Wednesday, May 26, 2021

TBH

These are all three very bad ideas.

The problem with swatting at transgender students is obvious, first from a moral/ethical point of view:
There's also the aspect of trying to fix a problem that doesn't exist. I read that Alabama wants (or has passed?) such a law. There is one transgender student in all of Alabama that law would protect the rest of Alabama from. Texas has a larger population than Alabama, so probably a larger number of transgender students. But do we need a law to protect the rest of us from their attempts to be regular schoolchildren?

But the clinker in there is not obvious: taxpayer funded lobbyists.  This is not a noble effort to protect taxpayers from funding lavish dinners and more lavish gifts on legislators via lobbyists.  It's the Lege's effort to get cities and counties and school districts (all independent government entities, to one degree or another) to leave them alone so they can do as they like.

School districts large enough to afford lobbyists hire them to report on what's going on in Austin during the session, and to advocate for their points of view, or just let them know when and where they need to send people (usually school superintendents, who are technically using tax money to advocate for public education) to hearings to make their voices heard.  Is that for, or against, the interests of the people?  You may find a particular issue to be not to your liking:  you may think, for example, no child should wear a mask at school, and schools should be "open" and campuses full of people; or you may think no one should be on the campus and those who are should be wearing hazmat suits.  Opinions differ, and if you think I'm exaggerating for effect; I'm not.  Now, whose interest in this fight is the "people's" interest?  And if the schools are lobbying for more equitable funding via state revenues, is that in the people's interests, or not?  Most people in Texas have no idea how school funding is accomplished, and most of the ideas they do have are wrong.  Do they pay attention to school funding bills in Austin every two years?  Somebody has to, and the schools have found, for their and the sake of the children, that they have to do it.  Are they all that effective?  No, actually.  Should they not be allowed to try?  Absolutely, says I.

Then again, I'm a Texas Democrat, and it was the Democrats in the House who bottled up those three bills until it was too late for the House to consider them (the calendar in a 5 month session once every two years pretty much runs the session, donchaknow?).

Will this come back up in a special session?  Don't hold your breath:
Governors don't like special sessions because they have to call them, and voters know special sessions cost more money.  Governors don't like to be the individual costing the taxpayers more money.  There will be a special session for redistricting because the census numbers won't be official soon enough; that will be forgiveable.  But there won't be time in that session to tack on these three bills, and calling a second special session just for those bills, is probably not going to happen.  One special session every two years is allowable.  More than that, is practically heretical.  And besides, the Lege didn't really do anything about the state's electric grid, and we'll be reminded of that in a few months when brownouts and rolling blackouts return.  Nobody'll freeze to death, but Texans hate losing their A/C even more than they hate losing their heat in winter.

If any special session could be justified, aside from redistricting (which we will grudgingly accept as the cost of having a government), it would be to fix, once and for all, the problem of electricity in Texas.  Needless to say, nobody's holding their breath waiting for that one.
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