Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

So, with apologies to those who think of this as boring stuff, here's a look at the two-year budget that House and Senate conferees voted unanimously yesterday to support. For the record, I would vote for this budget if I were the deciding vote, but I would vote against it if I were not. There are too many important items left unfunded, which the state could have done if it had borrowed just some from the nearly $7 billion Rainy Day Fund.

The Senate late Wednesday rescued a bill to move 80,000 children from the ranks of the uninsured to a government-subsidized health insurance program.

As lawmakers scramble to save dying bills, it is worth pausing a moment to recall that this entire misadventure began on the evening before the first day of the session in the Texas Senate. That’s when most Senators discovered that Woodland Republican Tommy Williams was going to engineer an end run around the 2/3s rule to advance two partisan items that were otherwise dead for the session: Voter ID and redistricting.

Senate Democrats have blocked the reappointment of the conservative head of the state board that sets standards and policies for Texas public schools.

The Texas House on Sunday tentatively passed a resolution urging Congress to provide emergency funding to help ports of entry on the Texas-Mexico border. Senate Concurrent Resolution 10 is authored by state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, and sponsored by state Rep. Veronica Gonzales, D-McAllen. The resolution was passed by the Senate earlier this session.

A Republican senator says Gov. Rick Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst are conspiring to kill a constitutional amendment that would allow the Legislature to meet when necessary to override a governor's vetoes.

Hopeful Texas Democrats and entrepreneurs say the change would open opportunities for the state's energy industry, while cutting the greenhouse gas emissions that are heating the planet. But even as Texas installs more wind power than any other state and boosts incentives for solar energy, fossil fuels reign.

The Texas Senate is keeping alive a plan to boost enrollment in the Children's Health Insurance Program.

A Senate vote late Wednesday night sent the plan back to the House. The session ends June 1.

The Texas Senate just approved extending the Texas Economic Development Act which allows school districts to enter into tax-subsidy agreements with businesses.

With eight days left in the 2009 session, nearly every major issue facing the Legislature is either unresolved or dead.

The 22-9 vote Monday put Fort Worth, Arlington and other Tarrant County cities closer to a long-sought goal of financing billions of dollars in road and rail projects. But supporters face more challenges as the legislation moves into the hands of a House-Senate conference committee with seven days left in the 2009 session.

State lawmakers are expected to boost spending on financial aid for college students during the next two years by about 35 percent, to $1 billion, under an agreement reached by House and Senate budget negotiators.

The CHIP bill sponsored by Rep. Garnet Coleman and Sen. Kip Averitt does not have to fall victim to the genocidal slaughter occurring in the Texas House. There are lots of ways it could be revived, including, of course, a vote by two-thirds of the House to take it up out of order. That seems unlikely, especially since only 17 Republicans voted for it in the first place.

One approach, incentives to install solar panels on homes and businesses, could be the catalyst for a homegrown industry of system installers and panel manufacturers, they say. Those manufacturers also could benefit from close proximity to an existing link in the solar supply chain — the single largest manufacturer of high quality polysilicon used in semiconductor chips and solar panels, which is located in Pasadena on the Houston Ship Channel.

The House gave its final approval Tuesday to scaling back the law allowing automatic college admissions for high school students in the top 10 percent of their graduating class, a limit sought by the University of Texas at Austin.

The head of a key Senate committee said Tuesday the panel will not approve another bill aimed at boosting enrollment in the Children's Health Insurance Program — leaving its fate largely to a divided House.

A controversial voter-identification bill perished along with possibly hundreds of other bills this morning in a partisan dispute in the state House of Representatives.

The death of CES Environmental Services employee Joey Sutter at the company's Port Arthur facility last December was a striking reminder of the inherent danger present in the petrochemical industry, despite great advances in safety over the decades.

Hinojosa says he doesn’t mind the franchise tax exemption piggy-backing his bill, as the bill fully funds the doctor’s loan program. “Once you use the money for loan repayments, the balance will be used for tax cuts,” he said.”They cannot shortchange the doctors.”

IT IS hard to find anybody with a bad word to say about Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s young education secretary. Margaret Spellings, his predecessor in the Bush administration, calls him “a visionary leader and fellow reformer”. During his confirmation hearings Lamar Alexander, a senator from Tennessee and himself a former education secretary, sounded more like a lovesick schoolgirl than a member of the opposition party: “I think you’re the best.”