The question - as the author describes it - is whether budget riders qualify as items of appropriation.
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The disagreement concerns the scope of the governor’s line-item veto authority, which is established in the Texas Constitution, Article 4, Section 14, as follows: “If any bill presented to the Governor contains several items of appropriation he may object to one or more of such items, and approve the other portion of the bill.” A seemingly straightforward statement, but you’ll notice that the document doesn’t specify what it means by “items of appropriation.” As is often the case with the Texas Constitution, there’s no way to retroactively clarify what the people who drafted the document meant by the phrase, or whether they even considered the language carefully; this isn’t exactly the Magna Carta we’re talking about. But since the governor is only allowed to veto “items of appropriations”, the actual meaning of the phrase matters and has been continuously debated.
This round of debate was triggered by Abbott, who forced the question with his line-item vetoes to the 2016-17 budget bill, most of which struck out various budget riders. By doing so, the governor’s office said, he cut almost $300m from the budget as passed by the Lege; he also broke with precedent, by asserting that such riders qualify as “items of appropriation.” The governor’s reasoning is summarized in atwo-page memo that circulated in his office. His argument, basically, is that the budget riders in question are blatant ruses. The Lege’s appropriations for the Facilities Commission, for example, included almost $1bn for Section (e), “Construction of Buildings and Facilities.” About $200m of this $1bn was intended for three specific projects, the details of which were laid out later, in budget riders that Abbott vetoed. According to the Lege, Section (e) would be the “item of appropriation” in that context: the governor could have vetoed the whole billion, or none of it. According to Abbott’s office, this is ridiculous; the budget riders were the functional equivalent of “items of appropriation”, regardless of the Lege’s hijinks: “The Legislature cannot use magic words to make an item veto-proof.”
Unnamed legislators, for obvious reasons, disagreed with Abbott’s interpretation. As a result, Joe Straus and Dan Patrick, on behalf of the House and Senate respectively, asked the Legislative Budget Board to assess Abbott’s vetoes, and send its analysis to Glenn Hegar, the comptroller. Or, if you take Patrick’s word for it, Straus asked the LBB to weigh in, and he stoically accepted their determination to do so. It’s not really important who called in the LBB. The point is that someone in the Lege asked Ursula Parks, the director of the Legislative Budget Board, to weigh in, and so she did. Her memo argues that Abbott’s vetoes exceeded his constitutional authority and represented a departure from precedent and tradition. An “item of appropriation”, she wrote, refers to an item that actually makes an appropriation of funds from the state treasury. The budget riders in dispute merely tell the state agencies what to do with those funds once appropriated; that being the case, per Parks, the governor can’t scribble them out.
