GOP-held Legislature focuses on hot-button issues over big picture
Social conservatives have plenty to cheer about as this year’s legislative session hurtles through its final weeks.
Everyone else? Well, not so much. This could have been a session devoted to serious business, in which Republicans and Democrats came together to work on the big-picture issues that will determine the future viability of the state: infrastructure, education, public health. Instead, it’s turned into a bit of a free-for-all, as the Republicans who control both chambers jostle for position in forthcoming GOP primaries and pursue pet projects.
Many Texans may be surprised over the coming weeks to discover what lawmakers prioritized this year. Take Senate Bill 8 — a measure that would ban abortions after the six-week mark, which passed the Texas Legislature last week and is now headed to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk.
“This bill specifically is designed to attempt to evade review from the court system — and frankly, it’s one that has us nervous,” Drucilla Tigner, a policy and advocacy strategist for the ACLU of Texas, told me.
If the bill is signed, Tigner explained, organizations such as the ACLU will challenge it in court before it takes effect. But even if the challenge is successful, such a law would nonetheless have a chilling effect on practitioners across the state, many of whom may be reluctant to provide abortions before the legal questions are fully resolved.
And challenging the law in court, Tigner continued, will be trickier than it looks. SB8 would prevent the state from enforcing the ban, instead leaving that task to individuals— a novel mechanism that could thwart preenforcement challenges — and definitely complicates them.
“The question is, who do you sue to enjoin the law?” asked Tigner.
A genuine question, not a rhetorical one, that litigators are still puzzling over. And, in the
meantime, advocates for abortion rights are hoping that Texans take the present threat seriously, rather than assuming the courts will clean up the Legislature’s mess.
In fact, advocates on an array of issues are disheartened by both the progress that hard-right Republicans have made, and the relatively muted response from the general public. GOP lawmakers are already taking a bit of a victory lap.
“The Texas House is about to have the most Conservative 48-hours in the chamber’s history as we prepare to debate strong measures on prolife, camping bans, public safety, and election integrity,” the GOP caucus tweeted on May 5, before delivering as promised.
In a tweet on Saturday, Abbott, also a Republican, ticked off the results on his personal Twitter feed:
“In 48 hours, the Texas House voted to:
* Defund cities that defund police
* Ban abortion at detection of heartbeat
* Slash STAAR test requirements
* Ban homeless camping statewide
* Penalize protesters blocking roads
* Ensure election integrity — easy to vote, hard to cheat.”
Good things to brag about in a statewide primary — or a presidential one, perhaps. Since then, Republicans have tackled even more of the issues you may have heard about on Fox News lately. On Tuesday, for example, the House advanced a bill by Rep. Steve Toth, R-The Woodlands, aimed at preventing Texas teachers from exposing their students to “critical race theory.”
“You said in your layout: ‘We are a democracy.’ But how can you say that when you’re literally excluding topics we can talk about in the classroom?” asked state Rep. Mary Gonzalez, a Democrat from El Paso who studied critical race theory as part of her doctoral program, during the floor debate.
Toth, for his part, had prepared for the debate by circulating a chart of the disturbing rise in suicide rates among children ages 10 to 14, along with a letter dubiously connecting the dots. “Race-shaming our kids, due to the color of their skin will only exacerbate a terrible situation,” he wrote.
To call this the most conservative session of all time might be a stretch, in part because GOP lawmakers are focusing on a subset of their party’s usual priorities — some of which aren’t consistent with the version of conservatism most Texans grew up with.
For that matter, fiscal conservatives have had a subdued voice. Many self-appointed budget hawks took issue with the state budget passed two years ago, which authorized nearly a quartertrillion dollars’ worth of state spending. The budget proposal now being developed is similarly capacious, yet it has attracted very little backlash — or attention — even from conservatives.
But the Legislature has lurched to the right this year: There’s no disagreement about that. It’s been disappointing to see Republicans devote so much energy to the pursuit of culture-war priorities — especially as the state continues to deal with a pandemic that has claimed the lives of 50,000 Texans and the aftermath of February’s catastrophic power grid breakdown, in which people literally froze to death in their homes.
It didn’t have to be this way. The 2019 session was a comparatively harmonious and productive affair, by Texas standards.
Experts agree the explanation for the shift has to do with politics. In the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats picked up 12 seats in the Texas House and came within striking distance of winning a number of other legislative races — enough to tip the balance of power in the lower chamber and, by extension, the entire state.
But the Republicans who took the 2018 election results as a wake-up call seem to have taken the 2020 election results — Democrats picked up one seat in the House but lost another, for a net gain of zero — as a sign that they remain firmly in the driver’s seat.
The result is that bipartisanship hasn’t become a dirty word, but it’s not something Republican lawmakers feel they need to worry about. So they aren’t.