Good news, if it goes anywhere. The Texas Senate approved a bill to regulate short-term lenders on Monday night, a milestone some thought the chamber wouldn’t reach after a personal and divisive floor fight on Thursday. But with the measure’s author, state Sen. John Carona, R-Dallas, calling the highly-altered bill an “ugly baby,” it remains [...]
Posts Tagged ‘John Whitmire’
Senate committee votes to repeal state sodomy law
About time. The Senate Criminal Justice Committee voted on Wednesday to repeal the state’s anti-gay sodomy law, a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. Texas, along with Oklahoma and Kansas, will be the only states that still have the law on the books after Montana’s legislature approved its repeal of the measure [...]
Division over the payday loan bill
Quite a heated little fight in the Senate yesterday. An ugly scene erupted in the Texas Senate today, with Sen. John Carona (R-Dallas) suggesting that some of his Republican colleagues were “shills” for the payday loan industry and worrying that the GOP would be seen as “the party that is backed and bankrolled by payday [...]
Romeo and Romeo and Juliet and Juliet
This is a small step forward, but it’s an important step. In a state where attempts to expand gay rights have hit a wall of conservative Republicans, a Senate committee on Tuesday approved a bill to provide a new legal protection for sexually active gay teens. Under Senate Bill 1316, gay and lesbian teens who [...]
Reciprocal discovery
There’s a bit of controversy brewing over one of the criminal justice reforms that have been proposed. The bill at issue was filed on deadline day. Senate Bill 1611 would enact uniform discovery requirements in criminal cases across Texas. It would require prosecutors to give defense lawyers evidence in their files and to include essentially [...]
Not so fast on the North Forest charter plan
Not everyone is convinced that the plan to allow a consortium of charter schools to take over North Forest ISD is a good idea. In interviews Monday, state Rep. Senfronia Thompson and Sens. Rodney Ellis and John Whitmire, all Democrats, voiced reservations about the last-ditch attempt to prevent the annexation of North Forest to Houston [...]
Treating rather than jailing the mentally ill
Very good news. Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia and his medical staff wholeheartedly support a bill filed this week to reduce recidivism by the mentally ill who wind up in the county jail, a $5 million pilot program to transition them into community treatment facilities. “These individuals are principally in our custody because they are [...]
Senate committee restores some money to public education
Emphasis on the “some”. Texas public schools would get back a chunk of the $5.4 billion in state funding they lost two years ago under a budget proposal adopted by the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday. But they probably should not expect much more than the $1.5 billion the committee added to the 2014-15 state [...]
Here come the craft beer bills
From Brewed and Never Battered. Senator Kevin Eltife (R-District 1) introduced bi-partisan legislation along with Co-Authors, Senators Brian Birdwell (R-District 22), John Carona (R-District 16), Eddie Lucio (D-District 27), Leticia Van de Putte (D-District 26), Kirk Watson (D-District 14), and John Whitmire (D-District 15) to modernize the state’s alcohol regulatory system to make more competitive Texas’s small, [...]
How would you pay for extra school security?
Would you be willing to tax yourself for it? Texas school districts could create special taxing districts to fund more security under a proposal unveiled Tuesday by three Houston-area lawmakers. The Texas School District Security Act would allow school boards to hold elections on whether sales or property taxes should be raised to fund more [...]
January finance reports for area legislative offices
Just to complete the tour of semiannual finance reports, here’s a look at the cash on hand totals for area legislators. First up, the Harris County House delegation. Patricia Harless, HD126 – $308,221 Dan Huberty, HD127 – $69,058 Wayne Smith, HD128 – $218,425 John Davis, HD129 – $99,962 Allen Fletcher, HD130 – $46,559 Alma Allen, [...]
White Ds and non-white Rs
A few points to make about this. White Democrats are an increasingly vanishing species in the Texas Legislature, where there will be only 10 when the new legislative session starts in early January. The face of the Legislature has undergone a dramatic transformation in the past 25 years, and the state’s rapidly changing demographics are [...]
The Lege will take another crack at payday lending
I’m glad to see this, because the Lege definitely left business unfinished last time. About 83 percent of customers in Beaumont and 75 percent in the Houston and San Antonio metro areas are locked in a loan renewal cycle, latest lender reports show. State Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, and state Sen. John [...]
The felony mental health court
I’d celebrate, too. [State District Court Judge] Krocker and others celebrated the official opening of Harris County’s felony mental health court, which started putting mentally ill defendants on probation instead of sending them to jail in May. Krocker has been working to get a special court to oversee felony cases of defendants diagnosed with schizophrenia, [...]
On locking up prostitutes
It doesn’t make much sense. Busted 32 times in 17 years for prostitution in Austin and other places, Beatryce Hall’s rap sheet reads like a frequent-flier ticket for Texas prisons: 11 times in 11 years. Many of those trips were courtesy of a 2001 Texas law that allowed prosecutors to charge prostitutes with a felony [...]
Rethinking school discipline
Wow. Nearly 60 percent of junior high school and high school students get suspended or expelled, according to a report that tracked about 1 million Texas children over a six-year period. About 15 percent of the Texas seventh- through 12th-grade students tracked during the study were suspended or expelled at least 11 times and nearly [...]
“Sanctuary cities” bill passes the Senate
Once it was added to the call, this became inevitable. Senate Republicans finally passed a priority issue for their party early Wednesday morning when they outmuscled their Democratic colleagues on an immigration-related bill intended to make it easier for law enforcement to corral illegal immigrants. At its core, SB 9 allows law enforcement officers to [...]
Sugar Land prison to be closed
Good news. Lawmakers trying to settle on the state’s budget for the next two years have agreed to shutter a 102-year-old state prison in Sugar Land. Under the proposal adopted this week by negotiators from both chambers of the Legislature, the state would stop funding beyond Aug. 31 the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Central [...]
Two forensic bills
Texas has thousands of untested rape kits in it, and a bill to try to make something happen with them. The bill, by Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, would require a police department to submit a rape kit to a crime lab within at least 10 days, and complete the DNA analysis no later than [...]
Smaller cuts from the Senate
Trail Blazers: The Senate Finance Committee on Thursday adopted a school funding plan for the next two years that would cut basic funding for school districts by nearly 6 percent – or $2 billion a year – to handle a massive state revenue shortfall. The committee voted 13-2 to approve the recommendations of a special [...]
Should we do away with school police forces?
Grits makes the case. If public school budgets will be radically cut in Texas, a prospect which for the moment appears all but inevitable, which employees should be eliminated first? Judging from the ongoing debate, maybe campus cops. Jason Embry at the Austin Statesman describes some of the debates surrounding school budgets thusly: One of the [...]
Time for the Senate to go after John Bradley
Grits: Governor Rick Perry’s appointees to the Texas Forensic Science Commission are up in the Senate Nominations Committee [today]. Senators should use the forum to force Commission Chairman John Bradley to answer all the questions he’s dodged in the past – especially about the ways in which he’s delayed or shut down all the Commission’s [...]
Keeping track of innocence-related bills
From Grits: The House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee has posted an agenda which includes three important pieces of innocence legislation carried by Chairman Pete Gallego: HB 215 Relating to photograph and live lineup identification procedures in criminal cases. HB 219 Relating to the electronic recording and admissibility of certain custodial interrogations. HB 220 Relating to procedures [...]
Sacrifice is for the little people
You almost have to admire the gall. Milton Rister, director of administration in Gov. Rick Perry’s office, just asked Senate budget writers for a net increase of $81.5 million in state funds for the next two years. If I took accurate notes — and Finance Committee Vice Chairman Chuy Hinojosa, D-McAllen, chided Rister for not [...]
Endorsement watch: Ellis and Whitmire
The Chron finally turns to legislative races by endorsing two Senate Democratic incumbents in a pair of lightly contested races. [Sen. Rodney] Ellis, the longtime Democratic incumbent in Texas Senate District 13, has made his mark in many legislative areas, including education, the state budget process and the criminal justice arena. It is thanks to [...]
Interview with State Sen. John Whitmire
Next up is State Sen. John Whitmire of SD15. Known as the “Dean” of the Senate, Whitmire was elected to the House in 1972 – the same year as Rep. Senfronia Thompson – and moved to the upper chamber in 1982. Like his colleague Sen. Ellis, Sen. Whitmire is known for his work on the [...]
The TYC still has problems
Three years after the Texas Youth Commission was rocked by a sexual abuse scandal, there are still major problems at its facilities. In a formal complaint asking the U.S. Justice Department to investigate, Texas Appleseed, Advocacy Inc., the Center for Public Representation and the National Center for Youth Law said the commission is unable to [...]
Some budget cuts can be a force for good
If there’s one place where something good can come out of the current budget mess, it’s with the criminal justice system, where recent trends, economic realities, and the hard-won lessons of 2003 are contributing to an environment where good policies can come from the decisions that will need to be made. “One in every 22 [...]
No mention of Willingham
The Texas Forensic Science Commission had its first meeting since Williamson County DA John Bradley was named Chair by Governor Perry. Bradley did the job Perry picked him for by preventing any official discussion of the Cameron Todd Willingham case until after the March primary. The delay and Friday’s agenda, which failed to move forward [...]
Getting smarter about crime, state prison edition
Some good news on the criminal justice front. Texas has a new swagger that comes from a recently released U.S. Justice Department report showing the growth of the state’s prison population is slowing to the extent that three new prisons slated for construction have been scrapped. At the same time, the state is becoming the [...]