Lawmakers are not expected to reconvene until Wednesday this week, extending the holiday weekend due to snow and ice in the forecast. When business resumes, legislators will continue to check typical start-of-session business off the list.
Blaise Gainey, who covers state politics for The Texas Newsroom, said the House’s housekeeping resolution – HR3 – is among the items lawmakers will discuss.
“The housekeeping resolution usually is just figuring out how much their staff can get paid, that sort of thing. Just how to make sure that we are taking care of the people that work for the House — this is like staffers and any committee staff,” Gainey said. “But this time around, there’s actually an addition in there that a lot of people may be worried about. And it could be the reason why it wasn’t voted on last week.”
This addition gives the House speaker the ability to hire an attorney to represent the House and its members.
“This attorney would be chosen only by the House speaker, and it could essentially take people to court or defend the House and its members in court cases,” Gainey said. “It’s not 100% clear what this would be used for specifically, but some people are worried that it could be sort of a new power given to the House speaker that had never been there before. And [some people are] just wondering about possible abuse.”
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Gainey said experts he spoke to said this lawyer could work on issues related to defamation or intimidation.
“If people are intimidating members to vote a certain way, maybe this could be a way to sort of have somebody there, an attorney that can make legal threats essentially and say, ‘hey, we’re going to sue you,’” Gainey said. “If I was to guess, I would say that this was actually brought about because right before the speaker’s vote, there were a lot of people in the Republican Party being threatened to vote for another speaker, and they were being told that they needed to vote this way because that’s the rules. And some people thought that was intimidation.”
This resolution usually happens before committee assignments are made, said Gainey, who expects it will ultimately pass after discussion.
“I think it’ll just need to be talked about and debated on the floor at that time. My guess is there will be some excuse or thought given on why this provision is in there,” he said. “And then members will either want to amend it or they’ll move on and vote it through. So it shouldn’t take too long.
“My guess is when they get back after these freezing cold temperatures, they’ll likely be going over this and spend a couple of hours maybe even trying to decide whether or not they want to pass it as-is or make some amendments.”
