Editorial Roundup: Texas
Fort Worth Star-Telegram. October 14, 2023.
Editorial: Can Texas leaders stop fighting and finish a deal on school choice, funding?
The Legislature may be closer than ever to a deal that will boost both parental choice and public schools, but you wouldn’t know it to hear the constant bickering in Austin.
Most of the attention in the first week of the latest special session did not go to school vouchers, boosting teacher pay or adding resources for border security. It went to the swirl of political rancor among Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, House Speaker Dade Phelan and Attorney General Ken Paxton — Republicans all, but illustrative of the truism that familiarity breeds contempt.
Plus, a GOP consultant’s shameful association with a well-known hatemonger fueled the fire. Jonathan Stickland, the former House member who runs the prominent political action committee that generously supports Patrick, Paxton and other staunch conservatives, hosted white supremacist Nick Fuentes at his west Tarrant County office.
Phelan called on Patrick to return the PAC’s donations; Patrick lamented Phelan’s invoking of the atrocities in Israel and called for the speaker to resign. The lieutenant governor also offered assurance that Tim Dunn, one of the billionaires funding the political committee, is aware of Stickland’s “blunder” and assures it won’t happen again.
Amid all that, the House and Senate were trying to actually work on legislation that Gov. Greg Abbott called for. The House has resisted Abbott’s plea for “education savings accounts” that would give parents state money to use for private-school tuition, home-schooling expenses or other educational needs.
But Phelan signaled an opening, suggesting House Republicans could accept a deal that expands school choice as long as public schools get a significant funding boost. The time is ripe — the comptroller confirmed that the robust Texas economy continues to give lawmakers billions of dollars more to work with.
First, though, Patrick and Phelan will have to decide if they want to compromise. The lieutenant governor kept the Senate in a marathon session Thursday and bragged about passing bills to fulfill most of Abbott’s priorities, including a school-choice plan that would give parents of up to 57,500 students $8,000 toward education expenses.
In a state with 5.5 million kids enrolled in public schools, that’s neither the sweeping program that Abbott wants or the crippling blow to public education that Democrats and other opponents suggest. It’s a good start to assess how a targeted school-choice program could work.
The politics are tricky enough, without Patrick and Phelan engaged in their perpetual chest-puffing contest. The latest round stems from the most recent nuclear event in Texas politics: the impeachment and trial of the attorney general.
Patrick set the stage when, immediately after the Senate let Paxton off from charges of abuse of power, he blasted the House’s entire effort to rein Paxton in and promised a full accounting of the cost to taxpayers.
The lieutenant governor almost always gets what he wants, yet he has trouble banking his victories and moving on.
House members on all sides are lingering on the Paxton result, too. Impeachment managers keep trying to add to their case. Rep. Andrew Murr, the Junction Republican who led the drive against Paxton, can’t identify a single regret about the way his committee or the House impeachment managers handled the case, despite their sweeping loss.
Paxton has employed his one true superpower, finding a way to make things worse. The latest trove of documents released by House impeachment managers inadvertently included Paxton’s home address. Let’s be clear that in this era of political explosiveness, that’s a serious error.
But Paxton wants to ask district attorneys, many of them Republicans, to investigate the House members responsible under state laws that punish “doxxing.” In Tarrant County, that means he wants DA Phil Sorrells to waste time and resources trying to determine if Rep. Charlie Geren of Fort Worth, one of the impeachment managers, intended to put Paxton at risk.
Look, we get it: GOP primaries are approaching fast, and Republicans on all sides are eager to have the “establishment vs. insurgents” fight that’s been simmering for years. Some members will no doubt pay a price for supporting impeachment, but the revenge Paxton exacts will probably be limited.
Before we get to all that, though, how about locking in some actual accomplishments? How about a little governing before it’s all politics, all the time?
It’s up to Patrick and Phelan to lead their chambers to compromise. It’s up to Abbott to find a way to get them to “yes.”
San Antonio Express-News. October 10, 2023.
Editorial: In presidential bid, Hurd showcased principles and vision
In a better world, former U.S. Congressman Will Hurd would be making a deep run in the Republican presidential primary.
Hurd would be lauded for his career as a CIA officer, as well as his three terms in Congress representing parts of San Antonio and a broad stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border. He would stand out in a crowded GOP field for his moderate and pragmatic stances, ability to define complicated issues and overall policy chops.
But this is not the world we have chosen, and after struggling to gain any traction, Hurd has suspended his admirable presidential campaign.
We would not equate Biden to Trump, who faces 91 criminal charges in four separate state and federal cases and whose rhetoric and repeated election denials sparked the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.
But Hurd is absolutely right in calling on Republican voters to rally around candidates who offer inspiring ideas and have the political instincts and policy depth to lift the nation to meet the complex challenges of the day.
As he wrote on X, “not enough people are talking about real, achievable solutions to the generation-defining challenges that are in front of us, including artificial intelligence, our new Cold War with China, and the complexity of the ongoing crisis at our southern border.”
Hurd has thrown his support behind former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who he said “has shown a willingness to articulate a different vision for the country than Donald Trump and has an unmatched grasp on the complexities of our foreign policy.”
When he was a border congressman, Hurd advocated for what he called a “smart wall,” or the use of technology along the U.S.-Mexico border to address security needs, rather than a costly and ineffective wall. As a presidential candidate, he was unflinching in his criticism of former President Donald Trump.
Speaking at the Iowa Republican Party’s Lincoln Dinner on July 28, Hurd said, “Donald Trump is not running for president to make America great again. Donald Trump is running to stay out of prison.”
He was then booed off the stage.
Hurd is only 46. It could be credibly argued he lacked the elected experience for the presidency — having served just three terms in Congress — but he certainly has demonstrated the principles needed for any public office as well as the required political bravery.
In or out of politics, Hurd’s future is bright. But his failure to generate GOP enthusiasm should be viewed as a warning sign. What does it say about the Republican party that someone so young, engaged and optimistic — so representative of what the political present and future could be — has no place on the debate stage and no standing with primary voters?
In a better world, Hurd would make a deep run in the GOP primary for the presidential nomination. But in a better world, no former president would be facing 91 criminal charges and yet be a front-runner for the presidency. That this is the world GOP primary voters have chosen — with profound implications for the nation — is its own type of indictment.
Houston Chronicle. October 12, 2023.
Editorial: Lousy Abbott voucher deal should die in the House like all the rest
Voucher proponents, after decades of trying, may finally have a path forward. With the start of the latest special session, House Speaker Dade Phelan suggested a compromise was in the works.
Texans should be wary. While compromise has a central role in politics, the bipartisan coalition that has blocked vouchers for decades shouldn’t stop now.
The Texas House has been the thorn in the Senate’s side when it comes to educational savings accounts that allow families to use taxpayer dollars for private school tuition. But on Monday, Phelan told the Chronicle he’s been talking with both rural Republicans, representing areas where public schools are the heart of the community and among the major employers, and Democrats who together have traditionally formed a firewall against vouchers.
“I do feel like we can come to terms. It’s going to take not just a path forward on school choice, but on school funding,” Phelan said. “The truth of the matter is that we’re going to have both, we have to have both, and we’re in discussions with the governor’s office on that.”
In other words, though Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s ploy of tethering teacher raises and school district allotments to a voucher plan failed in the general legislative session earlier this year, it may work now in the special session Gov. Greg Abbott called.
The details of a possible deal haven’t emerged yet. The initial special session call only mentioned vouchers, not publicschool funding, but Republican Sen. Brandon Creighton has put forward a bill that includes a $75 increase in the per student allotment. That doesn’t augment public school funding anywhere close to the roughly $900 per student needed to keep up with inflation. He’s also behind the proposal to offer $8,000 to students leaving public schools to enroll in private ones. The cost? Five hundred million for just the first two years alone, according to the bill’s fiscal note. It’s a bad deal.
We’ve seen bad voucher bills before. Many times.
In the 1950s, it took six state senators and 36 hours of filibustering to derail efforts to give private school tuition grants to families looking to opt out of racial integration.
By the 1990s, it took a compromise on charter schools, at first allowing just 20 charter schools in a sort of pilot program meant to test their success. Bankrolled by deep-pocketed conservative donors, including James R. Leininger and others, governors from George W. Bushto Rick Perry and now Greg Abbott have tried to add vouchers to their legacies. Between 1995 and 2015, at least 54 bills tried to advance vouchers in one form or another, according to a search by the Austin American-Statesman.
Proponents never stopped trying.
This year, Abbott vetoed dozens of unrelated bills in retaliation after lawmakers failed to deliver vouchers in the regular session. He could call special session after special session — and has vowed to do just that — until it gets done. He’s threatened Republican lawmakers who don’t support vouchers with primary election challenges.
Is this what it takes? Intra-party warfare to push through a policy that almost certainly won’t help the most desperate families and will instead force the state to prop up two education systems: one underfunded yet forever chasing rising standards at the threat of takeover and another profiting from public dollars with no accountability.
Why the urgency now? There’s no new research suddenly affirming wide-scale voucher schemes. No, instead, it seems the grip of deep-pocketed, far-right donors is growing ever tighter.
It’s true vouchers have not been uniformly a conservative issue. It was a Black, Democratic Houston-area lawmaker state Rep. Ron Wilson — often at odds with his party — who introduced a voucher bill in 1993 that would’ve granted vouchers to disadvantaged students to give those kids, as he said, a “fighting chance.” And that’s how some Republican leaders sold the idea as well. Bush, for example, wanted a voucher program that would aid students at low-performing schools.
But critics saw through it. Cecile Richards, daughter of former Texas Gov. Ann Richards and founder of the Texas Freedom Network, called it a “billion-dollar experiment local taxpayers can’t afford.” And Sylvester Turner, then a state representative and now Houston mayor, insisted that even the efforts to target voucher programs at disadvantaged populations were a Trojan Horse.
“When people want something, they don’t mind using minorities and the poor to open the door for programs they want,” he said.
And on and on it went.
With hundreds of thousands of students in charter schools across the state, isn’t that enough choice?
“I firmly believe that one of the reasons vouchers are still being discussed is the student body in charter schools is just as diverse in race, religion, ability, and economics as the ISDs from which these parents are trying to remove their children,” Thomas Ratliff, who served as vice chairman of the Texas State Board of Education, wrote recently. The Republican continued, “The question now is whether the Texas Legislature in 2023 will vote to move back toward segregation. Even in 1957, Texas lawmakers knew better than to do that.”
Do they still?
As we’ve written, research suggests vouchers don’t yield academic gains, the amount offered generally tends to help middle-class families, and even a high-ranking official with the Texas Education Agencyhas admitted that vouchers could cost public schools.
We believe in choice. Texans already have choice. We’ve made the compromises. Vouchers shouldn’t be one of them. There simply isn’t a way to funnel taxpayer money to private schools — even with a paltry boost to per-student public school funding — without further jeopardizing our long-term ability to support a thriving public school system.
END