HB 13 Won’t Die
May 26th, 2007 at 8:08 pm
House Bill 13, the governor’s homeland security bill seemed finished. Rep. Lon Burnam called several points of order on the bill as it came to the House after leaving the Senate. The bill’s author, State Affairs Chairman Rep. David Swinford, fronted a press conference afterwards to complain. It’s worth quoting Swinford at length to get the full flavor.
“With the work that we’ve had with Lon today and yesterday, I’ve asked him what specifically he had problems with, and I was told that we didn’t work hard enough with the ACLU with this bill. And I have to tell you that we made a decision that we were more interested in the safety of our children than we were the safety of the drug thugs. And we made that call because I’m a grandfather, and I’m pretty close to kids, so if that’s the reason we lost this bill, I think that’s a very sad commentary on us taking care of the citizens of Texas.”
Then, as is his wont, he started to sob. (In fairness, this time he caught it early.)
“I am not upset about this bill. I am upset because the time we spent on the border, and seeing that they are winning and we are losing. And that concerns me greatly. This will have a big impact. The crime and the drugs are moving, looks like, about 50 to 100 miles inland every year. So two years from now if this bill doesn’t come about, you can expect them to be taking over a lot more communities.”
After the press conference, Senate sponsor Sen. John Carona made noises about trying to convince his colleagues in the upper chamber to strip off their amendments and just accept the House version. Apparently, that didn’t fly.
But by golly, Rep. Frank Corte, the House’s number one law-and-order-civil liberties-be-damned legislator is trying to ride to the rescue. According to sources on the conference committee, Corte is trying to shovel some of the worst provisions in HB 13 into his SB 11 (another awful homeland security bill). In particular, Corte wants to put the fusion center, a fancy name for a huge intelligence database that will house both private and public information on Texans, into the governor’s office.
Stay tuned to see if Corte succeeds.
May 27th, 2007 at 7:49 am
What is Swinford crying about? I can’t identify any real loss at all.
Also, for what it’s worth, ACLU’s concerns were hardly the “safety of drug thugs.” Jake, maybe you ought to get Rebecca Bernhardt’s talking points on HB 13 to see what the group’s real concerns were as opposed to this silly hyperbole. What you’ll find is that her concerns were pretty similar to those expressed in committee by the Department of Public Safety - the bill ignores the real border safety problems to engage in pork barrel politics and meaningless grandstanding, without significantly restraining the Governor to focus new money on the state’s existing border security strategy.