On Tuesday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott followed through on one of the many political threats he's made in 2023 when he called yet another special legislative session to begin immediately. The ill-fated third session, which began Oct. 9, ended Tuesday without the governor seeing his top priorities successfully make their way through.
Abbott sought to save face while also pointing the finger of blame elsewhere when announcing the fourth special session.
“I am immediately calling lawmakers back for Special Session #4 to complete their critical work to empower Texas parents to choose the best education pathway for their child while providing billions more in funding for Texas public schools and continuing to boost safety measures in schools,” Abbott said in a statement on Tuesday. “We must pass laws that will enhance the safety of all Texans by increasing funding for strategic border barriers and mirroring the federal immigration laws President Joe Biden refuses to enforce.”
Sorry, but we have to ask: How special can a Texas legislative special session be when it’s the fourth one of the year? In another, more dubious way, however, the fourth time makes things pretty special in this case. It rarely happens, as it's rarely needed for a governor who is from the same party that controls the House, Senate and all the other most powerful positions in the state government.
According to the Texas Tribune, Abbott’s decision is downright historic, reporting that, “[n]ever in the Legislature’s 176-year history have lawmakers met for more than three special sessions in a year with a regular session.”
“The reality is that private school voucher scams are deeply unpopular in Texas, and will harm our rural schools the most." – Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa
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Republicans in both chambers were able to agree on one thing, at least: their distaste for COVID-19 vaccine requirements from employers. Those will now be officially outlawed.
For special sessions, the governor alone decides what is to be discussed. Abbott announced an agenda that looks similar to that of the third session. So-called “education savings accounts,” which sure sound a whole lot like tax-financed school vouchers to us, and controversial border security measures make up the agenda for the new session. One difference between the third and fourth session is that additional funding for schools — not just a voucher program — is up for discussion this time around.
The Texas Democratic Party isn’t impressed much by that change in topics.
“This year, Greg Abbott has wasted millions of dollars calling special session after special session to pass legislation that appeases his billionaire backers and gives him opportunities to promote his extremist ideologies on Fox News — all while leaving working families behind,” Texas Democratic Party chair Gilberto Hinojosa said in a statement. “The reality is that private school voucher scams are deeply unpopular in Texas, and will harm our rural schools the most. Through a bipartisan effort, some Texas Republicans representing rural communities joined all Texas House Democrats in holding the line against the passage of voucher scams in the third called session after Abbott’s 'too-little-too-late' call for more public school funding if vouchers are passed.”
Some recent polls suggest more Texans are in favor of school vouchers now than in years prior, but the same can be said for legalizing various forms of gambling and marijuana reform, two items that have failed to gain any traction in recent legislative sessions.
Additionally, support for school vouchers is strongest amongst Republican voters and people in non-rural areas, where a wider selection of schooling options is more readily available than in small towns and rural districts. Last week, the Observer reported that a group of school voucher critics suggests such programs are inherently racist and would likely re-introduce school segregation to the state. In an October press conference, Democratic state Sen. Nathan Johnson, from Dallas, called Abbott's plan a "school voucher scam."
Abbott began the third special session by seeing the Senate quickly pass Senate Bill 1, the sort of voucher bill he has pursued for years now. SB 1 would have allowed $8,000 per student to be used by families toward private school tuition, books, uniforms and other specified educational needs. But the House, as it has every time a bill similar to SB 1 has been brought up, had other ideas.
In the final week of the third session, Abbott announced he had included a funding boost to schools in a voucher plan he was working on with House Republicans. The plan would have increased the allotment of money per child districts would receive from the state and establish an education account of more than $10,000 per eligible student. But the session ended on Tuesday without any House movement on that proposal, hence the call for an unprecedented fourth session in a year where a regular session had already taken place.
That’s a lot of in-party haggling — officially 208 days of legislative session haggling in 2023, to be exact (the maximum for a normal session is 140 days). And that much isn’t shocking at this point, given the Republican civil war that has raged in both Washington and Austin.
Johnson is at a loss as to what he and his colleagues are to do at this point. He's frustrated by the repeated special sessions. On Wednesday afternoon, we asked him what he expected to happen in this latest session.
"I don't really have any expectations," Johnson said over the phone, sounding more than a bit exasperated. "I don't really know what the governor's office is doing. The people who are having these backroom conversations and trying to strike deals aren't consulting with a whole lot of anybody in the Democratic Party because they know how we're going to vote on this garbage, but I think the governor is still going to have trouble moving anything with a voucher on it."
Johnson began to crystalize a few more loose predictions for the new session, and while doing so, he made his own promise to those who oppose his stance, one that is, so far at least, shared by the majority of the Texas House.
"My expectation is that we will see an increasingly virtuous education package that will or will not be attached to a voucher," Johnson said. "And the strategy for the voucher pushers will be to hold good policy hostage against the bad. I'm not going to play that game, and it's an open question as to whether enough others will. I don't think it's a forgone conclusion that they [the governor's office] get something."
