Pulling Your Lege...Apart

Well, there's a week left, and this time it seems that the story of the 79th Texas Legislature will end as a trilogy. For those of you reading the Globe-Republican, you may be surprised to learn that the Lege is still in session, since their "coverage" of the special session has been, well, a wee bit understated. This is actually the second such special session, called by the Governor with great huffing and puffing after the regular session ended in a train wreck back at the end of May, over what was supposed to be the year's signature issue, school finance reform.

Back in March, I described the school funding proposals and their sources, so I won't rehash that here. What has now happened is that the legislature has decided that this job is just too hard to do. What they really mean by that is well described in this Dallas Morning-News column by William McKenzie. In simple terms, as I've suggested previously, the ideological perspective dictated by Republican electoral politics is utterly inconsistent with good governance. In the case of school funding, the way that has played out, as McKenzie puts it, is to pit the anti-taxers against the fix-the-school crowd. Many of the latter in Texas are Republicans who are beginning to wonder why.

They are Republicans because for years, they took Republican leaders at their word when they were told that they were for fiscal responsibility, less intrusive government and good management. They are now struggling to reconcile that belief with the unfolding reality that Republican leadership really favors unprecedented spending and borrowing, more intrusions into personal privacy, lower taxes only for those who don't need it, corruption on a grand scale, and utter mismanagement of everything from the war to local schools. On both the national and state levels, that has many real conservatives in open rebellion.

Those conservatives are, over time, going to face a choice between trying to reclaim a party that has left them behind and jumping ship. As I've argued before, I think the majority are going to wind up jumping, and the school funding issue could be the one that tips the scales. Why? Because this is a philosophical litmus test for the regressives. So the politicians who have thrown in their lot with the crowd that believes we have an exclusively Christian nation (never mind that Jesus didn't believe any of their malarky) are not going to abandon positions favored by that constituency. That's why Gov. Mo' Fo' is going to stay with the anti-taxers (and probably win the Republican primary doing it). At the same time, for non-ideologs the first priority of state government should be schools.

And so one of our regressive leaders, Speaker Craddick has already promised that the House won't be party to any school finance reform that doesn't lower taxes, especially on the hard-pressed wealthy. Craddick has made perfectly clear that if he can't get his way, he is prepared to just go home. Especially telling is the remark by his press secretary, Kathy Walt, "You don't win wars by waving the white flag." Like so many regressive remarks, it begs the question "who is the enemy?"

Well, Mr. Speaker, I'd prefer for the sake of our kids that you would fix our schools, even though that probably means raising some taxes. But, if the sine die has already been cast, then, to coin a phrase, bring it on.

DEMOPHOENIX