Sunset and sine die
If the Legislature can’t address real challenges, then give up and go home.
The must-have accessory for the sartorially inclined legislator during the special session won’t be a seersucker suit for the hot Austin summer or custom-made boots from the legendary Rocky Carroll, who passed away last month.
No. The only thing legislators will need is a shiny little button that reads, “Sunset and Sine Die.”
Those lapel pins represent a call for sanity during the special session, which begins July 18 and lasts up to 30 days: Approve the must-pass sunset bill and adjourn. Without that sunset bill, important state agencies like Texas Medical Board will be forced to shut down.
Everything else on the governor’s agenda is little more than the wish list of campaign consultants desperate for the political equivalent of a sugar rush after a biennial session that failed to pass any truly appealing meat-and-potatoes bills.
The most likely outcome will be an abridged version of the regular six-month version: The Senate passes bad bills and the House blocks them. If Gov. Greg Abbott wants to see some real action after the sunset bill passes, he’ll tell the Legislature to save the Battleship Texas from disrepair or address coastal storm surge protection. Or, if the governor is feeling gutsy, he could call for a school finance reform bill.
Instead, we’re stuck with 19 issues that run the gamut from banal to bizarre.
There are items to override local voters on everything from tree regulations to permitting processes and municipal spending. There’s a property tax proposal that restricts how locally elected governments can raise revenue but, as Chronicle reporter Jeremy Wallace wrote last week, won’t actually reduce homeowners’ bills. And there’s, of course, the once-dead bathroom bill. Abbott has apparently taken a plunger to the Pink Dome commode where Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, flushed the unnecessary statewide regulation on how transgender Texans use the potty.
At this point, Straus looks like the last sane man up in Austin. Texas Democrats are in a coma — Texas Monthly declared their Senate caucus to be little more than furniture under the Pink Dome. Probusiness conservatives, once the most powerful and prominent political creatures in Texas, are now an endangered species. Straus is one of the last survivors. But it wasn’t concerns about boycotts or opposition from tech companies that persuaded Straus to block the bathroom bill. Straus was moved by his own sheer humanity — a desire to stop the Legislature from bullying the weak.
Before the end of the regular session, Straus was presented with a compromise version of the bathroom bill that he had been assured was legally crafted to merely abridge local nondiscrimination ordinances. As Austin journalist Lawrence Wright describes in his must-read New Yorker article about Texas politics, Straus didn’t even glance at the bill.
“I’m not a lawyer, but I am a Texan,” he said. “I’m disgusted by all this. Tell the lieutenant governor I don’t want the suicide of a single Texan on my hands.”
There’s a documented pattern of depression and suicide in the transgender community, but no pattern of transgender Texans assaulting folks in restrooms.
We have a state maternal mortality rate on par with developing nations and a failing school finance system that increasingly relies on property taxes. Those issues get little more than a task force or commission during the special session.
But when it comes to the political red meat, no expense is spared hoisting transgender Texans into the spotlight and promising to use government power to halt the menace that has apparently invaded our stalls and urinals.
If you want things to change, then start thinking now about donating to and volunteering for the right candidates in the March 2018 primary and November 2018 election. Look for Texans who believe that government should be run with a heart as big as the Lone Star State. That’s the sort of attitude we hope will never go out of style up in Austin.
Until then: Sunset and sine die.