The Texas Observer

Heading into the Senate budget debate this week, there are a few points where the House will be watching closely. Most of these measures come from the surprising amendments the House passed to its budget a couple weeks ago, catalogued here by Capitol Annex. A compare and contrast as the budget committee gets ready to meet this morning:

House: Restored cuts to CHIP enrollment by removing eligibility and registration restrictions that had lopped off thousands of kids from the rolls.

Senate: Some members oppose removing the requirement that families re-enroll every six months instead of every year. The story of Karen Rohrer, “a single mother who moved back to Texas in February 2006 with her 14-year-old daughter, Tasha, who has a painful bone disorder, and her 15-year-old son, who’s manic-depressive,” provides at least one good reason to keep the annual enrollment.

House: Passed an across-the-board pay raise for all teachers, librarians, et al., while defeating a measure that would have put the money toward incentive-based raises, a plan opposed by many educators.

Senate: Thinks there’s enough money in the public pot o’ gold for both kinds of raises. “I think there’s still room … to look at both of them. I think they both need to be in the bill. I don’t think there should be one or the other,” said Sen. Florence Shapiro (R-Plano) the chairwoman of the Education Committee.

House: Voted overwhelmingly to prohibit any tax money from going to vouchers for private school tuition.

Senate: Has several voucher bills winding through committees, including one for students with autism, that may prove hard to resist.

House: In the case of mysterious un-proposed amendment, the House leadership eschewed calling for more prisons and instead stuck to talking up rehabilitation and reintegration measure that could keep low-level offenders from taking up ever-more-scarce beds in lockdown facilities. Even the Texas Republican Caucus got in on the act.

Senate: Lite Guv David Dewhurst, who it is assumed wants to run for higher office on legislative accomplishments this session, has made it clear since January that he wants more prisons.

These are just the obvious contentious issues between the House and the Senate at this point. There will surely be surprises — most of the above issues were surprises coming out of the House’s debate. Paul Burka is also reporting* that tensions are high internally at the Senate before SB 1 even escapes from committee. As Burka tells it, a lot of the discord stems from bi-partisan chafing at Dewhurst. As we noted earlier, extra money also makes folks expect a little more.

And all that’s just for starters.

*If that link doesn’t work, go here and scroll to the post with “cauldron” in the title.

by Matthew C. Wright

This entry was posted on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 11:38 pm and is filed under 80th Texas Lege, Dollars and Sense. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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