Rick Perry’s slush funds get no love in the opening budgets. The House and Senate’s initial two-year budgets would force Perry’s deal-closing Texas Enterprise Fund to exhaust its last $7 million and throttle back on state film incentives and subsidies for major sporting events. The Emerging Technology Fund, which subsidizes high-tech commercial ventures, would face [...]
Posts Tagged ‘David Simpson’
Point of disorder
New House, new rule. The Texas House’s Democratic minority was dealt a blow Monday when the House passed an amendment to the chamber’s rules to limit legislators’ ability to derail a bill based on clerical errors. Calling “points of order” on such errors is a strategy lawmakers have often used to block measures they oppose. [...]
Simpson in, Hughes out to challenge Straus for Speaker
It started with an announcement that Rep. David Simpson would make the Speaker’s race a three-way, which I assure you sounds dirtier than it actually is. Rep. David Simpson, R-Longview, filed papers to run for Speaker of the House, he said in a letter to colleagues Monday morning. He joins Rep. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, in [...]
More on Texas proving the need for the Voting Rights Act
From the DMN: “There have been growing arguments that the Voting Rights Act is obsolete and should be struck down,” says University of Michigan law professor Ellen Katz, a nationally recognized expert on the Voting Rights Act. “But [Gov.] Rick Perry and the state of Texas, through their overreach in these cases, may have just [...]
Sine Die, take two
The House followed the Senate out the door yesterday, leaving a bit of unfinished business behind. The Senate’s version of a bill to criminalize intrusive pat-downs by federal agents with the Transportation Security Administration has died in the House, after the chamber couldn’t get the four-fifths vote needed to suspend the rules. The 96-26 vote [...]
Where the state cuts meet the local budgets
Via Grits, an editorial in the Longview News-Journal of interest: Routine mental health services were the first to fall during the 2003 budget crisis, which was preceded by pre-session cuts the fall and summer of 2002. East Texas mental health professionals, judges, law enforcement and elected officials tell us such cuts already have curtailed routine [...]