Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

"Texas Pioneer Woman" with child

Yesterday the Senate passed its version of the budget. Since receiving it from the House, the more austere chamber has moved swiftly, in legislative time, like it was putting the bill out of its misery. The debate today on the Senate floor got right to the point, which can be nice for observers (and Observers, too, I guess) since it doesn’t stretch until near dawn. But because most of the deals are struck before the budget leaves committee, and no amendments are allowed on the floor, the Senate doesn’t reveal the guts of the process as much as its counterpart across the rotunda.

In the end, the “real budget” gets hammered out in conference anyways, but today was the last chance for most Senators to voice their grievances and plea for certain compromises. Prior to the vote, two sharp critiques of the bill from opposite ends of the spectrum — one from Democrat Eliot Shapleigh and one from Republican Dan Patrick — offered an odd bit of convergence between ideologies.

Shapleigh looked at the budget and the $3 billion or so that the Senate wants to hold aside for tax cuts in the next session, that is, 2010 and 2011, and was baffled. “Have we ever in the history of this body banked tax cuts for four years in the future?” he asked budget author Sen. Steve Ogden (R-Bryan).

“Don’t think so,” Ogden replied.

Shapleigh then went on: “When you look at the papers in the state of Texas in the last six months, let’s look at the reality.” That reality includes:

• more drop outs than any state in the country
• fewer students with high school degrees than any state
• among the highest number of uninsured children of any state
• foster children sleeping in hotels, among other problems with CPS
• staffing levels at TYC that are 1/3 of the national average for staffing levels at similar facilities
• staffing levels in mental health facilities “that have earned us a lawsuit with the Department of Justice”

Yet, “in this budget, the priority is tax cuts, 95 percent of which go to people making over $80,000,” he concluded. “What do you tell the children in the state of Texas about this budget?”

This being the Session of the Child and all, Ogden grew notably incensed:

Everything that you laid out is addressed in this budget. Every problem that you described is a problem that is now. This budget is for Sept. 1, 2007. (Growing angrier) Every. Problem. You. Describe is addressed in this budget with huge increases in funding to try and redress some of the grievances that you’re talking about. This budget, far from ignoring those complaints, takes them head on. And if you studied the budget you’d have to appreciate the commitment of the state.

The debate went back and forth for some time, with much haggling over statistics invovled.

A short while later, though, Sen. Dan Patrick (R-Houston) followed up. He looked at a budget that was, in terms of non-adjusted dollars, the largest in Texas history and was baffled: “I am concerned about those in need in our society. So how is it that we continue to spend more and more money, doubling the budget from 1999 to 2009, but still are 45th, 48th, 50th, depending on the category, in these services (for the poor)?”

It was all part of Patrick’s push for a “blue ribbon commission,” to meet between sessions to pore over the budget and remove each and every unnecessary shiny dime, along with other procedural “reforms,” like abolishing the 2/3 rule, which he thinks adds pork to the budget.

The kicker in all this is that these are flush years. “The state,” Ogden said early on, “is in the best fiscal shape it’s been in since the early ’70s” — that would be during the oil boom, when Texas could nearly afford to get rid of property taxes altogether. But even with all this dough, lawmakers decided they would rather skim off the top of agency budgets to pay the Frew settlement, leaving those blessed tax cuts untouched.

In the end, though, the Dean of the Senate, Sen. John Whitmire (D-Houston) rose to praise Ogden and his bill. “For you to be able to write a budget … that Sen. Shapleigh would challenge you so sharply for not spending more, and in the same presentation, Sen. Patrick criticizes you for spending too much — that’s hard to do. And you ought to be proud, because I think it indicates that you’ve done your work.”

What Whitmire neglected, of course, is that their criticism wasn’t really a sign of a healthy disagreement between opposing ideals. Instead they looked at the same budget very differently, but came to the same conclusion: Texas can and should be doing more, much more, to help its own citizens.

Kind of like budget-crafters who look at all the money in reserve and say it will keep school funding in line with the court order. While the cynic, looking at the same $3 billion, might see lawmakers buying themselves two elections’ worth of tax-cutting cred in just one session.