They should have stamped "fragile" on the House budget package. That is how tricky it was to assemble. Chairman Pitts tried to explain to the tea party members that there was no money in SJR 1; it's just a vessel for moving future payments into the Rainy Day Fund for water projects. That didn't seem to mollify the tea party contingent, led by Van Taylor and Scott Sanford, that gathered at the back microphone. Some members worried that the rating services (Moodys and Standard & Poors) would be alarmed because there wasn't enough money in SJR 1. In fact there is no money in the bill, nor was there intended to be any. The money comes later, in HB 1025, where it will be drawn down from the Rainy Day Fund. It will still be necessary for citizens to vote on whether to approive SJR 1. If they don't approve it in November, the Legislature will be back at square one, and action on the water plan will have to wait until 2015.
Read MoreHaven't we seen this picture before? Speaker Straus performs well for most of the session, but when crunch time comes, he can't close the deal. His team has no cohesion (except for Geren), and there doesn't appear to be a strategy. So Straus falls back into his old persona of presiding rather than leading. It's happened every session he has been speaker. I wrote much the same story line a few days ago, ending with the prediction that Straus would end up putting Rick Perry in the driver's seat. That is exactly where we are headed. Just wait and see, Perry is going to eviscerate the restoration of the education cuts.
The Senate, of course, has its own problems. It's more cohesive than the House, but Tommy Williams has fallen back into his old House persona of losing his temper at a key moments. (In Straus's case, it's being in a canoe and choosing not to paddle.) Can you imagine what Bullock would say about this situation? Where are the giants when you need them? I'm not going to wax eloquent about the good old days -- they weren't so good as we might like to remember -- but at least they produced leaders who could close a deal when they had to. Oh, and here's another prediction: SB 11, the drug testing bill that caused so much drama and comedy last night in the House before being killed at midnight, will come back in the special session. What a mess!
Read MoreUPDATE: The Nominations Committee has approved all three nominees the UT System Board of Regents. The full Senate will take up nominations next.
I walked in the east door of the Capitol yesterday with Senator John Whitmire. He asked if I was going to nominations. I said I was. Then he said, "I told them [the nominated regents], 'Don't even sit down. I know you're on a mission. And you're going to hurt your [reputation] very badly.'"
Kirk Watson carried the questioning in the early going. He got the candidates to agree that they cannot fire the president unilaterally, that the decision to initiate the dismissal of a president belongs to the chancellor alone. (For some background, read Jake Silverstein's exclusive interview with Chairman Gene Powell here.)
Read MoreThese were the final elements of the budget deal that was reached yesterday:
--Add $200 million to the Foundation School Program
--Use a portion of TRS funding to get to $3.9 billion, the Democrats' target amount for restoring the school cuts
The major point of disagreement arose over the System Benefit Fund, which has long been a personal concern for Sylvester Turner, became a contentious issue between Turner and Williams.
The Senate's Medicaid budget rider, which laid out a possible path for Medicaid expansion, was rejected by the House.
The "all funds" budget number is $195 million. It came in $600 or so million under the spending cap.
Higher ed health related institutions received a sixteen percent increase. This was the best budget for higher ed in years.
Read MoreThis morning I wrote about the prospects for a budget deal, the topic du jour that is uppermost in everyone's mind. The post contained, among other comments, this line: "House Democrats complained that Senate budget chief Tommy Williams had 'misled' them." That is what I was told by what I believed to be reliable sources; the problem is, now I don't believe it was true--or that Williams had sandbagged a deal. A Williams staffer asked me to correct another statement in the article, which was that Willams and Perry are close political allies. While there may have been a time when that was true, it is not true today. For example, a rider in the appropriations bill read as follows:
"Of the funds appropriated elsewhere in this Act to the Health and Human Services Commission in Goal B [never mind the jargon], no amount may be spent to modify Medicaid eligibility unless the commission develops a plan to create more efficient health care coverage options for all existing and newly eligible populations, and the commission receives prior written approval from the Legislative Budget Board before implementing the plan."
Perry wanted the bold-face language removed from the rider. Williams stood firm in resisting. He was determined that the Legislature should write the checks. This is as it should be; the Legislature holds the purse strings.
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