Prefiling for the Next Lege: The Good, Bad, and MAGA

House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, at The Texas Tribune Festival Sept. 22 (Photo by Jana Birchum)

The action never stops in the capital of the Great State – less than a week after Election Day, prefiling of bills for the 88th Texas Legislature got under way, and now there are more than 1,000 in the queue. (You can find the bill lists at capitol.texas.gov/reports/general.aspx.)

In the last regular session – not counting the three special sessions of the Endless 87th – a total of 6,927 bills were filed, of which 1,073 were passed, of which 21 were then vetoed by Gov. Greg Abbott. So we're just getting started. Those totals don't include joint resolutions to call for constitutional amendments, of which only four passed, or regular resolutions, of which there were another 3,000 or so. A few of the latter have been prefiled for the 88th, the first of which (House Resolution 6 by Rep. Tom Oliverson, R-Cypress) congratulates the Houston Astros for winning the 2022 World Series.

Many bills filed are identical, increasing the chances that one will get lucky, grab the attention of a committee chair, and have a hearing rather than just die pending, as most bills do. This year's earliest birds (the low bill numbers can matter at points in the Lege's arcane procedure) include Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, who represents part of Southeast Austin, and Rep. James Talarico, D-Austin, whose House Bill 21 sets guidelines for an independent citizens redistricting commission (he also filed House Joint Resolution 4 to let Texas voters create that commission). Zaffirini filed the first 39 bills on the Senate list, which is totally in character for her, on a variety of subjects; Senate Bill 31 would enable (and really require) the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to interconnect Texas' stand-alone power grid to the rest of the nation.

The first 20 bill numbers in the House and 30 in the Senate are reserved for what state leaders consider priorities, like banning abortions (last session's SB 8) and punishing pro sports teams for not playing the national anthem (last year's SB 4, a real law that got passed in the 21st century by the governing body of the world's 10th-largest economy). Abbott will lay out his priorities at his State of the State address in January, the week after the Lege convenes.

House Speaker Dade Phelan and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick will likely pick up some of Abbott's threads and add some of their own, which in the House will probably be nerdy and in the Senate will be MAGAtastic. Last session, Winter Storm Uri, which shut the Lege down a month into session along with the rest of the state, spawned a flurry of low-numbered bills to address that crisis; Zaffirini is not the only member who thinks that job isn't finished, based on the bill queue.

Six weeks before the 88th gavels in, the Texas GOP, coming off improbably resounding wins earlier this month, has no use or need or time to even pretend to listen to Democratic priorities, which has not stopped the blue team from filing flurries of bills to make statements, such as redistricting commissions (Talarico's is one of many), expanding Medicaid, legalizing cannabis, banning assault weapons, and, as always, bringing casinos to Texas in the guise of economic development, usually carried by members of color from low-income districts (Senate Joint Resolution 17 by Sen. Carol Alvarado, D-Houston).

The Dems have also filed bills that may help the GOP dial back some of its Fox News-fueled excesses of the last session(s), which some more centrist Rs have expressed interest in, but which no Republican can risk filing on their own. These include adding rape/incest exemptions to the state's abortion ban (SB 122 and 123, co-authored by eight Senate Dems including Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, D-Austin), or raising the assault-­weapon minimum age to 21 in the wake of Uvalde (Zaffirini's SB 32), or cleaning up the hash made of the Education Code by last year's real-time freakout over "critical race theory" (HB 97 by Rep. Diego Bernal, D-San Antonio).

There are no-hope statement bills from the GOP side as well, but unlike the Dems' perennial pushes for better (or any) policy, these are yet more race-to-the-bottom panders to ephemeral know-nothing MAGA bullshit. You may already have heard about HB 643 by Rep. Jared Patterson, R-Frisco, which defines any commercial venue that hosts a drag show as a sexually oriented business, and then defines "drag" so broadly as to include Greater Tuna, As You Like It, and The Marriage of Figaro, along with literally any performance by a transgender entertainer. This will not become law or stand up in court, but point made, libs owned.

There's plenty more of that from the usual stunt queens like Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park, who turned a viral TikTok into HB 521, which allows "pregnant women" and their "unborn children" to use the HOV lane. There's profane anti-trans bullshit that we won't even dignify with a citation. There are a bunch of dunks on the Biden administration, including commitments to ignore or nullify "unconstitutional" actions of the federal government, which is itself hilariously unconstitutional (HB 384 by Rep. Cecil Bell, R-Magnolia, the grandly named Texas Sovereignty Act).

There are multiple Get Tough on the Border bills that refer to "illegal aliens," a point of pride among their authors (SB 237 by Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood). And so on. There are also bills that focus on the real must-do mandate of the GOP caucus, lowering property taxes by any means necessary, which at this point means capping appraisals, which S.J.Res. 19 by Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, would ask voters to enshrine in the state constitution.

In this light, it's super interesting to see any bill co-authored by members of both parties. There's only one, in the Senate, by Hall (who is bugfuck crazy but also a doctor) and Sen. Nathan Johnson, D-Dallas, to exempt fentanyl testing strips and equipment from the state's drug paraphernalia laws. Bipartisanship lives! (Talarico, Oliver­son – also a doctor – and Reps. Andrew Murr, R-Junction, and Sheryl Cole, D-Austin, are all carrying companion fentanyl bills in the House.)