Three-Point Shots, Vol. 1, No. 11: Lege Session Week 18
Bryan Slaton gets the heave-ho, and a generation of young staffers gets a good night's sleep. The legislative funnel is starting to narrow, but much of the people's business is still undone.
Welcome to another edition of Three-Point Shots, an occasional series briefly surveying three interrelated stories of passing importance. Three-Point Shots is a part of my Life Its Ownself Substack page. If you enjoy reading it, please 1) hit the Like button, 2) subscribe to the Life Its Ownself, and 3) share it with others in the link below. Also, comments welcome and encouraged.
Wednesday, May 10, 2023
The House acted with rare dignity and decorum yesterday to expel one of its members. Then it buckled down to work; we are at the point in the Regular Session of the 88th Texas Legislature where the rules of each chamber are shutting down bills that have not made sufficient progress in the legislative process. But much of the people’s business is still undone. Read more about the rules below, and take a gander at a partial list of topics yet to be addressed on the House floor.
1. UPDATE: Former Rep. Bryan Slaton
Monday, as the hangman’s noose was being fitted around his neck, Rep. Bryan Slaton (R-Groomer) acknowledged the inevitable and resigned from the Texas House of Representatives.
If he thought that would be the end of it, he was mistaken. Rep. Andy Murr (R-Junction), the chair of the General Investigating Committee, indicated he wanted the House to consider and adopt the resolution to expel him anyway.
Imagine the plight of a House member as she or he considered expelling Slaton, an action that had not been taken in almost 100 years. No matter what disagreements, disputes or rivalries exist among the 150 members, they all share the bond of having been elected by their voters, and they are keenly aware and respectful of that. Kicking a duly-elected member out is about as big a deal as there is.
And so, as the members sat down to consider Slaton’s fate, the tone was somber and dignified – words rarely used to describe the House. The members of the Committee that investigated Slaton’s actions and recommended his expulsion laid out in formal detail their investigation, the facts they determined and the conclusions they reached.
No one spoke in Slaton’s defense. At the end, as he called for a vote on the resolution, Speaker Phelan said something that’s rarely heard on the floor: “Show the Speaker voting aye.” The final vote was 147-0.
Consistent with its procedures, the House removed his name from the voting board, from his desk in the chamber, and from his office door in the Capitol Building.
Slaton’s expulsion was an important validation of the reforms the House made to its sexual harassment and workplace abuse policies in 2018. Sexual harassment is still a problem in the Texas Legislature, but the fact the House took a complaint seriously and acted on is a welcome and reassuring change from past practice.
2. The Elegant Beauty of the House and Senate Calendars
As everyone who works within a thousand-yard radius of the Capitol knows, tomorrow (Thursday) is the last day a House bill can be considered in floor debate on second reading. For the parliamentarily-challenged, that means that if a House bill is not heard and passed by tomorrow at midnight, it’s dead.
Of course, nothing is ever really dead until one or both chambers have adjourned, and old hands can remember the occasional bill that no one had seen, read or remembered until it suddenly became law. According to the Texas Constitution, the regular session ends after 140 days. The elegant Latin phrase is sine die, which means “without a day” to reconvene. It’s pronounced “SEE-nay DEE-ay,” but around the Capitol it is just “SAHN-nee DIE.” The tricks for keeping a “dead” bill alive are many – amending the language onto another House bill, getting a companion version over from the Senate and passing it, sneaking it into a conference committee report on a different bill, and so forth.
The deadline calendar itself is a relatively recent innovation. It forces some discipline on the legislative process. Prior to 1993, it was possible for a bill to be filed in the House on the penultimate Monday in May, pass out of committee on Tuesday, pass the House on Wednesday, be referred to a Senate committee on Thursday, heard in committee and approved on Friday, passed by the full Senate on Saturday and sent to conference committee, and amended in conference committee on Sunday in a way that was unrecognizable to either the House or Senate, then brought to the floor of each chamber on Monday – Sine Die – for an up-or-down vote.
In 1993, House Speaker Pete Laney and Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock collaborated to impose some order on the end-of-session madness. They essentially front-loaded the chaos, so that by the time the Lege got to its last week there were not any huge policy or budgetary surprises out there. According to Chuck Bailey, one of the Wise Old Men of the Texas Legislature, “It was felt that laws created by strict rules establishing definite timelines were better laws than those that came out of barely controlled chaos.”
When I worked for Travis County as its legislative advocate, I held a weekly meeting with managers and policy experts throughout the organization to discuss what was happening under the Pink Dome – good bills, bad bills, power plays, and the like. Every May, I printed and distributed copies of the deadline calendar so my colleagues could see how it affected the many bills we were tracking. And I always got a laminated copy for myself, and dragged it around to meetings like a little kid with a new toy. And, can you imagine, people would say I was a geek!
3. There’s plenty to get done still.
Here is a partial list of the hot-button bills that still have to pass the House before Thursday night. N.B. In some case, there is a companion Senate bill to accomplish the same thing that is still “alive.”
· Bills to allow casinos and sports wagering, subject to voter approval
· Absentee voting changes
· Random election audits in large counties
· Allowing people to sue social media companies for censoring them
· State preemption of local government authority
· Raising the minimum age to purchase an automatic rifle from 18 to 21
· School marshals
The next few days should be interesting …
Listen for it … Over the next few days, we’re bound to hear a phrase that causes me no end of delight. As the House is hurtling through all the bills it is trying to pass before the deadline, it will sometimes get ahead of itself and make a procedural mistake. It is then the duty of the presiding officer to call attention to the error and have the chamber rectify it. He sets the stage for the parliamentary correction with a simple command:
“Back up, members.”
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Good recap. If you didn’t watch all of the GI Committee laying out the resolution, Ann Johnson was masterful.