McLeroy, Smoking, and Voter ID

My ADD is out of control today, plus my car broke down, so I’m capable of nothing better than a bullet listing of what’s been happening under the dome lately:

• Don McLeroy’s appointment to the chairmanship of the State Board of Education is back from the dead! But that doesn’t mean it’s healthy. In a committee meeting at the desk of Nominations chair Mike Jackson, R-LaPorte, McLeroy’s nomination was sent to the Senate floor on a 4-2 vote (Watson and Shapleigh voting nay). Jackson previously would not move the nomination because he didn't think he support was there. Has something changed? Have the 21 necessary votes been secured?

• Speaking of not dead yet (what is this, a Monty Python movie?), Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, and Rep. Myra Crownover, R-Denton, declared yesterday that their statewide smoking ban (SB 544 would have eliminated smoking in indoor public places) was in fact a goner: “Big tobacco spent millions to kill smoke-free legislation and they got to enough of our legislators to win this round,” said Ellis. However, Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka cryptically blogged today that it “may not be dead after all” but said he had no details. When I and some other reporters quizzed Ellis about it today, he grinned inscrutably.

• Betty Brown, R-Athens, scheduled a lunchtime press conference today to announce that she will try to amend SB 362, the voter ID bill, to have a strict photo ID requirement. But she got upstaged by the House Democratic Caucus, which took over the Speaker’s Committee Room with a presser of their own to denounce voter ID and a vow to “defend our contituents’ voting rights.” Brown waited around a bit for them to finish, got impatient, and then announced she was rescheduling for 9:30am Thursday. Richard Whittaker took some video of the press conference jousting, which we hope to get posted later.

• UPDATE: Oops, forgot one (told you I'm ADD): Jane Nelson's SB 476, which would strengthen the role of nurses in hospitals' nurse staffing decisions, passed the House unanimously on Wednesday and now goes to the governor's desk. The House version of the bill was authored by Austin's Donna Howard. The bill was criticized by the National Nurses Organizing Committee as lacking teeth (the NNOC pushed a bill that would mandate nurse-to-patient ratios) but was supported by the Texas Hospital Association and the Texas Nurses Association.