The Texas legislative session has crossed the halfway mark for this year, which means things are kicking into high gear.
Over in the House, a popular bill will be back on the table. Blaise Gainey, who covers the Capitol for The Texas Newsroom, said the House Committee on Public Education will be taking up school choice again this week by looking at House Bill 2.
“They allowed a lot of testimony from the public last time around. My guess is that this will be more of a discussion between lawmakers. We may even see some amendments proposed to the bill,” he said. “Over 500 people or 700 people have already told lawmakers how they feel about the bill now. So… I’m not sure what more they would need to hear from people. My guess is this will be a rather short one.”
If this committee approves the bill, it will go on to the full House for consideration.
“It’s not clear if they’ll take a vote (this week),” Gainey said. “They could run into something that makes them say, ‘hey, let’s pause this and take another step back and bring it back up another week or another day.’”
Gainey said he will be watching to see if this bill passes the House for the first time. In 2023, the House held out against passing a similar voucher-like bill, which caused the issue to stall.
“The governor stated last week that he believes the House Education Committee will pass it. I don’t know if he also assumes that once they pass it, it’ll get on the floor this week and pass,” Gainey said. “I think it’s still up in the air whether or not it passes on the House floor. I think it will definitely make it to the House floor, but whether or not they have enough votes to get it passed, we’ll just have to watch and see.”
The Senate passed their version of this bill early in the session. If both chambers pass their versions, the next step is to reconcile the differences before the governor can sign the legislation.
“The House version allows for more money to be put into these vouchers, definitely for kids with disabilities. It also doesn’t say the exact dollar amount for each voucher. It is more so 85% of what that student would get if they were attending a public school,” Gainey said.
“So it’s not as easy as saying $10,000, which is the Senate version. There are also some differences in exactly who gets the first dibs on applying for these.”
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Going into the second half of the regular session, Gainey said he expects a lot more bills to be passed.
“If you look at the floor calendars for both the House and Senate, they have a lot of bills on them. They probably won’t even be able to get to them all this week,” he said. “So they’re gonna be pretty busy.
I think this is the busier time in session when bills are actually passed and may be sent to the governor. You might see some bills starting to be sent to the governor as early as next week.”
There have already been whispers of a special session this year, with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick saying he wants to push for one if his priorities in the senate aren’t passed. However, Gainey said it’s too early to say for sure.
“This stuff is all very fluid,” he said. “And what looks like they can’t come to some sort of agreement, all of a sudden, the next day or two, they may all of sudden find a great way to agree on a bill that is very controversial.”
