After more than 30 years of total control, Republicans skip the grid, cost of living, pollution, and ICE attacks on Texans to create committees for problems they caused
AUSTIN, TEXAS — Speaker Dustin Burrows on Tuesday released interim committee charges for the Texas House, outlining what Republican leadership wants studied before the 90th Legislative Session. The 53-page document creates a healthcare committee from the same majority that voted down Medicaid expansion 85-63 eight months ago, assigns a monitor to a voucher program that is already failing, and includes instructions to study annexing New Mexico counties. Republicans have held total control of Texas for more than 30 years. Life in this state has gotten harder and more expensive under Republicans’ watch, and their interim agenda suggests they would rather study anything else.
The charges contain no study of electric grid reliability or weatherization, no study of toxic pollution or water quality, no plan to respond to federal agents trampling on Texans’ freedoms and killing a young US citizen in Texas, then covering it up last year. Texas is more expensive to live in than ever before, according to January Census data. The closest Republicans come to actually addressing any of the problems they created is a Select Committee on Health Care Affordability, created after the House left 1.2 million Texans in a coverage gap while the federal government offered to cover 90% of the cost. The committee’s seven charges study cost drivers, insurance design, and consumer transparency. They do not mention Medicaid, the uninsured, or the coverage gap.
What the charges do contain is a set of assignments targeted against Texas communities. The Elections Committee is to study “the integrity of the voting procedures in Texas” despite the Heritage Foundation’s own database containing just three confirmed cases of non-citizen voting in Texas since 2012. The Judiciary Committee will investigate whether Sharia law has “permeated” Texas courts, though the Legislature banned foreign law from state court proceedings in 2017 with HB 45. A Select Committee on Governmental Oversight will investigate nonprofit funding, local government authority, and how to bring contiguous New Mexico counties into Texas. And the Education committee will study the impacts of SB 2, Republicans’ disastrous voucher scam bill that hasn’t finished its first enrollment cycle and is already in crisis. Students with disabilities are locked out of funding they were promised, private schools are opting out, Islamic schools were excluded until a federal judge intervened, and public school districts are flooded with IEP requests from families gaming the disability funds.
“Every Texas family paying more for healthcare, more for electricity, and more for groceries should look at Republicans’ interim plans for their state Legislature and ask what any of it does for them,” said Texas House Democratic Caucus Chairman Gene Wu (D-Houston). “After more than 30 years of consolidated Republican rule, all Republicans can come up with is a healthcare committee that doesn’t mention the million Texans they’ve chosen to leave uninsured, a voucher monitor for a program that broke before the first kid could use it, and a plan to annex New Mexico. Your electric grid, your water, your insurance bill, your kid’s classroom — none of it made the GOP’s priority list. They’ve been too busy with the donor class and too distracted by the culture wars to deal with what’s actually making life harder for Texas families.”