This week's episode of the trib Cast is supported by former US Ambassador to Mexico Antonio Garza and the Texas Managed Care Alliance. Hello and welcome to the second episode of the trib Cast. I'm Eleanor Klibanoff, a reporter here and co host of the Trip Cast. I'm joined by my two other co hosts, politics reporter James Barragan, editor in chief Matthew Watkins, and our very special guest, Texas Tribune co founder former executive editor Ross Ramsey from.
The former original trib Cast back in December of two thousand and nine.
The Podfather, The Podfather horrible. We'd like to apologize for you.
Reboots never as good as the original. But here we are, But.
Here we are. We're trying.
Thank you all for joining us. It is the first week of session. We're wearing cowboy hats to honor it.
You told me I could take it off.
You could take it off now, Matthew, your narrative fun.
There's a fun part of the table over here.
In the afternoon, I'm getting on an airplane and I just spent this morning trying to figure out how to fit cowboy boots into my very constricted suitcase, cowboy boots in a tuxedo.
And so now the boy boots and a TUXI was very important.
Matthew is very important up in Washington.
Boots and boats or boots and black ties.
Wow.
Okay, so that is your Texas credentials. You can take off the hat and still be a proud text.
I will admit that I had to borrow the cowboy boots.
I have brown cowboy boots, but not black ones, so embarrassing.
I didn't.
That is embarrassing.
So if you're not watching on YouTube, join us on YouTube because we are wearing hats and having a lot of fun.
Some of us are Matthew Watkins Roast Podcast.
Thank you for joining us. Okay, well, so we are one day into the legislative session. We're recording this on Wednesday morning. We have a lot of news to get through. But before we get to that, James, I mean I was over in the Capitol yesterday day, big first day of school energy. Everybody was finding their locker and seeing their old friends.
You were there. What was the energy under the pink Dome?
Yeah?
I mean usually it is first day of school energy. As you said, people are finding their old friends. The new people are very excited. They think they're going to pass all their bills, Their families are there. Everybody's super excited because it's the swearing end day. But hanging over all of this was the Speaker's battle, which I think everybody knew was going to be a big deal and was frankly, I think people were not really sure which way it was going to go, one way or the other.
So that was kind of looming over all of this, and there was this sort of air of uncertainty. You asked everybody, you know, how you doing, how are you feeling there? So we'll see, we don't know what's going to happen. So it was a little bit different than other opening days that.
It was like the first day of school.
If the student body president and the football captain said they were going to have a fistfight in the cafeteria.
Yeah, I'd been talking about it all summer.
So yeah, it's like we all had to elect the class president on day one. Yeah, with about as much influence, you know, eventually they would have. So, I mean, the brief facts are if you want the whole backstory on the Speaker's race, you know, last week's episode, we got into it in depth. It's also you can read our
coverage on our website. But to summarize, it essentially came down to Republican Dustin Burrows of Lubbock, who was seen as representing the more establishment arm of the party represented David Cook of Mansfield, seen as representing this more further right, more insurgent arm of the party. The Democrats also put forward set of Anna Maria Rodriguez Ramos. It really came down to Cook and Burrows. Last week, James, You and
Jasper predicted Burrows would get the vote. I decided to be contrarian and predict.
That Cook would get the votes. Who was right?
What happened, Well, it ended up being Dustin Burrows, and I think it happened a lot quicker than.
I expected it to go.
It was two rounds and Burrows won with a vote of eighty five to fifty five with nine people not voting. But in that first round, the Democrats had a real opportunity and I'm sure we'll get into this, but Democrats are a real opportunity to in the second round make this hurt a little bit more for the Republicans and really squeeze them and make them make a decision rather than cast their lot with the boroughs.
Or cook team.
Anna Maria Rodriguez Ramos, as you said, was in that first round, and because she was in it, and because twenty three Democrats stuck with her, neither of the two Republican candidates could get to that seventy six threshold that would be a simple majority to win the speakers race. And then there was talk in the chamber of well, if we can just keep forcing this and keep like president not voting or white lighting this, we can force
the issue. And there was a question by missus Tis and Fromie Thompson of Houston of whether if they just kept going to infinity could they nominate a new candidate, and the answer was unclear. The answer was sort of we'd have to ask the parliamentarian. There was no clear answer in their rules. And so I think that really influenced how some of those Democrats voted afterwards, because they were like, do we want to make this keep going and going and going forever and not have a straight
up answer from the parliamentarian. And I think a lot of them decided, well, we don't, let's just get on board the Borough's team and get this over with. I mean, it still took a lot longer than other speaker votes, but we were done by I want to say, two or three.
Yeah, it turns out the Democrats were more united than maybe we thought, right, forty three Democrats for Burroughs, three Democrats for Cook, forty three Democrats for Burroughs, thirty six Republicans for Cook. We now have a speaker again, going back to the days of Joe Strauss that was elected by more Democrats than Republicans, which.
Makes a lot of people mad.
Well, you know, in the same something, you know, watching this from outside, a lot of it had in common with the Strauss race. You know, this was less about Republicans and Democrats and more about inside versus outside, and whether the House is going to be controlled by forces outside, whether that's money forces, whether that's the Lieutenant governor or the Senate or you know, or they're going to be
controlled by the House. And you know, one way to read this vote is that that overcame the partisan differences between the Democrats and the Republicans and they just voted. You know, look, we want to run our own show. We would rather not have this run from some outside you know, chair somewhere and certainly not by the outside chair over on the eastern end of the capitol.
Yeah, I think that also is I mean there are also outside influences that impact like the current establishment we talk about like some of the when you talk about some of the packs, like obviously Art is very involved Texas or the lawsuit Reform are very involved in some of those leadership people, and they support a lot of
the leadership people. But it's also about and this is something we talked about last week, but about power and like the people who are in power and who share that power with the current leadership team, and a lot of the people who are on Cook's team are sort of outside of that power establish it. And obviously they want a new guy in so they could be part of that power, right, And I think that's going to play out a little bit here and that they're going to continue to be shut out.
Right, So you know, how so how do Borrows get the Democrats? I mean, you know, there was conversation about reviving this whole thing and having budget chairs on all of the substantive committees so that you could give CBO chair its a I can't remember what called chairman of the Budget Office or something. You know, anyway, you'd have a budget chair on like the Agriculture Committee, and you
could give that to a Democrat. You're not giving a chair to a Democrat, So you're honoring the Republican Party, but you're giving them a little bit of power, you're putting them on appropriations. Was there, you know, was there anything to that? Was there something substantive the Democrats got out of this.
I don't know if you've heard anything different, Matthew, but I'm not quite sure how they won over the Democrats. I'm sure it is some of those things, and we're sort of actively looking to find out what exactly those those not promises, but yeah, I mean, I guess their pledges or promises or agreements or were. But I think that in the end, the Democrats probably felt that they had a better shot with Burrows than they had with Cook overall in terms of getting their legislation pass of
killing legislation that they didn't see as favorable. But I'm not sure exactly what the details are, And that's one of the big questions for me, like won them over?
Yeah, I think the big question moving forward is.
This has a lot to do with power, as we already talked about, but does it have anything to do with policy and the decisions that are actually going to be made. I think, you know, rightly or wrongly, David Cook was associated with the insurgent wing of the House, wing that has grown in power, and that has been largely associated with a few, you know, the financial support of a few billionaires, and you know Tim Dunn being
the most prominent one. And I think I have to imagine that Democrats part of this motivation was to just not give that wing a victory, because that wing is what scares Democrats more than anyone else in the state. I think there is a question here of you know, they that wing did not win a victory, you know, technically by electing the speaker. It's still a very conservative speaker. And if you look at the things that that wing has been upset about that they haven't gotten in recent years,
You're talking about school vouchers which Burrows supported. You talked about Democratic Democrats being allowed to chair some committees in the House. It seems very possible that that's going to go away. You talk about like little maybe more under the radar, things like ending taxpayer funded lobbying, going after
cities and local government's ability to lobby the legislature. Dustin Burrows was the author of the death Star bill that we called, people called it last session, which really really targeted the power of cities. You know, I think there's a real question about whether that could actually finally make its way through. I mean, a lot of the things that that wing has been going for, they might still
get what they want. And they that wing has been pushing ever since Strauss was elected, probably even before that, putting intense pressure on that wing of the party. And they haven't been able to gain control of the House, but they've been able to push the House in the direction of that they want it to go very very effectively.
And you know that now basically the choice for Democrats is essentially two people that want to do the exact same thing, ones that's associated with that wing and one that isn't.
And they chose the one that isn't right.
I mean, the gap between like the Democrats who spoke on behalf of Representative Rodriguez Ramos and like the Texas that they presented, and the gap between what Burrows and Cook supporters presented is is vast Burrows and Cook next to each other look like so similar when you look at compared to you know, the Democrats were talking about, you know, expanding abortion access, protecting LGBT Texans like Burrows a.
He is not talking about any of that. And now to build consensus, he's not going to say how can I appease the Democrats?
Cerial boxes, the contents on him were about the same.
Absolutely, right, I mean these are the same. It's just the central market.
And we won't say which is.
You decide.
Well, and this is also a mirror image of the Paxton Strauss fight. You know, there was a there was an effort to knock off Strauss, you know, that was very similar to this. The candidate at the time was a House member named Ken Paxton and represented by these outside interests, and they were sort of parading around the John Reagan Building over here on campus while the Republican Caucus met, and the caucus decided to go ahead and
go with Strauss. But you know, this has been a developing fight for a long long time.
Well, let me just throws too, which is like Paxton also loomed large in this fight.
Now that he's Attorney general.
I mean, the impeach his the House impeachment of him, which you know, he was eventually cleared by the Senate, was a huge part of this insurgent wing gaining power. He also, among others have like sort of threatened this to primary people who oppose what happens on that front.
On this question, the caucus fight.
Oh, I think that there's no doubt that there's gonna be a lot of primary challenges for sure. You know, the RPT chairman has already said that. Some of the lawmakers, the more conservative lawmakers, have already said that they've said things like this is war, and they warn't beforehand that. I mean, that's what Paxton was saying on his two day statewide tour that if they didn't vote, if they didn't honor the GOP caucus endorsed nominee, who was David Cook,
that they would be primaried in next year's election. So I think we will see that for sure.
But I do want to.
Point out too that I agree with you guys, like both of these guys are very conservative, but I do think that there needs to be like new language around what that means, you know, because like they are both conservative, and I think, you know, Matthew, you were saying they're the right wing of the party. I think that is actually the right way to get get to it. They're like much more socially conservative. Burrows is more of like the business friendly Republican, but he is also very conservative.
I don't I don't really think it's about a difference of policy. I really think this is you know, I think you guys were on it when you were talking about power in there to go who's who gets to who gets to run this and who calls the shots here?
And you know, I really do think that the House's chance of sort of calling its own shots internally is stronger with Burrows than it would have been outside with with Cook, because you know Cook, you know, when you when you analyze that part of the of the or that faction, you know they were getting instructions from somewhere, not at the corner of Congress and twelfth, you know.
And and but the result for this, I mean, if you're looking at this, you know, like we said, if you're looking at this, you know, if I get this speaker, this is the result from the Capitol. And if I get that speaker, this is the result from the Capitol. I'm not sure that's that different.
I think also, uh, to the point about the primaries to Burroughs did get mostly support from Democrats and a few Republicans, and so that to a certain extent, I think proves the point of the right wing conservatives of the party right, and so that's why there will be like, I think both things can be true.
It's also true that in order to get things through the capital, you need to agree on the policies and you need to be able to get along right. And you know, we all remember last session where there was this massive surplus. Everyone agreed they wanted to spend a big chunk of that money on property taxes, and Patrick and Phelan fought the entire legislative session over how to do that and could not get it done and had to come back for special sessions in order to get
that pass. And you know, I guess maybe they eventually did pass something. So maybe we're just talking about like what's going to happen with our summer vacations.
Like how painful the process is of getting there, right, which I do you think it it's more indicative of how that's going to go that we came in without a speaker, or that it got resolved pretty quickly like which is more telling to me.
It's more about how can the House and the Senate get along? Then how can they get along within the House. I don't really have any doubt in Burrows's ability to get through get things through the House. It's whether that can then be reconciled with Dan Patrick, who you know, put out a pretty you know, salty statement yesterday. He was clearly advocating for cook in the days ahead of the session. You know, he's not particularly happy. He can
hold a grudge. I mean, I think you know, the question is will Burrows be able to sort of mend that relationship.
I want to talk about the other chamber, but first let's take a moment to thank our sponsors, Mexico more than just a neighbor. For timely cross border Insight turned to former US Ambassador Antonio Garza. Learn more at Tony Garza dot com and the Texas Managed Care Alliance, which is working to protect high quality healthcare for Medicaid patients, insure accountability for taxpayer dollars, and advocate for fair and competitive contracting policies. More at Texas Managedcare Alliance dot org.
So we do have an entirely other chamber to worry about. Certainly less sparks on the first day over there. But Governor Greg Abbott was in the Senate. He gave a speech in which he addressed his top priorities of stricter bail laws and school choice, school vouchers, education savings accounts. And Dan Patrick, speaking to Abbot, said, we passed that school choice bill five times. We passed that bail bill
five times. I don't know who my partner is going to be across the Hall, but we passed that bill many times. Obviously, the Senate is not the sticking point for those but ross this school choice school vouchers issue has been floating around a long time.
Is this the session it gets done?
You know? I sure, I think that they won. They won the primaries. I mean, you know they they basically made a fist and backed it up, and you know, the old school politics, it's like, you know, do this or else and the and they produced the or else. So everybody who votes against vouchers is in a position where every Republican, I should say, who votes against vouchers is in a position where, unless they have a very very very strong signal from home and or else from home.
You know, if you if you vote for vouchers, we're going to turn you out. They're going to have to follow the governor and the Lieutenant governor on knows, particularly the governor, because he produced a bunch of money and a bunch of effort that wiped out enough of the House members that it actually was one of the things that called into question the speakers race. You know, is the is the House now controlled by the House like
it always has been. So he's been the you know, sort of the angry younger sibling right with its middle fingers up and and there was a moment there where he's sort of say, are they going to come into this so cowed that they're going to let the governor and the Lieutenant governor determine who the speaker is and what the issues are. But I think that even though they didn't determine who the speaker is, they have determined what the issues are and you're gonna get a voucher bill this time, right.
I Mean, in some ways it's just how power works. To talk about power is well, and that those people in other big.
Question may have been solved, you know, by by Glenn Hager. There's enough money here to do vouchers and also put a bunch of you know, sort of levening money into public schools here, so you can say, you know, we think this is terrible, but also this other thing. So you know, I think you'll get both of them together.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, if they don't pass vouchers, I'll in twenty twenty five, I'll put this cowboy hat into my regular wardrobe.
An orange cowboy hat for in your oatmeal for YouTube.
You know, nothing is for sure.
Of course, anything can go weird and crazy, but it would just be wild to me if they somehow couldn't get it past. They have the votes, they have a speaker who supports it, and as we said last week, I think, you know, if I'm Burrows and I need to sort of shore up relationships with the other people in power in this state. One way to really do that is to get that Boucher bill through the House very quickly early in the session, to make Greg Abbott happy.
Yeah, and I mean historically the sticking point there has been rural Republicans who feel like their constituents aren't going to be served by that Dustin Burrows from Lubbock. You know he's a supporter. I think there's been more momentum in those rural districts. James, do you feel like those rural Republicans are going to have sway on this issue the way they are been blockers the way they have been in the past.
Well, a bunch of them, to Ross's point, got replaced. They're gone, So they're gone. So they were sort of the buffer, I guess, and they're gone, which leads us to this situation where school vouchers does seem like an inevitability. I think the governor has said he's got seventy nine hardcore supporters, but you know, the doubles in details. I think there will be some kind of bill that gets past.
Is just what does it actually look like? But yeah, a lot of those people who were the blockers are either chose to retire or.
Were knocked out in the primaries.
You can ignore the politics for a minute. If you think about school finance has always sort of turned on. They produce a bill and then they produce these printouts of the twelve hundred or eleven hundred school districts and say this is how this piece of legislation will affect financially each one of these districts. So every member of the legislature can look at these and say, I'm okay here, I'm okay, I'm hurt here, all of that kind of stuff.
One of the substantive arguments against vouchers has been you're going to take money out of my public schools, and you know you're going to hurt this community institution whatever else. That means if they have enough money in a school finance bill that even with vouchers, your district's not hurt. Then it takes away some of that argument, and it takes away some of the heat that those members might feel from home, and they might be able to hold
their nose and vote for it. And I and then when you add the politics in, as James points out, you know, I don't see how that bill doesn't And you know, we had a Texas Tribune event up in Dallas.
This is not a rural area, obviously.
But Morgan Meyer, who supported the voucher bill, he said exactly that. He said, I was looking at the numbers and it did not hurt my districts. It actually was helping us. Was going to bring hundreds of millions of dollars to our districts. And that's why I voted for it, and it becomes easier to rationalize.
Yeah, and you know what hurt districts was the four point five billion dollars that was allocated for schools contingent on vouchers getting passed that didn't go through.
I mean.
Those districts, you know, many of which are very opposed to vouchers, and many people have said, you know, it's not worth it to take that like short term you know, amount of money. But I wonder how many of them still feel that way after we've seen schools closed and jobs canceled and everything like that. The districts really feel like they need them.
Money, right, I mean, this is how again, this is how power works.
Right. It's like get who you want in office and hold something valuable hostage until you kind of get what you want.
And some of these may be the things that you know, as you find out, as we all find out, you know, what, if anything, did the Democrats get in this you know broker in this deal? You know, are we going to base school funding on enrollment instead of attendance? And you know, all of those kinds of things along the way that you know, turner screw here, turnis screw there. It's not like you won the issue, but you won some concessions along.
The way, right, which I do think Democrats have gotten somewhat savvy at using those like small tools, you know, because they're not going to necessarily be able to block these big bills. Speaking of the budget, Matthew, you spoke with Controller Glenn Hagar this week. Give us sort of the rundown of how the money's looking.
The money is looky, not as strong as last session, but stronger than pretty much any other session that came before it.
It's a small quibble I'm.
So going into last session.
Well, actually, first of all, they have I think one hundred and ninety four billion dollars in general revenue to spend, which is slightly less than they had available in twenty twenty three, but more than they actually chose to spend, so they can essentially spend more money than they want to.
They have a twenty four billion dollar surplus coming in from last year, which again is less than thirty two point seven billion from last session, but still like far more than any other surplus prior to that some of that money is that the four point five billion dollars that I mentioned earlier, they didn't go to schools. There's a few other things that kind of are supposed to go to specific counts accounts like highways and water funds
and everything like that that hasn't been spent. That's not account allocated for. But as Hagar kind of confirmed to me on the stage on Monday, they've got about twelve billion dollars to work with that they can kind of allocate to other things. The other thing that I think is really interesting that he flagged in this is that the Rainy Day Fund, the Economic Stabilization Fund, will also reach around twenty four billion dollars this calendar year and
will reach essentially it's maximum. It's basically the Rainy Day Fund caps out at ten percent of like prior spending, basically and for the first time in history, in part because of how much oil and gas are being extracted from the state, which is what funds the Day Fund. In part because Hagar actually won the ability to invest that money and has also been collecting interests and things like that in recent years. It will reach that cap.
And one of the questions that Hager was sort of raising, is should the legislature lift that cap and allow that to grow even further so you could he's basically saying, by in a decade that amount could reach eighty billion dollars or should they you know, lower taxes with it? They could, it's the an oil and gas tax that feeds that. You could conceivably lower that tax, although that
only helps us pretty small number of people. Or do you just kind of allow that money at which is the current set up, to go back into the general fund to spend each year? And you know, it's an interesting question, but the big picture thing here is just the state has a lot of money to spend again, and in some ways that'll make things easier.
In some ways that'll make it harder for them.
So like we're retrich this year.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it's all good. It's all good. You know, there was a you know, back in the day, there was an Appropriations chairman Rob Dannell later became a federal judge who said, you know, it's easiest to do a budget in a legislature where the money's short because people come, there's a line of supplicants, we want money for this we want money for that, and you can say I
love you, but we just don't have the money. But when you have a surplus, you know, and he was talking about much smaller surpluses, but when you have enough money quote unquote, when they come to you and they say we want this and we want that, you have to say, well, I just don't love you, and it's a different kind of problem.
And everyone starts fighting over what should we do.
So now we've had this line for a couple of sessions now where they've had some kind of surplus or they've had some kind of you know, land of plenty, and they've gotten into this mode where they basically you can see more clearly what their priorities are and are not because it's not that they don't have the money, it's that they don't have the will for some of these things.
I think three things to look at for likely candidates for some of that money to get spent.
One property taxes.
I don't think you can have a surplus in this state, in this political environment without doing something to lower property taxes. Water infrastructure. That's been a big issue kind of leading up to the session. A lot of people across the political spectrum saying we need to spend more money preparing Texas for the future with in terms of water supply and.
Everything like that.
And then as we've already discussed school funding, the schools really struggling. I think folks would like to sort of take that attack line off the table heading into twenty twenty six.
But I think two of those three are I mean, I don't know, we have ross herehegon Wigan, but wouldn't it be unwise to use like one time expenditures on them, Like it seems like the water infrastructure one is the only one that you'd really want to do it one time spend.
The water thing is you know you can do that with bonding, so you can put one time money into that and then you know, sort of live off the corpus to some extent. Right, you know, the question is exactly right. You know, if the other two are related. If you lower property taxes, you're basically saying the local part of school finance is going to go down, and to compensate for that, the state part's going to go up.
That's how you do that. That's a waterbed, right, and especially if you're in an environment where you're telling people. We're gonna do vouchers. It's not going to hurt schools. Everybody's going to go up right. You have the money to do that and do the property tax thing. But then you have to worry about next time and next
time and next time. And that's what's happened to school finance over and over and over again in history, is that it eventually, you know, the state's funding goes down and that puts pressure on property taxes and you get back yeah, you know.
Yeah, right now we're rich, rich, and it looks all good. But when we hit a bust or something, it's it's not gonna be all good, and we may if there is no legislation that puts in an infrastructure to actually solve these things, or in the budgeting it solved. Then one time expenditures are kind of hard to justify in the long run, I think.
And if you're an appropriator and you're looking for ways to say no to all those people in line, this is how to do it. Say it's one time money, we can't use it for ongoing expenses.
But those one time expenditures are popular with you know, it's great to say I threw all that money Yeah.
It's going to make me feel better about my property taxes right now?
Yes, exactly.
Well, you know, before we go, I think the most important thing on every Texans mind this week is I think James and I have been discussing all morning, which is that Dustin Burrows, in addition to being our new House speaker and representing how power works in the state of Texas, is also the first House speaker since eighteen eighty seven to have a beard.
Beards are back. We've got two beards on this.
Stage, Ross, not anybody's beard.
Ross. Are you thinking about growing a beard?
Now that I've thought about it all my life? If I had stopped shaving when I was thirteen, I would pretty much look like I love right now.
Uh. You know, bearded representation on the dais What does this mean to you guys?
I think I think Burrows. I think Burrows has got to trim the beard a little bit.
Really, he gets the power he already did.
He looked like us.
He's certainly trimmed.
Yeah, I think when he's out in a lumbic winter, he's got a bigger one, but he's certainly trimmed.
He has a hibernation beard for a minute there.
Right right, and it's it's gonna get hot, and then Dustin Burrows does then shave it down. But I think I am a strong proponent for the beards. I've been a strong proponent for beards since I started covering the legislature. The last guy shout out to Asher Price from Axios because he did all this research. The last guy to have a full on beard and be the Texas House speaker was a guy in eighteen eighty five called Lafayette Lumpkin Foster.
So that is, you know, Lumpy Foster.
And I hate to be this person, but you know, not a woman in the bunch in the whole history. But you know, we do finally have bearded represent tation and so you know, we'll have to see what that means for policy.
This is If you would like to read a story about bearded speakers, please email our editors who are sucking the fun.
Yeah you know this is you know, if anything happens on the beard front, we at the Texas Trip Cast will be cracking it. Yes, we want to thank our sponsors, former US Ambassador to Mexico Antonio Garza and the Texas Managed Care Alliance. Our producers are Rob Avila and Chrisoba. Oh Chris, I should have checked her last name before we did this. Chris Shobaa. Our theme music is composed by Rob. I want to thank James, Matthew and Ross for joining us and we will see you guys next week