And now for a state level issues - one that also illustrates how checks and balances work in Texas.
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After more than a year of defying the state legislature, the Texas Racing Commission finally, sort of, caved in on Thursday.
After being deadlocked on whether to allow historical racing to remain on the commission's books back in December, this time around, Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar weighed in and helped end the long battle between the state legislature and the racing commission.
The commission voted 5 to 4 to repeal historical racing.
The vote comes after months of contentious back-and-forth between those in the horse-racing industry, some racing commissioners and the Legislative Budget Board.
State lawmakers have long insisted that historical racing, in which people bet on races that are shown on video with all the identifying information about the race removed, is actually an expansion of gambling, which many Legislative Budget Board members and other state legislators are firmly against for whatever reason. (Actually, the main reasons seem to be a mix of religion and highly effective casino lobbyists from neighboring states.)
It all started, of course, with a vote. In August 2014, the Texas Racing Commission voted 7-1 to approve historical racing for the state. The decision was met with rabid enthusiasm from the Texas horse-racing industry.
Texas thoroughbred horse racing returned to the state after the 50-year ban on parimutuel wagering ended in the 1990s. For a brief period, the Texas horse-racing industry boomed, but in recent years race attendance has declined. While some states, like Louisiana, prop up their thoroughbred horse-racing industry with fat purses drawn from racetrack casinos, Texas racetracks didn't (and still don't) have that option.
Dwindling crowds forced officials at Sam Houston Race Park and other Texas tracks to choose between offering more races with smaller purses or offering the larger purses that tend to draw the better jockeys and horses in the industry. Soon the top horses and trainers, even the trainers who started out in Texas, had stopped bringing the good horses to the Texas racing circuit and the quality of the races started a swift decline.
But there was a problem with that 2014 decision. Namely, some state legislators were rather displeased that the racing commission had voted to allow historic racing without getting the state legislature to sign off on the decision, as we've previously reported. In fact, a group of legislators quickly started to insist that the TRC didn't have the authority to make such a decision. Things rapidly deteriorated from there.
