar a Rodr guez Ramos a Dallas Democrat brought an amendment to move million from perimeter prevention to create an economic instability dashboard that would track indicators of household economic distress including eviction filings and food insecurity rates GOP state Representative Tony Tinderholt criticized the amendment for taking money percent of the proposed billion for Operation Lone Star away from fighting sex slavery and fentanyl at the boundary which led to a brief argument between the two You want to use your talking points your right-wing red-meat talking points I hear you Rodr guez Ramos mentioned But these same people who you re serving the red meat to they re getting evicted from their homes The amendment failed - Another heated debate came over a Republican amendment filed by Representative Tom Oliverson to take million from Medicaid and funnel it into the Thriving Texas Families Initiative which funds anti-abortion pregnancy centers A ProPublica inquiry located the campaign formerly known as Alternatives to Abortion is riddled with waste and lacks oversight Democrats criticized Oliverson on his lack of specificity as to where the money would go and how it d be used San Antonio state Representative Barbara Gervin-Hawkins pressed Oliverson to name any of the specific providers in the initiative which he could not do You have to be knowledgeable if you re expecting us to put million in a plan Gervin-Hawkins announced I too agree that we want to be in endorsement of mothers and babies but to do it without any specifics is quite concerning The amendment passed - As they do in every session Democrats also put forth a largely symbolic test vote to expand Medicaid in Texas which remains one of just states that have not done so State Representative John Bucy carried the amendment this time It should break all of our hearts that one of the richest states in one of the richest countries has allowed this to become our normal Bucy explained Our money is going to other states while taxpayers aren t getting anything In the debate GOP members argued against expansion largely by making indicates about huge amounts of Medicaid fraud in the current state effort which is the duty of the Republican-run authorities including the state attorney general to police Representative Gene Wu the Democratic caucus chair revealed the amount of fraud cited by the GOP took place over decades and that annual Medicaid fraud averages to about or percent about the same rate as most of other state agency programs Several Democratic and Republican representatives took to the podium questioning and interrupting each other in favor of or against the Medicaid expansion amendment The amendment failed - Ultra-conservatives did manage to press for one of their primary causes in the budget debate though largely without success Representative Andy Hopper a freshman right-winger from Wise County put forth an amendment to absolutely eliminate state funding for UT-Austin because of its LGBTQ and DEI studies programs and degree plans After a brief back and forth between Hopper and Representative Lauren Ashley Simmons who attempted to explain intersex people to a clueless Hopper Simmons filed a point of order the th of the day not that anyone was counting House parliamentarians ultimately ruled against the amendment after nearly an hour of deliberation Shortly after Representative Brent Money a fellow freshman hardliner introduced an identical amendment only swapping out UT-Austin for Texas State University Lest one think Money suffered temporary amnesia about the fate of his pal Hopper s amendment he swiftly withdrew the amendment after using his time at the microphone to make sure his colleagues knew how he felt about woke gender ideology Around midnight Representative Janis Holt made the point to amend Representative Ramon Romero s amendment about desalination to replace the words The Gulf of Mexico with The Gulf of America Zwiener adequately summed up everyone s feelings about the whole endeavor with a simple question Why The post Slowly and Painfully House Passes Billion Budget appeared first on The Texas Observer