Very funny if, as advertised,  a bit long. (Via Rick Hertzberg at The New Yorker.)

The New Yorker writer and CNN senior legal analyst is my guest on this week’s episode — our seventh season finale.

Paul Burka, Patti Hart, and I discuss the last gasps of the session and the improbable improbability of a special. Along the way, those two taskmasters grade the speaker (B-), the lite guv (C), and the guv (A+ on politics, F on policy).

The legendary UT-Austin women’s basketball coach is my guest this week.

From a Rachel Maddow segment last night:

“The Republican party right now is clawing its way to the bottom. They’ve got 23 percent of the American electorate supporting them. They’re seen as a sort of bitter, partisan party right now: anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic. I just think that this sends a lot of the wrong signals to independents and soft Republican voters out there who are leaving the party in droves. … I say it as a proud Republican, and as a progressive and moderate Republican, but I would just hope that there’s room for us still. There are a lot of voices in the party that seem to be crowding and shouting us out and shouting us down all the time.”

As I write this, charges of obstructionism are flying in the House — that’s apparently the worst slur Speaker Straus, ever genteel, can muster — but it seems clear to me that it is the House Republicans, rather than the House Democrats (or the Senate Republicans, as Kronberg says), who have something to answer for here. The Senate Rs decided they were okay with upending decades of tradition in spiking the two-thirds rule at the start of the session, and because there were enough Rs to do it — elections have consequences — they were well within their right. I may not like it, and you may not like it, but they had the procedural authority at their disposal. Over in the House, where the split is 76-74, because the last three election cycles have seen the GOP squander a much larger majority, the Rs are powerless, really, to stop the Ds from exercising a similar, and similarly legitimate, procedural authority. Even the Speaker himself concedes that point (via QR):

“Democrats have been using the process that’s available to them to use in a way that I wouldn’t suggest is helpful,” he said in an impromptu gaggle with the press during floor discussion of the Top 10 Percent Rule debate. “I would say the more they talk, the more explaining they have to do and I feel like the entire Republican caucus agrees with me on that. And I just hope they put aside some of this, some of the abuses of the process – legitimate – but I think ill-timed beyond just making their point.”

Had Craddick not be ousted, had they still hovered somewhere just south of 90 members, etc., etc. But the fact is, he was, and they don’t. So it’s up to the House Rs, not the House Ds, to get the train back on track. They’re the ones who have to get the Ds to compromise, because unless they do, the Ds can use, in the Speaker’s parlance, the process that’s available to them. Mr. Schminciple may not like it — and he’s right that tactics are not an endgame — but to quote David Mamet in what we may as well call Glengarry Glenn Smith, “That’s the way the game is played, Bubby.”

As for the explaining to be done, I would say it falls to those people who are so hell-bent on passing voter ID ahead of windstorm, insurance sunset, and other bills that pass the test of pressing need. Does voter ID pass that test? Honestly? I understand the reason for it, and I can even accept that every check on possible fraud is worth having in place, provided it doesn’t disenfranchise upstanding voters. But can anyone who supports it, in the Senate or the House, look me in the eye and tell me it’s more pressing than, or even as pressing as, the other issues presently languishing?

The legendary jazz saxophonist is my guest this week.

Paul Burka, Patti Hart, Ross Ramsey of TEXAS WEEKLY, and I discuss the coming end to the legislative session — specifically, the fate of the voter ID, insurance sunset, top 10 percent, and windstorm bills, along with the renomination of Don McLeroy as chair of the SBOE.

I may have missed this, but I just learned that one of Barack Obama’s possible appointees to the Supreme Court — Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge and University of Chicago law professor Diane P. Wood, who interviewed with the President at the White House today — is a Texas transplant who graduated from the Plan II Honors program at UT-Austin and then UT Law School. I know this because I happened to be at dinner tonight with my favorite uncle-by-marriage, David Robertson, who has taught at the UT Law School for more than forty years, and I asked him about the prospective replacements for David Souter, not knowing that Wood had been a student of his in the early seventies — or that Wood’s child is a student of his currently. According to Wood’s Wikipedia page, she was born in New Jersey but moved to Houston with her family when she was sixteen (her father’s job with Exxon was the reason). She graduated from Westchester High School before heading to Austin and the Forty Acres.

An interesting exchange with Julian Castro, elected last Saturday to lead San Antonio, about the departure of AT&T’s corporate headquarters from Alamo City and the need for — and use of — tax incentives for economic development purposes. (The full interview runs in our July issue.)

What do you do about luring companies to San Antonio and keeping them there? There are a number of major corporations headquartered in the city, but the loss of AT&T to Dallas last year had to hurt. What kind of package can you put together to attract and retain their kind?

A couple of things. First, we’re going to keep refining our economic development model. We have dozens of development entities right now, and we are going to look at how we can streamline that process and create a web presence—an informational portal of entry for San Antonio along the lines of what Houston and Phoenix do. Second, we need to get back to what Mayor [Henry] Cisneros did so well in the eighties, which was to raise the profile of the city. If you watch the Today show or CNN when they do the weather, you’d think San Antonio didn’t exist.

It’s the seventh-largest city in the country. Is there problem that I don’t know about?

Whatever it is, we’re going to fix it.

Do you hire people to help market the city? Do you get more aggressive in publicizing things going on? Because obviously you want to spend your time on substance, and marketing isn’t really substance. Or at least it doesn’t have the same impact.

I like to think it does. If you’re a graduate of Yale or the University of Michigan or the University of Chicago and you think about where the jobs are, oftentimes there’s opportunity in San Antonio that you wouldn’t know about. We can’t even fathom how much of a talent investment we’re missing out on. So we’re going to get on the road, get with companies, write letters to media outlets, and do all the practical things we need to. Over time, we’ll get into the national conversation about up-and-coming cities.

What about tax breaks, which are always controversial? Are you open to cutting deals with companies in exchange for locating in San Antonio and bringing jobs to the city?

You have to use tax incentives in a responsible way—with substantial recapture provisions in them.

Explain.

For instance, if you have a ten-year tax break and the company leaves after six years, you can contractually recover some of the revenue that you would have gotten during those six years. I think we also need to look at how we can use incentives not only to attract investment to the city but how to grow investment from within—how we can help small or big businesses grow. The situation with AT&T caused a lot of soul-searching in the economic development community about what else we can do to pay attention to what we already have here. I’m going to focus on how we can enhance our incentives for those folks.

Why do you think AT&T left?

I think Dallas suited the leadership of the company a little better. A question was raised at that time with respect to our airport—whether it could handle a company that was ranked tenth on the Fortune 500 list. Well, San Antonio also has Valero, which was sixteenth in 2008 but jumped to tenth in 2009. We’ve also seen the success of USAA and H-E-B. I’m confident that the airport works well for huge companies.

You were out of office when the AT&T move was announced. Do you think the city did enough to prevent it?

I think Mayor Hardberger and [Bexar County] Judge [Nelson] Wolff were attentive, but we can improve on that. I think there is a more aggressive approach now because of what happened. That ball will not drop again.

Paul Burka, Patti Hart, Harvey Kronberg, and I discuss voter ID, stem cells, the killing of feral hogs, the killing of bills, how the leaders are leading, and Rep. Edmund Kuempel.

The historian and author is my guest this week.

Paul Burka, Patti Hart, Peggy Fikac, and I discuss Medicaid $$, the DPS sacking, TxDoT sunset, voter ID, and the latest polling in the race for governor.