Ross Ramsey plunges in, and no I don’t regret that at all.
Gov. Greg Abbott wants lawmakers to take a bathroom break, and you can’t blame him for trying to find relief.
The next legislative session hasn’t even started and regulation of which restrooms transgender Texans use is getting the kind of attention usually reserved for taxes and immigration.
Abbott told reporters last week that he wants to wait and see what lawmakers come up with before he’ll take a position. At a forum last month, House Speaker Joe Straus downplayed the issue in a different way, saying it’s not “the most urgent concern of mine.”
If those two officials sounded mild to untrained ears, they were perfectly clear to those with political antennae. Their intended audience knows that this issue is not on the fast track some in their party want it to be on.
A slowdown might turn the bathroom fight to the back burner. Republicans attribute it to a directive from the federal Department of Education on how school districts should deal with the needs of transgender students.
Abbott doesn’t like the federal directive and tweeted his support for the state’s challenge to it early last summer.
But he is unwilling, at this point, to endorse legislative efforts to remedy the situation. The policy questions around facilities and transgender people are complicated and the politics are gnarly.
[…]
It’s always possible that the incoming Republican administration in Washington will retract that initial federal directive and remove the declared reason for state action — the kind of bureaucratic “never mind” that could ease the political pressure for new laws.
The courts might take care of that for them. A federal judge in Texas already put the federal rules on hold, saying the feds didn’t jump through the right hoops when putting the regulation into effect. The Obama administration is appealing that ruling.
It is already clear that the drum major at the front of this particular parade in Texas — Patrick — is trying different variations of a transgender bathroom bill to find an acceptable option. Sen.-elect Dawn Buckingham, R-Lake Travis, said earlier this month that “my understanding is the businesses, the sporting venues, will not be affected by this law” — i.e. the bill could be limited to schools and other public buildings.
That might solve some problems. But the North Carolina law was aimed only at public buildings and still ran into opposition from businesses and from sports groups like the NCAA and the NBA.
A lot of this is stuff that we’ve talked about before. I’m glad to see someone other than me read the Buckingham and Abbott statements as showing the effect of business lobby arm-twisting, though I remain concerned that those folks will cut and run at their first opportunity to declare victory. But it seems clear now that they are making a difference, and that’s all to the good. Those of us who want to see this dead and buried and not just neutralized need to keep the pressure on to make that happen.
For F’s sake, doesn’t the Texas Governor and Legislature have anything better to do than dictate to the populace what bathrooms they can and cannot use ?
That was rhetorical.