Only uncertainty is certain in the Texas Legislature

AUSTIN — It’s a perfectly natural question for an editor to ask an Austin journalist at this point in an odd-numbered year, when the Legislature passes the halfway point in its biennial session: “What’s going on in the Capitol?”

The perfectly honest answer to that perfectly natural question is this: “Stuff. Lots of stuff, but not much has actually happened yet.” That’s when both the reporter and his editor have their work cut out for them.

Commentary By DONNIS BAGGETT, Texas Press Association

Back in the day, when Capitol journalists used Trash-80 computers to file their stories and editors used Maalox to handle their heartburn, I was state editor of The Dallas Morning News. I routinely kick-started my workday by asking the late, great Wayne Slater, The News’ capital bureau chief, that very question about what was happening. His response was generally along these lines: “Aww, just stuff. Not much.” Then he would submerge himself into the depths of governance and conveniently lose radio contact —  cellphones were about as big and powerful as a Volkswagen Bug and as dependable as a Yugo — while he nosed around the big pink building for the day.

I would spend much of that day sweating bullets and trying to avoid the managing editor, who had an annoying habit of dropping by to see what was happening in his newsroom.

The News had a sizable investment in its capital bureau, you see, and the boss was funny about expecting us to deliver meaningful stories even when news wasn’t breaking. We called it enterprise reporting back then, if you’ll recall.

Inevitably, Slater would surface again at 3:58 p.m. This was two minutes before the 4 o’clock budget meeting, when the chief decided which stories would run on Page One and which ones were destined to meet their fate back amongst the truss ads. By that point I was about two-thirds of the way through my daily dose of Maalox and mentally running through ideas on how to break the bad news to the boss.

Typically, Slater would call in from the hallway outside the Linoleum Club — the press corps’ nickname for the capitol cafeteria — to report he’d gotten a tip on something that sounded significant: something like the guv’s tax cut program running into backroom opposition from legislative leadership. “Gotta run,” Slater would say, adding breathlessly that he might be a little late for the 2-star, which of course was the early edition that went to Austin.

My job description required that I sell this vague yet tantalizing story to the managing editor for Page One, wheedle the news desk into holding the 2-star front page for late shove that evening, then harass Slater until he actually filed said story. He would eventually do this, of course, with mere moments left for me to edit his work while a nervous, key-jangling committee of higher-ranking editors glared over my shoulder.

Ah, the good old days.

That’s similar to the the situation I find myself in now. There you are reading the Messenger and sipping your latte while wondering what your TPA crew is up to, and here I am, sweating bullets to find something interesting to tell you whilst the fate of all our bills is up in the air. Sadly, Slater is now pestering the powers-that-be in the Great Beyond, so enterprise stories are hard to come by. So I’ll use what’s left of my allotted space to describe how your lawmakers are grinding this year’s “stuff” into legislative sausage.

Although half the session is in the rear-view mirror, no tax cuts, school reforms or other priorities of the governor, lieutenant governor or speaker of the house have been stuffed into casings and sent to the smokehouse. There’s been a respectable modicum of activity in the Senate, and as always enough political noise to in the House make you daydream about a spring break trip to Big Bend. But no substantive legislation has made it to the governor’s desk. Not much really happens until House committees start sending bills to the floor, and those committees are just now getting up to highway speed.

Rank-and-file lawmakers have spent much of their time so far establishing their rules for the session, lobbying for choice committee assignments and hosting hundreds of visits from chambers of commerce, unions, trade groups, cities, counties, school districts, police and fire chiefs, universities, civic groups and every special interest you can  imagine — including the Texas Press Association. The only groups who haven’t arrived yet are the school kids, and it’s a bit early in the spring for field trips.

Sprinkled among all these meetings are unanimous votes for resolutions commemorating everything from Aunt Myrtle’s 100th birthday to a wedding of a nice young couple back in the district who have such a glorious future ahead, not to mention the blessings and best wishes of everyone in their blessed, beloved and beautiful hometown, along with the heartiest congratulations and sincere best wishes of each and every one of the 150 members of the Texas House of Representatives. All this congratulating and well-wishing and grinning for the cameras takes time.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, House and Senate leaders are prioritizing bills. The powers that be eventually assign each bill to a committee, then that committee decides — sometimes with gentle guidance from the speaker or lite guv — which ones will get hearings and which ones will wither on the vine. This is important but unseen activity, this winnowing down a list of more bills that Sam Rayburn could ramrod through a year-long session, much less one constitutionally limited to five months every odd-numbered year.

At this writing, we have 66 days remaining in the 140-day session. A record 9,328 bills were filed in the House and Senate before the regular bill filing deadline on March 10, not including scores of routine and uncontested local bills to form new utility districts and such.  Those are still streaming in. There’s not enough time for the committees to hold enough hearings and vote on whether to send all these bills to the floor. Even if they did, the full House and Senate couldn’t possibly hold debates and vote on all of them. As a result, thousands of bills will never get hearings. And many of those that do won’t be brought up again later for a vote by their committee, much less by both chambers of the Legislature.

Your Texas Press Association staff assesses this mountain of bills, then makes recommendations to the TPA Legislative Advisory Committee regarding which ones to fight and which ones to support. Now we’re wearing out our soft-soled shoes making the rounds to legislators’ offices and attending committee hearings, presenting our witnesses and our best arguments to support our side.

The bottom line on what we’re doing in the Capitol at this moment is this: TPA is taking formal positions on 69 of those 9,328 bills and keeping an eye on another 100 or so that are benign as written but could turn malignant with a bad committee amendment. If you go to the members’ section of texaspress.com you can read which bills we’re focusing on and what our positions are, then follow them through the legislative process.  If historical averages hold true, 15 to 20 percent of the total bills filed will become law. Some will go down in flames during floor votes. Some will pass both chambers, only to get vetoed by the governor after the legislature leaves town. The lion’s share will simply suffer a slow, invisible death in File 13.

As all this is taking place, you can rest assured your TPA team is working hard to pass bills that are good for Texas newspapers — and to help nudge those that aren’t into a long, dark, lingering demise.

Wish us luck, and have a slug of Maalox for us if you please.