It’s not the Lege these days without a special session threat.
Gov. Greg Abbott on Sunday said he would veto a toned-down version of a bill to offer school vouchers in Texas, and threatened to call legislators back for special sessions if they don’t “expand the scope of school choice” this month.
“Parents and their children deserve no less,” he said in a statement. His dramatic declaration came the night before the House Public Education Committee was scheduled to hold a public hearing on Senate Bill 8, the school voucher bill. That measure passed the Senate more than a month ago, but has so far been stalled in lower chamber as it lacks sufficient support.
The committee is set to vote Monday on the latest version of SB 8, authored by Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, which would significantly roll back voucher eligibility to only students with disabilities or those that attended an F-rated campus. This would mean that fewer than a million students would be eligible to enter the program.
Abbott doesn’t believe the revised version does enough to provide the state with a meaningful “school choice” program. Since the start of the legislative session, Abbott has signaled his support to earlier proposals that would be open to most students. The governor also said he has had complaints over the new funding for the bill, saying it gives less money to special education students. It also doesn’t give priority to low-income students, who “may desperately need expanded education options for their children,” he said.
The centerpiece of the original Senate bill was “education savings accounts,” which work like vouchers and direct state funds to help Texas families pay for private schooling.
The version approved by the Senate would be open to most K-12 students in Texas and would give parents who opt out of the public school system up to $8,000 in taxpayer money per student each year. Those funds could be used to pay for a child’s private schooling and other educational expenses, such as textbooks or tutoring. But that idea has faced an uphill climb in the House, where lawmakers signaled last month their support for banning school vouchers in the state.
I haven’t followed the ups and downs of this latest version to suck money out of the public school system and use it to subsidize private schools. I will note that as in previous sessions, there was a budget amendment passed in the House to block any money being spent on vouchers, and in last week’s “get stuff done before the legislative calendar deadlines”-palooza, a motion to suspend the rules for an amended version of SB8 was shot down. Neither of those things happen without Republican support, and that’s been the key thing about the voucher fight all along – at least in the House, the votes for it aren’t there.
Abbott, like Rick Perry before him, has successfully used special sessions to pass Republican bills that Democrats have blocked via parliamentary means in regular sessions, like the omnibus voter suppression bill in 2021 and the bill aimed at shutting down abortion clinics that Wendy Davis filibustered in 2013. The extra time was what Republicans needed to overcome these procedural obstacles. Here, though, the resistance is coming from other Republicans. When special sessions have been called to overcome that kind of friction – see, for example, 2017 and the efforts then to pass a bathroom bill (who would have thought those would be the good old days) – they have generally ended in failure.
That could happen here. As Scott Braddock has noted on Twitter, there’s nothing to stop Speaker Phelan from taking a motion to adjourn sine die right after gaveling in the special session. I doubt that would happen, but it may be the case that there’s nothing Abbott and/or Dan Patrick can do to cajole or coerce the reluctant Republicans to change their minds. We’ll just have to see, if it comes down to it. The two people in Austin right now that I bet are rooting against that the hardest are probably Sens. John Whitmire and Roland Gutierrez, both of whom have other things to pursue as soon as they’re able to start fundraising again. Stay tuned.
