It’s about that time in the legislative session – the halfway mark – when the pace picks up as lawmakers see time to get their bills passed dwindling.
The Senate was in high gear on Monday, in keeping with the rapid pace they set last week. Senators have suspended the rules to move a number of bills to final passage. Some of these bills are bipartisan, others pretty contentious. The House so far has not been as quick to move on legislation.
Andrew Schneider, who covers state politics at Houston Public Media, said he has been watching Senate Bill 38, which sets up the process to judge cases in civil courts when a property owner is denied access to their property by someone who has no legal right to remain on the property.
“Basically, it’s designed to combat what’s known as squatting,” he said. “Governor [Greg] Abbott, Lieutenant Governor [Dan] Patrick, and House Speaker [Dustin] Burrows all say that squatting is a growing problem across the state. They’ve named it as a top priority for the session. The Senate State Affairs Committee held a hearing on the bill on Monday but has yet to take it up for a vote.”
The bill’s author, Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, held hearings with his local government committee on the issue last May.
“He estimates there are possibly thousands of cases of squatting in Harris County alone and as many as 10,000 statewide. He says tougher legislation is necessary to protect the property rights of homeowners and landlords, not to mention their personal safety,” Schneider said. “Property owners and landlords themselves testified then and also at yesterday’s hearing that existing laws aren’t strong enough to deal with squatters and that getting squatters off their property can force them to run up thousands and thousands of dollars in legal bills.”
However, opponents of the bill fear what it could mean for vulnerable tenants.
“Opponents argued that it would make it easier for landlords to evict legal tenants and harder for low-income tenants to get legal assistance,” he said. “They argue the tenant protections in the states are too weak as it is and that the bill and its House counterpart are unconstitutional because they deprive tenants of due process.”
Schneider said he expects the Senate State Affairs Committee to vote on SB 38 sometime this week.
“Given how quickly it’s been moving as the session passes the halfway point, it’s possible we could see the full Senate vote on it soon afterwards,” he said.
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Schneider said there are also a number of other notable bills up for discussions this week.
“We’ve got the House Higher Education Committee, which is holding a hearing right now on HB 126. That would make it easier for student athletes to get paid. That’s an issue that’s been fairly controversial for several years, not just here in Texas, but nationwide,” he said. “We’ve got the House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence, which is going to be holding a hearing on HB 449, which would make it a crime to create so-called deep fake videos depicting sexually explicit images.”
And on Tuesday afternoon, the House Agriculture and Livestock Committee will discuss HB 2063, which will set up a database to track firefighting equipment across the state for use in fighting wildfires.
Going forward this session, Schneider said a lot of the focus will be on the pace of bills passing the House. The Senate has already passed more than half of Patrick’s top 40 priority bills, starting with the school voucher bill, SB 2.
“The question now becomes, well, is the House, which now has a more conservative makeup than it did in previous sessions, more likely to pass some of these bills that made it through the Senate and did not make it through the House previously?” Schneider said. “Again, the focus there is going to be on SB2, the voucher legislation.
“We had some legislation that passed last week in a particularly busy session. One of the ones that I was following was SB 10, the bill mandating the placement of the Ten Commandments in public schools. A lot of these bills have gone to the House but have yet to be assigned to committees, so we’ll have to see how quickly they act if they do.”
