An attack on flu vaccinations by a Houston City Council member has drawn fire from medical officials, as patients with influenza symptoms continue to fill emergency rooms across the country.The remarks do give us a good opportunity to look at the direct relationship that exists in certain contexts between the federal government and cities. Sometimes this relationship allows a city to bypass a state. This can be a useful strategy in a state like Texas that tends to not support these types of projects.
As the council considered a proposal Wednesday to accept $3.1 million in federal funding for childhood immunizations, Councilman Jack Christie voiced his opposition to the measure, apparently conflating it with flu vaccinations.
"I'm going to vote against this," Christie said before the 15-1 vote. "You don't die from the flu."
Christie backed down somewhat from his comment on Friday. What he meant to say, he said, was that "People should not die from the flu."
The biggest problem with Obama’s fever metaphor is that it treats Republicans as monolithic. This wasn’t such a stretch during his first term, when the GOP calculated that relentless obstruction was the best way to undermine him, a goal they were united around. Back then, his gain was the GOP's loss, and vice versa. But with Obama having run his last campaign, the game is no longer zero-sum. Up to a point, Republicans need not fear his rising popularity, so long as they become more popular too. And this has created divisions within the Republican Party.
It’s useful in particular to sort House Republicans into three groups: moderates, pragmatic conservatives, and hard-core conservatives. The moderates have to run in closely divided districts and prefer to hew to the center when possible. The pragmatic conservatives tend to be in somewhat safer seats. But because they’re in a stronger position politically when their party is more popular, they have an interest in boosting the party’s overall image with voters. Finally, the hard-core conservatives are either jihadi extremists who value ideological purity above all, or pols who worry more about potential primary challengers than their general election opponents. They have no problem if the party is scorned nationally so long as they preserve their conservative bona fides.
The Vote No/Hope Yes group is perhaps the purest embodiment of the uneasy relationship between politics and pragmatism in the nation’s capital and a group whose very existence must be understood and dealt with as the Republican Party grapples with its future in the wake of the bruising 2012 elections.
Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist and once the top spokesman for J. Dennis Hastert, a Republican and former House speaker, described the phenomenon thus: “These are people who are political realists, they’re political pragmatists who want to see progress made in Washington, but are politically constrained from making compromises because they will be challenged in the primary.”
The Greater Houston Partnership plans to take a longer-term and more visionary approach to the issues facing Houston, leaders of the business group said Thursday.
Outgoing chairman Tony Chase told 1,000 members during the partnership's annual luncheon that as he and others reviewed last year's accomplishments - including its support for bond referendums for Houston's public schools and community college system and for international travel from Hobby Airport - they pondered whether the group was having an appropriate effect on the biggest civic issues.
"It took some soul-searching, but, ultimately, we concluded that we were not," Chase said.
Mr. Obama has followed recent tradition in making appointments; like every president going back to Ronald Reagan, he has filled about 70 percent of the posts with career diplomats and 30 percent with political appointees, often but not always top donors. Dangerous spots like Yemen are invariably filled by diplomats, according to statistics compiled by the American Foreign Service Association. Highly sought European and Caribbean countries usually go to political appointees. At least three Obama fund-raisers are interested in Italy this time around, according to people familiar with the roster of potential candidates. They include Azita Raji, a San Francisco philanthropist; John R. Phillips, a Washington lawyer married to the former Obama aide Linda Douglass; and Robert Mailer Anderson, a novelist.
The reason for the Texans’ supremacy in the political arena is owner Robert McNair, an energy executive who is a liberal donor to conservative causes. The study finds that McNair has donated $215,200 of his estimated $1.4 billion net worth to political causes since January 2009, “almost strictly to Republicans.”
Overall, Texans’ players, executives and coaches have totaled $293,100 in political contributions — far ahead of runner-up San Diego. Chargers personnel gave $171,500 to federal politicians and committees since January 2009. The Spanos family, which owns the team, has been tied to Texas Gov. Rick Perry‘s 2012 presidential campaign.
Overall, the teams that favored Republicans most with their campaign cash included the Houston Texans, Arizona Cardinals, Dallas Cowboys, Denver Broncos, Carolina Panthers, Kansas City Chiefs, Washington Redskins, Detroit Lions, New York Jets, San Diego Chargers and the Baltimore Ravens, all of which donated at least 70 percent of their contributions to the GOP.
Meanwhile, the teams that favored Democrats most with their political donations included the Seattle Seahawks, St. Louis Rams, San Francisco 49ers, Oakland Raiders, Philadelphia Eagles, New York Giants, New England Patriots and New Orleans Saints, all of which donated at least 70 percent of their political contributions to Democrats.
Dewhurst said Senate Bills 7 and 8, filed by Nelson, the chairwoman of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, would bring down ballooning state Medicaid costs. “What we’re trying to do, Senator Nelson and myself, is improve the quality of health care for our Medicaid population” by providing incentives that lead to better patient outcomes.There's more along those lines from the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, and Austin American-Statesman.
SB 7 would redesign long-term and acute care services for the disabled and elderly — the most costly services in Medicaid — by instituting quality-based payment systems and expanding Medicaid managed care to cover services provided in nursing facilities.
SB 8 would ensure that providers found guilty of Medicaid fraud in Texas or other states would be barred from participating in the state’s program, strengthen prohibitions against marketing to Medicaid patients, add medical transportation services to managed care and enable the Health and Human Services Commission's Office of Inspector General to establish a new data system to catch Medicaid fraud earlier.
"Because this building was built with monies from the Confederate Pension fund it was, at that time, designated as a memorial to the Texans who served the Confederacy."Not good enough for the group. Here's one of the many confederate monuments on the capitol grounds
The Democratic caucus got more liberal this past Congress as a lot of Blue Dogs and conservative Southern Dems lost their seats in the 2010 elections, and in general the party has been getting gradually more liberal since the 1930s. And from the ’30s to the ’70s, the Republican caucus was slowly getting more liberal too. But around 1976, it suddenly shifted and grew rapidly more conservative, and has continued to do so ever since. The Tea Party movement doesn’t appear to have sped that process up much, but then again many of its successes came in primaries to determine challengers for Democratic seats, in which those challengers (like Sharron Angle or Christine O’Donnell) went on to lose. That wouldn’t show up in these figures.
Responding to petitions from Texas and seven other states calling for the right to secede, the White House has called for healthy debate, but to not let "that debate tear us apart."
"In a nation of 300 million people — each with their own set of deeply-held beliefs — democracy can be noisy and controversial. And that's a good thing," Jon Carson, director of the Office of Public Engagement, wrote in a statement called "Our States Remain United." "Free and open debate is what makes this country work, and many people around the world risk their lives every day for the liberties we often take for granted."
"Whether it's figuring out how to strengthen our economy, reduce our deficit in a responsible way, or protect our country," he added, "we will need to work together — and hear from one another — in order to find the best way to move forward."
The White House's response addressed nine petitions filed on the White House's We the People website, which allows any petition to receive a response provided it gets 25,000 signatures. The petition asking for Texas secession, which noted that "it is practically feasible for Texas to withdraw from the union," received 125,746 signatures. Many of the individuals who signed, however, are not from Texas.
. . . there is a hot question bouncing around the lower courts: whether the constitutional right to bear arms, as laid out in Heller and McDonald, extends outside the home. The answer matters especially, but not only, for how tightly the states or Congress can limit people from carrying concealed weapons. Judges are dividing on that question, and the upshot is this: If the Supreme Court wants to stop the recognition of a right to bear arms outside the home, it will have to step up and say so.
Now the South is becoming isolated again. Every demographic and political trend that helped to reëlect Barack Obama runs counter to the region’s self-definition: the emergence of a younger, more diverse, more secular electorate, with a libertarian bias on social issues and immigration; the decline of the exurban life style, following the housing bust; the class politics, anathema to pro-business Southerners, that rose with the recession; the end of America’s protracted wars, with cuts in military spending bound to come. The Solid South speaks less and less for America and more and more for itself alone.This makes the South seem very static. that's a debatable point, but the general story the author tells is worth looking through.
Solidity has always been the South’s strength, and its weakness. The same Southern lock that once held the Democratic Party now divides the Republican Party from the socially liberal, fiscally moderate tendencies of the rest of America. The Southern bloc in the House majority can still prevent the President from enjoying any major legislative achievements, but it has no chance of enacting an agenda, and it’s unlikely to produce a nationally popular figure.
A general diffusion of knowledge being essential to the preservation of the liberties and rights of the people, it shall be the duty of the Legislature of the State to establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free schools.I mentioned that the part in bold and that a current lawsuit involves this phrase. Following the $5.4billion in budget cuts made in the 82nd session of the Texas Legislature, 2/3rds of the public school districts in the state sued.
If the courts finds the funding mechanism of public education unconstitutional, the Legislature must revisit school finance in the budget. And if the state does not comply with the court-ordered instructions, the Texas Education Agency would be blocked from giving money, [State Rep. Jimmie Don] Aycock said. “The lever is the ability to shut off funding to the schools so [legislators] don’t have to do exactly what the court says, but be within the boundaries set by the court,” Aycock said.We will follow this as it develops.
Thompson said schools have repeatedly sued the state over the years because Texas refuses to perform studies on its education system and to update its financing for its changing population. “They quit doing them because they didn’t like the answers,” he added. “They were consistently finding that it’s going to take more resources."
Some legislators have tried to permanently change the state’s responsibility to education by amending the Texas Constitution, but they have not gained traction. In the early 1990s, state Rep. John Culberson, now a Republican congressman from Houston, drafted an amendment to exclude courts from school finance matters by allowing lawmakers to determine adequate levels of financing. State Rep. Gary Elkins, R-Houston, offered an amendment last session, but it failed in committee.
"Florida, good luck with no more hurricanes," Rep. Frank LoBiondo (R-N.J.) shouted to any member who might oppose the bill. "California, congratulations, did you get rid of the Andreas Fault? The Mississippi's in a drought. Do you think you're not going to have a flood again?Conservatives mostly argued that the bill contained pork projects that were not directly related to storm damage. I can't right now find a comprehensive list though. A few posts below I linked to arguments that pork projects have traditionally been a way for bills to get sufficient support for passage.
"Who are you going to come to when you have these things? We need this, we need it now. Do the right thing, as we have always done for you."
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) issued a similar warning to members who oppose the bill.
"I hope that we can have an overwhelming bipartisan vote," she said. "I think that ideally… that would be the right thing to do.
"But as a practical matter, you just never know what mother nature may have in store for you in your region, and you would certainly want the embrace of the entire nation around you and your area, for your constituents, for your communities, for our country."
- Houston Chronicle : A legislative weapon frequently used by Democrats to delay bills was crippled during the House rules debate Monday. Rep. Phil King, R-Weatherford, proposed to weaken “point of order” rules, which can return a bill to committees on the basis of an error in the proposed law’s language, including typographical errors in witness affirmation forms, committee minutes and bill analyses.
- The Texas Tribune also discusses the change to the point of order rule: The Texas House's Democratic minority was dealt a blow Monday when the House passed an amendment to the chamber's rules to limit legislators' ability to derail a bill based on clerical errors. Calling "points of order” on such errors is a strategy lawmakers have often used to block measures they oppose.
. . . The vote was 92-56, with only three Republicans joining Democrats against the amendment — Elkins and Reps. David Simpson, R-Longview, and Jim Keffer, R-Eastland.
Some Tea Party lawmakers — led by Simpson, who also challenged the speaker for his leadership position — hoped to punch holes in Speaker Joe Straus' power by reforming some House rules but came away with several tabled or withdrawn amendments.
Simpson proposed initiatives to increase openness, including making conference committees public and adding the exact times for House proceedings, but the first was tabled and the second failed.
But other transparency measures were approved. Rep. Mike Villarreal, D-San Antonio, authored amendments that would allow Texans to submit video testimony on bills, to publish testimony and presentations by state agencies to the public, to quantify the cost and benefit of legislation by a range estimate by the Legislative Budget Board and to add fiscal notes to bills to demonstrate their economic impact.
- The Dallas Morning News: It took 6 hours, a debate about whether God wants lawmakers to have clock-stopping ability and discussion of 33 amendments, but the House did finally finalize their rules of procedure.- The Austin American Statesman describes how the Speaker may have emerged as the most powerful of the Big Three in Austin:
In all, the rules will provide a more open look at bills and their costs. The caption that describes each bill will have to say if it raises fees or taxes. The committee witness lists will go electronic, meaning people waiting to testify can see where they are in the order (and feel free to use the restrooms without fear of losing their chance to speak.) Documents provided to the committees and bills that undergo a complete committee substitute will go online so the public and other members can see what’s being discussed. If the Legislative Budget Board can’t quite figure out what the fiscal impact of a bill will be, instead of saying “can’t be determined,” they’ve been instructed to give us a ballpark figure. Public video testimony (under three minutes) is now acceptable.
What didn’t happen is any marked change in the Speaker’s powers. Efforts failed that would have given him less discretion in appointments and given more deference to committee assignments based on seniority. So did efforts to circumvent committee rules and force bills to the floor.
Of the Big Three — the governor, lieutenant governor and speaker — Straus is the only one without a recent and humbling loss.
Gov. Rick Perry suffered a crushing defeat in the Republican primary for president last year, and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst was throttled by now-Sen. Ted Cruz in the 2012 race for U.S. Senate.
Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi, credited Straus’ proven ability over two legislative sessions to be fair to House members.
“The speaker is exceptional in working with members,” said Hunter, an ally of the speaker. “What you’ve seen within the last week is he has a strong, diverse support base.”
And from the Fort Worth Star Telegram:
The speaker has the ability to hold up legislation indefinitely in committee, and Tea Party-backed lawmakers lost their attempt to stop that. Democrats also lost most of their efforts to keep rules that would allow them some power to block bills.
State Rep. Van Taylor, R-Plano, proposed automatically expelling convicted felons from the House, forcing committee chairmen to hold hearings on popular bills and forbidding rewriting a bill so much that it was fundamentally different from when it was first proposed. All were shot down.
. . . State Rep. Bill Zedler, R-Arlington, proposed a rule change that if more than half of lawmakers co-author a bill, it does not have to go through the normal committee process, an important demand by Tea Party-aligned lawmakers. Veteran lawmakers from both parties argued against the bill, saying it bypassed the public lawmaking process. The vote rejecting the rule change was 137-11.
Another proposed rule change would have required any bill to cite the portion of the Texas Constitution that authorizes the action. State Rep. Jonathan Stickland, R-Bedford, proposed the measure in his first speech on the House floor but saw it shot down on a voice vote.
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