As of Tuesday, Gov. Perry had signed 206 bills of the 1,403 sent to him by the Legislature. The latter figure doesn’t include several thousand resolutions honoring everything from chips and salsa to Emmitt Smith, but we can safely pass over most of those as not posing a significant danger to the future of the republic. There were, of course, exceptions. HCR 75, a full-throated endorsement of President Bush’s “war on terrorism,” was one more rhetorical surrender to the kind of imperial adventurism that “conservatives” once prided themselves on opposing. It was left to the House’s lone Quaker, Fort Worth Democrat Lon Burnam, to defend family values by angrily denouncing the war on all fronts as “illegal, immoral, and fiscally irresponsible.”
The governor toured the state for ceremonial signings of HB 4, the “tort reform” bill that grew as a disfiguring hunch on the back of medical-malpractice reform. It was the latter, of course, that the governor chose to emphasize to attendees, declaring that thanks to med-mal reform, “our hospitals and clinics will be open to the patients who need them. Pregnant women will not have to worry about finding an obstetrician to help deliver their newborns. Texans who suffer trauma can know that when their life is on the line, the specialist they need will be on call.”
We can only hope the governor is right. The nonprofit consumer groups (Texas Watch, Consumers Union, Public Citizen, etc.) take a rather dimmer view. Dan Lambe of Texas Watch concluded, “This legislation moves Texas far from the mainstream of American jurisprudence and absolutely shatters the balance of power in the courtroom in favor of insurance and corporate interests against Texas consumers. This bill does not resemble anything close to balance or fairness; it simply represents jackpot justice for the insurance industry.”
Perry couldn’t miss an opportunity to take another shot at “trial attorneys,” now a catch-all epithet for anybody who thinks Texas courtrooms should do something other than rubber-stamp the pleadings of corporate defendants. “The only folks hurt in the pocketbook by this lawsuit-reform measure,” the governor said, “are the plaintiffs’ lawyers.” And also, by the way, the injured citizens those odious counselors will no longer have the resources to defend.
The Moving Finger Writes —
Most of those 206 bills are not nearly as photogenic as HB 4, and the governor is likely to get writer’s cramp this week signing (or vetoing) the remaining 1,197 by Sunday.
At press time, there was already a standoff between his office and that of Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, as the two officials played chicken over whether or not HB 1 (the state budget) expires if Strayhorn doesn’t certify it by the veto deadline — Perry says yes, CKS (or is that CKMRS?) says no. If the governor wins that argument, it’s an instant addition to the just-called special session — and no end to the mischief lawmakers can achieve in July.
The vast majority of the 206 new laws are either so narrow in scope or so local in consequence as to be safely ignorable by most of us. Yet also among them is HB 2292, the health and human services “reorganization” bill likely to reverberate catastrophically through society and the economy for years. HB 728 quietly postpones last session’s children’s Medicaid simplification for two more years, and so quietly relieves still-uninsured children (nonvoters all) of $702 million in state and federal funds. Less heralded is HB 3459, which “reorganizes” the Texas Education Agency — if you’re like me, you already have friends or colleagues receiving undeserved pink slips as a consequence of these bills.
Here also are both SB 14 and SB 310, parts of the homeowners insurance package trumpeted by the governor, but of which Consumers’ Union Reggie James concludes bluntly, “The truth of the matter is, you and I will not see our rates rolled back to reasonable levels, insurance companies will still be able to unfairly use credit scores against us, and insurers will have an easy time asking for and receiving further rate increases.”
There are undeniably necessary bills as well, like SB 1948, which enabled the Tulia drug defendants to be released on bond this week. Austin GOP Rep. Terry Keel, sponsor of the Tulia bill, also co-sponsored SB 1057, which brings some long-needed rationality to the judgment of competency in criminal and juvenile justice proceedings.
Elsewhere in the local delegation, Elliott Naishtat’s HB 329, which has received less publicity than the big homeowners’ insurance bills, arguably will prove more useful, as it brings “mold remediators” under state regulation for the first time — which should be effective, one supposes, until the mold remediators get smart enough (or rich enough) to hook up with the insurance lobby. Dawnna Dukes’ HB 1364 allows emergency shelters to help minors without children as well as mothers or pregnant women — if you thought legislation on such a question would be unnecessary, you haven’t lived in Texas very long.
Left-handed Monkey Wrenches
Most entertaining, inevitably, are the bills which rational citizens (admittedly, a fairly narrow demographic) would consider useless, absurd, or downright preposterous. These include not only the already notorious (e.g., SB 7, Sen. Jeff Wentworth’s “Defense of Marriage Act,” and his only slightly less dubious SB 83, mandating student pledges of allegiance to both the U.S. and Texas flags — dual loyalties, anyone?), but also lesser-known cousins. HB 854 (Odessa’s finest, Buddy West) forbids Texas Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund money to any school that fails to censor the Internet for “obscene” material. Apparently nobody told West that his colleagues are stiffing the TIF grants altogether.
Indeed, in spite of all the endless piffle about “the importance of education to the future of this great state yadda yadda yadda,” the Lege in fact loves to beat up on teachers (whose salaries are to be cut under the guise of “no new taxes”) and students. The very same 78th Legislature that, as its very first act, added $15 million to the City of San Antonio’s already extravagant public welfare for the Toyota Corp., now also mandates (HB 319) as a new “objective” of public school education: “Educators will prepare students to be thoughtful, active citizens who have an appreciation for the basic values of our state and national heritage and who can understand and productively function in a free enterprise society.”
Educators and students take careful note: High on the list of “the basic values of our state” appears to be that one popularly known as “hypocrisy.” 
For more on HB 4 and HJR 3 and “tort reform,” see the May 20 Open Letter to the Legislature by Ralph Nader.
This article appears in June 20 • 2003.
