Cripes. Some bills just won’t stay dead.
Rep. Frank Corte, the House’s number one law-and-order-civil liberties-be-damned legislator is trying to ride to the rescue. According to sources on the conference committee, Corte is trying to shovel some of the worst provisions in HB 13 into his SB 11 (another awful homeland security bill). In particular, Corte wants to put the fusion center, a fancy name for a huge intelligence database that will house both private and public information on Texans, into the governor’s office.
The bad news is that Corte has gotten this past the committee conferees on SB11. The good news is that, as Grits notes, it’ll take a 2/3 majority to pass due to the route Corte took to get it this far. Surely fifty Nays is not too high a hurdle to kill it. Right? If all else fails, maybe the House just won’t have time to get to it. Keep your fingers crossed.