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The Lead:

Five days left till sine die, and the deadlines are coming fast. Today’s the last day for the Senate and the House to pass bills and joint resolutions from the opposite chamber on third reading.

The House agreed—except for Rep. David Simpson’s lone “nay” — to postpone voting on Senate Joint Resolution 1, a key component of this session’s budget deal, yet another day. (That gets the bill around last night’s midnight deadline for voting on Senate bills and resolutions on second reading). The Dallas Morning News has the details.

The House will take up SJR 1 today. It’s a constitutional amendment to create SWIFT, the State Water Implementation Fund for Texas, and pave the way for the Lege to fund water infrastructure projects.

The word is the House will postpone a vote on SJR 1 up to Thursday, if necessary, until the Senate hears House Bill 1025.  The emergency spending bill is the House’s attempt to add $200 million to the public school system, and Gov. Rick Perry has threatened to call a special session if the bill doesn’t pass. Right now, the level of trust between the House and Senate isn’t too high.

Yesterday’s Headlines:

1. The Senate passed a much-amended House Bill 500, the controversial bill that would exempt quite a few businesses from the franchise tax, according to the Quorum Report (subscribers only). Sen. Tommy Williams tacked on an amendment that ties the passage of the bill to SJR 1, to muck up the budget game of chicken between chambers even more.

2. The House tentatively passed a bill Tuesday that allows for “hotter,” or more radioactive, waste to be dumped at a site dangerously close to water tables. The Observer‘s Forrest Wilder reports this is just one more favor granted to a major GOP donor.

3. The Senate passed House Bill 29 yesterday, which requires universities to offer a flat-rate, four-year tuition option for incoming students. But the Texas Tribune reports the Senate Higher Education Committee’s restrictions on university regents might solicit a veto from Gov. Rick Perry.

4. Last but certainly not least, House Democrats managed to kill SB 11, the drug screening-f0r-welfare-applicants bill on the floor last night. Dems lined up points of order and stalled the bill until it—and about 50 other Senate bills on the calendar behind it—were dead. The Statesman has details.

Line of the Day:

““We believe, simply, that this bill is wrong,” —Democratic Rep. Chris Turner on SB 11, which would have required drug screening for some welfare applicants.

What We’re Watching Today:

1. HB 1025 in the Senate and SJR 1 in the House. Here’s hoping the House doesn’t move the vote to Thursday.

2. The Senate has yet to hear HB 972, which would allow for licensed concealed handgun owners to pack heat on university and college campuses.

3. Today’s also the last day for the House to consider Senate Bills on the Local and Consent calendar, including a bill that would set requirements for election interpreters and one that would update the definition of “autism and other pervasive developmental disorders.”

Every legislative session, Harold Simmons’ radioactive waste dump company comes to the Legislature with a new favor to ask. Every session Rep. Lon Burnam, a Fort Worth Democrat with a peace activist pedigree, puts up a spirited protest. And every session, Simmons—one of the state’s most generous GOP donors—pretty much gets what he wants. This time was no different.

Yesterday, Burnam won a temporary victory when he knocked down Senate Bill 791 on a technicality. Among other changes, SB 791 would’ve allowed Waste Control Specialists to bring “hotter” (read: more radioactive) waste from out of state. But today, West Texas lawmakers tacked similar provisions onto a related radioactive waste bill. The legislation, SB 347, sailed through on  131-12 vote. The House rejected Burnam’s attempts to require auditing of the radioactive waste shipments as well as requirements to beef up monitoring for water at the site.

Burnam repeatedly referred to the legislation as the “biggest vendor bill” this session—a reference to the considerable political and economic muscle that Simmons brings to the table.

“Have you been listening?,” Burnam said to the House. “I’ve been saying for over a decade that this vendor is going to walk away from this facility as soon as they’ve made as much money as they think they can make … and the state of Texas will be economically liable for the contamination and the leaks and the improper disposal.”

He reminded his colleagues that three Texas Commission on Environmental Quality staffers had quit in protest when their superiors gave Waste Control a permit over their objections. A team of engineers and geologists had unanimously determined that the dump is dangerously close to water tables.

But Rep. Tryon Lewis, a West Texas Republican and the House sponsor of SB 347, said the dump is safe. “This site is about as secured and monitored as about any site you can imagine in this country,” Lewis said.

A sunset bill for the Texas Ethics Commission tentatively passed through the House Monday evening, with a few ethics reform bills tacked on as amendments.

Senate Bill 219 would have made minor changes to the agency as part of a once-every-12-years sunset review process, but on the House floor today it became a vehicle for amendments requiring Railroad Commissioners to resign from the position if they decided to run for other offices; mandating that lawmakers’ financial disclosure forms are posted online (without their home addresses); requiring that 501(c)(4) nonprofits report their donors if they get involved in Texas elections, and requiring legislators and their families to report any government contracts in which they hold more than a 50-percent stake.

Rep. Phil King (R-Weatherford) sought to move the Public Integrity Unit out from the Travis County district attorney’s office and place under the state attorney general’s office. Sen. Dan Patrick (R-Houston), in 2007, and Rep. Bill Zedler (R-Arlington), in 2011, tried the same move, to bring the unit under the typically Republican-controlled attorney general’s office.

Oversight of the Public Integrity Unit, which investigates public officials for ethical misconduct, has become increasingly political over the past decade. While every district attorney in the state has authority to investigate public officials, the DA in heavily Democratic Travis County is the only one that gets state funding to do so.

King said today that the unit violates laws requiring a separation of the executive branch and judicial branch by putting both powers under the Travis County DA’s office. While the DA’s office gets statewide jurisdiction, King noted that only a small percentage of Texas voters—about 4 percent—get to decide who heads the Public Integrity Unit. King has also kept up a steady drumbeat this session calling for Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg to resign in light of her jail sentence for drunk driving.

Rep. Charlie Geren (R-Fort Worth) pointed out that two of the cases under investigation by the PIU are against employees inside the attorney general’s office, creating a conflict if the Public Integrity Unit moved there.

“I just think we’re stepping in a place where we don’t need to go,” Geren said.

Rep. Elliott Naishtat (D-Austin) reminded the House from the back mic that under the Travis County DA’s office the PIU has been very successful in prosecuting misconduct.

“Are you aware that in just the last six years the PIU has obtained more than 680 convictions and obtained court orders for more than $11.8 million in restitution?” he asked.

Lawmakers voted to table the amendment, but some Republicans didn’t let King’s first amendment go down without a fight—almost an hour after it was killed, a few members requested a re-vote.

“I don’t think there was any misunderstanding about how you voted,” Geren said, in protest. “We have a district attorney that screwed up and got arrested for DWI, I think she should resign, but that doesn’t have anything to do,” he said, with the Public Integrity Unit’s operations.

Eventually it was determined the amendment could not be brought back up, but King did manage to pass an amendment requiring a study of whether the PIU’s place under the Travis County DA’s office is legal.

SB 219 still has to make it through a final vote in the House and a conference committee of House and Senate members before it makes its way to Gov. Rick Perry’s desk.

An emotional and incredibly strange war waged over the last two years—in community halls and small-town diners, conference calls and YouTubes, Fox News broadcasts and legislative hearings—concluded this morning as Sen. Dan Patrick announced that “the era of CSCOPE lesson plans has come to an end.”

And so begins the time for Tea Party and anti-CSCOPE activists to take a victory lap, or, if you’re one of the thousands of teachers that used CSCOPE’s lessons in your classroom, the time to start printing off and photocopying those handouts before they disappear forever.

“The big lesson here is that if you can generate a witch hunt that includes enough incendiary and distorted claims, then there are politicians at the Capitol who are ready to throw their supposed commitment to local control out the window,” said Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller in a statement this morning.

The curriculum management program, run cooperatively by the state’s 20 regional Education Service Centers, will still be available for the hundreds of school districts that use it to help teachers cover all the state standards, or TEKS. But the handouts and sample lessons that prompted charges of Marxist, progressive, liberal, socialist, globalist, environmentalist, anti-American, anti-Christian, Muslim, Mexican indoctrination will be gone by August 31.

It all ended with a 72-hour blitz of meetings at the Capitol and a letter late last night, “signed by all 20 members of the CSCOPE board,” Patrick said. CSCOPE administrators had turned over thousands of financial documents to Patrick’s office last week.

“It couldn’t be a more exciting day for us on the education committee,” said state Sen. Donna Campbell (R-New Braunfels). “We identified something that was shrouded in secrecy, that affected education for our children, made it difficult for parents to find out what was being taught to our children, and we now have that issue resolved.”

Kyle Wargo, executive director of Amarillo’s Region 17 service center and a CSCOPE board member, got the privilege of speaking for the defeated. ”I’m certainly very excited,” he said, which is understandable given what a punching bag regional service centers have become over the last six months.

“It’s the right thing to do. It’s in the best interests of the school districts, it’s in the best interest of the children.” Wargo said. Writing lessons for schools across Teas just isn’t practical, considering how much diversity of thought there is across a state Texas’ size. “We’ve learned one thing,” he said. “Lesson plans have a lot of subjectivity to them.”

“This is a great example of what happens when moms and dads across the state of Texas come together and get involved in their children’s education,” said Rep. Steve Toth (R-The Woodlands). “Everything that happened has happened here as a result of all their hard work, tireless efforts, blogging, Facebook messages, Twitter messages, email, press conferences, traveling tireless hours across the state to raise awareness about this program.”

Toth will pull his CSCOPE accountability bill in response to today’s news, and Patrick said the State Board of Education would also shelve its review of CSCOPE history lessons.

Patrick said he hoped big school districts would step in to help small districts replace the lesson plans they’d been getting from CSCOPE before—a practical solution, but also the sort of regional partnership that created CSCOPE in the first place. Failing that, he said, of course there’s always the private sector: “There are many vendors that, I’m sure, will try to fill this vacuum starting next year.”