The underfunded public school system here in Texas is about to face another problem: should Dreamers be forced out of the US, children across the state–and the nation as a whole–will be affected by their absence.  From The Dallas Morning News:

Texas stands to lose about 2,000 teachers who are in the DACA program, and as many as 20,000 such teachers would be affected nationwide. The clock is ticking, and without a legislative reprieve, within a few years it will be illegal for these teachers to  work in the U.S. Their loss would hit bilingual education, where there’s a constant dearth of educators, especially hard.

The lack of adequate funding for public schools in Texas is already forcing some schools to close and others to hire fewer teachers.  Funding bills passed during the 2017 legislative session did little to address these issues.   Should Texas lose as many teachers as is estimated, can we expect the state to do much about this loss during the 2019 legislative session?

One refrain among the distressing stories coming out of the Texas Gulf Coast is that many people wanted to evacuate before Hurricane Harvey struck.  But they couldn’t leave.  They didn’t have the resources necessary to go.  From Think Progress:

The BBC recently interviewed residents in Rockport, Texas about why they decided to stay. [….] One woman, Judie, said she stayed because she had nowhere to go and didn’t have the money to leave.

As A. Mechele Dickerson concludes in a commentary in Fortune:

“To pay the costs—including transportation, housing, food, and other expenses—associated with an evacuation, the evacuee needs either savings, ample disposable income, or the capacity to finance an evacuation using short-term debt. [….] People stayed because they could not afford to leave.”

Evacuations in themselves can be expensive and dangerous.  But given that global warming may lead to stronger hurricanes and that the current US federal government is unlikely to do anything to mitigate climate change, perhaps we should be asking ourselves if we need to reevaluate our approach toward disasters such as these.

The question that I return to (from, admittedly, my dry vantage point up here in the northern part of the Lone Star State) is what we as a state and as a nation need to do to make available resources so that people who want to leave before a storm hits can do so.

Which really is a question of how to raise this issue with our elected officials.  In a state as conservative as Texas, where the ideas of fiscal responsibility and self-reliance permeate any sort of political decision, we’re not likely to find a receptive audience.

Do we really need to turn this into an argument about the cost of evacuation versus the greater cost of rescue and recovery missions?

Perhaps Harvey will spark more discussion of what we need to do to prepare for future storms.  But first, we may need to figure out the ways we need to talk about it in order to get a more humane response from our elected officials who are eager to put into place discriminatory regulation because it’s the “right thing to do,” but who are reluctant to do the right thing when it comes to helping out before actual threats.

 

Texas, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, is second only to Virginia in its number of Confederate symbols, and the folks at The Texas Tribune are compiling a list of symbols around the state:

“The list at the bottom of this page outlines known Confederate symbols in Texas. Most of this list, which is incomplete, comes from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Several monuments, schools and roads have been added through reader submissions. Help us further fill this list by sending us the name of Confederate symbols we’re missing.”

The first step in removing these symbols is finding them.

While there’s progress–the University of Texas at Austin just removed Confederate statues around campus–there’s much work to be done.

In 2017, that is. But for now, conservative leaders’ efforts to push the “bathroom bill” through the special legislative session in Texas have failed.

And it’s looking like there won’t be a second special session in which proponents can try again. From The Hill:

[Gov.] Abbott’s office did not say whether the governor would call a second special session, but [Lt. Gov.] Patrick seemed to suggest there is no new session in the offing.

Here’s hoping we don’t see a repeat of this bill when the Texas legislature reconvenes in 2019.

 

The Texas Legislature’s Special Session isn’t quite over yet, but it’s looking like efforts to pass the “Bathroom Bill” may have failed yet again.  From The Texas Tribune:

With just days left in the 30-day special legislative session, controversial proposals to regulate bathroom use for transgender Texans appear to have no clear path to the governor’s desk. As was the case during the regular legislative session that concluded in May, efforts to pass any sort of bathroom bill — a divisive issue pitting Republicans against business leaders, LGBT advocates, law enforcement and even fellow Republicans — have stalled in the Texas House.

And it’s unlikely that will change in the coming days.

Big business, LGBT advocacy groups, and moderate Republicans all contributed to the failure of the extreme right-wing faction of the state’s legislature to pass the bill.  Though this particular attempt at passing the “Bathroom Bill” may not have succeeded, the faction behind this discriminatory bill isn’t giving up.  From The Advocate:

“Still, Equality Texas, the state’s main LGBT rights group, is urging opponents to keep up the pressure. The House is also sitting on two other “bathroom bills,” the group notes, and Abbott could even call another special session.”

As philosopher Jean Kazez concludes in her recent Op-Ed in The Dallas Morning News: “I suspect [the bathroom bill] simply functions to allow conservatives to express outrage about a phenomenon that they don’t understand and can’t (yet) get used to.”  Which leaves us wondering if they ever will.

It’s “good news, bad news” time here in the Lone Star State, y’all.  The good news?  The Texas 2017-2018 legislative session has ended without passage of the bathroom bill.

The bad news?  Gov. Greg Abbott has called a special session, and on the agenda is Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s obsession: the bathroom bill.  If certain legislation doesn’t pass during a session, the governor can call the legislators back in order to finish up the job.  Mr. Patrick took advantage of this fact.  From The Texas Tribune: “Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick had been pushing Abbott to call a special session on the bathroom issue, as well as property taxes.”

Fortunately, the Texas House doesn’t seem terribly interested in passing the bill.  It’ll be bad for the economy and bad for privacy rights.  Unfortunately, the governor can keep calling special sessions until he deems the work of the legislature complete.

On the off chance that Senator John Cornyn is selected to be the next director of the FBI, Texas might just have the chance to fill his seat with a Democrat sooner rather than later.  From The Texas Tribune:

Gov. Greg Abbott would be tasked with a short-term appointment, but several months later the state would hold a special election to finish the duration of the term, which ends in 2021. 

The The Austin American-Statesman floats a couple possibilities as challengers to Gov. Abbott’s appointee: US Representative Beto O’Rourke of El Paso, who has already begun his 2018 campaign against Senator Ted Cruz, or US Representative Joaquin Castro of San Antonio.

That said, the scenario is unlikely to play out.  Again, from The Austin American-Statesman:

While Cornyn did serve as both a Texas Supreme Court justice and state attorney general before being elected to the Senate, he would seem among the least likely picks on the list.

Which leaves us here in the Lone State State waiting for the 2018 election for the next opportunity to elect a Democratic candidate to a Senate seat.