Three-Point Shots, Vol. 1, No. 12: Lege Session Week 19

Can Rick Perry run for President and relieve us of the dreariness of both Trump and Abbott? Meanwhile, the Lege continues to beat up on trans kids and public education.

         Welcome to another edition of Three-Point Shots, an occasional series of three stories whose interconnections are often known only to the Flying Spaghetti Monster and me. This week, we look at Rick Perry teasing a third presidential run, and update two important issues roiling the Legislature two weeks before adjournment.

         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 Life Its Ownself, and 3) share it with others in the link below. Also, let me know what you think in the comments section below!

Tuesday, May 16, 2023

         There are two weeks left in the 20-week legislative session. Some ideas, like casino gambling or gun safety regulations, are dead. Others, like putting the 10 Commandments in all classrooms, are on their way to the Governor’s desk. But many of the toughest issues are still unresolved, including Greg Abbott’s #1 issue, school vouchers.

           But first: Rick Perry is not dead after all!

1.    Rick Perry for President 2012!  2016!  2024?!

         It’s sometimes hard to remember that, until Greg Abbott eclipsed him in every possible category of cruelty, cowardice and corruption, it was fashionable to think of Rick Perry as Texas’s worst governor in modern times. His leadership so underwhelmed the people of Texas that he won re-election in 2006 with only 39% of the vote. His executive order to inoculate all Texas girls against HPV was controversial, mostly because people suspected he was getting kickbacks from Merck and its lobbyist Mike Toomey. (And can you imagine the blowback today against any vaccination order?)  He was an early adopter of Tea Party nonsense, including vague suggestions that Texas should secede from the Union. And his presidential run in 2011 collapsed in late-night comic jokes and ubiquitous “Oops!” memes.

         After leaving office, Perry entered the scrum of the 2016 GOP presidential primaries. He announced his bid in June 2015, and trained his fire on the upstart Donald Trump. Politico reports:

[F]ormer Gov. Rick Perry on Wednesday unleashed a torrent of insults about the billionaire, calling Trump a "barking carnival act" and a "toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and nonsense."

During his speech at a downtown hotel here, Perry also described Trump as "a sower of discord," a scapegoater, a candidate who offers "empty platitudes and promises," and "a cancer on conservatism." He added that Trump "is wrongly demonizing Mexican Americans for political sport" and is "the modern-day incarnation of the know-nothing movement."

         Starved for money and polling success, he was out by September. He endorsed Ted Cruz for president in January 2016, part of the last-ditch effort to derail Trump’s momentum. Eventually, though, Perry bent the knee and become Trump’s Energy Secretary in what was surely God’s Most Ironic Joke of All Time, Politics Category.

         Perry resigned as Energy Secretary in 2019 amid investigations into his role in the Ukraine scandal (“Nice little country you got here, Volodymyr. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it.”) Then he got caught up into the January 6 investigation, having sent a sedition-adjacent email to Mike Meadows the day after Trump lost.

(Former Energy Secretary Rick Perry participates in a discussion at an America First Policy Institute summit in Washington, DC, on July 25, 2022. Photo: Tom Williams/AP via CNN)

         Anyway, Perry told Jim Acosta of CNN over the weekend that he “hasn’t ‘written off’ the idea of running for president in 2024, saying there was ‘a lot of time’ before a decision would need to be made.” Asked if Trump should be the nominee, Perry replied, “I’m still trying to sort that out for myself.”

         If past is prelude, if he runs Perry will probably flame out early on. There are some ineffable qualities to being president, and GOP primary voters have  decided – twice! – Perry doesn’t have them.

         Will this have any effect on Greg Abbott’s fast-fading hopes of running for President?  Maybe. One of the things Texas politicians have been able to bring to national campaigns, going back to LBJ through George H.W. Bush, Lloyd Bentsen, and George W. Bush, is Texas money. If Perry gets in, how will that affect Abbott’s ability to raise donations and pledges from rich Texans? Both are long shots, certainly, but Perry is more of a known (if unsuccessful) quantity.

         My take: Perry will test the waters and find them too hot or too cold for him to jump in. (Which he probably knows, raising the question of why he’s teasing a run in the first place.) And barring the death or incapacitation of everyone being discussed as a presidential contender, from Trump all the way down to Sununu, Abbott has no chance of being the GOP nominee.

2.    House Debates, Passes Anti-Trans Bill

           After several days of contentious and passionate debate, the Texas House passed a bill yesterday to ban gender-affirming care for minors. It specifically bans a menu of procedures and therapies and directs the doctors’ regulatory agency to take away the practice license of any physician who performs them. The House version differs in some respects from the Senate version, and so the bill now goes back to the Senate for either approval of House changes or appointment of a conference committee.

           The bill marks a victory for the anti-transgender movement in Texas, whose champions have been the Transphobic Trio of Guv Greg Abbott, Lite Guv Dan Patrick, and Twice-Indicted Attorney General Ken Paxton. While the Lege was debating SB 14 and other anti-trans legislation, Paxton got in on the persecution by announcing an investigation into Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin for foisting unnecessary and even harmful medical treatments on adolescents under its care. This has led several of the physicians working for Dell Children’s to quit – whether they jumped or were pushed is in dispute.

           My take: The war in transgender Texans, about which I’ve written here and here., is a great moral failure of our state’s leadership. First they tried to kick them out of bathrooms, then found out that was a nonexistent problem. Then they kicked them off sports teams; now they want to deny them health care they need. These are solutions in search of a problem, and it’s hard to imagine a more vulnerable population to punch down on.

3.    Abbott threatens special session if he does not get his way on vouchers.

         Voucher schemes to pay private school tuition have been around since the 1950s, after Brown v. Board of Education. They’ve never passed in Texas, largely because vouchers are, for different reasons, anathema to both urban Democrats and rural Republicans. But Governor Greg Abbott has made passing a voucher – excuse me, “parental choice” – bill his number one priority for this session, and has structural powers of persuasion to help muscle it through.

         The Senate passed SB 8 earlier in the session. It would offer $8,000 vouchers to a wide gamut of students, including almost everyone already attending private or sectarian schools. The bill also contained a version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” language, severely restricting classroom lessons, campus activities and educator guidance about sexual orientation and gender identity in public and charter schools up to 12th grade, with very limited exceptions.

         The House version, left pending in committee while negotiations among the members continue, changes the Senate bill considerably. It restricts the eligibility for the vouchers to students who have a disability, are “educationally disadvantaged” — meaning they qualify for free or reduced lunch — or attend a campus that received a grade of D or lower in its accountability rating in the last two school years. Not exactly Greg Abbott’s target audience, although well more that 50% of Texas’s five million schoolkids. The bill also eliminates the “Don’t Say Gay” provisions, and goes on to restructure the STAAR accountability testing system.

(Photo: Robert Jerstad, San Antonio Express-News) 

         MY TAKE: With significant differences between the Senate and House, it’s possible nothing will pass. It’s also possible Abbott will veto a bill that is not to his liking. Abbott is already threatening a special session, possibly in September (when teachers will be busy in classrooms).

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         But wait, there’s more! … Never Back Down, Ron DeSantis’s super PAC that is supposed to embody his toughness, backs down.

         Former House member, now congressman Lance Gooden … is against earmarks … or is he?

         Word to the Wise? … Some House members became upset last week when, during the multi-day debate on SB 14 (the anti-trans kids bill), a “corrected committee report” was entered into the legislative history of the bill (check the entry on May 12 at 3:21 a.m.). In their view, the “correction” was a violation of House rules and possibly illegal, since the bill was in the custody of the House and could only be changed by the House itself. Some members suspected it was to scrub a potentially fatal point of order on the bill. But the scrubbing itself created another point of order, in their opinion.

         Today, in a colloquy between Speaker Phelan and State Affairs Chair Todd Hunter, the two invoked Rule 14 of the House Rules to justify the razzle-dazzle. Rule 14(1) is titled “When Rules Are Silent,” which should not be reassuring to the members, but Phelan and Hunter explained that there are congressional precedents to amending a bill in the middle of the night with no one’s fingerprints on it.

         Harvey Kronberg, whose Quorum Report newsletter / website has been covering the Lege since 1989, editorialized that “Process legitimacy is long gone in the Senate. The House should not follow the same path.” The House’s credibility – and Phelan’s credibility with his members – depends on their confidence that the rules will be followed.

        

         Have a good week!