Swingers in the Senate

Traditionally, swing votes are found in the middle of the political spectrum, but this session’s Anthony Kennedy in the state Senate may come from the far right. While all eyes have been on Royce West and Chuy Hinojosa, the two Democrats considered most likely to vote with the Republican caucus to bring the budget to the Senate floor this week, Dan Patrick has quietly positioned himself as a third key figure. Patrick told me this afternoon that his “intent” was to vote to suspend the rules so that the budget could be debated. And he said he “supported” the budget in general, despite his “no” vote in Senate finance. What he would not say was whether or not he would vote “aye” when it came to the floor Patrick said his opposition in committee was meant to signal his displeasure with the decision to use $3 billion from the Rainy Day Fund to balance the budget. Now he says he can live with that concept—noting that, the way the bill is crafted, the money might not get appropriated if the Texas economy rebounds sufficiently to boost tax revenues. What he wants now is 1) an interim committee dedicated to finding long term solutions to school finance, and 2) an amendment to the sales tax speed up in Senator Duncan’s non-tax revenue bill. The tax speedup was one of the biggest sources of new funds—$880 million—found by Duncan and his Fiscal Matters Subcommittee colleagues, but Patrick thinks it is too burdensome for small businesses, and he wants them protected. (Let me pause here and make sure you understand that I understand that we all understand that neither this $880 million, nor virtually any of the other revenue sources found by Duncan’s subcommittee are actually “new funds” in any reality-based sense of the word.) If Patrick gets his way, however, that means the $880 million figure will come down, and some other source of funds will have to be found in the next day or two. It sounds like Patrick is really trying to get something in exchange for his vote on the budget, though he may just be stalling to see how much animosity there is out in the heartland about the spending levels in the Senate’s budget, viz a viz the much more austere House version. In which case he may vote to suspend—which is, after all, the really crucial vote—and then feel free to cast a symbolic “no” vote on the bill itself, knowing it has still has the votes to pass. On the off chance that this was his plan, I asked Michael Quinn Sullivan, who has been lambasting the Senate’s version of the budget on Twitter for the last several days, how his organization would view such a maneuver. I put it to him just as a hypothetical, not mentioning Patrick. “There’s just something smarmy about that,” Sullivan said. “When it’s done in a disingenuous fashion, so that senators can say to one group, ‘Oh, I was for the budget,’ and then to another, ‘Oh, I was against it.’”