Abbott more upbeat on special session prospects,
A week ago, as the Legislature prepared to convene in special session, Gov. Greg Abbott warned that he would be naming names of those lawmakers who back his agenda and those who don’t.
“No one gets to hide,” Abbott told the audience at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation on July 17.
But on Monday, the governor took a sunnier tone in a pair of radio interviews, appreciative of the swift work the Senate appeared to be making of his agenda, and optimistic that the House will, widespread doubts aside, follow through.
“The impression I get is that the House is taking my agenda very, very seriously and that they will be passing out a lot of the pieces of legislation I have offered up,” Abbott told Sergio Sanchez and Tim Sullivan on 710 AM KURV in the Rio Grande Valley. “Time will tell, and that time will be coming up here soon.”
“I think the House will outperform rather than underperform, but call me an optimist at this stage,” said the governor, declining to speculate what he would do if the House is not as responsive as he is hoping.
“In a football game, when you’re still playing in the first quarter, you’re not thinking about what you’re going to do if you don’t wind up winning the game,” Abbott said. “You focus all your time, energy and attention on making sure you win the game. For me, that means not thinking about what’s going to happen if the House doesn’t pass my agenda. Instead, what I do all day, every day, is focus on ensuring that we have the House passing my agenda.”
“In that regard, I meet with House leaders very, very frequently to make sure we are putting together the votes that are needed to support all of my items on my special session agenda, and we continue to add to those every single day,” Abbott said.
Abbott brought the same cheery aspect to Newstalk 550 KCRS in Odessa, telling host Kris Moore, “the Texas House is working very diligently, and I have increased confidence that they will be passing out a lot of the pieces of legislation that I have put on the agenda.”
Abbott’s tone is in contrast to that of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who has, since the acrimonious end of the regular session in May, been sharpening his attacks on House Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, as an obstacle to his shared conservative agenda with the governor.
The governor also does not bring anything like the fervor of the lieutenant governor to the most contentious issue of the special session, the effort to regulate bathroom use by transgender individuals.
While Patrick offers lurid images of sexual predators posing as transgender people to gain access to restrooms of the opposite sex, and of teenage students being required to shower with other students of the opposite sex, Abbott’s description of the issue is blandly bureaucratic.
On KCRS, he said it was simply a matter of creating a uniform policy across the state, a well-worn theme for the governor who also told Moore about how he wants the session to preempt local restrictions on mobile devices in automobiles so that the state’s new ban on texting while driving can be accompanied by a standard statewide policy that “doesn’t prevent people from making a phone call while they drive.”
Ditto on bathrooms, Abbott said.
“We are trying to avoid what you might a call a patchwork quilt of different regulations across the state applied by different types of government organizations and especially, we’re trying to avoid a conflict with Title IX of the U.S. education code, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex,” Abbott said.
“What we are trying to do is achieve some level of legal clarity,” said the governor, noting that, as a former attorney general, he looks at issues through a legal lens, but without ever explaining to listeners in the Permian Basin what he would like the law to say or do.