Thursday, June 25, 2009
Perry Sets Date for Special Session
Well, we can all stop holding our breath. Gov. Rick Perry announced today that the special session he’d promised will start July 1.
Perry wants a short session focused exclusively on renewing TxDOT and the insurance department, and on passing transportation bonds. The governor said in his release that he expects lawmakers to pass these items before the July 4th holiday. A three-day special session? That might be a record.
Whether the session will stay that short is now largely up to the legislature. Perry can talk about short sessions all he wants, but once one starts, lawmakers have 30 days to finish up.
"To get this done in three days is very ambitious and requires the cooperation of a lot of people,” says rules expert Hugh Brady. “You’re really going to have to bust a hump if you’re going to get this done by Friday afternoon.”
More contested legislation like the Voter ID Bill and CHIP expansion have been kept off the agenda, and Perry says he doesn’t anticipate adding anything new while the session’s underway. But even with such a narrow set of issues on the call, lawmakers have a lot of leeway about what amendments they can add to bills.
True, the House Parliamentarian could always adopt a very strict interpretation of what amendments are germane to certain bills, but that would be going against several judicial and legislative precedents, Brady says. “If the House or the Senate really wants to, they could take a narrow bill and try to expand it to add consumer protection or whatever they’d like to add onto it.” So lawmakers could still add amendments that substantially reform TxDoT and the insurance department, and it may take more than a few days to do so: just passing a bill in a three-day period would require suspending certain rules, he added.
But will they really want to? In that sense, at least, Perry timed his session well. As Brady points out, “it’s the middle of the summer and nobody really wants to be here.”
Coming to a Texas highway near you: License plate readers
Deep in the Senate's version of the massive TXDoT bill is a provision that, if not stripped out in conference committee, will allow local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to install license plate reading cameras on Texas highways. The technology - already in widespread use in surveillance-crazy Britain - is very powerful, enabling the government to automatically photograph the license plates of moving vehicles and check the information against databases. If the system finds a "match," officers can be alerted.
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Senate Bill 690: Trimming the Grassroots
Karen Hall’s knees still haven’t recovered from gathering signatures door-to-door for an amendment to Bryan’s city charter. “Democracy is a messy business,” she says, “but we like it.”
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Women to Watch: Rep. Kristi Thibaut, D-Houston
After she lost her first campaign for a House seat from Houston in 2006, Kristi Thibaut showed up in Austin anyway. What she encountered, as she lobbied unsuccessfully for lower utility rates with fellow ACORN activists, was almost enough to make her wonder why she'd wanted that seat in the first place.
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One Weekend a Month, Two Weeks a Year, Five Years in Jail
Sometimes our legislators don't even know what's in their own bills. This morning, Rep. Dan Flynn (R-Van) discussed his House Bill 1165 before the Defense & Veterans Affairs Committee and it was evident that he hadn't read - or maybe didn't understand - what all was in it.
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